Page 487 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

484 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

On 16 September 1976, two and a half months after the enactment of the
Arms Export Control Act, the sub-committee on foreign assistance of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee reopened hearings on the proposed sale

of 160 F-16 aircraft to Persia at a cost of $3,800 million. The sale was the initial
stage of an eventual order for a total of 300 F-16 and 250 F-18 aircraft. At the

start of the proceedings the chairman of the sub-committee, Senator Hubert
Humphrey, remarked that, when the hearings had originally begun, the
Committee on Foreign Relations had been inclined to ask for detailed informa­

tion on each and every proposed sale of arms to the Middle-Eastern states
concerned. At the urging of the State and Defence Departments, however,
automatic reporting requirements had been held to a minimum, with the
committee only asking for information as it required it. Until the more recent

notifications of arms sales the practicality of the arrangement had not been
seriously tested. Now, Humphrey said, he had to report that the performance

of both the State and Defence Departments in responding to requests for
information was nothing less than ‘deplorable’. The committee had asked for
details about Saudi Arabia’s armed forces and had not received them. It had
asked for an analysis of the military threats to several countries in the Middle

East and had not received it. It had asked for inventories of the weapons
possessed by Middle-Eastern countries. The information was delivered,
Humphrey observed, ‘in a totally unusable form’. Instead of requests for

approval of specific arms sales coming in at intervals, a ‘whole bucket’ of
requests, involving sales to a value of $6,000 million, had now been put before
the committee for its approval, with only thirty days left before the ninety­

fourth Congress was due to adjourn. The whole sequence of events, Humphrey
concluded, ‘indicates an almost total lack of respect on the part of the executive
branch for the committee’s role in considering arms sales matters’.
At the root of the State and Defence Departments’ cavalier behaviour lay the

calculations that each had made about how arms sales to Persia and Saudi
Arabia might serve its own separate interests. For the Defence Department, as
we have seen, there were considerable benefits for its own research, develop­
ment and procurement plans in the continuing sale of large quantities of

advanced weapons to the two countries. For the State Department the arms
sales were an integral part of the financial and political compact into which the

United States had entered with Saudi Arabia, one of the chief purposes 0
which was to absorb Saudi Arabia’s surplus oil revenues. Much the same
calculation applied in the case of Persia, also. But the main consideration, so tar
as the State Department was concerned, was the part that arms p aye , an

were designed to play, in equipping Persia and Saudi Arabia to p ay er
which the State Department had devised for them as the ^ardia"s , .
security of the Gulf. It was on these grounds that the State DePar‘ f

sought, in the years from 1972 to 1976, to justify the increasing vc> u
sales to the two countries, and it did so again in the testimony 1