[Arab nation or Arab nations?] "Neighbors - The waning of the `Arab nation'
"
HA'ARETZ 5 Mar.'03
By Zvi Bar'el

QUOTE FROM TEXT:
" 'This may be the last Arab summit which is perhaps the
true profit of this meeting. At long last we will be able to be
nation-states and not a meaningless Arab nation.'
("Egyptian commentator")"
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EXCERPTS:

The ... hotels in Sharm el-Sheikh have seen a good many international
gatherings ... but the only reason they hosted last Saturday's Arab League
summit was security considerations. Usually such meetings are held in Cairo,
at Arab League headquarters. ...

But it wasn't only demonstrators that induced President Hosni Mubarak to
move the summit to a distant location. About a month ago, when he was asked
about the need for an emergency meeting of the Arab League, he replied off
the cuff, "I want to ask you what an Arab summit can do against the problem
that exists between Iraq and the United States." When a journalist
suggested - at a press conference with Mubarak - that the Arab states could
invoke the oil weapon, the president retorted angrily, "Do you want the Gulf
states to stop the flow of oil? Did Saddam Hussein consult with the Arab
states when he invaded Iran? Did he consult with them when he invaded
Kuwait? The Arab states paid Saddam $60 billion and assisted him in the war
against Iran. Then he invaded Kuwait and split the country in two. He
attacked the American forces, and his policy brought about the largest
American presence in the history of the region."

A fiasco foretold

A month later, though, it was Mubarak who initiated the summit, and from the
outset there were signs of the looming fiasco. At first, it wasn't entirely
clear that the Arab leaders were willing to attend. The Saudi foreign
minister said two weeks ago that there was no reason for a summit, Libya
stated that it would absent itself, Jordan didn't understand what there was
to discuss. Others had their own agenda: Kuwait saw the meeting as an
opportunity to play up the Iraqi threat to its integrity, and Syria wanted
to use the platform to assert its firm opposition to a war and its demand
not to allow American forces to use Arab countries as staging bases. These
disagreements were a rebuke to Mubarak, as the possibility loomed that no
one would show up or that the meeting would lurch out of Egypt's control.

Finally, the parties agreed to meet on March 1, so as not to create a
precedent of failing to accede to the Egyptian president's call.

As usual, the Arab foreign ministers met first, to prepare the resolutions
that would be adopted and to reexamine, after only 10 days, whether the
disagreements remained. It turned out that nothing had changed. ... Egypt
proposed sending a high-level delegation to Baghdad, Washington and the
European capitals, but Iraq rejected this, saying it would be "intervention
in Iraq's internal affairs." Kuwait wanted to unite the clauses of the
resolutions on Iraq to create a connection between opposition to a war
against Iraq and a new policy that Iraq would be called upon to adopt
vis-?-vis Kuwait. That was opposed by the foreign ministers of Syria, Iraq
and Egypt, who stated that the "Iraqi question" was more important and
merited a separate clause in the resolutions. After this was agreed on,
Kuwait asked that the clause on Iraqi policy toward Kuwait precede the
clause of opposition to a war . ...

"If the foreign ministers are unable to agree on these minor issues, how
will they agree on the big questions ? ... an Egyptian commentator ...after
the summit resolutions were made public. "A summit of this kind is an
affront to the Arab leaders and to Egypt, the host. It would have been
better if it had not taken place. I am sorry that President Mubarak was
belittled at such a meeting."

Indeed, during the week that preceded the summit, Mubarak had to field
trenchant questions about Egypt's position on a war against Iraq. The
journalists in the government-controlled media outlets were instructed to
take the side of the president, and praised him for his activity to prevent
a war. His visits to Europe and his meetings with German Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder and with French President Jacques Chirac were described as though
they were a campaign to save the world. Special emphasis was placed on his
years-long activity regarding the Palestinian question, which Mubarak views
as more serious than the Iraq issue.

Ibrahim Saada, the editor of the important paper Akbar al-Yum, devoted a
particularly sarcastic article to the Arab leaders, and especially those who
sought tough declarations against the United States. "I was especially
amazed when I discovered that instead of trying to persuade Saddam Hussein
to implement the resolutions of the United Nations and to draw the Arab
position closer to that of Europe ... [the Arab foreign ministers] in their
frivolous meeting actually drove the United States to speed up its military
operation against Iraq," he wrote. He also commented that the clause of the
resolution stating that an attack on Iraq is an attack on Arab national
security means that the Arab states will have to launch an attack on the
United States. "That is a ludicrous resolution," he wrote. "No Arab state
went to war against Iraq when it invaded Kuwait in 1990. The lie known as
the `joint Arab defense pact' [to which the Arab League member-states are
signatories] would have left Kuwait under Iraqi occupation to this day were
it not for the resolutions of the Security Council."

As for the decision not to assist foreign forces in a war against Iraq,
"Most of the Arab states have agreements with the United States; do they
intend to annul them?... I would like to see what happens if Iraq demands
that the Arab states implement the resolutions of the League's foreign
ministers. Are we going to see Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Yemen mobilizing
their armies in order to fight the United States with the aim of protecting
Saddam Hussein's regime? ... I don't understand how the well-known Syrian
diplomat Farouk Shara agreed to such declarations when he knows that the
Arabs do not want to and are incapable of going to war against the world's
greatest power for the sake of the blue eyes of big brother Saddam Hussein."

This lengthy article is really a compilation of the agreed positions of the
realistic stream in the Arab world, which includes, Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
Jordan and the Gulf states. Yet even among them, there are no small
differences about the correct Arab approach and more especially about the
ability of any Arab position, which is based on a minimal common
denominator, to create some sort of workable policy against a war in Iraq.
The result was appalling from the Arab states' point of view. Thus, for the
first time in the history of the conflict with Iraq, an Arab proposal was
put forward to urge Saddam to leave Iraq. The suggestion, made by the ruler
of the tiny but super-rich United Arab Emirates, was seconded two days later
by the rulers of Bahrain and Kuwait. Saudi Arabia, too, is apparently not
against that solution, though it did not say so publicly.

Although that proposal does not reflect the mainstream of the Arab League,
it raises the question whether there is anything left of the mainstream and
who represents it. More important and more jarring, this political
initiative came not from the traditional leadership, such as Egypt, Saudi
Arabia or Syria, but from the countries of economic clout, which were once
considered marginal but may now exploit their economic strength to forge a
new Arab policy - if not Arab then at least regional. ...

Following the Arab League summit last Saturday, and the voicing of its
generalizing resolutions, which do not include any concrete action, an
Egyptian commentator noted with no little rightness, "This may be the last
Arab summit, which is perhaps the true profit of this meeting. At long last
we will be able to be nation-states and not a meaningless Arab nation."

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Dr. Joseph Lerner, Co-Director IMRA