But this editorial doesn't take into account a basic understanding of complicated military equipment:

A top military official in Venezuela recently said his country might sell its 21 U.S-supplied F-16 jets to Iran. As a practical matter, this sale probably won't go through, and the mullahs of Iran won't get any fighter planes to go along with the nuclear weapons they seem keen on acquiring. But the threat did highlight one of the inherent dangers of U.S. arms sales, especially to potentially unstable countries in the Third World and elsewhere.
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The U.S. always has been among the world leaders in foreign military sales. It has recently produced F-16s for export to customers such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. There are also plans to sell F-16s to Pakistan. That doesn't count plans to sell weapons to nations as diverse as Kuwait, Finland, Spain, Japan, Greece and Saudi Arabia.

Just now, none of these countries is thought to be a danger to the U.S., its allies or its interests. But what will these countries be like five or 10 years from now? Who will their future leaders be? Asking those questions prompts a conclusion: The sale of fighter planes and other weapons should be an exceptional feature of U.S. foreign policy, not a conventional one. The sale should be made only as a result of an exhaustive review of all options.

In reality however, this actually isn't true.  When countries that we sell military equipment turn bad, like Iran did after we sold them F-14's, its actually pretty easy for us to stop that equipment from functioning properly.  All we have to do is stop selling them replacement parts.  Fighter jets aren't quite the same as the car in your garage... they need a little bit more than just an oil change every 3000 miles.  They need constant maintenance from trained personnel, and they need replacement parts on a regular basis to continue functioning.

After the Shah was deposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini, we pulled all technical support crews from Iran, and stopped selling them replacement parts.  Within months, their precious F-14's were sitting on a desert tarmac, unable to operate... which is where they remain to this day.  Of course, all this says nothing about the quality of their pilots compared to ours in a dogfight.  Even if Iran were flying F-16's... do you really think they'd be a match against our trained Air Force pilots flying the same aircraft, or some Navy guys just out of Miramar flying F/A-18's?

Update: I mistakenly said that Iran was sold F-15's in the 70s, when in fact they were Tomcats.  I fixed the above text.