She was 24 when “the bombs changed everything.” In 1995, she married and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where her husband has a business. Trained as a draft designer, she took courses at a community college until their baby, Laila, was born four months ago. Rema is anxious to complete her courses in interior design as soon as possible. “I can still do this work with my one good eye,” she says.

Perhaps the Clintons might call on Rema next week on their way to visit their daughter Chelsea at Stanford, which is only a few minutes away. She might shed some light on the consequences of the impending decision to bomb Baghdad again.

The president will surely remember the last time. It was June 27, 1993, in the first months of his presidency. As commander in chief, he announced, he was acting to foil an alleged plot to assassinate former President George Bush during his victorious visit to Kuwait.

It was 2 a.m. when the bombs started falling. Rema’s family was sound asleep. “There was no warning. We heard an explosion and felt the walls shake. We tried to get out but we couldn’t do it. The whole house collapsed on top of us.”

Rema was terrorized then and confused now. “It had nothing to do with us. My father was a successful businessman. My mother was an artist. I used to work as a display designer in a museum. We had nothing to do with politics. It was two years after the (Gulf) war had ended.”

Rema has never received an apology from the government that took her parents away from her “in the prime of their lives.” Rema was buried alive for five hours under the broken stone and rubble that was once her home. “I was very deep under and no one could hear me. I was dying by the time they got through. They didn’t get to my parents for another two hours. It was two hours too late.”

Her mother, Laila, was director of the Iraqi National Art Museum and a powerful force in gaining recognition for woman artists throughout the Middle East. She was also, her daughter remembers, “very beautiful, very well respected and very kind.”

Rema does not speak of anger and revenge, but of sorrow and fear. “I get scared so easily now, I can’t do anything. I always wear dark glasses.” And she has one major concern — her brother, who miraculously escaped serious injury when “smart bombs” turned his parents and his home into a bit of what Pentagon officials refer to as “acceptable collateral damage.”

“I’m very worried about my brother,” she says. “He is still in Iraq and they are getting ready to bomb.”

Meanwhile, at U.S. air and Naval bases in Georgia and North Carolina, unmarked converted bread trucks pull up to staging areas and start pumping out an invisible plume of gas. Within minutes thousands of airmen, soldiers and logistics personnel are down and coiled in agony. Back in the Gulf, hundreds of sailors on U.S. ships headed for Kuwait begin collapsing with the “flu.”

In fact, it’s cholera, and the victims have been felled in a “germ war” that a study conducted for the Pentagon says U.S. forces are not ready for.

According to the study, made available to Salon, U.S. military units are “vulnerable” to a chemical and biological attack whose purpose is to delay, if not paralyze, the deployment of U.S. forces involved in desert fighting with Iraq. Yet many criticisms raised in the study, produced last November, have been ignored even as hostilities between the U.S. and Iraq appear imminent, informed sources say.

The study raises serious concerns should the Clinton administration take the Republicans’ advice and seek to go all the way in toppling Saddam Hussein. “Our nation’s ability to project power is vulnerable to limited chemical/biological (attacks)” when troops and equipment are being mobilized for the Gulf, warns the study conducted by Booz-Allen & Hamilton, a management consulting firm based in MacLean, Va.

The study projected a scenario in the year 2010, which suggests to one of the study’s authors that U.S. vulnerability to germ-war attacks is even greater now, when U.S. and United Nations weapons inspectors are being barred by Iraqi authorities from checking out the regime’s suspected weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological agents.

“The universal perception has been that’s it’s been a really important thing that you’re pointing out and I hope someone else takes care of it,” said Amoretta Hoeber, deputy secretary of the Army in the Reagan administration. “That’s the generalized response we’re getting.”

The U.S. budget for protection against chemical and biological warfare has been soaring since last year. Estimates of “more than $2 billion could be defended,” according to Bill Richardson, a former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for chemical and biological matters. That includes everything from the FBI’s counter-terrorism programs to civil defense training to the U.S. Marines’ mobile Chemical and Biological Incident Response Force teams, based at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

“They’re putting a lot of money into this,” Hoeber said, “but the problem is there’s no one in charge and no one is thinking right about it yet. They’re not thinking about protecting the military, they’re thinking about domestic preparedness and things like that.”

