No More Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia

Despite the hype about the so-called “Israel Lobby,” the truth is that no President has ever been denied a major arms sale to an Arab country. Ships, planes, electronics, tanks, missiles, munitions, communications, radars – you name it, they get it. At war with Israel, at peace with Israel, having under-the-table relations with Israel, the Arabs get the arms they are willing to pay for – and some Arab countries get arms paid for by the American taxpayer. No Congress controlled by Democrats or controlled by Republicans has said no to a Democratic or a Republican President.

Despite the hype about the so-called “Israel Lobby,” the truth is that no President has ever been denied a major arms sale to an Arab country. Ships, planes, electronics, tanks, missiles, munitions, communications, radars – you name it, they get it. At war with Israel, at peace with Israel, having under-the-table relations with Israel, the Arabs get the arms they are willing to pay for – and some Arab countries get arms paid for by the American taxpayer. No Congress controlled by Democrats or controlled by Republicans has said no to a Democratic or a Republican President. And when Saudi Arabia violated the solemn promise to the Senate by an American Defense Secretary that Saudi F-15s would be based in the south, away from Israel, the Senate didn’t blink an eye and neither, by the way, did the sitting Defense Secretary.

Could we try again?

At precisely the moment the Bush Administration is promoting a multibillion dollar sale to Saudi Arabia, it has acknowledged that the Saudi government continues to allow tens of millions of dollars to be funneled to al Qaeda – which is presently killing American soldiers in Iraq. In an interview with ABC-TV, Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey said, “If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia.” The U.S. government is most interested in Yassin al Qadi, a Saudi national identified as a financier of al Qaeda, who lives freely in the kingdom.

The Administration claims it wants to enable Saudi Arabia to it to defend itself against Iran with the weapons we would sell them. The way the Saudis see it, they do have to defend themselves against al Qaeda but their chosen method is to pay it off and send young men out of the kingdom to wreak havoc elsewhere.

Middle East Newsline (MENL) reports that an American official said, “Saudi money has helped revive al Qaeda. The organization now has the money to directly recruit and train a more lethal brand of terrorist.” MENL continues, “Officials… cited the recent al Qaeda revolt in northern Lebanon – in which 30 percent of Fatah al Islam fighters were said to have been Saudi nationals. More than 1,000 Saudis were said to have trained in an al Qaeda camp in Syria, many of them for suicide missions in neighboring Iraq.”

While the details of the sale remain a closely held secret, Rep. Gary Ackerman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, said, “In the end, selling them arms won’t guarantee their cooperation… The results of such deals are usually a mixed bag of hoopla, limited behind-the-scenes cooperation and ugly public disappointments down the road, and I believe this will be the outcome of the deal currently being proposed… If we can’t get Saudi cooperation on the internal situation in Iraq, on stopping the flow of fighters and cutting off money going to insurgents there and to other terrorists around the world, then why should we believe that they see the war on terror as we do, and why sell them these weapons?”

We hope he wasn’t asking rhetorically.