AWACS: He Does It Again

By George J. Chruch

It was a battle that the Administration had blundered into by inadvertence, never realizing until almost the last moment how high the stakes had become. And thus only by investing all the President's prestige could victory be won. Moreover, that triumph could be only tentative and ambiguous, trading the certainty of new strains in the already troubled U.S. relationship with Israel for a marginal, perhaps temporary, improvement in America's ties with another critical Middle Eastern nation, Saudi Arabia.

But once the chips were on the table, the consequences of defeat, in the White House's view, were all too plain. If Congress turned down the Administration's plan to sell five sophisticated AWACS radar planes and other air-combat gear to Saudi Arabia, Ronald Reagan's ability to conduct any effective foreign policy at all would be called into serious question. If he could not deliver on this promise, how could foreign leaders trust any other commitment he might make? In European as well as Middle Eastern capitals, U.S. allies awaited the vote as a test of Reagan's credibility in defining American policy.

By the time the showdown came in the Senate last week, Reagan had put forth his maximum effort. Since Sept. 11, his aides had shepherded 75 of the 100 Senators to the White House to hear the presidential pitch in person; 44 had been closeted with Reagan in one-on-one sessions, 17 between Monday morning and 2 p.m. Wednesday. Then when the last, Arkansas Democrat David Pryor, left the second-floor study, Reagan suddenly found himself with nothing left to do to influence the vote. He spent the last three hours reading and chatting with Nancy and aides. He went downstairs to the Oval Office a few minutes before 5 p.m. to await the tally.

Fifteen minutes later, a gaggle of aides rushed in from the corner office of Chief of Staff James Baker, where they had been following the vote by telephone hookup to the Senate floor. The count: 52 to 48 in favor of the sale. "Thank God!" exclaimed Reagan. Later, posing for pictures, he answered a photographer's request for "a big smile, Mr. President," by saying: "Tm trying to smile with dignity. I don't want to look jubilant." But he was downright gleeful when he dropped in on applauding aides at a party in the White House basement mess a few minutes later. "I came to applaud you," said Reagan, clapping his own hands. "It was in the fourth quarter, goal to go, and you pushed it over. Doesn't it feel good?"

For the moment, certainly: the victory was the President's most astonishing yet, and his budget and tax triumphs last spring were authentic astonishers. Only two weeks earlier, the House had voted against the $8.5 billion Saudi deal by a resounding 301 to 111. Reagan had let that vote go by default, concentrating on the Republican-controlled Senate, which would have to concur if the sale were to be defeated.-- Yet even in the Senate, rejection also seemed likely. Two days before the vote, opponents counted 55 Senators committed to or leaning toward rejection. Reagan had to switch the votes of several Senators who had been publiclyproclaiming their opposition for months.

He did so by sheer persuasive power. There was to be no modification of the sale, only the endless assertion that, like it or not, the legislators dare not undermine him. Iowa Republican Roger Jepsen, a leader of the anti-AWACS forces, whose switch to Reagan's side the day before the vote signaled that the President would prevail, candidly admitted: "The situation hasn't changed. The only thing that has changed is me."

In addition to the AWACS, the Saudi deal included extra fuel tanks and Sidewinder missiles to extend the range and increase the punch of 60 F-15s already ordered. On merit, the Administration's case for approving the sale was defensible, if not entirely convincing. The West has a vital stake in Saudi Arabia's oil and the stability of the Saudi regime in its turbulent region. To fend off Soviet encroachment and the threats of neighbors serving as Moscow's proxies, the U.S. must provide the Saudis with adequate defenses. The sale would not shift the balance of military strength in the Middle East away from Israel, and it would provide the Saudis with a token of American reliability. Finally, the protection of the remaining moderate Arab states after the assassination of Egypt's President Anwar Sadat was essential to the interests of Israel as well as to those of the U.S.

