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THE ROVING EYE
The great Arab
face-saving theater
By Pepe Escobar
CAIRO - The media crunched in the courtyard of
the Arab League headquarters in Cairo on Sunday were
desperate to know something, anything, on where the
leaders of the Middle East stood, but Saudi Arabia's
Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal had other things
on his mind. He was going out for lunch. Foie gras
maybe? The other foreign ministers of the 22 members of
the Arab League stuck to their kebabs inside the
building.
Later, the Kuwaitis also went out -
not for foie gras but for "consultations". The wait was
tense: everybody knew, for instance, that Kuwait,
converted into an American armed camp, could not
possibly agree with Iraq on the current standoff. Only
at 10.30 in the evening was a declaration issued. And it
was deeply disappointing.
There's something
unreal about the Arab League. The extraordinary meeting
of foreign ministers was supposed to reinforce the
Beirut declaration of March 2002, according to which an
attack on an Arab country is considered an attack on all
22 members of the Arab League. Indeed, Arab states this
time sort of agreed "that they will not accept,
cooperate with, deal with, rally to or facilitate a
strike on Iraq", in the words of Arab League secretary
general Amr Mussa. But they could not even agree on a
date for a summit of heads of state to hammer out a
solid message to Washington. No wonder: at least three
members of the league - Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar -
totally contradict the message enunciated by Mussa. The
secretary general tried to put on his bravest face: "A
summit will happen." Maybe after a war on Iraq?
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has lobbied
non-stop to convene a summit in Sharm-al-Sheikh.
According to Egyptian officials, 15 of the 22 Arab
League members have already agreed. Even Kuwait, through
Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Jabar al-Sabah, has
confirmed that it will attend the summit. A date was
floated: February 22. Then another: February 27. But the
question remains: a summit for what? The best that the
Arabs can hope for at this stage is to attach their
camels to the European peace caravan led by France and
Germany plus Russia at the UN Security Council.
And that's exactly what appears to
be happening. One day before the also-extraordinary
European Union summit in Brussels, Greek Foreign
Minister George Papandreou - whose country holds the
current presidency of the EU - and European external
relations commissioner Chris Patten were also present at the
Cairo meeting. Papandreou said that he talked one-on-one
to Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and advised
Baghdad to comply with each and every UN disarmament term,
the only way to avoid a US-led war: the position was set
in stone the day after at the EU summit in Brussels.
Mubarak was due in Germany on Tuesday on a state visit,
and will meet French President Jacques Chirac in Paris
on Thursday, on the margins of a Franco-African summit.
Mubarak at least must be given the credit of trying to
maneuver to find a unified Arab position. But like the 2
million hajjis recently in Mecca dressed in white and
praying as one, the appearances of uniformity belie the
differences.
There's a lot of
wishful thinking all over the Arab world - as if people are
fatalistically waiting for a divine intervention from Allah himself.
In practical terms, this would happen in the form of
a package to be formulated at the still-tentative
Arab summit. The Egyptian-Saudi plan is to urge
Saddam Hussein to fully comply with anything - for the sake of
the long-suffering Iraqi population; or step down, leave
Iraq along with his family and the leaders of the Ba'ath
Party, and exile himself in any Arab country under the
protection of the Arab League.
Arab disunity
among their unelected leaders is mirrored by Arab
silence in the streets. Well over 10 million people,
mostly marching in the streets of Europe this weekend
carrying colorful, good-humored banners and quoting Hans
Blix verbatim, have de facto vetoed the war. This is a
thunderous political development - comparable to the
European popular revolutions of 1848 and the Eastern
European peaceful revolutions of 1989. The numbers are
particularly staggering in three countries whose
governments are staunch supporters of the Bush
administration: 3 million people marching in Spain
(including 1.3 million in Barcelona alone); almost 3
million people in Rome; and 1.5 million in London (these
are the real figures, not the "police estimates" quoted
by the mainstream media).
