COLUMN LEFT/ HOWARD L. BERMAN : Selling F-15s to Saudis Is a Political Fix : The deal escalates the Mideast arms race and is no long-term help for U.S. defense.

As one who represents an area suffering from huge aerospace layoffs, I well understand the seductive allure of President Bush’s decision to sell 72 advanced F-15 warplanes to Saudi Arabia. Couched as a jobs program, the sale is actually a political fix to divert attention from his failed economic policy.

Even if they were not destabilizing, arms sales in the developing world are, at best, only a stopgap measure for defense contractors and workers. Such sales will never be sufficient to sustain the employment levels created by the massive U.S. defense budgets of the past. By focusing on keeping a few production lines open for a few more years, the President is ignoring the real issue: the conversion of our defense industries and the development of a post-Cold War economy.

If America is to remain competitive in the advanced industrial marketplace of the 21st Century, then we must start working now to develop and manufacture products and services that will provide hundreds of thousands of secure, well-paid jobs to replace those lost by defense downsizing.

To facilitate the sale, President Bush abandoned his regional arms-control policy and has done all that he could to curtail the ability of Congress to examine a $9-billion transfer that escalates the Middle East arms race and reaffirms our status as premier arms-peddler to the world.

A year ago President Bush announced his support for a multinational effort to limit arms sales to the Middle East. At the height of the Gulf War, then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “The time has come to try to change the destructive pattern of military competition and proliferation in (the Middle East) and to reduce the arms flow into an area that is already over-militarized.”

However, since the end of the war, the United States has sold more than $16 billion of new weapons to the region. The hope offered by Baker has been discarded by a President who says he will do anything to win reelection--including, apparently, making this world a more dangerous place.

This sale also seriously undermines our credibility in our efforts to persuade other countries to stop their dangerous arms transfers. How can we tell the cash-strapped nations of Russia and China to restrain their sales when we ourselves continue to push weapons and vigorously pursue new markets? And how can we expect Britain and France to work with us in building a responsible arms-supplier regimen if we proceed with unrestrained sales?

The Gulf War provided a powerful example of the dangers of unchecked accumulation of advanced weapons. The acquisition of F-15s by Saudi Arabia will only provide impetus for other Middle Eastern nations to acquire more weapons to counter what they will view as a new Saudi threat. Unless we stop the arms race in the region, U.S. troops, in the not-too-distant future, are likely to face an Iran, a Libya, a Syria or an Iraq armed with the deadliest and most destructive weapons that 20th-Century technology has to offer.

President Bush ignored both precedent and the intent of the law governing adequate notification of these kinds of arms transfers. There is no urgency to this sale. It will be years before the first planes are delivered to the Saudis, yet the President notified Congress of his plans only a few legislative days before adjournment, knowing full well that this timetable gives insufficient opportunity to review all the issues raised by this massive transaction.

Selling billions of dollars of highly advanced warplanes to one of the most volatile and unstable regions of the world is not in the interests of American workers or American policy. If we continue to fuel the arms spiral, one day we will surely have to bear the costs. I hope we will come to our senses before we must face our folly.