There were also strong counterarguments. Even with the new weaponry, thinly populated Saudi Arabia would remain vulnerable to external attacks, and the AWACS would do nothing to prevent the most plausible threat to the monarchy: an internal uprising by radical Muslims. The sale would violate explicit assurances made to Congress by Jimmy Carter in 1978 that the U.S. would never extend the offensive capacity of the Saudi arsenal. Moreover, Reagan and his lieutenants could not demonstrate that fulfilling earlier promises to give Saudi Arabia state-of-the-art hardware would advance any overall U.S. plan for dealing with the Middle East.

In the first flush of triumph, the President proclaimed that "peace is again on the march in the Middle East," and Secretary of State Alexander Haig predicted that the deal "will inevitably contribute to stability and the peace process" in the area. There were some initial glimmers of hope: Egypt's new President Hosni Mubarak said that he would try to renew ties with Arab nations critical of the peace process, and Palestine Liberation Organization Chief Yasser Arafat said that he welcomed a peace plan proposed last August by the Saudis that implicitly calls for coexistence between Israel and the Arab nations.

But the risks in proposing the sale were high. A senior State Department official asserted that Senate approval of the AWACS sale "was a victory [only] because it averted a defeat. The downside was big, but the upside is small." Indeed, the very fact that the Administration risked so much to gain so little pointed to serious flaws in the way it formulates diplomatic strategy.

The Administration's hope for promoting peace in the Middle East is, to put it more bluntly than anyone in the Administration would dare, that Saudi Arabia can prod the P.L.O., and the U.S. can push Israel, into some sort of negotiations on the status of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Thus Washington's most immediate task in the wake of the AWACS vote was to reassure Israel that it still has U.S. support. Reagan began by sending a cable to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, only hours after the Senate roll call, in which he said that Washington would continue to "help Israel retain its military and technological advantages" over hostile Arab neighbors.

Official Israeli reaction was restrained enough. Begin emerged from a special Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem to read a statement that described a Saudi Arabia equipped with AWACS planes and missile-armed fighters as "a new serious danger." But his words seemed more regretful than angry; the Prime Minister had argued successfully against a more sharply worded statement proposed by some Cabinet members.

In private, however, many Israeli officials sounded both bitter and genuinely alarmed. The fears are not primarily military. Much was made initially of the prospect that Saudi AWACS planes could spy on Israeli aircraft movements in the interests of Arab enemies that might be planning an attack. Israeli leaders now admit that their fighters could shoot down any Saudi AWACS that essayed such missions. Rather, the worry in Jerusalem is that the Reagan Administration is shifting U.S. diplomatic support away from Israel toward Saudi Arabia. Said one close aide to Begin: "We realize what the Saudis can do in the White House. They can do anything they want."

Though the U.S. considers Saudi Arabia to be a moderate Arab state, Israelis see it as a corrupt, implacably hostile and rabidly anti-Jewish nation. They point out that the Saudis bankroll terrorism through financial support of the P.L.O. and last year called for a jihad (an Islamic holy war) to oust Israel from occupied Arab land. At times there is a touch of paranoia in the Israeli view. For example, discussing the much-rumored possibility of a U.S.-favored rapprochement between Egyptian President Mubarak and the rulers in Riyadh, one Israeli official asserted: "In that case, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. would have something of a common front against Israel."

In particular, the Israeli government fears that Washington is losing interest in promoting the Camp David peace process. The next formal step in that process will be the return to Egypt of the last portion of the Sinai next April; if Cairo-Jerusalem talks do not succeed by then in moving toward some form of autonomy for the Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, some new formula for continuing negotiations may have to be found. Although high U.S. officials insist that American policy is rooted in the Camp David accords, Israelis fear that Washington will try to push some variation of the plan put forward last August by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Fahd. To Israelis the plan is utterly unacceptable: it envisions an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital. Begin and his aides are certain that such a state would be dominated by P.L.O. terrorists.

