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Report: U.S. downgrades Saudi arms deal over Israeli concerns - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel NewsThe Wall Street Journal said Monday that the United States had signed on to sell dozens of F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, but that details in the final deal had been negotiated to quell Israeli concerns over the possible exchange.
Last month, a senior defense source told Haaretz that Israel was trying to prevent the United States from selling new F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia in order to upgrade the 150 F-15s already in the Saudi air force.
After remarking on the difficulty of establishing democracy in the Middle East, Brokaw said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates “will face some tough questions in this region about the American intentions going on now with all this new turmoil, especially in an area where the United States has such big stakes politically and economically.”
“And a lot of those questions presumably will come from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia,” reported Brokaw on the Nightly News. “I was told on the way in here that the Saudis are so unhappy with the Obama administration for the way it pushed out President Mubarak of Egypt that it sent high level emissaries to China and Russia to tell those two countries that Saudi Arabia now is prepared to do more business with them.”
Brokaw continued, “Back here in Iraq, the political and the economic situation remains fragile. So fragile that the U.N. secretary general is worried that this country could now see massive protests in the streets once again.”
Earlier in his report, Brokaw noted that while U.S. military forces are supposed to leave Iraq at year’s end, the U.S. Embassy staff was being beefed-up from 8,000 to nearly 20,000 personnel. “So Iraq is a reminder of just how difficult it is to establish a democracy in this part of the world,” said Brokaw. “After all, we've been at war here for eight years now, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, and thousands and thousands of lives have been lost on both sides.”
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In a sign of the depth of the Obama administration's concern about the political earthquake that has shaken the region, including the island of Bahrain off Saudi Arabia's Persian Gulf coast, this was Gates' third trip to the area in the past month. He has echoed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's cautioning of authoritarian Arab governments on the risks of moving too slowly in response to peaceful protests for political freedom.
U.S. relations with the Saudi ruling family have been strained for months, dating to the uprising in Egypt and President Barack Obama's call for long-time U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak to give up his presidency. Saudi leaders saw this as the U.S. abandoning a reliable friend with close military and diplomatic ties stretching over decades -- not unlike the U.S.-Saudi alliance, which has the added dimension of American dependence on Saudi oil.
Gates has acknowledged tensions in the relationship with the Saudis but insists it remains a strong partnership. "'It's a great exaggeration to say this relationship's ruptured," Gates said last month on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We have a very strong military-to-military relationship. As you know, the Saudis just made one of the largest purchases of American weapons in their history."
He was referring to a $60 billion deal announced last fall to sell the Saudis 84 new F-15 fighter jets and 190 helicopters, as well as upgrade 70 of their existing F-15s. The deal also includes a wide array of missiles, bombs and other equipment -- mostly with a perceived Iranian threat in mind. Iran, with its Shiite Muslim theocracy in charge, has long been a bitter rival of the Saudis, whose rulers and majority population are Sunni Muslim. Limited protests in Saudi Arabia reportedly have been confined mainly to Shiites in the eastern oil-producing provinces.
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