Sophisticated shipboard gas and germ war detection systems have been deployed but found wanting, according to a technician who told Salon that navy computer labs in New Jersey are frantically trying to fix the bugs as the Iraqi crisis deepens.

The Booz-Allen team contracted with about two dozen former top military officials, including a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Army’s former chief special operations officer, to “war game” germ and chemical attacks on U.S. forces and how the Pentagon would respond to them.

In the scenario, economic sanctions on Iraq have been lifted, allowing Saddam Hussein to secretly rebuild his chemical and biological stocks. At the same time, despite warming relations with Washington, Iran has continued its military build-up and held to its goal of expelling U.S. forces from the Gulf. A crisis is triggered when the formerly bitter enemies act in concert, Iraq invading Kuwait but quickly assuring Saudi Arabia that its goal is limited to recapturing its “19th province.” At the same time, Iran sends a “Trojan horse” naval convoy to Bahrain to back a
Shiite plot to overthrow the U.S.-friendly regime.

Then, in the war game scenario, chemical and biological attacks are launched to paralyze U.S. ground, Naval and air reinforcements en route.

“CNN had picked up the cholera story,” the scenario goes. “The ships en route to the Gulf were being referred to as ‘the plague convoy.’” They begin steaming in circle, their sick bays swamped. Suddenly Iraq looses a volley of missiles armed with mustard gas on a U.S. airfield in Kuwait, stopping a line of huge C-5 transports taking off for resupply flights to Europe.

In North Carolina, meanwhile, a crop duster lifts off the night runway at the appropriately named Locust, a farming town near Pope Air Force Base, and heads toward hangers filled with F-15 fighters and pilots. In Savannah, Ga., and 10 other East Coast military bases, Iraqi agents driving bread trucks position themselves upwind with gas-spewing generators.

“The teams had come into the United States two years earlier (and) obtained jobs in the area. The pilots worked as taxi drivers at the airport. The others had similar positions, driving hotel courtesy vans or delivery trucks,” the scenario goes. The terrorist attacks paralyze U.S. personnel. “The casualties overwhelmed the largely ill-equipped and untrained first responders,” the study adds.

Havoc reigns. Next, a saboteur steps off the last subway train at the Pentagon Metro station the following night, dons a gas mask and tosses several quart glass bottles of liquid mustard agent onto the platform. An anonymous caller “claims responsibility for the attack on behalf of the ‘Friends of Iraq and Iran’ and (says) that a second device has been emplaced within the Pentagon itself.”

And so on.

In the end, the good guys win. After days of death, delays, confusion and mass panic, the U.S. moves its logistical bases to alternates in western Saudi Arabia, rushes unaffected Naval and Air Force units to the region, pounds the Iraqis into submission, decontaminates poisoned bases, buries the dead and evicts the Iranians from Bahrain.

Hooray. But not after considerable damage has been done — and delays that might give the Iraqis time to sway U.S. public opinion against a long, drawn-out struggle on behalf of Kuwait, whose super-rich, quick-to-flee elites earned little sympathy when they were televised partying in Cairo while G.I.s put their lives on the line in Desert Storm.

That may be one reason U.S. officials from President Clinton on down have warned Saddam of instant, apocalyptic response if he launches chemical and biological attacks. They fear that the American public may have little stomach for protracted conflicts, especially when the casualties mount up.

At the same time, the Booz-Allen & Hamilton study (“Assessment of the Impact of Chemical and Biological Weapons on Joint Operations in 2010″) assumes a rather brilliant symphony of political, military and terrorist attacks — one for which the Iraqis have shown little previous aptitude. Even one of the study’s authors concedes that the “Red Team” that took the part of the Iraqis in the war game might have played its roles too well.

