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THE
ROVING EYE
The last
(diplomatic) Arab dance
By Pepe
Escobar
CAIRO - At the white corridors of the
Arab League headquarters in downtown Cairo, diplomats
are trying to convince themselves: war is not
inevitable. Very much aware of the serious political and
economic costs for the Arab world in the event of war,
many believe (or want to believe) that there will be a
negotiated solution.
There is also hope that
Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou - currently
holding the rotating European Union presidency - is
ready to participate in a proposed Arab peace mission to
Baghdad. Following a Lebanese idea, the Arab League is
preparing a crucial summit of foreign ministers this
weekend in Cairo that will make a last-ditch attempt to
find a peaceful solution for the Iraqi crisis. In
Baghdad, meanwhile, Saddam Hussein's son Uday also
supported an urgent summit in the pages of his newspaper
Babel.
The meeting will also prepare for the
next Arab League summit, which was scheduled for late
March in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, but will now be
held in Cairo in late February. Reflecting the deep
divisions within the Arab world, Bahrain, along with
Qatar, is one of the US bases from which jets will
strike Iraq. Sensing the drama, diplomats from Bahrain
requested that the summit be moved from Manama.
The foreign ministers' summit on the weekend
will examine every possible avenue that could help
convince the United States that essentially the "game"
is not over yet. They will certainly agree on sending a
peace mission to Baghdad to urge Saddam and his
leadership to do everything possible to strip the US of
every possible pretext for war. In the meantime, frantic
non-stop diplomacy continues. Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak received Jordan's King Abdullah on Friday and
Syrian leader Bashar Assad and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi
on Sunday to coordinate a common Arab position.
The key date remains this Friday - February 14 -
when the United Nations' chief weapons inspectors
present their new report to the Security Council. Arab
diplomats are aware that the key problem remains what
"Iraqi cooperation" means for the US, and on the other
hand what it means for the European Union, Russia, and
the Arab world. As much as the Arabs are desperately
trying to find a peaceful solution, not knowing whether
they will succeed, there are plenty of realists. One
diplomat remarks that "we also have to work with the
Americans and others on securing the fate and future of
some Iraqi officials if they decide to abandon power.
This will be a very difficult task." Another official
adds: "In most diplomatic and decision-making quarters
now, the line is that war is inevitable and we have to
think of the day after Saddam."
The Gulf War is
known by many as "The Mother of all Battles". Now there
is a pervasive fear all over the Arab world that the
real thing was not in 1991, but the imminent 2003
replay. This time, the war will be inside Iraq itself.
The eastern flank of the Arab nation will be invaded by
a Western army - for the first time since 1956, when
Britain, France and Israel tried to overthrow then
Egyptian president Gamal Abd El-Nasser. It was a US
president, Dwight Eisenhower, who forced them to
withdraw. Nasser remained in power. His fierce enemy,
British prime minister Anthony Eden, was confined to the
dustbin of history. This time, Arabs fear that there are
de facto no checks and balances - be they from a
disunited Europe, Russia, what still passes for
international law or from the Arabs themselves - to
oppose the grand designs of the hawks in Washington on
the Middle East.
One of these hawks, Richard
Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Policy Advisory Board,
as much as declared war in a speech last Tuesday in New
York: "Iraq is going to be liberated by the United
States and whoever wants to join us, whether or not we
get the approbation of the UN or any other institution."
No matter the spinning about "liberation", or how
efficient will be a policy of democracy imposed by
bombing, Arab leaders and public opinion basically
retain the fact that what is at stake is the complete
destruction of a modern state and its structures of
power. This means the killing or capture of the Iraqi
leadership and the occupation of an entire country that
could last for years. Many will rejoice at the complete
elimination of the Ba'ath Party, the Republican Guard,
the Special Republican Guard and sinister security
organizations such as the Jihaz al-Amn al-Khas (the
Special Security Organization) and the Himayat al-Rais
(the Presidential Protection Unit) - although few can
even imagine what structures will fill the void.
