Gulf arms: complex motives From ISN Security Watch

Gulf arms: Complex motives

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A Pentagon announcement of over US$10 billion in potential Gulf arms sales has again highlighted the tensions and international power plays driving the regional arms race.

By Dominic Moran in Tel Aviv for ISN Security Watch (14/12/07)

The US is pushing ahead with plans for a major boost in arms sales to Gulf states as it seeks to draw them into an alliance against Iran while protecting its regional strategic predominance against competing powers.

The Pentagon notified Congress on 5 December of the potential sale of up to US$10.4 billion in arms and military systems to the UAE and Kuwait. President George W Bush's administration pledged up to US$20 billion in military aid to its Gulf allies in July.

Arab Gulf militaries have been progressively expanding and improving their armaments since the first Gulf War, but this process appears to have picked up pace with Iranian nuclear and missile developments and the descent of Iraq into civil war.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates pushed for a joint regional missile shield and air umbrella, and integrated maritime surveillance and early warning systems in a speech to Gulf delegates at a security meeting last week in the Bahraini capital, Manama.

Gulf states are wary of being drawn into an official regional defense partnership with the US, which could be seen as a provocation by Tehran, but have increased the frequency of their joint military parlays.

Asked by ISN Security Watch if Gulf states are resisting incorporation in a regional defense pact, Chatham House's Dr Gareth Stansfield replied: "I would say that there has been some opposition to that. I think that one thing that has happened with this recent standoff with Iran is that the Arab Gulf states have become much more aware of their own regional interactions and relations."

Controversial sale

A further Pentagon announcement is expected in January concerning the Saudi purchase of a military package expected to include advanced US manufacturer Boeing-fabricated bomb guidance technology that transforms unguided bombs into precision munitions Reuters reports. This further notification was delayed after 116 Congressmen joined a Democratic initiative calling for more time to study the Saudi weapons package.

According to the article, less controversial upcoming deals may also include Patriot upgrades for several Gulf states and the Saudi purchase of ships from a new class of coastal patrol ships for the kingdom's Gulf fleet. Middle East Online reports that the Saudis are also interested in upgrades for their F-15s and AWACS at an estimated cost of up to $US620 million.

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False Alarm

comment |
posted December 10, 2007
(web only)

Ted Gup

At 5:23 am the fire alarm goes off in
the Charles Hotel. I spring out of bed; grab my pants, shoes and
T-shirt; sprint down the corridor toward the red exit sign; push open
the fire door; bolt down ten flights of stairs; and emerge into a dark
and chill December morning. Cambridge still sleeps.

I make my way to the hotel's front entrance and into the lobby. Behind
the reception desk a beleaguered woman is picking up the phone every
five seconds to say "It was a false alarm... it was a false alarm... it
was a false alarm." Beside me stands a man in a camel-hair overcoat and
red baseball cap. He is chewing the stub of a stogie. He is familiar but
the name escapes me, so I ask.

"George Tenet," he says. Read More

The Depressed Superpower

By Gabor Steingart in Washington

As frustration takes hold in the land of
optimism, Americans are beginning to resemble Germans. They are
collectively depressed over the Iraq War, the weak dollar and the aging
of the baby boomers. Presidential candidates are left to preach change
to an electorate that is afraid of it.

All it takes to find out why America is in such a bad mood is a look
at the local section of any American newspaper, at the photos of the
smiling faces of soldiers killed in Iraq.

REUTERS

Voters listen to Senator Hillary Clinton at a November campaign rally in Perry, Iowa.

All it takes to discover why Americans are beginning to doubt their own
greatness is to accept an invitation to a dinner hosted by Adrian
Fenty, the mayor of Washington, DC. His vision, says Fenty, is for
students in the District of Columbia to receive their books at the
beginning of the school year, not in the middle. When asked whether he
has other visions, the mayor nods enthusiastically. His goal, he says,
is to improve security in the city's schools. Fenty wants to make sure
students in the United States capital can once again leave the
classroom without facing the threat of violence.

All it takes to understand why the United States, a once-proud
economic power, seems so unsure about itself these days is a walk
through a supermarket with author Sara Bongiorni. In her book "A Year
without 'Made in China': One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global
Economy," Bongiorni describes how even those who call themselves smart
shoppers have mixed feelings when they purchase low-priced,
foreign-made products. "When I see the label 'Made in China,' part of
me says: good for China. But another part feels a rush of
sentimentality because I've lost something without exactly knowing what
it is."