Leaders of American Jewish organizations were especially dismayed by the AWACS vote, and the tactics they thought the Administration had used to win it. On the morning of the Senate roll call, How ard Squadron, president of the American Jewish Congress, cornered Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese in a hotel room in San Francisco. Meese was in town to keep a longstanding date to address an A.J.C. dinner that night. Squadron accused the Administration of trying to muzzle his organization by implying that the A.J.C.'s lobbying against the sale had put Israeli interests ahead of America's. Furthermore, he complained, the Administration was not sufficiently aware of the danger of anti-Semitism in the U.S. Presumably he had in mind the warning, expressed privately by some Administration lobbyists to Senators and then openly by Republicans Mark Hatfield of Oregon and William Cohen of Maine, that defeat of the AWACS sale might cause a backlash of public opinion against Israel and its American Jewish supporters.

Meese shot back: "I hope you're not implying that this Administration is condoning antiSemitism. Ronald Reagan doesn't need to apologize one bit for his record on Israel or on bigotry." Later, in his speech at the dinner, Meese assured his audience that the Administration would prosecute any anti-Semitic acts under civil rights laws, and that it had pushed the AWACS sale in large part because it hoped to bring Saudi Arabia into peace negotiations with Israel. His audience was not mollified. Squadron, in a speech following Meese's, again insisted that the Administration "appeared to challenge the loyalties of those who oppose the arms package."

The question is whether the U.S. will gain anything much to compensate for, and eventually assuage, Israeli and American Jewish wrath. Deeply worried about the fragility of the truce in Lebanon, the Administration hopes to replace a Saudi-mediated cease-fire with a more permanent arrangement to restore the authority of the Beirut government over its own country; that would involve withdrawal of Syrian troops and stringent restrictions on P.L.O. activity in the country. Reagan's special envoy, Philip Habib, will return to Beirut in mid-November to see what can be done in enlisting Saudi and Israeli support for such an agreement.

Besides drawing the Saudis further into the Middle East peace process, the U.S. hopes they will continue to pump large supplies of oil at steady prices, and join at least a tacit American-sponsored "strategic consensus" to deter Soviet thrusts into the region. But approval of the arms sale by no means guarantees that these American dreams will come true. A day after the Senate vote, at a meeting of the OPEC cartel in Geneva, the Saudis went along with a pricing agreement that would lower the top prices charged by some members but would also increase the cost of Saudi crude by $2 per bbl. In the eyes of some radical Arab states, the AWACS deal does not indicate that friendship with Washington pays off in tangible security gains, but that the Saudis are becoming pawns of the U.S.

Fulminations from radical Arabs were to be expected. Far more troublesome and discouraging is a sour mood in Saudi Arabia itself. Officially, the desert monarchy showered Reagan with praise for his staunch battle on behalf of the AWACS. But TIME editors on a news tour of the Persian Gulf region with U.S. businessmen heard a different line from Saudi officials, beginning with Prince Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz, No. 3 in the Saudi hierarchy. "I personally am hoping for the failure of the vote today," he said only hours before the Senate roll call. "That would be an eye-opener for the American people. It would make them realize that there is another government [Israel] that influences American policy."

At his multimillion-dollar estate in Riyadh, Sheik Abdul Aziz Tawajiri, a commander of the Saudi Internal security force under Prince Abdullah, delivered an emotional warning. Its essence: Saudi Arabia's aspirations to pan-Arab leadership are incompatible with close Saudi-American friendship, so long as the U.S. remains Israel's chief supporter. Within Saudi Arabia, warned Tawajiri, "a generation gap is developing. Perceptions of the U.S. are changing, slowly perhaps, but for the worse." As most of his ten sons sat silently near by, the sheik, who is in his early 70s, asserted that they "have sizzling arguments with me. They say, 'Dad, you are deviating, you're not with it. You keep singing the praises of the U.S. even when the Americans are working against us.' "

Would the AWACS sale change such attitudes? Tawajiri held out no hope that it would. Said he: "The U.S. hasn't sent us one single rifle without the imprimatur of Israel on it." That statement, of course, is ludicrous. Yet it is important evidence that Saudis share the Arab view about the American failure to rein in its Israeli ally, even when Israel bombs civilians in Beirut and a nuclear reactor in Iraq.

