Fueling a Powder Keg?
July 30, 2007
An official for the US defense department had said over the weekend that Washington planned to give some $20 billion (14.6 billion euros) in military assistance to Saudi Arabia and other states in the Gulf region to modernize their armed forces and limit Iran's influence. Israel in return would receive $30.4 billion in military aid over the next decade -- a significant increase to what the country received before.
While Israeli officials have welcomed the plan, which was officially announced by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday, German parliamentarians have criticized it as a move that will further destabilize an already fragile region.
A high risk strategy?
"If you add more explosive things to a powder keg -- and that's what the Middle East is -- you heighten the risk and don't make the region safer in the end," Ruprecht Polenz, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the German parliament, told Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper.
"In any case, it's a high-risk strategy," added Polenz, a member of parliament for the conservative Christian Democratic Union of Chancellor Angela Merkel. "The aim -- to signal Iran that a struggle for hegemony based on military might won't lead to success -- can lead to the wrong reaction in Tehran: to try harder and arm faster."
Polenz suggested that the German government should push for a regional security conference and -- together with the EU -- lobby others not to send arms to crisis regions.
A CSCE for the Mideast?
"Instead, one should try to get a process started that's similar to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe [CSCE] in the 1970s: to discuss the region's security problems with everyone involved, to build trust and maybe dampen armament or even encourage disarmament this way," Polenz said.
While saying that the idea to establish a Middle East equivalent of the CSCE was nothing new, Johannes Jung, a member of the parliament's foreign affairs committee for the Social Democratic Party, said that this was more urgent than ever.
"The region needs disarmament and not armament," he said, according to the Web site of German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.