Taking a trip down America's memory lane -- to Gary, Indiana, for
instance -- is a good way to understand why Americans today are so
anxious about the future. In the days when Gary was the home of the
world's biggest steel company, the running joke was that US Steel was
so hard up for workers that it would even hire dead people.

The company attracted workers from around the world, including the
family of future pop star Michael Jackson. Gary's steelworkers pumped
prosperity into America, and the country still retains a sizeable chunk
of the past that once thrived in Gary and other places like it.

Optimism Is Becoming an Endangered Species

But Gary is an ailing city today. US Steel has moved its
headquarters elsewhere and has severely cut back its Gary operations.
Nowadays, the city isn't doing any better than its most famous son.
Both have seen better days, but the difference is that Gary doesn't
even have the money for a facelift.

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Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Bush's Losing Iranian Hand

posted December 06, 2007 10:56 am

Whatever else the release
of the 16-agency National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian
bomb may be, it is certainly a reasonable measure of inside-the-Beltway
Bush administration decline. Whether that release represented "a pre-emptive strike against the White House by intelligence agencies and military chiefs," an intelligence "mini-coup"
against the administration, part of a longer-term set of moves meant to
undermine plans for air strikes against Iran that involved a potential
resignation threat from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and a "near mutiny" by the Joint Chiefs, or an attempt by the administration itself
to "salvage negotiations with Iran" or shift its own Iran policy, or
none of -- or some combination of -- the above, one thing can be said:
Such an NIE would not have been written, no less released, at almost
any previous moment in the last seven years. (Witness the 2005 version
of the same that opted for an active Iranian program to produce nuclear
weapons.)

Imagine an NIE back in 2005 that, as Dilip Hiro wrote recently,
"contradicts the image of an inward-looking, irrational, theocratic
leadership ruling Iran oppressively that Washington has been projecting
for a long time. It says: 'Our assessment that Iran halted the program
in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates
Teheran's decisions are judged by a cost-benefit approach rather than a
rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military
costs.'"

The Iranians as rational, cost-benefit calculators? Only the near
collapse of presidential and vice-presidential polling figures, and the
endless policy failures that proceeded and accompanied those numbers;
only the arrival of Robert Gates as secretary of defense and a representative
of the "reality-based community," only the weakening of the neocons and
their purge inside the Pentagon, only the increasing isolation of the
Vice President's "office" -- only, that is, decline inside the Beltway
-- could account for such a conclusion or such a release.

Whatever the realities of the Iranian nuclear program, this NIE
certainly reflected the shifting realities of power in Washington in
the winter of 2007. In a zero-sum game in the capital's corridors in
which, for years, every other power center was the loser, the
hardliners suddenly find themselves with their backs to the wall when
it comes to the most compelling of their dreams of global domination.
(Never forget the pre-invasion neocon quip: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.")

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Primer for campaign 2008

July/Aug 2007 • Barack Obama • Mitt Romney

Sept/Oct 2007 • Rudolph Giuliani • John Edwards

Nov/Dec 2007 • Hillary Clinton • John McCain

Renewing American Leadership by Barack Obama July/August 2007 "The American moment is not over, but it must be seized anew. America cannot meet this century's challenges alone; the world cannot meet them without America."

Rising to a New Generation of Global Challenges by Mitt Romney July/August 2007 "We must strengthen our military and economy, achieve energy independence, reenergize civilian and interagency capabilities, and revitalize our alliances."

Toward a Realistic Peace by Rudolph Giuliani September/October 2007 "With a stronger defense, a determined diplomacy, and greater U.S. economic and cultural influence, the next president can start to build a lasting, realistic peace."

Reengaging With the World by John Edwards September/October 2007 "We must restore America's reputation for moral leadership and reengage with the world, moving beyond the empty slogan "war on terror" and creating policies built on hope, not fear."

Security and Opportunity for the Twenty-first Century by Hillary Rodham Clinton November/December 2007 "We must get out of Iraq, rediscover the value of statesmanship, and live up to the democratic values that are the deepest source of our strength."

An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom by John McCain November/December 2007 "America needs a president who can revitalize the country's purpose and standing in the world and defeat terrorist adversaries who threaten liberty at home and abroad."

The Costs of Containing Iran

Washington's Misguided New Middle East Policy
Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008

Summary: The Bush administration wants to contain Iran by rallying the support of Sunni Arab states and now sees Iran's containment as the heart of its Middle East policy: a way to stabilize Iraq, declaw Hezbollah, and restart the Arab-Israeli peace process. But the strategy is unsound and impractical, and it will probably further destabilize an already volatile region.

