The West’s Clipping of the Arab States’ Military Wings

By: Kayhan Int’l

The politicians, military generals and arms manufacturers of the US and Western Europe have been surprised by the wide range of Iranian-made weapons and their effectiveness in either thwarting the Israeli aggression or shattering the so-called iron dome and other means of American supplied means of defence of the Zionist enemy.

The members of the Axis of Resistance are no doubt proud of their dexterity in targeting with ease the military and industrial installations in Occupied Palestine, thanks to their armaments modelled on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s rapidly improving weaponry. 

Unfortunately, hopelessly dependent on the US or forced to buy means of defence from the West, Arab states have deprived themselves of this cutting-edge military technology, and thus unable to counter the threats and aggressions of their common enemy, the illegitimate Zionist entity.

Iraq, although it is now free of the US occupation of 2003 except for the presence of some 2000 undesirable American soldiers who last week committed the crime of providing safe passage to Israeli aircraft for attacking Iran, has been forced into purchasing second or third grade defence equipment from the West incapable of thwarting any future Zionist aggression.

With its fleet of Soviet-era Mig, Tupolev, and Sukhoi fighter planes and bombers deliberately destroyed by the US occupation troops while parked on the ground, Iraq has no other choice but to buy substandard aircraft from the West, which will never give it state-of-the-art aerospace technology.

Reports speak of Baghdad’s talks with Paris for acquiring a dozen of France’s Dassault Rafale multirole fighter jets for air policing missions.

The French regime, however, has told the Iraqi government that the said aircraft will not come equipped with Meteor beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles, thereby reducing their overall utility as air superiority fighters for Baghdad.

This means Iraq will not have that cutting-edge 4.5-generation jet’s exceptional capabilities as an air supremacy fighter to stop Israel from violating its airspace.

Earlier, Iraq had bought France’s Thales Ground Master 403 and GM200 radars but without access to the SAMP/T air defense system. 

None of this is surprising or unprecedented. If anything, it is yet another reminder that the West European regimes or the US are not willing to sell Arab and other Muslim countries their most advanced air-to-air missiles that are capable of countering Israeli aircraft. 

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf states, as well as Turkiye and Pakistan will never have access to the rapidly advancing means of defence of the West, which has no inhibitions in supplying such equipment to the Zionist entity for worsening the genocide in Gaza, intensifying the war in Lebanon, and attacking Syria at will.

It is worth recalling that in the 2010s when Cairo bought Rafales, Paris refused to Meteor missiles and gave only the low quality medium-range MICA missiles.

The US for its part, when it sold a few F-16 aircraft to Egypt refused to supply the AIM-120s. In the words of David Witty, a former US colonel once based in Cairo, Egypt’s F-16s, to the same aircraft supplied to Israel, “are basically civilian aircraft.”

The same is the US case with Iraq. In the mid-2010s, when Washington sold Iraq with F-16s, specifically the F-16IQ Block 52 variant, it refused to give AIM-120s and only came with the antiquated AIM-7 Sparrow, which have become increasingly unreliable due to broken guidance devices.

As a result, the Iraqi Air Force’s already limited air-to-air capability has degraded even further, as was evident in its inability to prevent the recent violation of its airspace by the Zionist entity during its aborted attack on Iran with US complicity.