“One of the things I’ve always thought about as questionable in the study is that it assumes a logical enemy,” admitted Bill Richardson, a deputy assistant of Defense for chemical and biological matters in the Bush administration. “One must assume that — but it’s often wrong.”

How much better an “illogical” enemy like Iraq makes us feel, so long as it possesses chemical and biological weapons, is another question.

Those are some of the revelations in a series of letters the 33-year-old Kasi has written from his jail cell in Fairfax County, Va., where a judge Friday sentenced him to death by lethal injection.

Five years ago this Sunday, Kasi sprayed a line of cars outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., with AK-47 rifle fire, killing two agency employees and wounding three other people. He pleaded not guilty but was convicted last November, with a jury recommendation that he be put to death.

Kasi did not testify in his trial and has never spoken to the media. But in a series of 10 letters Kasi began writing to this reporter in December, he described his bitterness at the United States government for bombing Iraq and his life on the lam after the Jan. 25, 1993, shootings and said his only regret today is that he didn’t kill some CIA higher-ups instead.

“I am not proud of what happened. I feel sad (that) the people who came under attack were not powerful people … I wish powerful people would have come under the attack, then it would have been better,” he wrote.

“I wanted to shoot [then-CIA Director) James Woolsey but was not able to find him, or his timing of coming or going to CIA. If I had found (former CIA Director Robert) Gates I would have attacked him, as these are people who make up policies for CIA or U.S. government."

The Washington Post reported last year that CIA security agents had detected someone stalking Gates' suburban Virginia house a few weeks before the 1993 killings, with some speculating that it might have been Kasi. But the defendant said it wasn't him. "I never went to his house," he wrote.

Kasi also rejected the allegation by Gen. Hamid Gul, the retired head of Pakistani intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), that he had once worked for the CIA and had perhaps turned on the agency in an act of fury. Gul, who worked closely with the CIA during the Afghan War, insisted to this reporter in an interview in Rawalpindi last August that "Aimal Kasi was an agent of the CIA ... He was working inside of Pakistan and outside of Pakistan."

Kasi, however, declared, "I did not work for CIA." During the war in Afghanistan, he wrote, "I had mujahedeen (Afghan guerrilla) friends who worked with the ISI people in bringing (CIA-supplied) arms from military bases in Pakistan to the mujahedeen arms depot (in Afghanistan). I sometimes used to go with them. That was all."

Kasi got into the United States after buying false papers in Karachi and altering his name to "Kansi," he said. He later bought a fake green card in Miami.

Kasi denied he had any contacts with Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian or any other foreign terrorists, as has been alleged. He wrote that he was surprised that he hadn't been killed during his assault, which started when he stepped out of his car in morning rush-hour traffic and started firing at cars waiting to turn into the CIA's main gate in Langley, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

"I used to pass this area almost every day and knew these two left-turning lanes (were) mostly people who work for CIA," he wrote me.

"The attack on CIA was my idea alone ... Nobody in Pakistan knew about it. I alone planned everything and did it."

Kasi says the idea for the attack "started coming into my mind" after he purchased an AK-47 from a local Virginia gun dealer. After that, the planned attack was "more important than any other thing to me."

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In his letters, Kasi says the seeds of the idea were planted while he watched U.S. warplanes bomb Iraqi troops as they withdrew from Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. "Once the Iraqis withdrew from Kuwait then the continued bombings of Iraq were not justified," he wrote. "I did not want to become famous. I wanted to punish those who do wrong things against Muslim countries like Iraq."

While Kasi admits to the shootings, he disputes a key part of the prosecution's case: that he shot one of his victims, CIA employee Frank Darling, in the back, and then shot him again in the head.

"I started shooting at cars in front of me. When the shooting finished I was returning back to my Isuzu pickup ... I shot at him from front. I did not [go] back and to the back of his car. I shot him several times from the front. I sat in my pickup and drove away,” he wrote in one letter.

In another, he explained: “[Darling's] car was the last one on the left [of the] left turning lanes and he was looking at me … I looked at him before shooting … There was a child also in the car, in the front seat standing [and] looking at me. He was I think maybe five or six years old. I didn’t see the wife of Darling in the car.”

