Found This
@TomSea Saudi Arabia and the Reagan Doctrine
by Jonathan Marshall
published in MER155 <..snip..>
Saudi Arabia, for its part, has also made a major commitment to covert support of Reagan administration foreign policy objectives. One goal clearly was to neutralize or at least limit the power of the Israel lobby in the United States. It opened up its bank accounts to Washington, sending petrodollars to the Third World to stoke the fires of anti-communist rebellion.
Arms and InfluenceSuch cooperation and generosity did not begin with Ronald Reagan’s election. In the early 1970s, Saudi Arabia played a financial role in helping to wean Egypt away from the Soviet Union and transform it into a staunch US ally. In 1977, the Saudis financed the airlift of Moroccan troops to Zaire to save the Mobutu regime from Katangan secessionist forces. In 1979, they donated tens of millions of dollars to the Yemen Arab Republic, which was engaged in fierce border clashes with its pro-Soviet neighbor to the south, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. (The Saudis have been sending arms and money to the North Yemeni government and/or opposition forces since 1962.) At Washington’s request, the Saudis also bankrolled Somalia in the late 1970s to the tune of $200 million, thus helping to move that former Soviet client into the Western camp and secure for the United States access to naval bases on the Indian Ocean. [2]
The “special relationship” between Riyadh and Washington really began to flourish after 1981, as the Saudis turned to the Reagan administration to safeguard their orders of advanced weapons from Congressional interdiction at the hands of the Israel lobby. The new secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, hailed from Bechtel, the construction giant with major interests in Saudi Arabia. After only two weeks in office, Weinberger announced that the administration wanted to do everything it could to strengthen Saudi defenses in the wake of the the shah’s fall in Iran. [3] On March 6, 1981, the administration announced plans to sell new arms to the Saudis to halt what it perceived to be a “serious deterioration” in Western security interests in the region. Israeli officials and a majority of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee quickly assailed the decision. [4]
On April 1, the National Security Council (NSC) decided to expand the administration’s initial arms package to include five AWACS surveillance planes, the most advanced of their kind in the world. The total Saudi purchase, including the AWACS, came to $8.5 billion. President Reagan vowed to push the sale through, declaring that Saudi Arabia must not be allowed to fall like Iran and that the United States would forfeit “all credibility” in the Middle East if Congress blocked the sale. Finally, after extraordinary arm-twisting by President Reagan, the Senate approved the deal in late October by a narrow vote of 52 to 48. [5]
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http://merip.org/mer/mer155/saudi-arabia-reagan-doctrine