Dr Mohamed Sayed Tantaoui, the Sheikh of
Al-Azhar - a leading theological authority in Egypt -
has condemned the US adventure as "illegal". He asks,
"What sins have these people committed so their lives
will be sacrificed for a corrupted regime?" The sheikh
demands that no Arab or Muslim country should help
foreign forces bent on attacking Iraq. His position is
very clear: "Our refusal of any aggression against the
Iraqi people, children, women and the elderly doesn't
mean that we defend the Iraqi regime. We want to defend
the Muslim Iraqi population, which is part of the Arab
and Muslim world." But echoes from some of the 2 million
pilgrims now engaged in the hajj in Mecca are
unmistakable: there's nothing Muslims can do to prevent
a war, and the Americans will attack soon after the end
of the hajj this Saturday.
If the so-called
six-way conference on Iraq recently held in Istanbul is
any guide, the meeting in Cairo is also doomed to
failure. In Istanbul - which was the seat of power for
the Ottoman Empire - Arabs, Turks and Persians sat down
together for the first time in years. As with the
foreign ministers in Cairo next weekend, the six foreign
ministers from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran
and Turkey went to Istanbul trying to react to a chain
of events that they simply could not control. There was
a perception of an irrelevant Third World meeting where
delegates discuss what is imposed on them, and cannot
make any sovereign decisions. Turkish Prime Minister
Abdullah Gul admitted, "We expect that war, should one
take place, will make us all losers." Gul described how
he was trapped by two irresistible forces: the United
States, Turkey's key ally for half a century, and the
Turkish population, 90 percent against a US war on Iraq.
So Ankara did what Cairo will do next weekend:
frantic diplomacy trying to prevent war, and at the same
time preparations to follow the leader in the event that
war is inevitable. The real picture behind the current
diplomatic frenzy by Arab leaders and diplomats is the
necessity by certain key countries - Egypt, Turkey,
Saudi Arabia - to find political cover and not attract
America's wrath in a post-Saddam Middle East; at the
same time, they have to show their public - who are
almost universally against the war - that they are
trying to do something.
A joint Saudi-Egyptian
plan discussed in Istanbul is bound to be resuscitated
in Cairo. This calls for a peace mission to be sent to
Baghdad (the Cairo summit will approve the idea). This
mission will try to persuade Saddam Hussein to accept by
all means each and any demand by the Americans.
This would mean, for instance, getting rid of
all remaining chemical and biological weapons,
disbanding the Republican Guard and Special Republican
Guard, holding free elections, joining a new version of
the Arab-Israeli peace process and trying Iraqi war
criminals before an international war-crimes tribunal.
It's extremely unlikely that Saddam will agree to any of
these proposals. In this case, the mission could try to
persuade Saddam to step down, and then a general -
presumably not a member of the Ba'ath Party - would take
power, a case of "regime change lite".
The
Istanbul summit was a platform for Turkey to play it
both ways - on the diplomatic and also the military
front. In Istanbul, Turkey exerted pressure on Saddam's
regime just before Iraq was finally under total military
encirclement; it allowed certain key Arab and Muslim
countries to get on board the war wagon, under the
pretext that these countries did everything to save the
Iraqi regime, but Iraq refused; and it started
positioning itself for the post-Ottoman New Middle
Eastern Order.
So in this sense Turkey at the
Istanbul meet was and remains one step ahead of the
Arabs in Cairo. Turkey resigned itself to the seemingly
inevitable: a new, US-imposed order revolving around
Israel, Turkey, Jordan and - the jewel in the crown -
Iraq after Saddam, an order later to be extended to
other Arab regimes by persuasion or by force. Cairo is
still trying to salvage the past.
The Arab
tragedy may be that an independent Arab order built
after World War II has not been strong or united enough
to prevent foreign attack and control. The order, not
the game, is over.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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