Arab regimes face difficult and dangerous days ahead, an Arab press review aljazeerah.info

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Arab regimes face ‘difficult and dangerous’ days ahead

An Arab press review by the Daily Star, 3/26/03

The Arab world’s demand for an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq is widely seen by press commentators as a mark of how nervous Arab governments are getting about seething public anger at the invasion.
Pan-Arab Al-Quds al-Arabi publisher/editor Abdelbari Atwan writes that the Arab foreign ministers who met in Cairo to issue that call, and also request an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, need not have bothered to go through the motions.
Their stance (from which only Kuwait publicly dissented) would have been understandable if they had stood any chance of being taken seriously. But the world won’t pay them the slightest notice when they speak out against a war that is being launched from their own territory, and in which most of them are colluding, he writes.
“The Arab foreign ministers are redundant. The Arab diplomacy they represent has become the most ineffective in the entire world. The American forces invading Iraq are attacking from their bases, and the warplanes are flying through their skies, yet they are incapable of lifting a finger,” Atwan says.
“The official Arab order the foreign ministers represent, and in whose shadow they take cover, has collapsed and passed its expiry date. It now lies outstretched on the operating table of change either by its American allies who have sustained it over the course of the past 50 years, or at the hands of the oppressed Arab masses who have suffered from its injustice, repression and corruption,” he riles.
Atwan urges Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa to resign rather than continuing to paper over the cracks in that “order” and maintain the pretense that it is trying to do something to halt the war.
The Iraqis, he remarks, are not counting on help from the Arab regimes, but relying on themselves, and the support of the Arab peoples, to defend their soil. They have withstood the first crucial few days of the war, during which the Americans hoped to break their morale by terrorizing them, “and we are likely to see bigger surprises than those we’ve witnessed so far when the real battle begins in Baghdad,” he says.
US forces have advanced swiftly through the desert toward the capital, “but their problem is not how to reach it. It is how to enter it,” Atwan writes. “If the port of Umm Qasr, which was reduced to a couple of streets after the Kuwaitis were given half of it under the unjust UN border demarcation, held out for five days and nights and all of America’s sophisticated military technology failed to capture it, how are things likely to be when the invading forces try to storm proud Baghdad?” he wonders. “And while going into Baghdad will be costly and bloody, leaving it will be bloodier still.”
It seems that “the new American Iraq which President (George W.) Bush dreams about is not going to be democratic, but surrounded by anarchy and instability, fertile ground for extremism of all variants, and a pole of attraction for all Arab rebels and mujahideen opposed to American occupation and the Arab regimes that collude in it,” Atwan suggests.
Ali Hamadeh of the Beirut daily An-Nahar writes that although Arab governments are doing their best to contain public anger and protest, the “Arab street” is likely to become more irritated still as the war drags on and the Americans proceed to seize more Iraqi territory.
The anger is directed as much against the regimes as against the war or the US administration, he says. They can no longer tolerate seeing Egypt, theoretically the most important Arab state, adopt a stance toward the war worthy of a “pocket-sized” country, or Jordan and the Gulf sheikhdoms vying to do the bidding of a Bush administration so supportive of Israel that it sees its interests as identical to its own.
Hamadeh remarks that official Arab collusion in the war has been more flagrant since hostilities were initiated by the US and Britain. Leaving aside the five small Gulf monarchies, “which have virtually been reduced to military bases with states on them,” there are persistent reports of US forces operating out of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, despite their respective governments’ awkward denials.
“As for official Egypt, we’re still waiting for it to reveal more about the Americans’ supposed promises that the war will not last long. Does this mean the occupation of Iraq becomes more palatable and acceptable if it is swift?”
Hamadeh writes that the stand taken by the Arab foreign ministers at Cairo signals no real change in the feeble collective Arab stance. Nothing short of a collective Arab commitment to refrain from assisting the US war effort in any way would satisfy the anti-war Arab public.
He suggests that persistent Iraqi resistance to the invasion could prompt them to take a stronger line. But he cautions against overestimating the significance of the blows the Iraqis have managed to deal to US and British forces to date.
“There still isn’t anyone who believes that something might happen that could alter the final outcome of the war namely, the occupation of Iraq and the unseating of the present regime,” he writes.
