Page 1 of
2 The chimera of Arab
solidarity By M K Bhadrakumar
"I will not divulge a secret if I say that
this summit was very disappointing, particularly
regarding the tragedy of Iraq. If I had the
opportunity to make the Arab kings and presidents
who met in Riyadh yesterday and the day before
yesterday hear my voice, I would have told them
that you met while your brothers in Iraq,
Palestine and elsewhere were grievously suffering
from injustice and occupation.
"What is
strange is that the more the United States
inflicts injustice on Iraq, the more the Arabs
throw themselves in its
arms. If the Arab rulers had
some independence, they would dissociate
themselves from the United States and stop
revolving in its orbit inasmuch as it dissociates
itself from our interests and supports our enemy.
"O Arab rulers, what do you have to say
about these biased and unjust statements, which
participate in killing us and in shedding our
blood and which bless the shedding of Muslim
blood? What do you have to say about the massacres
that are being perpetrated against Iraq and our
Palestinian brothers, and what can you do to
support our brothers? What do you have to say
about these US statements that collude with Israel
to the point of crime and plotting?"
These
are the words of an unidentified preacher
delivering a Friday prayer sermon in Baghdad on
March 30. The preacher was pouring out his sense
of anguish and frustration over the inane outcome
of the Arab League summit that had concluded in
Saudi Arabia the previous day.
Indeed, the
fizz has gone out of the summit. All the brave
attempts by spin doctors (in the region and
abroad) to portray the summit as coupling Saudi
Arabia's weight with an Arab mandate for carrying
the so-called Arab Peace Initiative to a new
threshold never really carried any conviction.
In the popular Arab perception, there was
no doubt that the real bet was on the ability of
the Saudi leadership to get the United States and
Israel to accept the Arab initiative. But even
assuming that US President George W Bush is
inclined to pressure Israel, the plain reality is
that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert lacks the
personal or political credentials to take a major
step toward peace in the Arab-Israel conflict.
He is the weakest prime minister Israel
has ever had. Evidently, his priority is political
survival in Israel's murky, vicious domestic
politics. Meanwhile, he hopes somehow to keep the
so-called peace process solely on the Palestinian
track and to stick to the hardline stance
vis-a-vis the Palestinian Authority and the
Hamas-led Palestinian government.
As
Al-Ahram weekly put it, "Israel wants an Arab
capitulation ... It saw how the Arabs changed
their position in the past and it hopes for much
the same again. Before 1967, Arabs saw Israel as
an imperialist state. After 1967, they accepted a
two-state solution. Then the Arabs offered full
normalization to sweeten the deal. Now Israel
wants more."
In fact, the Riyadh summit
got off to an inauspicious start. Its credibility
suffered when it came to be known that just days
ahead of it, US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice had convened a meeting in Cairo of the
intelligence chiefs of four Arab states, Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan
- the very same states that the summit came to
endorse as composing the so-called Arab Quartet,
which would act as a sort of coordinator with the
international community in initiating an
Arab-Israeli dialogue.
It didn't need much
ingenuity to estimate that the Riyadh summit was
to be an elaborate exercise of public diplomacy,
whereas the US was in essence trying to bring
together the pro-American Sunni Arab regimes and
Israel in anticipation of a confrontation with
Iran.
Senior Arab political observer Rami
Khouri asked, "Which of the two meetings [Riyadh
summit or the Cairo meeting of intelligence
chiefs] was more significant and signaled the
tone, content and direction of Arab state
policies? Was this a natural interplay between
three separate factors - US foreign policy, Arab
security systems, and Arab leaderships? Or did the
three converge into a single trend, where US
foreign policy blended with Arab security policy?
"Rice's meeting with the intelligence
chiefs was a novelty that deserves more scrutiny,
for both its current meaning and for its future
implications. Whatever the nature of Rice's
meeting with the Arab intelligence chiefs, it
seems like the sort of noteworthy development that
Arab governments should explain to their own Arab
citizens," Khouri wrote.
Quite naturally,
there was always the lingering suspicion that one
main purpose of the Arab League summit was to
block what the beleaguered pro-Western Arab
regimes in the region perceived as Iran's
"encroachment" in the Middle East, Iran's ambition
to capture the Palestinian card in particular.
To quote Saudi-owned Al-Hayat newspaper in
London, "The Riyadh summit took back the reins of
the [Peace] Initiative from radicalism. The
presidency of this summit [Saudi Arabia] is now
responsible for the success of moderation and the
fulfillment of its victory by explicitly defeating
radicalism and extremism stretching from Sudan to
Lebanon, via Palestine and Iraq, as a result of
the direct Iranian intervention."
From the
Saudi perspective, therefore, the Riyadh summit
was a logical follow-up on the Mecca Accord, where
the main thrust was again on arresting the growing
Iranian capacity to set the tempo of developments
in the Palestinian territories. According to the
Saudi daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Syria tried in vain
to give some substance to the initiative adopted
at the Riyadh summit by pleading that the bottom
line in any settlement with Israel ought to be the
return of the Palestinian refugees.
The
Saudis apparently rebuffed the Syrian attempt. A
similar fate awaited the abortive Syrian attempt
to restrain the Arab League from extending
vehement support for Prime Minister Fouad
Siniora's government in Beirut, which Hezbollah
opposes.
In the event, the Riyadh summit
declaration voiced the Arab states' support for
the Hariri tribunal (which Damascus has been
stonewalling). Saudi King Abdullah criticized
Hezbollah's agitation against the Siniora
government. The Saudis made it clear that it was
time that Lebanon was neutralized as a front of
anti-Israel resistance. Furthermore, Saudi
diplomatic sources have "leaked"
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