Thus the Administration can expect only meager and uncertain rewards for the gigantic risk it took of having its credibility in foreign policy destroyed had the AWACS sale been rejected. Why it did so can be explained in only one way: the President and his aides never fully realized what a jam they were getting into until it was almost too late to pull out. That, in turn, points to serious flaws in the Administration's foreign policymaking apparatus, which have persisted throughout its nine months in office, in part perhaps because Reagan directed the initial energies and attentions of his Administration to be devoted to the U.S. economy.

One problem is that too many people are still taking it on themselves to speak for the Administration. Says one British Cabinet minister: "The disarray and doubletalk at the higher levels of American foreign policy has become so pronounced as to make us wonder who really is in charge." Another problem is that the State Department has not coordinated well with the White House staff; as a result, National Security Adviser Richard Allen is not laying before Reagan the detailed analyses of foreign policy problems and options that previous Presidents got from stronger aides. A third difficulty is that Secretary of State Haig is more of a tactician than a strategist, and has surrounded himself with aides of like mind; they tend almost reflexively to muscular, ad hoc responses toward particular problems, frequently focusing on the shipment of arms abroad as a prime method of diplomacy. Finally, Reagan himself, lacking experience in foreign affairs and concentrating mostly on domestic problems, has failed to appreciate his aides' shortcomings.

All these shortcomings combined to make the AWACS deal a nightmarish brush with disaster. The story began in a way, in 1978, when President Jimmy Carter pushed through a reluctant Congress the sale of the 60 F-15 fighters to Saudi Arabia. He did so. with arguments remarkably similar to those that Reagan was to use three years later, chiefly that the U.S. had to increase its influence in the Middle East by helping moderate Arab states to defend themselves. Harold Brown, then Secretary of Defense, had to pledge that Saudi Arabia's F-15s would not be equipped with such offensive gear as range-extending fuel tanks and bomb racks.

By 1980, the situation had changed. The Saudis felt threatened by a sequence of ominous events: the overthrow of the Shah of Iran (who in 1977 had ordered AWACS planes that fortuitously were never delivered); the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Ethiopia's increasing emergence as a Soviet ally on the Horn of Africa; Marxist South Yemen's attempt to overthrow the traditionally westward-leaning regime in northern Yemen. The Saudis began pressing for precisely the fuel tanks and bomb racks (Sidewinder missiles were added later) that Brown had said they would not get. When war broke out between Iran and Iraq, both Americans and Saudis had visions of bombing raids on the vital oil fields near the Persian Gulf; the U.S. dispatched four AWACS planes, manned by American crews, to give early warning of any such attack (they will stay until the first Saudi AWACS arrive in 1985).--

On Nov. 20, when President-elect Reagan made a courtesy call at the White House, Carter told him that Saudi demands for an F-15 "enhancement" package and some kind of airborne reconnaissance system were matters that Reagan would have to deal with early in his Administration. Reaganauts later claimed that Carter had presented them with an all-but-completed deal. Interviewed by TIME last week, Brown insisted that no deal had been promised. Rather, Brown said, he wrote to the Saudi defense minister asserting that the Carter Administration had merely "recommended" the F-15 enhancement package to Reagan and stating that it "looked with favor on an ultimate transfer" of AWACS planes to the Saudis. That was scarcely a commitment, Brown argued, and Reagan "could properly have rejected the whole thing, although it might have been embarrassing."

The new Administration, in any case, had no objection. As early as Feb. 3, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was proclaiming publicly that a new arms deal with the Saudis was in the works. He made no mention of AWACS, but Air Force General David C. Jones, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shortly convinced him that the radar planes should be included. According to some Administration insiders, Jones' clinching argument was economic: a sack of cash from the Saudis for the AWACS would hold down the cost of producing the radar planes for the U.S. Air Force.

No attempt was made to get a quid pro quo from the Saudis such as support for the Camp David peace process. Aides to Allen claim that they discussed asking Riyadh for such a commitment; they gave up the idea as futile. Nor did the Administration propose joint U.S.-Saudi control or manning of the planes, though that would have also allayed some Israeli and congressional objections.

