The pressure of imminent war has widened fissures in the Arab world.
Two incidents this month highlight the strain building as US-led military action looms over the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.
An Arab League summit at Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, on Mar. 1 became a shouting match between Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah.
During a speech, Qaddafi criticized Saudi Arabia for asking the US to protect it against Iraq during the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Abdullah interrupted him with a warning to mind his own business.
At the meeting, Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, proposed by letter a plan for Saddam to leave Iraq, which would be administered by the Arab League until Iraqis established their own government.
Hope that the Arab League might send any such message to Iraq ended with the flare-up between Qaddafi and Abdullah. The meeting yielded only a statement of opposition against an attack on Iraq with no elaboration of what role Arab governments might play in the crisis.
Days later, at a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Doha, Qatar, a spat broke out between Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, deputy chairman of Iraq's ruling Revolutionary Council, and Mohammad Sabah al Salem al-Sabah, Kuwait's foreign minister.
Sabah had called for resignation of the Iraqi president to prevent war. Ibrahim responded by calling Sabah an agent of the US and a monkey.
The Doha meeting never officially considered the UAE proposal, although representatives of the emirate were reported to have lobbied for the plan in private.
So Arab unity fails again. How can it do otherwise? Its most vociferous supporters are the likes of Saddam, Qaddafi, and Syrian President Bashar Assad, who insisted in Egypt that US objectives in Iraq were oil and "redrawing the region's map."
To outsiders, Arab unity seems like little more than a rhetorical cloak behind which tyrants hide their own abuse of Arabs.
Against their incendiary nonsense, it's refreshing to see the level-headedness emerging from the UAE and other gulf Arab states and the resolve demonstrated by Abdullah and Sabah.
(Online Mar. 7, 2003; author's e-mail: [email protected])
