What Are We Thinking? Part II
So what if Saudi Arabia moves its U.S.-origin F-15s to Tabuk Air Base, 150 km from Israel? So what if the administration changed its mind about a 25-year-old pledge to Congress? It isn’t as if the Saudis have produced a lot of terrific pilots in that time. It isn’t as if anyone seriously thinks the Saudi Air Force is going to go up against the Israeli Air Force. And if it is so foolish as to do so, surely no one thinks it could win. So what?
So what if Saudi Arabia moves its U.S.-origin F-15s to Tabuk Air Base, 150 km from Israel? So what if the administration changed its mind about a 25-year-old pledge to Congress? It isn’t as if the Saudis have produced a lot of terrific pilots in that time. It isn’t as if anyone seriously thinks the Saudi Air Force is going to go up against the Israeli Air Force. And if it is so foolish as to do so, surely no one thinks it could win. So what?
The “what” is that as times have changed, the nature of the threat to Israel has changed and of the three main assurances provided in the letter to Congress from then-Defense Secretary Brown, only one continues to be relevant.
First, he wrote, the Saudis would only use the plane defensively. “It would make no sense whatsoever for Saudi Arabia to acquire an aircraft with the characteristics of the F-15 with an idea of using it as a ground attack aircraft.” Secondarily, the Saudi government assured the U.S. that only Saudi nationals would fly the planes.
As Americans painfully learned, the plane doesn’t have to be used as a “ground attack aircraft” or as an aircraft at all. It can be used as a missile, and it wouldn’t take many, or particularly well-trained people to affect great tragedy. And the question of Saudi-only pilots rings hollow, as Saudis were themselves chief among the September 11th hijackers. While by no means perfect, only time and space – at best the distance from a southern Saudi airbase rather than the northern base at Tabuk – offer even a minimal opportunity for the IAF to intercept and destroy a terrorist plane headed for Israel.
Speaking this week at a conference in Israel on international terrorism, Israel’s Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, told the audience, “We learned that al-Qaeda attempted to recruit Saudi pilots to use and F-15 or civilian plane for a suicide air attack on Israel, possibly from Tabuk.”
Could it happen? Surely we don’t know. But knowing what we do know, it seems the height of indifference to Israel’s security for the administration to have ended a policy that served everyone’s interest, including the Saudi interest, for 25 years. Moving the front line north, added to uncertainty over the stability of the Saudi regime and the degree of Saudi participation in terrorism, will increase the nervousness of any likely target of Saudi-based terrorism – Israel, of course, but also American assets and allies in Iraq and the Gulf – and will require at least planning for fully justified pre-emption.
Maj. Gen. Ya’alon said, “We are concerned about it and demand [the F-15 deployment] be changed.” Congress should be concerned about it as well.
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Finally: Over the weekend, the EU added Hamas’s “political and social wings” to the list of terrorist organizations, making it possible for European security organizations to fully cooperate with the U.S. and Israel.