One Arab calls it like he sees it.
Ever since the latest phase of the Iraqi crisis started last autumn, most Arab countries have found themselves in a hole. What is surprising is that they to continue to dig, making the hole deeper.
The Arabs’ initial predicament was understandable. Until the last minute they did not believe that the US would invade. They hoped that the whole thing would blow over. One Arab leader described the crisis as “a summer storm.” At the end of January, Amr Moussa, the Arab League Secretary General, told me during a dinner in Davos that he was “absolutely sure” there would be no war. When asked why, he said, “Something will come up.”
Well, what came up was the US-led invasion. The Arabs had developed no policy to prevent it or, when it happened, to influence its course. More than three months after the fall of the Baathist regime, there has been no attempt at developing a common Arab analysis of the war and its aftermath. Instead, most Arab states have had recourse to their traditional methods of negation and dissimulation. They have refused to recognize the newly created Governing Council, and toyed with the idea of suspending Iraq’s membership of the Arab League. They have used the United Nations as a fig leaf to hide their lack of a policy on Iraq.
Asked by the US to allocate peacekeeping troops to Iraq, some have said yes, some have said perhaps, and some have made noises that mean neither yes nor no. The general mood is one of rejectionism, saying no because it is believed, wrongly, that Arabs like naysayers.
Please read it all. It is worth it.
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