Actually there was no child in the car. FBI spokeswoman Susan Lloyd speculated that Kasi mistook the head of Darling’s wife, Judy, who was trying to get under the dashboard of their Volkswagen Golf, for a child.

Kasi did not think he would get away after the shootings. “I thought I will be arrested, or maybe killed in a shootout with CIA guards or police,” Kasi said. Instead, he just hopped back into his Isuzu pickup truck and drove off, leaving the bloody carnage in his rear-view mirror.

Kasi painted a rosy picture of his four-and-a-half-year sojourn in Afghanistan after the killings, saying he was welcomed as a “hero” by fundamentalist Muslims who took power in May 1992, including then-Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

“Would you believe I rode with the prime minister in his black Mercedes to a place of worship — I did!” Kasi wrote. “I was respected by the people there as a hero, and in the four years there not a single person told me you did a wrong thing by attacking the CIA. They all said you did a great job.”

Kasi spent most of his time in the border regions near Pakistan, traveling with and protected by his fellow Pushtun tribesman. One day he was sitting under a tree listening to his radio when he heard a report that the man wanted in the CIA killings had been captured.

“First, I got surprised. Who have they arrested? And then I started laughing with myself and saying to myself, I am sitting under this tree and they are saying the man has been arrested. It was real funny — and I enjoyed hearing such news.” On another occasion he heard that two men had been arrested in Quetta by the FBI and taken to Islamabad. “They had arrested the wrong Aimal. After a week or 10 days they came back home to Quetta.”

An FBI agent who worked on the case disputed this element of Kasi’s account. “There were reports like that all the time over there. I stopped reading them.”

As the years passed, Kasi drifted from place to place in Afghanistan, usually not staying more than two weeks in any one spot, dreaming of a permanent safe haven somewhere — perhaps in Iran, perhaps in the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union. He’d been to Iran in 1984, he told me, but didn’t find much to admire in the Iranian revolution.

He also fantasized about going to Greece, getting a job on a ship and slipping back into the U.S. to hit the CIA again.

“I’d take a taxi to CIA headquarters, and when the taxi reached the same lights and the left-turning lanes outside CIA headquarters, I will jump out of taxi and shoot some more CIA officials,” he told me, then “escape in one of the dead official’s car.”

“These were the thoughts that used to come into my mind.”

Kasi began to believe that the U.S. and Pakistani security services had given up on trying to find him. He often crossed into Pakistan to buy newspapers or see friends and “nobody ever interrogated me,” he says. “All they ask[ed] was who are you, and I will say I am an Afghan … and if they want to see my I.D. I will show them a false I.D.,” which he said were easy to get. If a guard balked, he’d give him “100 rupees” — less than three cents — and waltz through.

His life on the lam began to unravel in June 1997, however, when some fellow Pushtun tribesmen — reportedly persuaded by millions of dollars in American reward money — inveigled him into an alleged scheme to smuggle Russian electronic goods into Pakistan.

“The promises were doing a business deal, buying a large amount of Russian goods in Afghanistan, selling them in (Pakistan),” he wrote, adding that he was also promised an “I.D. and legal documents (from) this area.”

Last June 15, Kasi was lured
to Dera Ghazi Khan, a dusty bazaar town in central Pakistan, and booked a room in a hotel. At 4 a.m., a team of FBI agents busted into his room, nabbed him and flew him back to the United States without an extradition hearing. The move caused howls of outrage in Pakistan, and the U.S. government has never admitted it caught Kasi there.

Speculation was rife in Pakistan that relatives of Farook Leghari, then Pakistan’s president, had helped set up Kasi. But Kasi refused to identify anyone, saying, “People will get killed.”

“I want to make it clear (that) the people who tricked me … were Pushtuns, they were owners of land in the Leghari and Khosa clan areas in Dera Ghazi Khan,” but “I will never name them,” he wrote.

Kasi’s likely death sentence has hardly dampened his fury. But he insisted that “I am not against the USA or the American people. I am against the policies of the U.S. government toward Islamic countries or toward Muslims.”

