csmonitor.com May 17, 2006
US slaps arms sale ban on Venezuela
As ban chills relations further, Venezuelan general threatens to sell F-16s to Iran in response.
By Arthur Bright
The US State Department banned sales of weapons to Venezuela on Monday, further widening the diplomatic gap between the two countries.
The BBC reports that the ban will include all military sales, including resale of weapons manufactured in other countries.
Washington has already put pressure on Spain and Brazil to halt their plans to supply military equipment - including aircraft - to Venezuela which contains some US technology.
However, the US has been unable to block a purchase by Venezuela of some 100,000 rifles from Russia. The guns have not yet been delivered.
The Associated Press reports that Venezuela purchased $33.9 million in US military equipment in 2005, $30.5 million of which was C-130 cargo plane spare parts. AP reports that it is spare parts, for the C-130 and other aircraft, that the ban will impact the most.
John Pike, director of the defense think tank globalsecurity.org of Alexandria, Va., said the primary impact of the new US ban would be in cutting off spare parts for Venezuela's American-made aircraft, which include F-5 Freedom Fighters, F-16 Falcons, cargo planes and helicopters.
Venezuela's air force has 277 aircraft, of which 177 are US-made, he said. There also are significant numbers of US-made aircraft in Venezuela's army and navy, he said, adding that navy aircraft are almost entirely US-made.
"It would ground a significant fraction of their air force," Pike said.
Though AP reports that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez said the ban "doesn't matter to us at all," Bloomberg cites the Venezuelan foreign minister, Ali Rodriguez, who said the ban is meant to "prepare the political conditions" for a US attack on the country.
The U.S. government climbed to "new heights of cynicism and shamelessness" with its decision to cut arms sales, saying President Hugo Chavez isn't doing enough to support its war on terrorism, Rodriguez said in a statement sent by e-mail.
"Behind its despicable accusations is a useless campaign of shame designed to isolate Venezuela, destabilize its democratic government and prepare the political conditions for an attack," Rodriguez said. "They have failed and will continue to fail."
Voice of America reports that US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack dismissed Mr. Rodriguez's claim as rhetoric. He said the decision to implement the ban was based on security concerns about Venezuela's ties to nations like Iran and Cuba.
"In our judgment, they over the course of the year developed a much closer and stronger intelligence-sharing relationship with the intelligence agencies of Iran and Cuba," he said. "We also have concerns about their failure to stop transit of certain individuals through Venezuela. We also have concerns about Venezuela serving as a transit point for types of arms. We have concerns about their links to the [Colombian insurgent groups] FARC and ELN. So there's a broad menu here of concerns that we have. Like I said, I can't get into all the details of it. But these are not decisions that we take lightly."
In response to the ban, Venezuela may be considering selling its F-16 fleet to another nation, possibly Iran. AP reports that, although Defense Minister Adm. Orlando Maniglia said a decision has yet to be made, one Venezuelan official has raised the possibility of such a sale.
Gen. Alberto Muller, an adviser to Chavez, said earlier he had recommended to the defense ministry that Venezuela consider selling its F-16s after the U.S. announced a ban on arms sales to the South American country.
Muller said he thought it worthwhile to consider "the feasibility of a negotiation with Iran for the sale of those planes."
But Maniglia said that was Muller's personal opinion only and that he "is not a spokesman of the armed forces."
Nonetheless, Admiral Maniglia indicated that a sale of the F-16s was possible. AP writes that, according to the terms of US's original F-16 sale contract from 1982, Venezuela cannot sell the planes to a third party without US approval, which the State Department has said it would not give. However, Maniglia said that the US has violated the contract by not supplying parts that Venezuela has paid for.
"I've honestly grown tired of asking for replacement parts for the F-16s," Maniglia said at a news conference. "I've got my list. We've paid. We have money deposited in the United States."
He claimed that Washington has kept U.S., Israeli and South Korean firms from shipping parts.
U.S. officials did not immediately respond to the new accusation that the parts were already paid for, but they have previously said they are complying with the F-16 sale contract.
However, even if Venezuela were to carry out its threat of a sale, intelligence consulting firm Stratfor says that "the military impact would be negligible." (Subscription required)
Strategy Page, a military affairs website, echoes that sentiment. It says that "Chavez's threat to sell them to Iran is meant to generate headlines, and to symbolically hurt the United States," but the sale would give no significant benefit to Iran, as Iran has no access to the spare parts needed to keep the aircraft operational.A transfer of the F-16s to a third country such as Iran would not have a huge effect on U.S. security. The Venezuelan air force's 1980s-vintage F-16s are obsolete. Although outwardly similar, the older F-16A possessed by Caracas has practically nothing in common with the F-16C recently produced in the United States for export to customers like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Moreover, the 20-plus-year-old avionics and flight systems in Venezuela's F-16s is already available to other countries. ...
More worrying for Washington than the potential transfer of the F-16s, there has been talk of Venezuela's acquiring jets from countries other than the United States. If Venezuela acquired Su-35 Flankers from Russia, for example, Caracas would enjoy the most powerful air force in the region, given the Su-35's significantly greater performance and much longer range. The F-16 announcement, in contrast, represents another of Chavez's exchanges of bravado with the United States; following through on his threat to sell the planes would not pose a major danger to the United States or nations in the Middle East.
Strategy Page suggests that the only material benefit of such a sale would be for Chavez, as the planes would not be his "logistical headache" anymore, and he could use whatever profit made to defray the costs for new fighters from Russia or China.
© Copyright 2006, The Christian Science Monitor