Incredibly, no real effort was made then by the Administration even to measure the potential depth of those objections. When Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir visited Washington in late February, he was told by Haig that some sort of aerial reconnaissance equipment might be sold to the Saudis; Israelis now insist that the warning was extremely vague. Israel had reconciled itself to the beefing up of the Saudi F-15s. Under the impression that this would be the main part of the package, Shamir expressed only ritualistic objection. His "I'm not worried" comment was then taken by the Administration to indicate that the Israelis would have no serious quarrel with an arms sale involving AWACS.

Administration officials briefed Congressmen behind closed doors about the impending Saudi arms sale in February, but made no mention of AWACS. The essential decision was taken at a Feb. 27 meeting of the National Security Council, but it was still not final when Reagan was felled by a would-be assassin's bullet in late March. While Haig was on a trip to the Middle East, Reagan gave him the official word from his hospital bed on April 4 to tell the Saudis that the AWACS would be theirs.

Even then, the Administration did not make a formal announcement until April 21, long after many Congressmen had been irritated to read about the impending AWACS sale in the press. Rather than trying quietly to persuade Congressmen and Senators to go along with the deal, it pushed the subject aside while concentrating on winning its economic package. In June, 54 Senators, including 21 Republicans, signed a letter to Reagan expressing "strong belief that the sale should not be made.

By late September, when the Administration was about to submit the sale formally, many legislators were openly insisting that they would never vote yes unless there were some sort of joint-control arrangement for the AW ACS planes. With Reagan's permission, Allen joined the group effort to negotiate a compro mise. His efforts aroused the ire of Haig, who felt that Allen was usurping a State Department role. In any case, it failed when word of the attempt leaked, all but forcing the proud Saudis to say no. Reagan was left with no way to win approval, ex cept to plead that rejection would destroy his ability to conduct foreign policy.

The President won, at two minutes to midnight. But has the Administration learned anything from the near fiasco? Once again, unfortunately, portents are mixed. The Administration still shows a propensity to opt for ill-considered military solutions to complex diplomatic problems. For example, the first reaction by Washington to the assassination of Egypt's President Anwar Sadat was to increase the size of a U.S. training exercise in the Egyptian desert scheduled for November. Operation Bright Star is being scaled down, in apparent recognition that so suffocating a U.S. embrace could only embarrass Sadat's successor.

Indeed, any overt American military embrace would run the risk of smothering other U.S. friends in the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia. Riyadh already fears that it might be perceived by radicals as a puppet of the U.S. -- a worry heightened by Reagan's ill-conceived declaration last month that Washington would not let Saudi Arabia become "an Iran." The President never made clear how he would back up his unsolicited promise to protect the Saudi monarchy from internal or external threats to its power.

Despite Reagan's and Haig's initial euphoria over the Senate AW ACS vote, at least some Administration officials are voicing an appropriately sober response. Said one senior Reagan aide: "We know that if we had been defeated, it would have been five steps back. We don't know whether going ahead with AWACS puts us five steps ahead. All we know is that it keeps us on the playing field, where we have to be." That is a realistic appraisal: the consequences of losing would have been serious for America's ability to conduct foreign policy around the world, so the narrow squeak past disaster was a vital victory. But it may yet prove to be a small one in light of the difficult battles that lie ahead.

-- Under a 1976 law. Congress can veto--but not modify--any proposed arms sale abroad totaling more than $25 million if both houses pass identical resolutions disapproving it. So far, that has never happened.

-- Major reason for the long lead time: NATO has on order 17 of the converted Boeing 707s, which must be built first; so, probably, will be ten of the AWACS requested by the U.S. Air Force. In addition, there can be no deliveries until an elaborate support structure, including more than 800 trained technicians and maintenance workers, is in place in Saudi Arabia.

With reporting by Laurance I. Barrett, Gregory Wierzynski

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