POLITICS-IRAQ: In a League of Their Own

By Cam McGrath Reprint | | Print |

Cam McGrath and George Baghdadi

CAIRO, Feb 28 2003 (IPS) - Now in its 58th year, the Arab League has come to be seen in the Arab world more for what it cannot do rather than what it can.

Despite limited successes, its inability to be one Arab League rather than 22 different nations has rarely surfaced so sharply as over Iraq, which was one of its seven founder members in 1945 along with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Yemen.

The differences over Iraq were clear at the meeting of foreign ministers in Cairo last week, and they are becoming even more prominent as the Arab heads of government meeting gets under way Saturday at Sharm El-Sheikh, a holiday resort by the Red Sea in Egypt.

Only committed Arab League officials see it differently. "There is a general agreement in the Arab world that whatever we do in relation to the Iraqi file should be done through the Security Council and only through the Security Council," Arab League spokesman Hisham Youssef said during an interview on state-run Egyptian television.

"There is also a consensus that we need to give the necessary time to inspectors to complete their work," he said.

Youssef played down reports that Arab states were unable to adopt a unified stance on Iraq, adding that differences between individual states over details were minor and natural.

"The Arab position has been known since the (March 2002) Beirut summit because they indicated then that Arab governments are against a military strike directed towards Iraq," he said. "Probably, we didn’t clarify our position to the rest of world as much as we could. Maybe we should have done more, but there has always been an Arab position, and this Arab position has always been against war."

As he spoke, the Kuwaiti delegates were talking about preparations for policies after the war is over and the Iraqi regime is smothered by U.S.-led forces.

The League of Arab States, popularly known as the Arab League, was founded in 1945 in an attempt to coordinate Arab economic activities and political expression. A mutual defence pact was signed in 1950. Nobody is even talking about invoking it in defence of Iraq.

Once an influential body capable of flexing the Arab economic and political muscle, the Arab League has lost much of its credibility in recent decades. Its summit meetings are characterised by infighting, theatrics and hollow statements.

"Arab differences are not new and they surface at every summit in one form or another," the United Arab Emirates daily Khaleej Times said in an editorial. "But if they lead to total dissent that opposes the very spirit of the issue in question, it results in discord and chaos."

Mohammed Kamal, political science professor at Cairo University says "it is difficult to merge these views into a common foreign policy or come up with a statement that reflects all Arab views." The Arab League has a "credibility problem because it always comes up with very ambitious statements that nobody believes will be implemented."

The Arab League does not have the mechanism or the tools to translate these communiques into concrete policy, he says. What the League says as a League is "mainly for domestic consumption, because at the end of the day every Arab country will pursue its own national interests."

Historically, the Arab League has been strong on issues involving external threats, and weak on inter-Arab affairs. For more than 40 years until 1994 its members successfully coordinated a broad economic boycott against Israel and companies doing business with it.

The Arab League also took a unified stance during the Gulf War in 1991, lining up behind a U.S.-led coalition to expel Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait.

"At that time you had an Arab country that had occupied another Arab country, and many people were against that," says Kamal. "This time round it’s different. People see it as helping the Americans to occupy an Arab country instead of liberating one."

The gravity of the present crisis requires the Arab League to go further than it is prepared to, an analyst says. "The initiative that is needed is not, of course, an eloquent consensus statement that upholds international legality and condemns the use of force," says Beshara Nasser Sharbel, a columnist with the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat. "What is needed is a single-item agenda and a bold initiative that can save Iraq from war."

But the very agenda of the 22-member of Arab League summit remains in dispute. The efforts by some Arab leaders to kill the momentum to war seems increasingly desperate.

There are suspicions about Egypt’s lukewarm opposition to the war. Arab observers say the Egyptian government may know through a direct channel to the U.S. that military operations are about to begin. Or, the U.S. is pressuring its allies to extract a lenient stand among Arab countries, one that would hold Baghdad responsible for any failure to cooperate with the United Nations instead of decrying military action against Iraq.

Some analysts say also that the Arab states may not have the political influence to offer viable alternatives to war. They say the meeting could serve largely to demonstrate to skeptical populations at home that they have done their best to resolve the crisis peacefully.

People in the Middle East are facing more than just the prospect of war. They now face the possibility that the U.S. government may exercise a day-to-day administrative control over a stretch of Arab soil for a long period.

The thought provokes angry emotions in a region where sensitivity over a colonial past run deep. Many people talk these days of the Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret pact made in 1916 between France and Britain to carve up Arab lands and Turkey from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

That pact led to British and French control of what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, and the death of early Arab nationalist dreams. Britain had already occupied Egypt in 1882.

"Without a doubt, a U.S. war on Iraq will plunge the Middle East into the darkest era of colonialism the world has known for decades," Syrian Vice-President Abdul Halim Khaddam told a Saudi daily.