“A lot of young people in Pakistan,” he said, “think mostly the same.”

It’s the opening chapter of “The Cobra Event,” a new thriller by Richard Preston, author of “The Hot Zone.” And while Preston’s fictional prowess has met with mixed reviews, the scenario he paints, of an Iraqi-backed biological attack on New York, is highly realistic, experts say.

Worse, not only does Iraq possess such destructive weaponry, but the United States has little idea how to deal with such an attack on its cities. This despite three years of intense study, millions of dollars spent and numerous urban war games, spurred by the nerve gas attack in a Tokyo subway by a Japanese cult, killing 12 and making more than 5,500 others ill.

“It is clear we are not prepared,” wrote Marine Corps Capt. Chris Seiple, a WMD (weapons of mass destruction) expert, in a recent issue of Parameters, the U.S. Army’s theoretical journal. “There is still a great deal we don’t know about how we should respond in such a crisis.” The National Defense Panel, a body chartered by Congress, earlier this month urged the U.S. military to focus more on the possibility of hit-and-run biological attacks and to begin training the National Guard to respond to them.

Forensic scientists, from places like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will be critically important in the analysis and response to such an emergency. Yet war games run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in cooperation with the Defense Department, the FBI, local police and other paramilitary agencies never practice the most likely bioterrorism scenario — disparate people inexplicably falling ill. Instead, they practice hunting down a terrorist who has not yet exploded his germ-bomb.

“Basically they practice the same one over and over again, with some kind of a device, an explosive device, that may or may not have chemical or biological agents associated with it,” groused an exasperated federal agent who is also a scientist. “That, I think, is the least likely thing. Basically, what’s going to happen is that a small device, if it exists, is going to go off and people are going to get sick, and that’s what you’re going to deal with.”

Or not even “go off.” Perfume atomizers and liquid drop dispensers will work just fine, spreading deadly ailments as easily as the common cold. In fact, the most likely early manifestations of such an attack will be whimpers rather than a bang, with people falling dreadfully ill from hemorrhagic fever, camel pox or anthrax, all of which can be easily manufactured and released into a crowded subway station from a “bomb” as small as a jewel box.

The chances of busting up a terrorist biological plot in advance are not good, say experts, in light of what happened in 1995 when the Aum Shin Rikyo cult released sarin gas in Tokyo.

“That was a 10,000-person cult,” said the federal agent, who insisted on anonymity. “If the combined intelligence of this country missed a whole cult, what makes us think we’re going to find a small device somewhere? I mean, it’s ridiculous. What’s going to happen is, even if a device such as is postulated in these exercises actually exists, the first time we’re going to come upon it is after it’s gone off somewhere and, you know, it’s done its thing.”

A military expert snorted at current civilian emergency planning, which has FEMA directing the U.S. government’s response to the death, panic and spreading casualties associated with a germ attack. “Everybody knows they couldn’t lead troops across the street for a free beer,” he said.

Following the Tokyo attack, Marine Corps Gen. (now Commandant) Charles Krulak formed the Army’s first integrated response unit to chemical and biological terrorism. Since then the Pentagon has adopted Krulak’s approach, but its insistence on traditional battlefield models for training, plus laws limiting the military’s role in domestic law enforcement, are major drawbacks, critics say.

“The Army says, ‘We have 40 years of experience with this,’ but they don’t,” says one of the Marine experts. “They’ve never done something like this. We’re not going to have a Desert Storm here. We’re going to have a chemical or biological Oklahoma City. For that, we’ve got to change course, and leadership.”

Could the same pressure from ordinary people be applied to a much larger threat to lives and peace — the continuing deployment of large weapons systems, mostly by the United States, and particularly in the Middle East? This is a question posed by John Tirman in his new book, “Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America’s Arms Trade” (Free Press).