Meanwhile, what were
the Arabs doing? The Arabs are about to witness nothing
less than the invasion of the eastern flank of the Arab
nation. Only Arabs can fully understand what this
invasion really means - something that US Secretary of
State Colin Powell himself finally admitted last week on
the record: the US wants to change the whole map of the
Middle East, which was drawn by the West (Britain and
France) at the end of the Ottoman empire. Arabs can
scream in private, but they cannot shout in public. In
Cairo, for example, they were afraid, very much afraid,
like the concierge of a five-star hotel surreptitiously
mimicking the gesture of a man handcuffed. On Saturday
morning, government officials "had no idea" where the
protest would take place. Less than 600 people
eventually showed up, surrounded by no less than 3,000
security police. Even in Tel Aviv, 2,000 people
protested against the war.
Mubarak, the
Saud family, King Abdullah in Jordan, they may all agree
with the anger and the fatalistic feeling of impotence
of their own populations, but still they don't allow
people to express it. Tyrannies anywhere assume that to
prevent the expression of popular will is to prevent the
will from existing. There were indeed thousands protesting
in Baghdad, and 200,000 in Damascus, but these were
in support of the respective regimes. They only reflect
the Ba'ath party's ability - in Iraq and in Syria -
to organize or intimidate its citizens. The backwardness
of Arab regimes even makes one feel a certain sympathy
for the American dream - but not the methods - of
bringing democracy to the Middle East. The problem is,
democracy cannot be imposed by bombing and territorial
invasion: Arabs themselves will have to learn from scratch -
and this will certainly take a political and
social earthquake, as in Iran in 1979.
What are most current
Arab leaders good for, apart from providing a good
life for themselves and their cronies? America wants
to bring them down - at least the ones it doesn't yet
keep on a leash. Al-Qaeda also wants to bring them down
- for different reasons, and in a completely different
register. In his latest audiotape, Osama bin Laden
says, "The recent deployment of forces for an attack
on Iraq is only a link in the chain of continuing attacks
on the countries of this region, including Egypt,
Syria, Iran and Sudan. However, their real intention
is to conquer and divide the land of the two holy
sanctuaries [Saudi Arabia], as they have long realized
the strategic value of this target, ever since this
objective was passed on from Britain to the United States
60 years ago ..." Any Arab would agree with that, and
many a reputable Western think tank as well. Asia Times
Online has reported that plans are being made at the
Foreign Office in London for a partition of Arabia: the
Arabs keep the holy places, the West keeps the oil. (Listening to Europe , Feb
1)
In the same audiotape, bin Laden then
examines the proliferation of unrepresentative Hamid
Karzai-style clones (as in Afghanistan) as the great
drama of the Arab world: "What is the difference between
Karzai the non-Arab and Karzai the Arab? Who implanted
and established the rulers of the Arabian Gulf? They are
none other than the crusaders, who appointed the Karzai
of Kabul, established the Karzai of Pakistan, and
implanted the Karzai of Kuwait and the Karzai of Bahrain
and the Karzai of Qatar and others. Who appointed the
Karzai of Riyadh? ... they were none other than the
crusaders, and they are continuing to enslave us to this
very day."
Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi intellectual
exiled in the US, advances an explanation for Arab
inertia: since the end of World War II, Arabs
increasingly view themselves as eternal victims
"condemned to pursue a combat-like Sisyphus against
absolute or satanic injustice". He contends that this
inferiority complex is found in different degrees among
all the peoples in the Middle East: Palestinians, Kurds,
Armenians, Chaldeans, Oriental Christians, Turkmen -
Shi'ite and Sunni. Makiya says that especially after the
unexpected Israeli victory in 1967, "this inferiority
complex became the engine of politics and culture; it
was the basis on which regimes like Saddam's in Iraq and
Hafez Assad's in Syria were built. Another factor was
that deadly anti-Americanism changed hands from Arab
secular nationalists to religious fanatics who used to
be marginalized".
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud
al Faisal has told the BBC that an American attack without
a UN resolution would be perceived in the Arab world
as "an aggression". Arab leaders contemplate the scenario
with desperation - because they know in the current
fundamentalist American administration mode ("if you're
not with us, you're with the terrorists"), the regimes
which are not America's vassals yet are condemned to
extinction. From America's point of view, the Roman
"divide and rule" maxim as applied to the Arab world has
been a resounding success. For Arab leaders, there's
nothing left but the great Arab face-saving theater. It
may not be enough to prevent a massive political and
social earthquake in the not too distant
future.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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