NY Times reports about 2011 record US sales of weapons, mostly to Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia. That’s a quite an increase from a previous year $24 billion in weapons sales. And all of that b/c of Iran “threat”.
I’m trying to figure this but logic eludes me. Iran wants to attack S.A.? Really? I mean, I know that S.A. is the US State Dept. puppet regime with the worst human rights record yet, they get the most sophisticated weaponry.
I personally find this US-SA symbiosis to be the most dangerous relationship in ME and having SA elevated like this to be the most offensive development in Islamic world.
Does US bear any responsibility by propelling this pathetic excuse of a country & regime and thus extending and enabling exactly the global problem of radical Islamic element that is very specific to House of Saudi(in my personal opinion, an utter reactionary version of Islam, both culturally and traditionally)? Isn’t this a case of foreign policy “having your cake and eating it too”? Is this one of those “1984”'s paradigms of “being able to hold two contradictory ideas” in one’s head and still claim to be reasonable?
Clearly isolating and alienating states doesn’t bring about change. North Korea is not getting “nicer”. Neither is Iran. Cuba is improving but one could argue that’s because no one has been on their back like before. I don’t support giving weapons to oppressive regimes but perhaps being friends with countries is more effective in helping them to improve their human rights than saying “You’re wrong, come back when you agree with us”.
Saudi Arabia is a bunch of goat fuckers but all the advanced weaponry won’t ever do them any good since their military isn’t worth shit and they don’t have the men with the training and expertise to use them. It’ll just be stored in some warehouse or stand unused in the desert. At best some minor prince will have some exciting place inside a F-15 cockpit to bang French whores especially imported for the occasion.
Saudi Arabia is one of the last perfect Western weapons buyers. Filthy rich, wanting to stock up on expensive American and European toys, yet too stupid to reverse engineer or demand license production at home. And there’s enough for everybody since they like to spread out the purchases to multiple countries.
With regard to Western moral standing in Syria, then there isn’t any. We’re propping up tyrannies in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain ever much as repressive as Assad’s regime on the one hand, and pretending to be all morally outraged about things happening in Syria with the other. I wonder what should be the response if Russia started to supply Bahraini or Saudi rebels with weapons, and demanded international condemnation and action on the matter of their respective crack down on popular uprisings?
I guess we’d be in for a round of “Chechnya !” “*Iraq *!” “Afghanistan !” “Viet Nam !”, possibly involving pics of shirtless Putin judo-ing grizzly bears at some point.
The weapon sales to Saudi Arabia are not about containing Iran, they are about making a buck. We’re reasonably certain the weapons won’t be used against the U.S. or our allies, so we’re willing to sell them slightly inferior versions of our toys. They’ve got money to spend. That money provides American jobs. It’s business.
Well, who do the Saudis feel their biggest threat is? Probably Iran. Both are vying for the title of Big Cheese in that neck of the [del]woods[/del] desert.
Well, yeah, that’s probably the reason they’re willing to drop so much cash on weapons. But really, as long as it’s not to fight us or one of our allies, do we really care? Should we?
This is an usual case of following a foreign policy that will eventually bite us in the ass. That’s realpolitiks for you : look at the short term and the bottom line, don’t even think about the consequences down the road. We wouldn’t have to worry about the Saudis worrying about Iran had realpolitiks occasionally taken a back seat in the past.
I say “we” in this case because every western country of any significance is supporting those fuckers and selling them weapons.
YES! Holy crap, if there’s nothing else the past 250 years of American politics has taught us, it’s that we SHOULDN’T ARM THE BAD GUYS EVEN IF RIGHT NOW THEY’RE ONLY FIGHTING OTHER BAD GUYS! How in the world is that not the very first lesson every American politician is taught?
The Saudis are going to buy weapons from somebody. If they get them from us, we know exactly what they’ve got, what weaknesses they have, and we might even include a few “undocumented features” that could come in handy if they try to use the weapons against us in the future. Plus, we get a $66 billion dollar boost to our economy.
Or we can go stand on a hillside somewhere and sing about buying the world a goddamn Coke,while somebody else sells them $66 billion dollars worth of weapons and reaps the economic benefits thereof.
I think it is pretty clearly in our interest to export goods for profit.
I don’t see any downside to selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. They aren’t likely to be launching wars of aggression anytime soon, and those weapons may have some deterrent effect on nearby hostile powers. T
The difference being that nobody else has quite the sort of weapons we do to sell. It’s not like we’re selling the Saudis 1980s tech; we’re not selling them F-22s, but we wouldn’t even sell those to the UK. We are selling them the latest block of F-15s and we’ve offered them F-35s.
Personally, I prefer having our military go up against Soviet and Chinese weapons. We’ve never had to take on our own advanced weapons systems. I think the only time we’ve fought a US equipped military was in Panama.
Nobody saw the downside in arming the soviets against the nazis, or arming Afghani rebels against the soviets, or arming countless other guerrilla groups and dictators that ended up being an absolute nightmare for us and the rest of the world.
The more weapons there are available for evil regimes to buy, the cheaper those weapons are on the market. It’s simple supply and demand. Do you want more, cheaper weapons available for ruthless warlords to purchase, or do you want fewer, more expensive weapons available for them?
Selling an evil man the tools with which to perform evil might be good in the eyes of the invisible hand worshipers, but objectively, its bad.
Do you want more closed factories, higher unemployment, and more families losing their homes to foreclosure, or would you rather have American workers making superior products that are in demand around the world?