WarSclerotic

The U.S. administration has confirmed a decision to sell up to $60-billion worth of military weapons to Saudi Arabia – officially an enemy of Israel – and Israel hasn’t uttered a peep of concern.

In fact, Israel is welcoming the sale – all because of Iran and the threat that its nuclear-weapons program poses to both Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“Israel is content that this deal will not impinge on our strategic superiority,” said Emily Landau, senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, “and it sees it as a positive reinforcement of its own view of Iran.”

In this respect, Dr. Landau said, Israel has a lot in common with many countries in the Persian Gulf. “We’re all worried about Iran developing nuclear weapons.”

The sale – the biggest U.S. deal ever – includes 84 new F-15 fighter jets and the upgrade of another 70 F-15s currently in the potent Saudi Air Force, 142 attack helicopters and 36 newly developed unmanned choppers.

While the United States has begun to supply missile-defence systems in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, the weapons Washington is selling Riyadh are pure offence.

“I think the United States is trying to get a message across to Iran by beefing up American allies in the region,” said Dr. Landau, who directs the Arms Control and Regional Security Project at the INSS.

And it’s about time, she added.

“We, and a lot of other countries in the region, have the sense that the U.S. is not taking the threat seriously enough, that it almost seems to have accepted that it is inevitable Iran will have nuclear weapons.”

“That’s not acceptable to us,” she said.

While the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has gone to substantial lengths to promote economic sanctions, many Israeli analysts don’t think that is sufficient.

In preparing that military threat, Israel and Saudi Arabia are going to great lengths – and going together, it seems.

This summer there were credible, though unconfirmed, reports that the chief of Israel’s Mossad spy agency travelled to Saudi Arabia for some unexplained purpose, as well as several reports of Israeli aircraft delivering materiel to a Saudi air field near the Jordanian border.

The Times of London reported that a Saudi defence exercise in April rehearsed a scenario in which Israeli fighter jets would fly through a corridor across the country in order to attack targets in Iran. The Saudis adjusted their air-defence systems so the Israeli aircraft would not be shot down, the paper said.

The idea that Israel might resort to attacking Iran if it produced nuclear weapons is not new. What is new is the idea that an Arab state such as Saudi Arabia might facilitate it.

The Saudis did not exactly deny it.

Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Britain, said that such military co-operation “would be against the policy adopted and followed by the kingdom,” adding that it would be “illogical to allow the Israeli occupation force, with whom Saudi Arabia has no relations whatsoever, to use its land and airspace.”

“Illogical” perhaps, but not if Saudi Arabia established relations with Israel, something that could result if Israel and the Palestinians sign a peace treaty. This may partly explain why Saudi Arabia has been such a determined supporter of the talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Obviously, there is much fear in the Arab world, and a clear understanding in Saudi Arabia as well as in Israel that a nuclear Iran is a great threat,” said Ephraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, speaking when news of such co-operation surfaced this summer.

Dr. Landau concurs. “I think that many states in the Gulf would sooner see an Israeli attack on Iran than have Iran become a nuclear-weapons power.”

That was certainly the view of the UAE’s ambassador to the United States. Speaking in Aspen, Colo., in July, Yousef al Otaiba was asked for his reaction should Israel attack Iran. “A military attack on Iran by whomever would be a disaster, but Iran with a nuclear weapon would be a bigger disaster,” he replied.

Writing this summer, Eldad Pardo, an Iran specialist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said the region, including Israel, is pulling together on this matter.

“There are clearly an intensifying set of signals toward Iran that it’s not just Israel that means business,” Dr. Pardo said, citing regional support for sanctions, Russia’s decision not to sell missiles to Iran and, perhaps most tellingly, “the fact that Arab countries have not come out against reports of a new Israeli satellite and new Israeli military equipment.”