Tirman is executive director of the Winston Foundation, a Washington organization that funds peace projects around the globe. He writes that the Middle East conflict is the direct result of U.S. arms sales to the region. He notes that such sales to Iran in the 1970s encouraged the Shah to view all internal problems “as nails that required a hammer” — an attitude that led to the Iranian revolution in 1979. Tirman argues that U.S. weapons sales to Israel, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have fostered similar mind-sets among their leaders, resulting in human rights abuses, corruption and policies that have undermined the very security that the weapons were meant to protect.

Salon spoke with Tirman about the continuing effect of U.S. arms sales in the post-Cold War world and what can be done to get Washington to change course.

You suggest that the chief reason Saddam Hussein is such an international menace is U.S. arms policies.

Our problems with Iraq today are the direct result of them. After the Shah of Iran’s fall in 1979, the United States, in a panic, began to sell weaponry to Iraq. It wasn’t much, although we gave Iraq military assistance in less direct ways. One was real-time military intelligence during its war with Iran; when warplanes were taking off from bases in Iran, Iraq would learn it immediately from U.S. satellites. Another was $5 billion in U.S. agricultural credits, which Iraq used to buy weapons. The third was political credibility, which the U.S. gave Iraq by taking it off the list of countries that support terrorism and then recognizing it diplomatically. All this made it easier for Iraq to buy weapons from various vendors. There were also covert shipments from the U.S. of dual-use items, like trucks, some helicopters and computers through Jordan. A company in Rockville, Md., sold Iraq biological weapons agents.

We repeated the same mistakes we had made earlier with Iran.

The Iranian revolution was, in my view, the result of the militarization of the Shah’s regime, the corruption, the diversion of resources, the pro-Western vassalage. All the things that can be described as part of the U.S. arms trade. Now we’re making the same mistake in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. And that is something that you don’t read in the media coverage of the current crisis with Iraq. No one has gone back to look at the roots of this crisis. It’s as if history began on Aug. 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. It didn’t.

Some would say the destabilization has been caused by America’s total support of Israel.

We should reexamine our arms sales to Israel. They have encouraged Israel to see all of its problems as security problems and not political problems that can have political solutions. I think we’ve done Israel a disservice by selling them so many weapons.

But why shouldn’t America arm its allies in the Middle East?

It’s wrong because there have been so many debacles associated with the policy. Iran and Iraq are the two biggest foreign policy disasters since Vietnam. Then there’s Turkey, which has become a human rights catastrophe in its treatment of the Kurds, and there’s Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which are teetering on the brink of their own catastrophes. Then there’s Pakistan, where human rights abuses are uncontrolled, and Afghanistan, where the forces we supported against the Russians have returned the country to the 15th century. That, to me, is a failed policy.

Washington policy makers would say it was an attempt to achieve various balances of power in the region.

The policy was to find moderate pro-Western regimes and basically bribe them with weapons to do our bidding and protect our oil interests in the region. You can say that the policy aimed at a balance of power in the Persian Gulf, or that it aimed at “dual containment” of Iraq and Iran. But it’s essentially the same policy: We arm our friends in the region to help us protect our economic interests. And it just keeps backfiring.

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How is the U.S. responsible for the Turkish oppression of the Kurds?

U.S. weapons sales encourage the Turkish leadership to see a solution only in
military terms. In southeast Turkey, entire villages are being destroyed and
huge numbers of people are being displaced. Refugees have
flooded the larger cities, where they can’t find work. As a consequence,
they’ve been marginalized. And who helps them? Nobody helps them except for
Rafah, the Islamic Party. They help them in the same way that the old
Democratic Party machine helped immigrants in the United States during the
19th century, building their loyalty for generations. In Turkey, it’s exactly
the same. Rafah’s well-organized social welfare policy has been able to
win the loyalty of the Kurds, who are now a major element in Turkey’s Islamic
revival.

Even as we patrol “no-fly zones” to protect the Kurds in Iraq against Saddam Hussein.

The relationship between Ankara and Washington is
first and foremost a military one. The U.S. saw Turkey as
part of the bulwark against the Soviet Union and now sees
it as a foothold in the Middle East. Everything the Turkish military has done
against the Kurds has been endorsed, either explicitly or implicitly, by the
U.S. government. As one defense official put it to me, “We need the
bases in Turkey more than we need the Kurds.” Basically that sums up the
situation there.

