Keeping Up With Thy Neighbor : Tragic dynamic of the Middle East arms race

Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Arens says his country “must” have another $700 million a year in U.S. military help to maintain the “quality advantage in weaponry” that Washington years ago assured. Israel already gets more American aid than any other country, $1.8 billion each year in military help and $1.2 billion in economic assistance. Now it seeks a huge 40% boost in military funds, only months after the Middle East supposedly became a safer place following the destruction of much of Iraq’s war-making machine. What’s going on here?

What’s going on is yet another dismal reminder that the Middle East arms race has pretty much acquired a life and a momentum of its own. The race has heated up largely without halt since the mid-1950s, when Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser cut a major weapons deal through the Soviet Union with the then-communist government of Czechoslovakia. (The significant U.S. arms link with Israel wasn’t established until 1969.) Since then the countries of the region, from Libya to Iran, have squandered tens of billions of dollars that could otherwise have gone to raise living standards, with the Soviet Union, the United States, France, Britain and China the sources for about 85% of the weapons imported.

A recent prime example of the diversion of scarce resources to weapons purchases can be seen in Israel’s next-door--and unremittingly hostile--neighbor, Syria. The Damascus regime was generously rewarded for its token participation in the anti-Iraq coalition, with cash payments from Saudi Arabia alone totaling well over $1 billion. Did Syria use this windfall to repair some of the damage to its state-mismanaged economy? No, it promptly went shopping for new weapons, mainly missiles, in China and North Korea. Egypt, another beneficiary from the anti-Iraq war, similarly seeks to add to its arsenal even as despair over its weakening economy deepens. Cairo wants to buy more U.S. arms and, according to a report it hasn’t denied, is working with North Korea to develop a new missile system.

It’s developments such as these that make the Israelis nervous and prompt them to seek hundreds of millions in further aid that the United States can ill afford to provide. But if history is a guide, higher Israeli arms spending to offset what its neighbors are doing would soon become the pretext for those neighbors to again increase their spending, keeping the bleak cycle going.

Is there any way out? Next week the Big Five arms suppliers, who also happen to be the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, will begin talks in Paris on limiting arms sales to the Middle East. As with all arms control efforts, hellish problems can be expected, not least because no Arab country except Egypt is willing to sit down to directly discuss the issue with Israel. Nonetheless a start must be made, for it is not just sad but is near-madness for Middle Eastern governments to go on pouring billions into weapons while their citizens lack adequate housing, vital medical care and urgently needed schools.