Page 311 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

308 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

serious predicament. He could not promptly switch to another power for arms
for the replacement of the aircraft and weapons he had acquired over a period
of time would have taken roughly the same amount of time to accomplish. The
cost would probably have been more than the Persian treasury could bear, and
besides, at the end of the changeover he would have found himself in the same
situation of dependence as before. It was no doubt with thoughts like these in
mind, and remembering the abrupt discontinuance of the supply of American
arms to Pakistan in 1965 and to Turkey in 1974, that the shah embarked upon

an ambitious scheme of arms production at Ispahan, primarily with British
help, at a reputed cost of $1,400 million.

The situation of dependence created by the furnishing of American arms to
Persia, however, was not entirely one-sided. The close integration of the
Persian arms procurement programme with that of the armed forces of the
United States themselves carried with it some disturbing implications, the
outlines of which had become increasingly apparent by 1976. For example, the
shah’s insistence upon early delivery of the F—14s he had ordered led to delays
in delivery of the aircraft in the numbers required to the United States Navy.
New weapons developed by the United States had by then, as their order of
priority for delivery, the United States armed forces, NATO and Persia. Even
this, however, was not good enough for the shah, who demanded that Persia be
moved up the list, ahead of NATO. He also attempted, by indicating his
preference for particular weapons at the development stage, to influence the

selection of arms by the United States government for its own forces. The
Grumman Tomcat, as we have seen, was a case in point. Moreover, as we have
also seen, the United States was ready, even anxious, to gratify his desire for
preferential treatment in arms procurement. The readiness can partly be
ascribed to apprehensions that the shah might retaliate against a constriction of
arms supplies or the withholding of advanced weaponry by reducing Persia s
oil exports to the West; although this would have been a desperate expedient in
view of his utter dependence upon oil exports to finance his ‘Great Civiliza­
tion’. A less dangerous and probably equally effective device would have been
to play upon the fears of the American aircraft and armaments manufacturers
that they might suffer financially from any diminution of Persia’s oil revenues.

The trouble with all this, so far as the wider interests of the Western world were
concerned, was that it created a vicious circle, in which expensive armaments
that required mounting oil revenues to meet the cost of their purchase gener­
ated pressure for increased oil prices, leading in turn to the need for the West to
sell even greater quantities of ever more expensive weapons in order to meet the
soaring cost of oil. ..
Most of all, however, the American attitude was determined by the po y
laid down by Nixon and Kissinger of entrusting the security of the Gulf and its
oil reserves to Persia and, to only a slightly lesser extent, Saudi Arabia, a po icy
that required that nothing be done to impede the building up of the ersian