The Arab League summit in Sharm El-Sheikh ended yesterday in a way that lived up to every Arab commentator’s worst fears. The Arabs, it is now crystal clear, are hopelessly divided when it comes to Iraq, and the reason is that they are hopelessly divided generally. Saudi Arabia’s earlier assertion that an extraordinary meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) would be of no use because it would not further the interests of either Arabs or Muslims could equally have been said ahead of the Arab League summit. The Arabs are now in a weaker position than they were two days ago.
However, certain truths when it comes to Iraq remain.
Washington has persistently ignored the advice of its friends in the Arab world that a new war in Iraq will play into the hands of the terror groups against whom President Bush claims to be acting. The link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda is absolutely unproven. However, in the wake of a US invasion, it really will be established, because the region and the world at large will see the double standard which Washington applies between Israel and the Arab world.
Israel has nuclear weapons and it is possible it may have at least examined the potential of biological and chemical warfare, if only for the same “defensive purposes” that full-blown development of chemical and biological weaponry has taken place in both the US and Britain. Yet, Washington has never made an issue of Israeli weapons of mass destruction. Israel has also behaved atrociously to the Palestinians within the occupied territories, goading men who were once moderates into extremism.
London and Washington make much of Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against his own people. The luckless Kurdish village of Halabja has given its name to a crime of great infamy. But what about Deir Yassin and the brutal butchery of a terrified Palestinian population by Zionist zealots, intent on panicking other Palestinians to flee from their ancestral lands?
Bush is one of America’s least traveled presidents. It seems that he only knows of the Middle East, that which is whispered in his ears by his largely Zionist-influenced advisers. The subtleties and complex history of our region are entirely beyond his ken. He thinks in terms of the good guys and the bad guys. Saddam is the bad guy and the Iraqi people need to be bombed into liberation and freedom from his clutches. Pax Americana will afterward be delivered to the wreckage, on Washington’s terms.
Every item on this potentially catastrophic agenda entirely ignores the wishes and concerns of every other country in the region. A US-occupied and destabilized Iraq will become a breeding ground for the botulism of terrorism, far more deadly in nature than anything that the world has yet encountered. The contagion will start in the Middle East, among those who have offered Washington the hand of friendship and the wisdom of experience, and then spread everywhere.
Entirely discounting Arab views and ignoring the pleas of so many countries around the world, Bush remains set on smashing Saddam’s Iraq. Is it still too late to convince him somehow, that this foolish act of violence will unleash a genie of terrorist retribution, possibly far more deadly than any threat Saddam himself has ever posed the world? The failure of the Arab Summit yesterday may indicate that it is indeed too late.
