Congress was recently notified by the United States administration that it would be participating in one of the largest arms sales in history to Saudi Arabia. The $60 billion deal includes advanced military aircraft, new helicopters and other weapons such as missiles and bombs.
Aside from the entire fact that the costs of the U.S. weapons development are socialized while the profits are privatized, this seems like we’re just selling weapons to another country, which doesn’t seem like a big deal considering how much foreign aid we usually provide to everyone else’s wars, but this arms deal has much more to do with foreign policy than meets the eye.
You see, the connections between Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the U.S. make up the Bermuda Triangle of foreign policy. Deeply confusing for most, and even disturbing to think about for many others, this twisted three-way makes absolutely no sense.
We have to look back in history in order to understand the complexity of this relationship.
The Iran-Iraq War is a good place to start. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the U.S. remained officially neutral while covertly assisting the Iraqi Army. As Iran started to succeed against the Iraqi invaders, the U.S. increased its support for Iraq, most likely because it was still a bit touchy about one year earlier when Iran overthrew the dictator that the CIA placed in power.
Iraq realized in 1988 that it couldn’t pay back its heavy debts to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and Saddam Hussein didn’t believe Iraq had to pay back its debts to Saudi Arabia because the Saudis had only supported Iraq in the war out of fear that the new Iran would influence the Saudis’ Shia minority that controlled a majority of oil fields. No agreement could be found, and Iraq proceeded to invade Kuwait two years later. This marks the beginning of the Gulf War and the U.S. government’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia.
Once the Iraqi Army was in Kuwait, its proximity was close enough to strike the Saudi oil fields, the fact of which was worsened by Hussein’s verbal — and extremely hypocritical — attacks on the U.S.-supported Saudi state. Eventually the U.S. military sent 543,000 troops into Saudi Arabia to protect it.
That is how much we have supported Saudi Arabia, and, due to that support, they’ve allowed us to keep around 5,000 troops in their country since 1992, a number that rose to nearly 10,000 during the recent conflict with Iraq. Saudi Arabia has become our puppet, and this leads directly to our current relationship with Iran.
Iran has already experienced what it’s like to deal with a puppet. The Shah brutalized that country to an extent beyond the imagination. It’s no wonder why Iranians just want to be left alone.
I’m not the first to admit that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says some crazy things from time to time, but, if the Iranian citizens don’t like him, then its their own problem to deal with, not ours. And they surely are capable of dealing with it. They have overtoppled an oppressive regime backed up by an even bigger foreign military before. If you don’t see the reflection of our own country’s founders in that mix, you’re not paying attention.
Now, whether Iran poses a threat to the U.S. due to its nuclear program doesn’t really matter because, as we’ve so aptly seen throughout the past decade, preemptive wars do not end well, and, as we’ll soon discuss, the only reason Iran would ever attack us is if we were to even further intervene in its affairs.
The U.S. continually enforces sanctions against the country, installs military bases surrounding its borders, supports much more oppressive regimes, gets jerked around by Israel, and we continue to ask why the Iranians are scared? They have as much right to defend themselves from us as we do from them. Of course, when the U.S. government doesn’t get its way, it has to call in daddy and the boys.
The most recent of the sanctions against Iran passed earlier this year have crippled Iran’s economy, all in the name of hurting Iran’s government. The U.N. is arrogant for thinking that sanctions hurt governments and not citizens. It is incredibly easier to be poor in the United States where the economy is at least semi-free as opposed to a country where imports are impeded by illegal blockades, causing costs to rise.
So, in essence, the U.S. government likes the Saudis because they allow us to be in their country, and it doesn’t like the Iranians because they don’t want us to be in their country.
But we had to make sure to understand the importance of the depths of these relationships, or else the debate ends up focusing on some kind of nonexistent difference in mentality between Saudis, Iranians and Americans that we can somehow fix overnight.
We always need to see things from various perspectives. How would we feel if Iran were to set up multiple military bases in Mexico, Canada and Cuba? The answer is we’d feel threatened.
The biggest factor in the equation is that Mecca and Medina, the two holiest Islamic cities, are in Saudi Arabia where our troops were stationed. This is one of the main reasons that The 9/11 Commission Report gave for the attacks on Sept. 11. Not only is the U.S. jeopardizing its relationship with Iran, but it is providing al-Qaeda with perhaps the greatest recruiting tool it has ever received.
It is true that we took out most of our troops from the area in 2003 in order to ease tensions caused by our foreign interferences, but the addition of this U.S.-supplied mass arsenal near the holy Islamic cities is a disastrous idea. With Iran’s recent insistences on being a sovereign nation, the sale to Saudi Arabia is our government’s way of telling Iran, “We’re not there, but we are.”
This arms deal is aggressive and demeaning and in no way protects the interests of the United States. Until our military is completely out of the Arabian Peninsula, we cannot expect to make any peace with foreign nations.
Reach Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu
