How America Keeps its Ally Armed to the
TeethBy Robert Fisk
The Independent
Monday, 13 April 1998
The US is flouting the rules over the supply of weaponry to its
Middle East friend. Robert Fisk reports from Beirut.
Almost every missile, shell and bomb dropped on Lebanon by Israel
over the past 20 years had "Made in America" stamped on it. Sometimes
quite literally. When Israel was dropping hundreds of cluster bombs
on civilian areas of Beirut in 1982 - in contravention of their
conditions of sale - I found their white-painted casings marked "US
Navy". Several contained timing devices with the abbreviated name of
an American manufacturer, "Gen Time Corps", stamped on them.
In Washington last summer, I was shown a confidential request made
to the US government by Israel for immediate delivery of 98,000
artillery shells of 155mm calibre; they were shipped at once as a
routine military transfer, no questions asked or conditions attached.
For the single all-important and most sensitive connection between
Israel and its American patron is the weapons pipeline through which
pours a tide of US fighter- bombers, helicopters, missiles, shells
and high-performance technology.
In 1973, the Americans were stripping their forward armoured units
in the Fulda Gap, Germany, to ship US tanks - in their hundreds - to
Israeli troops in occupied Sinai. An Oceania airbase commander once
recalled for me how half his squadron of US aircraft were painted in
Israeli colours overnight and sent to Israel without
consultation.
Almost every artillery piece, warplane, helicopter, missile and
shell used in Israel's bombardment of southern Lebanon in 1996, in
which almost 200 civilians were slaughtered, was American-made.
It was not always thus. In the early days of Israel's statehood,
its young pilots made do with second-hand Messerschmitts and
third-hand Spitfires. Until General de Gaulle imposed an arms
embargo, the Israelis were flying Mirage jets. But America's
armourers are now the mainstay of Israel's weapons supplies,
providing it with an overwhelming military supremacy over its Arab
neighbours while winking at the 200 nuclear missiles Israel keeps in
the Negev.
In theory, the United States maintains some leverage - a
much-misused word in the Middle East lexicon - over the use of its
arms. But you only have to read of the day Ronald Reagan learnt of
Israel's attack on Iraq's Osiris nuclear reactor in 1981 to
understand Washington's indulgence. The raid had been carried out
with American-made F-16s, all part of a 1975 batch of 75 such
aircraft sent to Israel "for defence purposes only". When Reagan's
aides looked to the President for a reaction, he replied: "Boys will
be boys."
As long as the Soviet Union existed - and sent its own ordnance to
the Arab states - Israel could argue that it was, in the former
defense secretary Caspar Weinberger's phrase, America's "unsinkable
battleship" in the Middle East. In 1968, the Israeli prime minister,
Levi Eshkol, asked Washington for the sale of advanced F-4 fighters
to offset Egypt's limited-range Mig-21s. The Pentagon argued that
Israel had sufficient A-4 Skyhawks to cope with the Migs. President
Johnson's staff then proved ready to trade 50 F-4s for Israel's
signature on the non-proliferation treaty. Israel didn't sign but was
promised 27 more Skyhawks and F-4s if they needed them.
In reality, over the past two decades, Russian equipment never
measured up to Israel's. Syria lost two-thirds of its air force in a
one-day battle in 1982, and its present stock of Scud missiles are
two decades old. The last Hizbollah Katyusha to be fired at Israel in
1996 fell two miles short of the frontier because, the UN later
discovered, it was manufactured in Stalin's Russia in 1944.
Paul Findley, the Illinois congressman who lost his seat primarily
because of his criticism of Israel, has recorded incidents when
Israeli intelligence officers had penetrated the Pentagon so
thoroughly they were able to tell American officers the exact
military location in the US of shells and other ordnance that Israel
was requesting. Even when Israel passed on US technology to third
parties - when, for example, it secretly sent agents via Scandinavia
to China to install new laser-guidance equipment on Chinese tanks in
the 1980s - the Americans made no public comment. The Egyptians
discovered what had happened when the Chinese offered them new tanks
with Hebrew writing on the laser equipment.
The repeated "transfer" of weapons - as opposed to sale - means
air-to-ground missiles are often sent to Israel with no conditions
attached. In a long investigation last year, The Independent
discovered a Boeing- Lockheed missile fired by an Israeli helicopter
pilot at an ambulance in southern Lebanon in 1996 had been sold not
to the Israelis but to the US Marine Corps. The missiles killed two
women and three children in the vehicle while the Israelis justified
the slaughter by saying there were Hizbollah members inside - which
was untrue.
It transpired that the AGM 114C rocket had been purchased by the
Marines, sent to the Gulf in 1990 for use against Saddam Hussein's
army and, after the war, was sent to Israel with dozens of other
identical missiles as a quid pro quo gift for Israel's forbearance in
not bombing Iraq. Not a single complaint was made by the United
States to Israel about the attack; indeed, the State Department and
Defense Department would make no comment on the affair even after 30
telephone calls from The Independent.
Israel's own arms industry - including the Kfir fighter-bomber and
the Merkava battle tank - has given the country a semblance of
self-sufficiency but it is the US which gives Israel its cutting
edge, and continues to do so long after the demise of the Soviet
Union.
A powerful Jewish lobby in the United States sees to it that
Congress raises no serious questions. Boys, it seems, will go on
being boys.
