No-Win Battle Over Saudi Arms

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

On entering the Senate chamber shortly before 4 p.m. last Wednesday, White House Courier Tim Saunders suddenly became the Invisible Man. Not that anyone actually failed to see him, or to guess what he was carrying in a manila envelope decorated with the White House seal. With Saunders in plain view, Majority Leader Robert Dole archly informed fellow Senators that Ronald Reagan had vetoed an attempt by Congress to block a sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, and * "somewhere there is a messenger who has that information." But the moment Saunders' presence was officially acknowledged, the veto would become the pending business of the Senate, forcing some sort of action. So for 2 1/2 hours, Saunders first stood and then sat at the rear of the chamber while the Senators ignored him and droned through time-killing rituals. Meanwhile, opponents of the sale, fearing that they would lose if a vote on overriding the veto were taken immediately, threatened a filibuster that--horrors!--could have delayed the chamber's Memorial Day recess. Finally, at 6:30, Dole acknowledged Saunders and announced a decision: the Senate would begin debate when it reconvened June 2, after the ten-day break, and vote by 2 p.m. on June 5.

It was a fittingly silly anticlimax to one of the sorriest foreign policy messes on record. No matter how the vote next week turns out, no one will emerge happy.

If the Republican-controlled Senate votes to override the President's veto by the required two-thirds majority, it is a foregone conclusion that the Democratic-dominated House will do so too. For Reagan that would amount to the most stinging foreign policy defeat of his presidency. But even if the Senate sustains the veto by a vote or two, the Administration will have won only a hollow victory. It has watered down the arms sale enough to force the Saudis to look to Western Europe for some types of sophisticated weaponry. The Saudis, far from being reassured of U.S. support, are grumbling that the ruckus indicates an indiscriminate anti-Arab mood in Washington. But it is Congress that is likely to come out looking worst, because so many of its members are too obviously being driven by fear of offending the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S.

To be sure, there are other reasons for opposing the arms sale. Senators and Representatives are unhappy about Saudi Arabia's subsidies to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Syria, and in particular its muted condemnation of the U.S. air attack on Libya in April. The Administration contends that the Saudi monarchy is as pro-American as it dares to get, and much more so than any successor government would be. In this view, the Saudis must be strengthened against radical Arab states and in particular their feared neighbor Iran. The Administration had carefully limited the $354 million arms sale to types of weapons that are already in the Saudi armory: 800 shoulder-fired Stinger antiaircraft missiles, 1,650 air-to-air Sidewinders and 100 antiship Harpoons. Nonetheless, the House and Senate in early May voted by overwhelming bipartisan majorities to forbid the sale. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar says several colleagues told him "that they felt their political survival depended on voting for this resolution of disapproval." Alaska Republican Ted Stevens told Reagan at a White House meeting: "Mr. President, you will wind up losing the Senate." His meaning was that enough Republican Senators might be defeated this fall if they voted for the Saudi sale to end G.O.P. control of the chamber.

Actually, major American Jewish organizations either kept silent about the Saudi arms sale or issued carefully neutral statements. Muses Hyman Bookbinder, a veteran Washington lobbyist: "The basic pro-Israel case has been made so often for so long, sometimes it works even when we are not working the issue." In some instances more than that was involved. Though the major organizations appeared to do no behind-the-scenes lobbying, California Businessman Michael Goland met with some lawmakers in the Senate cloakroom. Stories spread that he had talked of newspaper ads pointing out which Senators had voted to sell Stingers to the Saudis, if those missiles should fall into the hands of terrorists and be used to kill Americans.

Faced with a Wednesday midnight deadline for vetoing the disapproval resolutions, Reagan put on a full-court press to win the 34 Senate votes necessary to sustain the veto. Hoping to demonstrate that the lawmakers' worries were exaggerated, he invited leaders of major American Jewish organizations to the White House last Monday. But the leaders feared they might be set up as scapegoats for an Administration defeat, and seized on the death of one of their number as an excuse to call off the meeting. Reagan had more success in persuading Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to Washington, to go along with excluding the Stinger missiles from the deal, leaving only the Sidewinders and Harpoons.

Intensive arm twisting by Reagan and others had an effect too. By midday Wednesday, Dole appeared to have just enough votes to sustain a veto. Reagan accordingly signed the veto message at 2:26 p.m. and rushed it to the Senate in Courier Saunders' envelope. In vain; Democratic Senate Leader Robert Byrd had promised an extended debate, and Dole had nowhere near enough votes to shut it off.

So everything goes over until next week--and the struggle may not end even then. A week or two after the June 5 vote, congressional opponents of the Saudis are likely to begin a move to defer or cancel delivery of the five AWACS aircraft and eight support tanker planes that Riyadh has had on order since 1981. That move may fail, but probably only after another ugly, drawn- out fight that will advance U.S. interests in the Middle East not one iota.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett and Barrett Seaman/Washington