Al-Sijill
2009-02-26 22:53:02At least one enterprise is recession-proof: selling arms to Arabs.
This week's International Defense Exhibition & Conference, the Middle East's top arms show, was the largest one ever held. Thousands of arms producers and buyers made the pilgrimage to host-city Abu Dhabi to marvel at the "defense solutions" - euphemism is an arms industry art - on display. IDEX is the Jerusalem of arms sales these days; Arab government's appetite for new weaponry is undiminished despite the global recession and falling oil prices, and Iraq - war-torn, fragile Iraq - has become a growth market in the bazaar.
Baghdad will soon take delivery of a package of $11 billion worth of new weapons, including C130 transport aircraft and assault helicopters armed with Hellfire anti-tank guided missiles. The cornerstone of the deal, however, is the M1 main battle tank. Iraq will buy 140 of them, variants of which are already deployed in far greater numbers by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Even a relatively small complement of M1s is enough to give pause to Iraq's neighbor and ancient rival, however. Iranians remembers well the terrors of their war with Saddam Hussein's armies, which lasted nearly the whole of the 1980s and claimed a half-million lives, many of them civilian.
Tehran has little to worry about, at least for now. A hundred or so M1s are hardly a threat to massive, mountainous Iran. (Besides, the explosive devices Iran has fashioned for Iraqi insurgents have managed to penetrate the M1's armor.) Truth be told, the arsenal Iraq is procuring from the US is more likely to be deployed against domestic challenges to Baghdad's authority - a Kurdish grab of disputed Kirkuk, for example - than against any threats from abroad.
Still, motorized armor and air transport gives Baghdad the ability to project force well beyond the 200 kilometer radius the Pentagon had early prescribed for Iraq's military. Plus, Baghdad's purchase of the M1 and other American-made weapons will create an enduringly umbilical link between the two countries long after the bulk of US troops are withdrawn from the country. Ahead of a visit to Washington two weeks ago, Iraq's defense minister told reporters that the US-South Korea military relationship could be a model for Iraq-US ties. (Note to Iraqis: American forces arrived on the Korean peninsula in 1951 and show no sign of leaving anytime soon.)
"With all this hardware comes the need for US maintenance and spare parts," says Nathan Hughes, an analyst at Stratfor, the global intelligence company. "It builds the foundation for cooperation, for training, upgrades, and also doctrinal links. This gives the US a foothold in Iraq."
The US is not alone. France, for example, which along with the Russians was a major supplier to Saddam Hussein, has signaled its willingness to help Baghdad rearm itself. And it's not as if there isn't plenty of business to go around the region. In 2007, the Bush administration and other governments made available to the Gulf states state-of-the-art weaponry at discounted prices as a counterweight to the looming threat from Iran. Arab governments responded with alacrity, racking up some $20 billion in orders "out of fear," according to the Washington Post, "that US military installations on their territory would make them targets in an American war with Iran." What could be more Orwellian than that? Buying weapons to protect yourself from the threat posed by the presence of other weapons.
Every country has a responsibility to protect itself, particularly in a neighborhood as dangerous as the Middle East. Yet for all the hand-wringing over Tehran as a "regional power" and the addled musings of its president, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, it's worth noting that Iran is one of the most screwed-up countries on Earth. Its economy is Balkanized by the Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard that has developed its own commercial empire, and the Bonyads, the charitable groups run by ex-ministers that are engorging themselves on the country's hugely corrupt privatization program. Its youth suffers from an AIDS epidemic, rising drug-addiction rates, and a jobless level of about 20 percent. The number of working-age adults entering the economy is growing at about 4 percent a year, among the highest such rates in the world. Inflation is in double digits, the consequence of entrenched subsidies funded by oil revenue. And in fact, Iran cannot even take its petroleum riches for granted, however. Because of chronic underinvestment in the country's energy fields, Tehran is expected to be a net oil importer by 2020. Far from being a cohesive autocracy and geopolitical giant, Iran is so fractured economically it is practically ungovernable.
All of which is cold comfort for Israel and the Arab world's ruling establishment, sitting as they are in the cross-hairs of Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. But those are asymmetrical threats against which battle tanks and attack helicopters are of dubious value, as demonstrated by Israel's inconclusive war on Gaza and its failed 2006 conflict in southern Lebanon. Ditto Iran's nuclear ambitions, a product of Persian ego and insecurity that is unlikely to be disposed of absent the declaration of the Middle East as a nuclear-free zone, which is about as likely as an Israeli pavilion at this week's IDEX.
With cuts slated for the Pentagon's $100 billion arms procurement budget, the Middle East remains a lucrative trough for US defense contractors. Thankfully for them, they have an able pitch man in Mr. Ahmadi-Nejad. The "post-9/11 arms spigot" as US Defense Secretary Robert Gates called it, may indeed be closing, but there's still a torrent of deals to be cut in the Arab world. Of course, given the region's instability, it is entirely possible that the weapons sold to one regime today could end up in the hands of a very different one some years down the road.
The Chinese call this "sowing dragon's teeth."