-
The Arabs and Iraq
By David Hirst, The Daily Star
-
All Arabs, regimes and peoples, agree on
one thing: War on Iraq may affect the entire world, but they and
their region will pay far the highest price. The war itself could be
terrible, but there is also what they fear will follow. Arab League
Secretary-General Amr Moussa warns that it will “open the gates of
hell,” and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that it will light a
“gigantic fire” of violence and terror. An Arab world deeply conscious
of its long history of humiliation by foreigners is about to see one of
its member-states conquered and occupied; and the Bush administration does
not hide its ambition to make this the first step in a “reshaping” of
the whole region at least as much in the interest of the Arabs’ historic
adversary, Israel, as its own. Commentators forecast all manner of
possible consequences, ranging from the breakdown of Iraq into civil war
and its dismemberment by neighboring powers to an attempt by Israel to
subjugate the Palestinians once and for all, perhaps with another mass
expulsion like 1948.
Yet the Arabs, peoples if not regimes, are agreed on something else too:
that they are doing less than anyone else on Earth to forestall the
calamity about to engulf them. It is disgraceful, Arab commentators say,
that others’ governments, even close allies of America, are far more
energetic to this end than Arab governments themselves, that other peoples
around the world have taken to the streets in anti-war demonstrations that
far outdo those of the Arab peoples. “European countries,” says
Beirut’s al-Safir, “have more Arab national feeling than we Arabs
ourselves.” It was the Turkish government, they point out, which
recently if unsuccessfully lobbied Arab states to sign on to
regional initiative to avert a war; it was at European instigation that
Mubarak belatedly sought to reassert Egypt’s traditional role as the
promoter of collective Arab action.
Palestine has always been the pan-Arab cause par excellence, and Arabs
thought their rulers had reached a nadir of impotence with their
failure, these past two years, to furnish meaningful help to the intifada,
or at least to get the US to rein in its Israeli protege. But now, with
Iraq, they have sunk yet further. Commentators call it the virtual demise
of the “pan-Arab principle” which has dominated regional politics
since Arab independence, the whole idea that Arab states, as constituent
parts of a greater Arab “nation,” should always combine in defense of
the higher Arab interest. “The first shot fired in the Anglo-Saxon war
on Iraq,” says Syria’s Al-Baath daily, “will be the coup de grace to
the corpse of the Arab system that least influential player in what is
happening.”
Officially, all Arab states oppose war. That is what they proclaimed at
their last annual summit. They are staging another on Sunday, with what
appears to be a maximum objective of launching an 11th-hour “Arab
solution” which, in practice, could only be a concerted attempt to
persuade Saddam Hussein to step down or a minimum one of throwing
their weight behind the endeavors of others. But the summit if held at
all is widely expected to be a fiasco.
Arab leaders will go to it hopelessly trapped between fear of their people
and fear of the US, on whose good will they will feel themselves,
post-Saddam, more than ever dependent. Some, like Syria, tend toward the
ingratiation of their people, staking out a strong, “patriotic”
position against war; this time, unlike in the 1991 Gulf War, Syria deems
it the less dangerous, painful option. But for others ingratiation of
America is the sounder, indeed only possible, course, with the result
that, in a mockery of last year’s summit, half a dozen of them have
offered their territories as launching pads for the coming onslaught. And
those which have not are almost universally deemed to be colluding with
the Anglo-American “war camp;” or, at the very least, to be more
aligned with it than they are with anti-war Europeans. “The Arab
system,” said Palestinian commentator Hafiz Barghouti, “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.”
His comment is typical of much woeful speculation as to why the Arab
“street” has been so relatively quiescent, especially since popular
disgust with governments failed, corrupt, tyrannical runs
incomparably deeper in this region than almost anywhere else. One answer
commentators come up with is the ruthless repression with which such
governments would counter any serious manifestations of popular will.
Another is the apathy induced by the knowledge that, with such regimes,
demonstrations never change anything unless, that is, they for
once assume so massive and explosive a form that they change the regimes
themselves. That they very well could is the fear haunting pro-American
regimes like Jordan’s and Egypt’s; both know that the outward calm is
no measure of the pent-up anger that lies beneath the surface, and that
what Palestine on its own failed to ignite, Iraq and Palestine together
could.
Indeed, some argue, disgust with the existing order runs so very deep that
many Arabs will actually welcome the war they simultaneously abhor. When
Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1991 some deplored this for what it was, the most
spectacular violation of Arab brotherhood; yet they simultaneously
applauded it in the belief that, though Saddam himself was the most rotten
ruler of a rotten Arab order, he was supplying the dynamite that would
blow the order away. It didn’t happen; with US help, the order,
including Saddam himself, was entirely restored. But this time, as leading
columnist Raghida Dergham points out, the US itself is supplying the
dynamite: “The oppression of those who live under the Iraq regime, and
the discontent of those other Arabs who deem their own regimes beyond
reform, has reached the point of despair. And despair has bred
acquiescence to anything that might shake the foundations of the Arab
world, even a war that was conceived by men famed for their loathing and
contempt for the Arab peoples and their total loyalty to Israel.”
David Hirst is a Beirut-based veteran
correspondent and author.