Sean L. Yom is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University.
On January 14, 2008, the State Department officially notified Congress of its intent to sell 900 Joint Direct Attack Munitions kits to Saudi Arabia. Though some in Congress balked at transferring such advanced military technology to a country still in a formal state of war with Israel, their protests soon faltered. The transaction is just the latest phase in the Bush administration’s plan to sell at least $20 billion of high-tech weaponry to Saudi Arabia and the five other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states—Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. These sales are part of a massive $63 billion package of arms transfers and military aid to Washington’s chief Middle Eastern allies first announced the preceding July. In addition to the GCC sales, over the next decade the US will provide $13 billion of arms grants to Egypt and $30 billion to Israel.
The Saudi weaponry sale was announced during President George W. Bush’s January tour of the Middle East, which featured successive stops in Israel, the West Bank, most of the GCC kingdoms and Egypt. The week-long mission reprised a rare joint visit to these states undertaken by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in the summer of 2007, shortly after the original $63 billion announcement. In placing huge offers of arms and aid on the table, both trips aimed at strengthening decades-long strategic relationships with these key US allies—repeatedly labeled “forces of moderation” by Rice—in order to contain the threat of regional “extremism.” To use the Bush administration’s language, the transfer of American-made weaponry will “contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States” by helping countries that are “an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East.”[1] As Bush colorfully warned, peace and prosperity in the region are now under siege by “violent extremists who murder the innocent in pursuit of power.”