Page 490 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Gazelles and Lions 487

United States had other matters to absorb her attention in the closing weeks of

1978 - among them the abandonment of Taiwan, the restoration of full
diplomatic relations with China and the strategic arms limitation talks -
matters which closely affected Soviet-American relations and which could
easily upset the delicate equilibrium governing these relations.

A mutuality of interests was similarly propounded by State Department
witnesses before the congressional committees from 1972 onwards to justify
the sale of large quantities of advanced American weapons and aircraft to Saudi
Arabia. The tenor of the arguments used may be gauged from what has already
been said of the State Department’s determination to portray Saudi Arabia and

her ruling house as arrayed like the lilies of the field. That the lilies had been
festering for some time was just as resolutely concealed from the committee
members. Thus, testifying before Senator Humphrey’s sub-committee in

September 1976 in support of requests from the Saudi government to purchase
arms and aircraft to a value of $7,510 million, Alfred L. Atherton, Jr, assistant
secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, painted a glowing picture
of Saudi Arabia as a country soberly aware of its duties as a regional power,
eminently worthy to be trusted to employ sensibly and responsibly the panoply

of weapons it had ordered, and above all a tried and true friend of the United
States. The previous March, Atherton had made a like deposition in support of
Saudi arms requests to a sub-committee of the House Committee on Inter­
national Relations, on which occasion he had assured its members: ‘We see

their present requests as reasonable and rational, albeit limited and relatively
small, and well within their capability to absorb and employ effectively.’
Considering that these requests included F-5 fighter aircraft to a value of over
$1,000 million, 440 helicopters and Hawk missile systems, they could hardly
be described as ‘relatively small’. Nor, in view of the elementary level of

technical competence possessed by the Saudi armed forces, could it be claimed
by any stretch of the imagination that the Saudis were capable of employing
them effectively.

Atherton was equally misleading about the political implications of these
arms sales. As he told the sub-committee,

We have looked carefully at the relative balance of forces in Saudi Arabia and its
neighbors, and conclude that these sales would not significantly affect that balance. In

act, to the extent that strengthening Saudi ground forces in a limited way enhances the
audi security role with respect to its smaller neighbors in the Arabian Peninsula, the
impact would be positive.

might be remarked in passing that if the State Department had in fact

^oo ed carefully’ at the relative strength of the Saudi armed forces, it was
eeping its information carefully to itself. For, as we noticed a short while ago,
enator Humphrey, the chairman of the Senate sub-committee on foreign
ssistance, was still complaining in September 1976 about the department’s