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THE ROVING
EYE
Arabs wash their hands of
Saddam
By Pepe Escobar
CAIRO - All over the Arab world, regimes and the
Arab street seem to know how Saddam Hussein could
actually win this war - with no losses to Iraq's
long-suffering people, oil wealth and infrastructure,
not to mention Saddam's military forces. He could comply
to each and any United Nations formality and offer
total, unrestricted cooperation. He could thus convince
the UN Security Council - and world public opinion -
that war is not necessary. If Saddam really engaged in
transparency, he might pull out a victory against the
Bush administration.
Will he do it? Arab
diplomats who know him say he won't. That's the
certainty they are carrying with them to the Arab
"ordinary" summit this Saturday in the Egyptian resort
of Sharm-al-Sheikh. Arab leaders at the summit won't
even call for Saddam Hussein to step down as president
of Iraq. Deploring the "extreme weakness" of the Arab
world, Arab League general secretary Amr Moussa admitted
that war could happen "in the next few days".
At
least in theory, the common Arab position is to prevent
their territories from becoming a base to attack another
Arab country. In practice, Kuwait has been turned into a
US boot camp, and Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab
Emirates are also an integral part of the US war
machine. These states have already hinted that they
would not abide by any decision of the Arab summit on
this matter.
The overall feeling is that the
Arabs are watching a disaster movie, passive, ecstatic
spectators unable to leave their seats. The plot is all
about them, but they don't seem to realize it. The
eastern flank of the Arab nation will be conquered,
occupied and run by a new MacArthur. The plot thickens:
Iraq may plunge into civil war, it may be balkanized by
neighboring Turkey and Iran, Israel may try to smash the
Palestinians for good, orchestrating a mass expulsion to
Jordan. But the Arabs remain paralyzed. It was Turkey
that had to call them to Istanbul to discuss how to
prevent war. It was the European Union that had to force
Egypt to reassert its traditional role of leader of
collective Arab initiatives.
Arab diplomats and
pundits are widely sounding the death of pan-Arabism -
that romantic '50s idea that Arab states are part of a
great Arab nation and should always be united to defend
it. It all went downhill: at the summit on Saturday,
Arab leaders are reduced to being torn between fear of
the United States and fear of their own people.
Palestinian writer Hafez Barghouti offers a devastating
analysis of the process: "The Arab system hasn't just
declared its impotence to stop the war, it has
volunteered to join in as if in resistance to the
desire of many friendly governments and peoples to stop
the potential massacre of the Iraqi people. But history
will also record that not only the Arab system failed,
retreated and colluded with the aggressors; the Arab
people, too, were spineless and terrified."
Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrullah openly
regretted that in "the greatest Muslim demonstration,
the reunion of 2 million Muslims in Mecca", there were
no calls against war. Nasrullah has fiercely accused a
few Arab regimes of secretly supporting war.
Nevertheless, pro-US regimes such as Egypt and Jordan,
which fear their own public opinion, know all too well
that the silence of the Arab street masks tremendous
anger. The endless humiliation of Palestine followed
daily on live TV, coupled with the upcoming
special-effects invasion of Iraq, could be the final
spark to light up the volcano.
One of the
defining aspects of the Muslim ummah is a feeling
of brotherhood. A Muslim in Kashmir feels hurt almost
physically by the suffering of a Muslim in Ramallah, and
vice-versa. That's how hundreds of millions of Muslims
all over the world feel hurt by the suffering of the
Iraqi people - caught between Saddam's reign of terror
and the sanctions-induced nightmare. But despair in the
Arab world with the disgraceful record of many regimes
is now so pervasive that not a few Arabs are actually
welcoming an invasion of Iraq - even if this war is
conducted by a Washington that didn't even try to
disguise its loathing and contempt for Arabs. Diplomats
in Cairo confirm that Arab regimes have been under
enormous pressure by the United States: "Their hands are
tied. That's why the extraordinary summit collapsed,"
said one. Others are more unforgiving: "Some leaders
simply don't have a global vision of their true national
interests. If they had presented an united front, they
would have changed things. It's like they are not
conscious [of] how serious the situation is. They are
limited by their desire to remain in power." For Salama
Ahmad, an editorialist at the semi-official Egyptian
Al-Ahram newspaper, "they will gather just to wash their
hands and pretend their conscience is clear". Another
Arab diplomat is even gloomier: "They don't have
military means. Financial means are practically
non-existent. And oil as a weapon, nobody even dreams of
it anymore." Nobody did until the idea was floated at
the meeting of the Organization of the Islamic
Conference (OIC) in Kuala Lumpur (see OIC: Organized irrelevance, February 27). It's unlikely Arab nations will
actually consider it.
Even Africans have been
more forceful than Arabs. At the end of the 22nd
Franco-African summit in Paris last week, they all
signed a "Declaration on Iraq" calling for more and
reinforced UN inspections. Ahmed Maher, the Egyptian
foreign minister, was dejected: "I keep telling
everybody that it took only 15 minutes for the African
countries to reach a unanimous position about Iraq."
But now the three African countries that are
current non-permanent members of the Security Council
are also under extreme political and economic pressure
by the US. There are subtle nuances. Cameroon won't be
easily swayed: France is Cameroon's main trade partner.
But Guinea will be president of the Security Council in
March. The country is poor, 90 percent Muslim and a
member of the OIC. Washington has already offered it an
array of economic carrots: pocket change. Angola is
another weak link: it has emerged only recently from a
27-year-long civil war. It defends a pacific solution in
Iraq at all costs. But US oil companies are very much
present in Angola, and the country badly needs an
international donors conference to start its rebuilding
process.
Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin
Ramadan has invited the leadership trio of the
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Malaysia, South Africa and
Cuba, to visit Iraq, follow the work of the inspectors
and then render their verdict to the international
community. But Saddam Hussein has hinted in the now
famous CBS interview with suave Texan Dan Rather that he
does not plan to destroy his Al Samoud 2 missiles,
because they were tested without being fully charged and
without guiding systems: this would mean they in fact do
not exceed the 150-kilometer range prescribed by the UN.
He may be calculating that if the destroys them, he
could preempt the US-UK-Spain war camp at the UN. Arab
diplomats say he won't, because his missiles and his
yet-to-be-found cache of chemical and biological
materiel are his prime instruments to instill fear and
prevent any internal rebellion.
Abdel-Moneim
Said, director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and
Strategic Studies in Cairo, sums it all up:
"Unfortunately, the destiny of our region is crafted
abroad. This is what we are seeing now: our future is
being dictated by people outside, be it a dictator like
Saddam on one side, or the Americans on the other." This
leaves the "ordinary" summit of the Arab League this
Saturday at least serving one purpose: to demonstrate
how dangerous is the abyss between the acts of Arab
regimes and the will of their populations. The abyss is
the utmost, undisputed source of terrorism in the Arab
world - terrorism that will only be amplified by the
Second Gulf War.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
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