The Rice plan also includes increased military aid to Israel — totaling $30 billion across ten years — and renews more than $1 billion in annual military aid to Egypt. Rice says the plan will “help bolster forces of moderation and support a broader strategy to counter the negative influences of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.”

Between the sales and the aid (which will fuel more sales), the U.S. will be tossing more than $60 billion worth of weapons and equipment into the region during the next ten years. In addition to that, news has leaked that British defense giant BAE — also a major player in the U.S. — is about to ink a deal to sell $20 billion worth of jet fighters to the Saudis, bringing the total to $80 billion, give or take a few. The BAE deal allows the Saudis to update its fighter fleet, which includes planes previously purchased from BAE in a 1984 deal that spawned a corruption investigation, involving Saudi foreign minister and Bush family friend Prince Bandar bin Sultan, which was killed by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair late last year.

$80 billion isn’t much compared to what the U.S. spends on weapons. By any other measure it’s an enormous amount of money, even amortized over several years, and an enormous amount of hardware to be pouring into such a concentrated group of what are, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, tiny states.

If we’re to take Rice at her word, and read behind it only a little, the deal heralds a classic Cold War containment strategy aimed primarily at Iran. But in military terms, Syria and Iran are already thoroughly contained even absent the threat posed by the U.S.

Iran and Syria combine to spend about $6.5 billion annually on defense ($5 billion for Iran, $1.5 billion for Syria).The countries involved in Rice’s deal spend more than $55 billion a year — the Saudi budget alone is an astonishing $27 billion, with Israel coming in at around $10 billion — while Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE and Egypt all spend between $3 billion and $4.5 billion annually; only tiny Bahrain, with a population of less than a million, fails to crack the billion-dollar mark.

So the countries involved in the deal already outspend Iran and Syria collectively by nearly 10:1 even without the new deals; add in the cost of the U.S. presence in the Gulf, and the ratio skyrockets. As a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, Iran’s spending is among the lowest in the region: 2.5%, as opposed to Oman at 11% (tops in the world*); Saudi Arabia and Qatar at 10% (tied for number two); Israel at 7.3% (6th); Kuwait at 5.3% (16th); Bahrain at 4.5% (22nd); Egypt at 3.4% (39th); and the UAE at 3.1% (43rd). Iran ranks 66th. (Syria spends 5.9% to come in at number 12, but that’s more a reflection of its pallid economy, internal threats and two decades in Lebanon than its fearsomeness: in dollars, only Bahrain among all the countries in the deal spends less.)

In other words, Iran is not a militaristic state. It has a large, poorly equipped army, an antiquated and decrepit air force, a rudimentary navy and a bunch of missiles. That’s enough to win wars against the miniature oil kingdoms, should the inclination arise — and there’s no evidence it would — and to inflict varying degrees of grief upon any attacker, but the country’s real power derives from its economic and political influence, and its geography: it has one of the largest economies in the region, its influence among the Shiite minority populations in the Middle East gives it considerable political leverage both above and below the line, and it can shut down the Gulf if pressed to the point of panic.

Those are things that arms sales to neighboring countries can’t really mitigate. The sales are wonderful for BAE and U.S. weapons manufacturers, but as a diplomatic strategy they seem much more likely to increase the pressure on Iran to produce a nuclear deterrent, if that’s the country’s intention, and to increase its reliance on Hezbollah and similar organizations as political and asymmetrical military deterrents, than anything else. Possibly Rice hopes to bait the ayatollahs into a ruinous arms race of the sort that helped to accelerate the Soviet Union’s bankruptcy, but given that the primary threat to Iran is not Oman or Saudi Arabia or even Israel, but the U.S., with a military budget about 300% larger than Iran’s entire GDP, it seems unlikely that they’ll bite.

Meanwhile, presenting Gulf states with opportunities to buy U.S. weapons represents a real retreat from the Bush administration’s imaginary commitment to democracy and human rights as strategic considerations, at least if one takes the traditional view that buying U.S. weapons is a privilege. Whether it will really increase tensions in the region is questionable; other than the U.S., Israel, which has approved the deal, is the only country involved that regularly uses its military outside its own borders. And no affordable amount of weaponry will insulate Iran’s immediate neighbors from retaliation should they cooperate with the U.S. in an attack on Iran, a reality of which they’re quite aware.

Rice’s other targets, al Qaeda and Hezbollah, are equally unlikely to truly suffer from the deal. As has been graphically demonstrated with both groups, although for different reasons, conventional military action against them has inherent limitations, so additional weapons, particularly in the hands of people unlikely to use them, won’t help. That the Gulf countries will be willing to do whatever it is the U.S. wants them to do against al Qaeda that they’re not already doing, in exchange for U.S. weapons that don’t materially increase their security, seems considerably less than certain.

By Bush administration standards, a diplomatic initiative that probably won’t do anyone any good — with the exception of the weapons manufacturers and those administration officials angling for jobs with them — but might not do any serious harm is a profound improvement. Let’s hope Rice’s longing for a return to the simpler times of the Cold War trumps Dick Cheney’s lust for the hot one.

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*North Korea is probably the actual leader but their budget is not especially transparent.