In the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, Beshara Nassar Sharbel writes that the Arab world is “so deeply divided that Amr Moussa’s attempts to rally support for the demand to stop the war are futile.” Nor will “the anger of the Arab street be able to halt it, or rescue a regime that is doomed however much its leader promises ‘imminent victory’ to the Iraqis and the pan-Arab nation.”
And Baghdad’s seeming hope that the US may reconsider its invasion plans if casualties start mounting is misplaced, as the hawks who are currently at the helm in Washington are insensitive to casualty figures.
Sharbel characterizes the anti-war protests that have been staged in the Arab world as being very different to the peace rallies held elsewhere around the globe. They have featured slogans “glorifying Saddam and Osama bin Laden,” accusations of treason and inflammatory calls for violence, and have been accompanied by bloody confrontations. This promises “difficult, indeed dangerous, days ahead if the Anglo-American war lasts long.”
Sharbel adds that unlike the Western protesters who can hope to change their government’s policies via the ballot box, the Arab protesters whose opposition to war is coupled with support for the current Iraqi regime have “no constructive political horizon.” Hence the fear that the protests can only lead either to violence, or to the imposition of the “silence of the grave” in the Arab countries concerned, he explains.
In Syria, the government-run daily Tishrin says the continuing anti-war protests are all the more reason for the countries of the world to act to put an end to the war wherein “the UN’s resolutions and principles are being trampled into the soil of Iraq.”
The paper finds it ironic that the Bush administration “has suddenly discovered there is something called international law,” which it accused Iraq of violating by showing captured and killed American soldiers on TV when it is engaged in the most flagrantly illegal and naked aggression and acting purely in keeping with the doctrine that “might is right.”
But Tishrin warns that the Iraqi people will not submit to a foreign occupation of their country. The TV images of an elderly Iraqi peasant who shot down an Apache helicopter with his old shotgun testify to their will to resist against the odds.
“Two days ago, the leaders of the aggression in Washington and London began warning of a protracted war. But the people of Iraq have been preparing for that for a long time, and taken into account every eventuality other than surrender to the invading aggressors,” the Syrian paper says. “This raises an urgent question: Should international legality also be kept in abeyance and subject to the Anglo-American war machine for the duration?”
Rajeh al-Khoury, in Beirut’s
An-Nahar, says the Americans and British appear to have been stripped of their illusions that Iraqis would greet them as liberators rather than conquerors, and that the war will be a “picnic” that will be over in a few days.
They are now talking about weeks and months, and have clearly been taken aback by a number of developments: not just the military setbacks they have suffered as a result of Iraqi resistance or accidents, but also the unexpected second appearance of the Iraqi president to deliver a televised speech.
Khoury finds it out of the ordinary that the US and Britain have been trying to suggest that the speech was prerecorded, when it contained direct references to the previous day’s fighting, including a salute to the commander and men of the 51st Brigade who the US media had claimed had surrendered.
This is part of their psychological warfare campaign, in which they have tried to suggest that the Iraqi leader has been wounded, perhaps even killed, or is not in control.
Khoury says it is particularly baffling that when British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon was asked about this, he replied that the question of whether Saddam Hussein was alive or dead would not make any difference to the war. “Why go to the bother of trying to assassinate him then?” he wonders.
Lebanese political analyst Saad Mehio argues that the degree of the resistance they encounter during the course of their invasion is likely to have a decisive impact on what the Americans choose to do with Iraq after they depose the regime.
He writes in the Qatari daily Al-Sharq that US policymakers have been deliberately vague about what kind of “replacement” regime they want to install. Whenever they are asked about this, they reply “everything in good time,” and they even kept quiet about their intentions at their recent talks on Iraq’s future with opposition factions in Ankara.
To Mehio’s mind, this reflects disagreements within the Bush administration over “the amount of democracy that should be injected into Iraq.”
Some think that replacements for Saddam Hussein can be found from within the current regime’s power base: the various military and security agencies, many of the major tribes, plus nontribal elements from the Tikrit area and the Baath Party.
On the other extreme, he remarks, there are those in the Bush administration who argue that the entire structure of the regime must be dismantled and the state overhauled completely, and do not see the weak and divided opposition as a credible replacement.

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