Vali Nasr, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Adjunct Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future." Ray Takeyh is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic."

Over the past year, Washington has come to see the containment of Iran as the primary objective of its Middle East policy. It holds Tehran responsible for rising violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lebanon's tribulations, and Hamas' intransigence and senses that the balance of power in the region is shifting toward Iran and its Islamist allies. Curbing Tehran's growing influence is thus necessary for regional security.

Vice President Dick Cheney announced this new direction last May on the deck of the U.S.S. John C. Stennis in the Persian Gulf. "We'll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats," Cheney said. "We'll continue bringing relief to those who suffer, and delivering justice to the enemies of freedom. And we'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has expressed a similar sentiment: "Iran constitutes the single most important single-country strategic challenge to the United States and to the kind of Middle East that we want to see." Meanwhile, Iran's accelerating nuclear program continues to haunt Washington and much of the international community, adding to their sense of urgency.

Taking a page out of its early Cold War playbook, Washington hopes to check and possibly reduce Tehran's growing influence much as it foiled the Soviet Union's expansionist designs: by projecting its own power while putting direct pressure on its enemy and building a broad-based alliance against it. Washington has been building up the U.S. Navy's presence in the Persian Gulf and using harsh rhetoric, raising the specter of war. At the same time, it funds a $75 million democracy-promotion program supporting regime change in Tehran. In recent months, Washington has rallied support for a series of United Nations resolutions against Iran's nuclear program and successfully pushed through tough informal financial sanctions that have all but cut Iran out of international financial markets. It has officially designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and the IRG's elite al Quds Army as a supporter of terrorism, allowing the Treasury Department to target the groups' assets and the U.S. military to harass and apprehend their personnel in Iraq. Washington is also working to garner support from what it now views as moderate governments in the Middle East -- mostly authoritarian Arab regimes it once blamed for the region's myriad problems.

Washington's goal is to eliminate Iran's influence in the Arab world by rolling back Tehran's gains to date and denying it the support of allies -- in effect drawing a line from Lebanon to Oman to separate Iran from its Arab neighbors. The Bush administration has rallied support among Arab governments to oppose Iranian policies in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. It is trying to buttress the military capability of Persian Gulf states by providing a $20 billion arms package to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. According to Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, one of the arms sales' primary objectives is "to enable these countries to strengthen their defenses and therefore to provide a deterrence against Iranian expansion and Iranian aggression in the future." And through a series of regional conclaves and conferences, the Bush administration hopes to rejuvenate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process partly in the hope of refocusing the energies of the region's governments on the threat posed by Iran.

Containing Iran is not a novel idea, of course, but the benefits Washington expects from it are new. Since the inception of the Islamic Republic, successive Republican and Democratic administrations have devised various policies, doctrines, and schemes to temper the rash theocracy. For the Bush administration, however, containing Iran is the solution to the Middle East's various problems. In its narrative, Sunni Arab states will rally to assist in the reconstruction of a viable government in Iraq for fear that state collapse in Baghdad would only consolidate Iran's influence there. The specter of Shiite primacy in the region will persuade Saudi Arabia and Egypt to actively help declaw Hezbollah. And, the theory goes, now that Israel and its longtime Arab nemeses suddenly have a common interest in deflating Tehran's power and stopping the ascendance of its protégé, Hamas, they will come to terms on an Israeli-Palestinian accord. This, in turn, will (rightly) shift the Middle East's focus away from the corrosive Palestinian issue to the more pressing Persian menace. Far from worrying that the Middle East is now in flames, Bush administration officials seem to feel that in the midst of disorder and chaos lies an unprecedented opportunity for reshaping the region so that it is finally at ease with U.S. dominance and Israeli prowess.

But there is a problem: Washington's containment strategy is unsound, it cannot be implemented effectively, and it will probably make matters worse. The ingredients needed for a successful containment effort simply do not exist. Under these circumstances, Washington's insistence that Arab states array against Iran could further destabilize an already volatile region.

NEW AND DISAPPROVED

Iran does present serious problems for the United States. Its quest for a nuclear capability, its mischievous interventions in Iraq, and its strident opposition to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process constitute a formidable list of grievances. But the bigger issue is the Bush administration's fundamental belief that Iran cannot be a constructive actor in a stable Middle East and that its unsavory behavior cannot be changed through creative diplomacy. Iran is not, in fact, seeking to create disorder in order to fulfill some scriptural promise,

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