Like many Americans, I was perplexed when I first heard that the Bush administration had approved a $20 billion arms sale to the Saudis with related sales approved to the Gulf States. I wasn’t outraged, and I certainly didn’t go looking for someone to exchange any high-fives with. I was perplexed. Ambivalent. Not really sure what I thought.

Saudi Arabia, like most of the Middle East, is a conundrum to which I don’t have the answer. On the one hand, as a wealthy and sometimes useful old ally (or maybe “ally” would be more appropriate) that might have to defend itself against Iran, which is currently an enemy that we share with the Saudis, it makes sense to sell them arms with which they may defend themselves if they have to. But on the other hand, Saudi Arabia is one of the founts of one of the Islamic reformations (Wahhabism) which has led to the war that we’re currently waging. And if I had a third hand, I’d point out that if we were to cut the Saudis off, they could just go buy arms from the Russians and the Chinese, both of which would be more than happy to arm both sides in any Saudi-Iranian war, and that such a move would end up drawing Saudi Arabia away from us and toward our geostrategic competitors. And, in the event that any Saudi-Iranian war went badly for the Saudis, there’s always the chance that the House of Saud could get overthrown and replaced with something even worse. 15 of 19 hijackers on 9-11 were Saudi, most of the foreign fighters in Iraq are Saudi, and so forth. If we arm them against Iran, they have a better chance of actually winning. Of course, a Saudi win might well make them every bit as dangerous as the Iranian mullahs.

So with all of that in mind, I come to the conclusion that if the Saudis are looking to buy up conventional arms, we ought to be the ones to sell them to them. But that doesn’t mean that I have to like it, and I don’t.

I was discussing this issue with a friend, who posited this question: If the Iranians go nuclear, wouldn’t that make the weaponry that we’re selling to the Saudis moot?

I don’t think so. Detonating a test nuke isn’t the same thing as developing a deliverable weapon, and even if Iran is able to successfully test a nuclear weapon, we probably still have a short window between that moment and the moment that Iran deploys a functioning nuclear weapon that can be launched on a missile or dropped from a plane. In fact, in a perverse sort of way, the arms we sell to the Saudis might become more relevant than they currently are, albeit for a short time, after Iran test fires a nuke. The Saudis might well do the work after an Iranian test fire that we’re all hoping that the Israelis do before one: They might launch a bombardment to destroy enough Iranian sites to set their miniaturization program back a few years and buy the world some time. We would help them as much as Islamic sensitivity would allow, but it would be in our interests to put a Saudi stamp in that mission. Once Iran test fires a nuclear weapon, literally anything is possible, and most of what’s possible is not good.

So what’s the point of all this? I think it’s easy for everyone from bloggers to journalists to the average person on the street to come up with snap answers that really don’t answer the question at hand. Everyone wants to sound compassionate about the situation in Darfur, for instance, but hardly anyone wants to address the Chinese elephant in the middle of that room. It’s easy to slam the Bush administration for selling arms to the Saudis, and it’s just as easy for someone else to come along and praise the administration for doing the exact same thing, and part of me would agree with both sides, but both easy reactions really miss the point. Iraq seems to be genuinely turning around lately, but there were no good options for dealing with Saddam prior to 2003, and outside Iraq there don’t seem to be any really good options on the table for dealing with any of the other crises at hand. You can arm the country that gave us Osama bin Laden, or you can not arm them, and neither choice is particularly appealing. You can try to get China to care about human rights outside its borders when it doesn’t even care about human rights inside its borders, or you can get the UN involved (knowing that China will use its seat on the UNSC to keep anything meaningful from happening), or you can insert the US military in in some way (knowing that the liberals who support it today will denounce it tomorrow), or you can shrug and watch genocide commence. You can stay in Iraq though it might turn out to be costly and futile, or you can leave too early and watch Iraq morph into a bloodbath. Or you can partition it and watch it turn into another India-Pakistan fault line, only with neighbors Iran, Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia all using proxies to jockey for position in whatever remains of the country’s people.

We seem to be moving toward a point in time that is not unlike the situation faced by President Truman in August 1945: No good options on the table, lots of wrenching choices, and no matter which path you choose, your decision will send many people to their inevitable deaths. The only questions are, whose people, how do they die, and what kind of world emerges in the aftermath?