Shelley Berkley fighting $60 billion weapons sale to Saudis

By Karoun Demirjian

Thursday, Sept. 23, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Any day now, the Pentagon is expected to notify Congress of what will be the largest single contract in the history of the country’s foreign military sales program. When it does, a group of lawmakers led by Rep. Shelley Berkley is vowing to do everything in its power to quash it.

Berkley is part of a triumvirate of House Democrats — along with Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York and Rep. Chris Carney of Pennsylvania — who in the past week have been circulating a letter urging members to oppose the Obama administration’s planned $60 billion deal with Saudi Arabia by backing a resolution to block it.

Berkley, D-Nev., and her compatriots argue that Saudi Arabia hasn’t done enough to support U.S. military and diplomatic efforts against terrorism, and has remained too hostile to the state of Israel to be trusted with $60 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets and Apache, Blackhawk and Little Bird helicopters.

“How do we ever expect them to be honest brokers when they’re so obviously anti-Semitic and anti-Israel?” Berkley said last week. “How are they going to stand with us against Iran?”

But supporters of the deal argue the Saudis’ proven stance against Iran is exactly why the deal is so prudent.

“The Saudis are ideologically and geopolitically the biggest adversaries to Iran in the Persian Gulf,” said Roby Barrett, an expert on regional security at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “Saudi Arabia isn’t a threat to Israel … and they are the best chance in the region against total Iranian domination.”

According to a Defense Department spokesman, the deal represents four contracts, each of which has been under consideration for several years — and much of the impetus behind the proposal is to do a sweeping update of an aging fleet, as much of the U.S.-manufactured materiel the Saudis have dates to the 1970s.

Saudi Arabia has been the No. 1 buyer of U.S.-made military equipment for decades, spending over $76 billion from 1950 to 2008. That dwarfs the next-largest buyers: Egypt, which comes in at $31.6 billion; and Israel, at $30.2 billion over the same period. And unlike Israel and Egypt, which finance much of their purchases through U.S. military and other aid, oil giant Saudi Arabia pays cash.

Included in the proposed sale are 84 new F-15s and 70 updates; 72 Blackhawk helicopters, 70 Apache helicopters, 36 Little Bird helicopters and a collection of electronic packages and missiles — all produced by U.S.-based defense contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Those companies estimate that the contract will safeguard more than 75,000 jobs in 44 states — including Nevada — a rare handout to highly skilled labor in a country reeling from a recession.

“Here are people with money who really want to buy the stuff … and they want to pay cash,” Barrett said. “We pay them billions for oil … so over the long term, it helps our balance of payments. And if the Saudis don’t buy that stuff from us, they will buy it from the Europeans.”

Berkley says she is unwilling to barter security for the economy.

“I would hate to think we would be jeopardizing the survival of the state of Israel to create some jobs,” she said.

But in taking that stance, Berkley and her colleagues are missing some key support — most notably, from Israel and the powerful U.S.-based pro-Israel lobby, who have not rubber-stamped the sale, but have not forcibly campaigned against it either.

“Israel understands and is comfortable with what we are doing,” a Defense Department spokesman said.

Gulf and military experts say that is because Israel and Saudi Arabia are aligned against a common enemy in Iran — because safeguards are in place to ensure that even if Saudi Arabia wanted to turn on Israel, it couldn’t use the U.S. military equipment.

“The Saudis don’t have the source codes, and these aircraft radars are programmed so they can’t fire on Israeli aircraft,” said Michael Knights, a fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington-based think tank with a pro-Israel bent.

“This is about defending Saudi airspace from Iranian attacks, which includes intercepting Iranian missiles potentially bound for Israel,” he continued. “It’s a first line of defense between the desert east of Tehran and Washington, D.C.”

Saudis and Iranians have long had a strained relationship. Iran’s religious leaders have openly attacked the Saudi monarchy, while Saudi Arabia remains suspicious of Iran’s ambitious goals for regional dominance. According to reports, Saudi King Abdullah told France’s defense minister this year that “there are two countries in the world that do not deserve to exist: Iran and Israel.”

Berkley, Weiner, and Carney cited that quote in their letter to fellow lawmakers to illustrate Saudi Arabia’s anti-Israeli stance.

There are other reasons thinking of Saudi Arabia as a close military ally remains too large a pill for many in the United States to swallow. The Saudi government is an Islamic monarchy with repressive policies toward women and minorities, and it is extremely difficult for Americans to travel to Saudi Arabia, except on business or diplomatic missions.

As the world’s largest oil producer, the Saudis are also viewed as holding the world’s economy back by promoting global carbon dependence, the eternal antagonist of the clean energy movement. And the Kingdom — which is also Osama bin Laden’s birthplace — has been accused of lending financial support to terrorism and to Israel’s enemies in the Palestinian territories.

But even with assurances that Israel will retain the upper hand regionally and remain better equipped with more advanced weapon systems, the idea that Saudi Arabia might represent the United States’ best hope as a deterrent against Iranian regional ambitions is, to many, a dangerous gamble.

“There has to be an informal dialogue addressing the concerns of Congress … and that dialogue has only just started,” said Rudy deLeon, senior vice president of national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress.

“Allies of Israel will not want to see the strategic balance changed.”

Berkley said she is not hopeful that her bid to block the Obama administration’s Saudi sale will be successful, especially given past experience. Last year the House passed a measure to ban foreign military aid to Saudi Arabia, and in 2008, more than 100 members of Congress co-sponsored a resolution to block the sale of satellite-guided missiles to the state. But Congress has never successfully prevented an administration from completing such a sale.

Under procedural rules, Congress has 30 days once the Pentagon has notified members of a planned sale to take legislative action to stop it — otherwise the deal is permitted to proceed.