While US President George Bush was giving his "allies and friends" in the Gulf a farewell trip, it seems he got nothing but polite nods and interesting outings, Sherine Bahaa reports His agenda was eventful but the results came to nil. What he said did not sit well with the Arabs. He spoke of democracy, peace process, hiking oil prices, arms deals and terrorism but his real core was Iran and Iran. As on his previous stops in the Gulf, the president was given a red carpet welcome, but no public engagements took place in a community where a recent poll found that his popularity rating was just 12 per cent -- less than that of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the Al-Qaeda leader and renegade Saudi, Osama bin Laden. His one and only speech during the eight-day tour was decided to take place in the United Arab Emirates, only a few kilometres from Iran. In his speech which he delivered in front of government and business leaders in a lavish, gilt hotel Abu Dhabi, Bush focussed not only on what the United States believes are Iran's nuclear ambitions but also its suspected support for Islamic militants in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. He called Iran's government "the world's leading sponsor of terrorism" and accused it of imposing repression and economic hardship at home. "Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere," he said. His stern message came amid simmering tensions over last week's face-off between Iranian and US naval vessels in the nearby Strait of Hormuz, the most strategic oil-trading route in the region. However, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, president of the UAE, did not make any public commitments after Bush's address, which received only polite applause. Months ago, such words would have made Arab leaders sweat but a US intelligence report concluded that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, a finding that has delayed a new round of United Nations sanctions. Moreover, Sunni monarchs have recently extended a diplomatic initiative to Iran. Saudi Arabia gave permission to Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, and the Gulf Cooperation Council also extended an invitation to him to participate in a summit meeting last month. This time, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the veteran foreign minister, last week gave a blunt warning to the US administration before the arrival of its president to the region. "Saudi Arabia is a neighbour of Iran in the Gulf, which is a small lake. We are keen that harmony and peace should prevail among states of the region." In his meetings in Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, Bush and his aides tried to press leaders to do more to help the United States to isolate Iran's leaders. Privately, Bush urged Persian Gulf leaders to restrict Iran's access to banks and other financial institutions, one administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to discuss internal deliberations. Yet Gulf governments confined their responses to polite nods, leaving the media and the people to express their scepticism. The Kuwaiti Al-Rai newspaper greeted Bush with a front page editorial headlined: "President, the region needs smart initiatives, not smart bombs." Al-Khaleej, a UAE daily, accused him of "striving to transform the Arab-Israeli conflict into an Arab-Iranian conflict, since nuclear Israel, which is armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction, which is aggressive, expansionist, racist and an international outlaw, does not threaten world peace." As Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, pointed out in an article in the Guardian this week, "most Arabs don't see Iran as a major threat." Telhami mentioned that in a recent poll conducted in the region asking which two countries were seen as threats to Arab states, 80 per cent said they viewed Israel and the US as the greatest threats; only 10 per cent mentioned Iran. However, as Ammar Ali Hassan, former director of the Washington-based Middle East Institute, told the Weekly, "we cannot rely on this. "What Arabs say publicly is not necessarily what they say when they sit behind closed doors with the Americans. They kept refusing the military invasion of Iraq but when the US took the decision they did nothing but consent." Hassan could be right if one believes the US is taking good care of security and stability of Arab governments in the Gulf through their military presence. Still, as Telhami argues, "US forces are there to protect American interests, not the local governments; a threat of withdrawal is not credible." What Bush did throughout this trip was repeat what he himself has been saying since his first week in office seven years ago. Back then, Iran's president was Mohamed Khatami, a reform- minded leader whose efforts to promote inter- cultural understanding earned him the recognition of international institutions such as the United Nations, which acted on his suggestion to proclaim 2001 the Year of Dialogue Among Civilisations. The ensuing election of Khatami's hardline successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was in fact spurred by Bush's warmongering, and merely made his incessant talk of the Iranian "threat" more convincing and a self-fulling prophecy. An interesting footnote to his trip: Bush, an indifferent tourist throughout his presidency, preferred to keep his trips short and rarely made time to take in the sites. Now he appears to have embraced tourism. After the speech in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, he spent an afternoon and evening with the emirate's crown prince, Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, at a tent encampment in the desert. The prince prepared a barbecue and showed off his falcons, one of which fluttered nervously on Bush's arm. "He's never had a press conference before," the president told reporters. On Monday, he flew to Dubai and toured the Sheikh Said Al-Maktoum House, a 19th-century building overlooking the Persian Gulf that is a museum of photographs and historic documents of the emirate. On Tuesday, he visited Al-Janadriyah Farm, the country retreat of Saudi Arabian King Abdullah, where he maintains 150 Arabian stallions. That trip repays the king's visit, when he was crown prince, to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Is it possible he is preparing for his post- presidency, when any trip abroad could be fraught with human rights groups demanding his arrest for crimes against humanity?
