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Washington seeking to calm Mideast with arms sales: experts
By Pascal Mallet
AFP
BRUSSELS
Petroleumworld.com 07 31 07
US plans to extend huge military aid deals to Middle East and Gulf states is a high-risk attempt to give Saudi Arabia and others the muscle to calm the region's problems, military experts said Monday.
"The failure of the American project for a democratic greater Middle East, confounded in the battle for Iraq, has forced Washington to try to salvage the situation by distributing military aid all over the place," said Joseph Henrotin, editor-in-chief of the French Defence and International Security periodical.
The United States Monday announced new military pacts worth 13 billion dollars for Egypt and 30 billion for Israel over 10 years, plus billions more for Saudi Arabia and Gulf states.
The US plans will "help bolster forces of moderation and support a broader strategy to counter the negative influences of Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran," said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington as she and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates set off on a rare joint trip to the region, seeking assurances of help in stabilizing Iraq.
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states will be aided to "support their ability to secure peace and stability in the Gulf region," Rice said.
Reports have cited potential arms deals with the Saudis and five other Gulf states -- the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, worth least 20 billion dollars.
"These arms sales to Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) States are given by the United States to Saudi Arabia in expectation that it can help calm down the situation in the Sunni world, where it exercises an influence" said Henrotin.
Evoking Iran's "strategic threat" Washington is apparently helping the Saudis to counterbalance Tehran.
In truth, the Belgian expert said, the more immediate US objective is to "dissuade Riyadh from covertly aiding Sunni extremists against Iran and its allies in Syria and the Shiite Lebanese Hezbollah.
"Those same Sunni extremists could also turn against the United States," Henrotin added.
At the same time Washington is reinforcing the Israelis to ease fears which arise there every time Arab nations receive US military aid while at the same time "calming Iranian fervour for a nuclear arsenal," he added.
It is a complicated balancing act, added Henrotin, with the US supplying all its allies at the same time "in the hope they will not turn them against each other."
Ruprecht Polenz, chairman of the German parliament's foreign affairs committee, fears the balancing act won't work.
"If you add more explosives to a powder keg, you increase the risk and do not make the region more secure," said Polenz, a senior figure in Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat party, said in an interview in the Frankfurter Rundschau daily on Monday.
He added the warning that the message the United States hoped to send to Iran with the weapons deal could backfire, leading Tehran to step up its own arms drive.
Christopher Pang, head of the British Royal United Services Institute's Middle East programme said the US "has used the same tactics before of arming those they hope will keep a perceived threat in check."
"The risk of course is that it provokes an arms race in the region," he added.
Such fears were shared by Caroline Pailhe, a researcher at the Brussels-based peace and security research group GRIP.
"In a region where energy reserves play an important role, it is always dangerous to give certain players more arms," she said.
"Due to the instability of the regimes involved, the policy could one day rebound on the Americans," she added, recalling that the West had previously aided the Iran at the time of the Shah, Saddam in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Yossi Melman, a defence specialist for the Israeli Haaretz newspaper put it in these terms: "Who knows what could happen in Saudi Arabia? Today it is the House of Saud. Tomorrow it could be the House of Bin Laden."
AFP 30 1729 GMT 07 07
Copyright© 2007 AFP. All rights reserved.
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