In the same way that we needed the Shah more than the Iranian people.

Right. The
weapons that we sold to the Shah weren’t used against the Soviet Union;
they were used for other purposes, including against his own people. It’s
the same general pattern that’s unraveling in Turkey. And the costs for Turkey
have been enormous. We’re talking about 28,000 dead, some 200,000 wounded and
2 million homeless in the southeast; millions of dollars wasted; an economy
in ruins; a staggering national debt and falling foreign investment. I’d call
that a catastrophe. And it could get worse. The Islamicists could rise
again, and there could be an ugly confrontation with the military and no way
of knowing what the outcome would be.

How about Saudi Arabia?

Saudi Arabia follows the same policy pattern: Find the moderate
Islamic regime to do our bidding, supply it with weapons and hold our
breath and hope for the best. We are now in the process of holding our
breath. In Saudi Arabia, there are human rights abuses, Islamic terrorism, a
lot of concern about the stability of the regime and who would come in if it
falls. It’s a real house of cards.

You think the regime is that shaky?

It’s very fragile. They’re deeply in debt. They’ve overspent on weapons. I don’t see how the House of Saud can
maintain itself like this indefinitely. If and when it goes down, it will go
down in a way that Washington will consider catastrophic. Either someone
will come to power that we don’t like, or there will be enormous disruption to
our oil supplies. Almost certainly, something bad will happen. The only thing
we don’t know is when.

Couldn’t the U.S. use its arms sales to bring about more enlightened policies in these countries?

This is one of the great fallacies — that we have to keep selling them
weapons to maintain our influence. Turkey, which was supposed to be one of the pillars of “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq, has basically thumbed its nose at the policy.
They’re trading with Iran, and they want very much to resume trade with Iraq.
Turkey is one of the most outspoken proponents of lifting the oil embargo on
Iraq. It supported Saddam when he made his military incursion into
northern Iraq last year. In the current crisis with Iraq over the U.N.
weapons inspections, Turkey publicly stated that it does not support U.S.
military action. They want Saddam in power, and they want Saddam to have
control over the north. So what good has all our weapons largess done for
us so far? The answer is not very much. The same fallacy applies to Saudi
Arabia and our other allies in the Gulf. Remarkably, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait
wanted no part of U.S. military action against Iraq. When you think about it,
when you think that Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, that’s
astounding.

How would you change U.S. policy?

You start with establishing a moral international standard, a code of
conduct, for countries to whom you are going to sell weapons. There’s a proposed standard now in the United States and Europe which is a pretty good place to start.
It says you don’t sell weapons to non-democratic regimes or to
regimes that have exhibited a gross pattern of human rights abuses. Through
diplomacy and economic power, the U.S. would get other major weapons-selling
countries, especially Europe, to sign on to the standard.

That sounds wonderfully utopian. Is it realistic?

People always say it sounds utopian until you come up with counter-examples,
like the treaty to ban land mines. Only five years ago, such a treaty wasn’t
even on the map. Now we have a treaty, which has been signed by most of the countries of the world, including Europe.
How did that happen? Well, it happened because there was a moral
outcry. And even though the United States is not signing the treaty, we don’t
sell mines anymore, and we only use them in one arena — Korea. That’s a long way from where the United States was 10 years ago.

There’s no reason you can’t do this with other weapons. If, for example,
you implement a policy that says we won’t sell weapons to
Saudi Arabia, the Saudis will have to find other solutions for their security.
Maybe they will sign a defense pact with the United States. Or maybe they
will build a regional security arrangement with other neighboring countries.
Or maybe they will open up and become more democratic.

Our policy until now has been catastrophic. We have to change the fundamentals.
And one of those fundamentals is the arms trade. If you can change one piece
of this relationship, then all the other pieces — the question of oil
supplies, the Arab-Israeli conflict — all look a little easier to resolve.
It’s time to start somewhere.