While channel surfing last night I stumbled across CNN international. Wolf Blitzer announced the topics of his following Situation Room show.

‘Bush arrived in Saudi Arabia with a huge gift of $20 billion,’ or so he said.  I didn’t feel well enough to sustain his babbling so I immediately zapped away.

But today I checked the transcript and, as expected, Blitzer was as fact-free as it gets. "a pricey gift …" he said.

This is not a gift, but, in the benign version, an offer to
sell some very expensive and useless stuff. As the Saudis depend on U.S.
defense, (and are deliberately kept in that state), they are required to
pay tribute. Since the first U.S. war
on Iraq, Saudi Arabia purchased U.S. weapons for about $40 billion. One is tempted to call these sales camouflaged extortion.

The $20 billion Blitzer talked about is the amount for which the U.S. hopes to sell weapons to six Gulf countries. The United Arab Emirates are offered to buy for some $10 billion and Kuwait for $1.7 billion. The current total deal with Saudi Arabia will likely stay below $1 billion.

The most imminent sell to SA is of 900 JDAM kits for a price of $123 million. JDAMs are strap-on guidance system for dumb gravity bombs. They depend on GPS satellite signals, something the U.S. can disable anytime. The weapons SA will purchase for a horrendous price are less capable than those Israel gets for free. (Sidenote: the NYT link above nearly beats the quality of Blitzer’s reporting by confusing the bombs in question with missiles. Missiles can be launched from a distance – bomb droppers are exposed to adversarial air defense.)

The price of the JDAM deal is some $137,000 per guided bomb. But the pure JDAM strap-on kit is listed by FAS as costing about $20,000. The dumb bombs these guidance-kits are strapped to are less than $4,000 each.

The market price for the deal should thereby be around $22 million, not $123 million. The extra $100 million on the bill are bribes, profits and funds for the Republican party.

Did I mention extortion? That’s the only real issue these Gulf weapon deals are about.

The Saudi military buys a lot of USuk hightech, but never manages to integrate the stuff. The more complex systems are maintained and run by Saudi payed U.S. contractors. Some fun stuff is used for training games, like competitive tank-gunning with live ammunition. A few Saudi princes are allowed to show off in modern jets to impress their peers and girl friends. The Saudi military is essentially a deliberate hoax.

If the Saudis would ever take their national defense seriously, they immediately would be in danger to lose their oil fields to a U.S. marines onslaught. Such plans exist since 1973 and continue today as visible in Lt.Col. Ralph Peters’ map.

The only ‘gift’ the US is offering SA is to keep the status quo intact. This as long as the Saudis pay their tribute.

Timeo Danaos …

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Note: Beating CNN anytime, Asia Times has a good piece on the deal: Smart bombs, dangerous ideas