WASHINGTON — The United States has once again opened up an arms bazaar in the Mideast.
While Israel and most Jewish groups have not raised objections to the proposal, some Middle East analysts worry that the proposed arms sales threaten to erode the “qualitative edge” the Israeli military enjoys over its neighbors.
Defense Secretary William Cohen last week pledged to sell $3.2 billion worth of state-of-the-art fighter planes, tanks and Patriot missiles to Egypt, as well as sophisticated air-to-air missiles to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
The proposed new sales, which are likely to be approved by Congress, came as Cohen toured nine nations in the Persian Gulf and Middle East to discuss security threats from Iraq and Iran.
Although the United States has sold Egypt and other Arab nations a wide range of weaponry in the past — and annually earmarks some $1.2 billion in military aid to Egypt — the peddling of the most sophisticated weapons in the U.S. arsenal has prompted criticism from defense hawks.
“It puts Israel in greater and greater jeopardy,” Tom Neumann, executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, said of the proposed sale to Egypt.
“Essentially it just notches up their arsenal to a higher technological level. Eventually it’s going to be so immense and so cumbersome that it’s going to precipitate a war in the Middle East.”
Others downplay the significance.
“There’s nothing new about this, they’ve been doing this for years,” said Michael Eisenstadt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“These are countries which have been supportive of the peace process and have their own defense requirements,” Eisenstadt said, adding that “under different circumstances these sales would be of concern, but not under current circumstances.”
Asked to comment on the proposed sale to Egypt, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed to his country’s 20-year-old peace accord with Egypt, which he said “involved the shifting of Egypt away from Soviet arms to Western arms, American arms, and that has been an agreed-upon arrangement.”
The absence of an audible outcry from the American Jewish community in recent years to these types of sales stands in contrast to the bitter confrontations with the Reagan and Bush administrations during the 1980s over arms sales to the Arab world.
The new alliances created during the Persian Gulf War and Israel’s signing of peace agreements have changed the facts on the ground, analysts say.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, has taken no position on the new arms sales.
The Clinton administration, for its part, has rejected criticism that it is fueling an arms race in the Middle East, defending the moves as a means of helping its allies in the region meet legitimate needs for military modernization.
In Israel, Cohen pledged to maintain Israel’s “qualitative edge” and held out the prospect of additional U.S. funding for the $1.6 billion Arrow missile project designed to help Israel thwart any ballistic missile attacks.
Cohen said he was looking at ways to fund research and development of a third battery for the Arrow, an Israeli-produced missile system jointly funded by Washington.
Despite U.S. assurances that the strategic balance in the region will not be affected by the new sales, some analysts believe that transferring advanced weapons systems to Egypt may not ultimately be in Israel’s interests.
“Who does Egypt need weapons to defend themselves against?” said Mitchell Bard, a foreign policy analyst.
“They have no legitimate defensive need, so the arms are only likely to be used offensively” against Israel, he said, adding that the U.S. taxpayer will foot the bill.