3 billion dollars a year? That's not all that much

This is one item out of many from the weekend column I wrote with Aluf Benn. The rest is coming tomorrow. Stay tuned...

On October 26, 1981, The New York Times did an inventory count: The paper discovered that 53 senators opposed the sale of AWACS espionage planes to Saudi Arabia and only 38 were in favor of the proposed deal. Nearly two weeks earlier, Newsweek had reported that the Saudi deal would probably "become [President Ronald] Reagan's first major foreign policy defeat." The magazine said that the likely outcome of the vote would be a "humiliation."

Those two weeks proved an illuminating lesson in the Saudis' juggling ability in Washington's power games. On October 28, two days after the Times published its count, 52 senators voted for the deal, 48 voted against. The chairman of an American concern persuaded Sen. Orrin Hatch; the CEO of Union Pacific, the railway company, spoke with Senators Jim Exon and Edward Zorinsky, from Nebraska; the oil companies put pressure on Senator David Boren, from Oklahoma.

This week, loud voices were heard casting doubt on the administration's wisdom and questioning the deal it had devised. The
Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards was the first to speak out, declaring that "the Saudis have fallen short of what they need to be doing" in the fight against terrorism. In Congress, many legislators (most of them Jewish, by the way) explained that they will consider voting against the deal. Some of them also quietly expressed a certain amount of astonishment at the speed with which Olmert had signaled his support for the deal. But that was exactly the American plan. "I want to draw your attention to a statement Prime Minister Olmert made yesterday," the deputy secretary of state, Nicholas
Burns, said in a press briefing.

In contrast to the 1980s, this time Israel chose to cooperate. Deals of this kind, an Israeli observer said this week, always pass in the end anyway. The only question is the price and the quid pro quo.

The minimum value of the U.S.-Saudi deal, $20 billion, convinced even the less enthusiastic officials that increasing U.S. aid to Israel at this point in time is essential. The grumbling over Israel's "schnorring" mentality should be put off until better times, they suggested. A senior State Department official even went so far as to say that "three billion a year" the amount promised Israel during the coming decade "is not all that much." The great majority of the aid is earmarked for defense procurement in the American market - more purchase coupons or subsidies to the U.S. military industry than cash on the line. What can be acquired for that amount today, the senior official noted, is far less than what could be bought for seemingly less aid 10 years ago. The price of weapons has risen.