Regional Arms and the Man : Bush pushes aggressive military hardware sales for Middle East: Sound familiar?

In today’s Machiavellian world, it should come as no great surprise that Washington is taking the fast-track approach to arms sales in the Middle East. It has quality goods in quantity--and a lot of countries want them. If the U.S. doesn’t register big arms sales, others will be more than happy to oblige. China, for one; North Korea, for another; the Soviet Union. There is no shortage of arms-exporting nations more than willing to do the devil’s work.

Why let others cash in on all the fear? American arms are the hot merchandise right now and they fetch top dollar. The U.S. economy is in a recession and arms sales help prop up the bottom line. The Iraq War offered fabulous promotion for the U.S. defense industry. What country in its right mind would want dud-Scud stuff when it can get its hands on the Rolls-Royce of armaments?

American merchandise is costly, though, and many countries want a lot of it. To help Egypt, Washington recently forgave Cairo’s billions in indebtedness. It is also asking the U.S. Export-Import Bank to float a big new line of credit to enable cash-short countries to buy U.S. arms.

The American people are likely to have a divided reaction to the resumption of this arms race. Some will nod their head knowingly, dismiss all the arms-control talk as the rhetoric of hopeless utopians and be thankful for a policy that, in effect, says take the money and run.

But surely some sense of deja vu is inescapable. Until just recently Iraq was receiving a steady flow of Western arms and technical assistance. Washington was promoting Saddam Hussein’s government as a proper balance to those putative religious fanatics in Tehran. That stab at a balance of power through arms sales literally blew up in our faces.

Moreover, the policy might be more persuasive if it were true that arms sales would take the place of direct U.S. military involvement. But the Persian Gulf intervention showed that not to be the case. In the end it was arms sales, on a majestic scale to Iraq, that wound up putting U.S. lives at risk rather than removing the need for foreign deployment.

One justification for regional arms sales is to achieve a balance of power. But the mathematics of calibrating what precisely constitutes a balance of power has often been a science too precise for the blunt instrument of American policy. A better approach would be an aggressive international effort to curb such sales. President Bush enjoys such stature now that an arms-control campaign might just make some progress. But all the energy is going in the other direction. One day--when a moderate Egyptian president is succeeded by a less reasonable one; when another Saddam Hussein emerges; when Syria’s Hafez Assad sheds his nice-making smiles--this lost opportunity may come back to haunt the world.