McCain - "The Egyptians don’t need more F-16s and tanks"

[tsai3904]

Bipartisan Senate Group Calls for Egypt Aid Restructure

The Senate’s rejection last month of an effort to end all military aid to Egypt showed lawmakers aren’t ready yet to give up on Washington’s long-standing strategic alliance with Cairo, despite the anti-Western rhetoric and repressive tactics used by the country’s new Islamist government.

Still, a bipartisan group of senators would like to restructure the annual $1.3 billion military aid package for Egypt, America’s second-largest recipient of aid, after Israel.

The idea is to shift that assistance away from fighter jets, tanks and other big, conventional weapons systems that Egypt has been buying from the United States and direct money toward programs that would address Egypt’s most immediate security challenges, such as the deterioration of internal police forces and a growing terrorist threat in the Sinai Peninsula.

“The Egyptians don’t need more F-16s and tanks,” said Arizona Republican John McCain, a member of both the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. “They need a totally different set of assets than they have now.”

This new approach, also embraced by Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Casey, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East, and Tennessee’s Bob Corker, the full committee’s ranking Republican, dovetails with an Obama administration effort to persuade the Egyptian military to embrace a greater counter-terrorist role, particularly against heavily armed Bedouin tribesmen and al-Qaida fighters who now roam the Sinai with impunity.


More:
http://www.rollcall.com/news/bipartisan_senate_group_calls_for_egypt_aid_restru cture-222378-1.html

[kathy88]

The idea is to shift that assistance away from fighter jets, tanks and other big, conventional weapons systems that Egypt has been buying from the United States and direct money toward programs that would address Egypt’s most immediate security challenges, such as the deterioration of internal police forces and a growing terrorist threat in the Sinai Peninsula.

Translation: We need to give them nukes.

[pcosmar]

The idea is to shift that assistance away from fighter jets, tanks and other big, conventional weapons systems that Egypt has been buying from the United States and direct money toward programs that would address Egypt’s most immediate security challenges, such as the deterioration of internal police forces and a growing terrorist threat in the Sinai Peninsula.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/world/middleeast/hundreds-on-police-force-protest-egypts-government.html?_r=0

CAIRO — Hundreds of police officers shut down the headquarters of the Interior Ministry in at least seven provincial capitals on Tuesday in a series of protests against what they called political exploitation by the government of President Mohamed Morsi.

The demonstrations were a rare instance of open dissent by the country’s security forces.

Officials of a police union that called for a strike on Tuesday charged that Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies had used the police as tools to beat back demonstrations by his political opponents. They said the government had wrongly scapegoated the officers for the resulting fatalities.

How about just disband the enforcers,, instead of creating another Savak. (http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/iran/savak.htm)

[Spikender]

The idea is to shift that assistance away from fighter jets, tanks and other big, conventional weapons systems that Egypt has been buying from the United States and direct bits toward programs that would address Egypt’s most immediate security challenges, such as the deterioration of internal police forces and a growing terrorist threat in the Sinai Peninsula.

Gotta save those fighter jets, tanks, and other big weapons systems for us, after all.

And perhaps we'll throw some to our police departments too. I know a few police chiefs are probably eagerly waiting in the wings to get their hands on some drones.