The time has come for the Arab parties to clarify their attitude towards the Greater Middle East Initiative. How ready are they, asks Mohamed Sid-Ahmed In a few days' time, G8 leaders will be holding their annual meeting in Georgia in the United States where their deliberations are expected to extend to issues of fateful importance to the Middle East, notably, President Bush's Greater Middle East Initiative. The host country invited several Arab nations to attend, with mixed results. While Egypt, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia declined the invitation, others, including Jordan and Yemen, accepted, revealing that on this issue too the Arabs are unable to agree on a unified position. In Tunis last month, the Arab states finally managed to honour the commitment they made at the 2000 Beirut summit to hold annual summits. However, they did not manage to adopt a unified stance vis-a-vis the many challenges now facing the Arab world, particularly America's mega-plan for the region. President Mubarak has made no secret of his opposition to the plan. Speaking in Bucharest last week, he said: "we are not interested in the ongoing talk about the Great Middle East. We are interested in our Arab region." He also stressed the importance of collective Arab cooperation under the umbrella of the Arab League. As the 30 June deadline for the handover of power to the Iraqis draws closer, so too does the date on which elections are to be held for the creation of an interim "sovereign" Iraqi government. Although all parties admit that conditions are far from ideal for the holding of free and fair elections, Bush cannot afford to postpone the deadline. As it is, he is facing a serious credibility crisis. The escalating violence in Iraq coupled with international outrage over the Abu Ghraib torture scandal have caused his approval rating at home to plunge to an all-time low. He is desperate to clean up his image before the US presidential elections in November. To that end, he is trying to mend his fences with European critics of his unilateral war, as well as to involve the UN more closely in the decision-making process on Iraq. It is UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, not Paul Bremer, who is selecting the members of the new interim government, although critics allege that the process of selection was hijacked by the Americans. Brahimi has been instructed by Kofi Annan to move the date of elections forward to autumn. Some say the UN secretary-general has been asked to do this by Bush, who hopes early elections in Iraq could stop the downward spiral in his approval ratings and improve his re-election chances come November. But there is no guarantee that Brahimi's nominations will serve Bush's strategy. Nor, indeed, that they will meet with the approval of the other great powers who still enjoy considerable authority in the Security Council. China has recently joined France, Russia, Germany and Spain in demanding that a date be fixed for ending the presence of the US-led multinational occupation forces in Iraq, and that until such a date their prerogatives be reduced. There is also sharp disagreement between the US, on the one hand, and France, China and Germany on the other over the joint US-British draft proposal currently before the Security Council, with the latter group demanding the insertion of a paragraph granting Iraqis full sovereignty after the 30 June deadline. During his visit to Moscow last week, President Mubarak took the opportunity to exchange views with President Putin over the draft resolution detailing how much power will be vested in the new interim government. Not only does the resolution not set a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation forces from the country, but it gives the new, supposedly sovereign, government only "limited control" over their activities. The continuous presence of foreign troops on Iraqi soil is justified as necessary to counter potential flare-ups of violence. But that is no justification for depriving Iraq of its inalienable right to exercise sovereignty over its own affairs. Foreign troops can always be called on when necessary, but that should be an exception, not the rule. Moreover, if the international community feels the Iraqis are not capable of putting their own house in order, then the only acceptable alternative to foreign occupation is to send in a UN peace-keeping force answerable to the Security Council. With the prospects of a viable resolution of the Iraqi crisis more remote than ever and Israeli brutality against the Palestinian people reaching new heights, the situation in the Middle East is exceedingly bleak. If there is one small window of opportunity that might eventually allow a ray of light to relieve the pervasive gloom it is Gaza, where the protagonists, however different their motives and final objectives, have a common goal, namely, the departure of Israeli troops. As far as Sharon is concerned, hanging on Gaza, one of the most densely populated spots on the face of the earth and one of the main centres of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, is placing an untenable strain on Israel's resources, and he is desperate to get out without any further delay. Hence his unilateral disengagement plan, which he is now modifying after the original plan was rejected by his own party. However, lest anyone think the Israelis are withdrawing in defeat or from a position of weakness, he has adopted a scorched earth policy, raining bloodshed and devastation on the Palestinian people and their infrastructure and stepping up his campaign of assassinating their leaders. He also insists that the Gaza pullout is the last Israel will agree to. That is not how the Palestinians see it. If they agree to the idea of a pullout from Gaza, it is only as a first step in a process of successive Israeli withdrawals, not as the first, only and final withdrawal. As such, it should be accompanied by pullouts from the West Bank and on all other fronts. How to transform a pullout whose aim is to strengthen occupation into one furthering complete withdrawal? How to make of an operation aimed at consolidating injustice an outcome that feeds the opposite? That is a key problem at this junctur. Can the Arab summit resolution calling for an end to acts of terror against civilians, including Israeli civilians, bring about the required change? After all, a resolution adopted by the Arab summit is not binding on Palestinian activists in the field who are at the receiving end of Israeli's relentless campaign of assassinations that has already claimed such top leaders as Hamas's Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdul-Aziz Al-Rantisi. It is no secret that the Tunis summit came under enormous pressure from certain Western circles to issue a resolution condemning the killing of Israeli civilians. In return, the Arab regimes expect some of the pressure now being brought on them to introduce democratic reform to be eased. On the issue of Bush's Great Middle East Initiative, the Arabs remain a house divided, unable to adopt a unified coherent position vis-a- vis a plan that will affect them more than anyone else. Paradoxically, they are less critical of the plan and of Bush's handling of Iraq than forces within American society, including members of the ruling Republican Party. As to the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, he delivered a scathing attack on Bush this week, accusing him of "bullying when he should have persuaded and [looking] to force before exhausting diplomacy". He also said he wanted to build new alliances with other nations, to make better use of America's economic and diplomatic influence and to liberate it from its dependency on Middle East oil -- that is, from a strategy centred on Iraq. In another speech this week, former Vice President Al Gore harshly criticised what he described as the Bush administration's "deviant values and dreadful policies". He called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet, whom he accused of exposing America to shame and disgrace and of dragging its good name through the mud of Saddam's torture prisons. Between these two attitudes, the increasingly vocal opposition to Bush inside America on the one hand, and the muted Arab opposition to the Great Middle East Initiative and, more generally, to the policies of an administration that has plunged the region into crisis on the other, stands the European Union, headed by France, Spain and Germany and, outside the EU, China and Russia. When will the Arab parties understand that merely putting on a show of unity, as they tried to do at the Tunis summit, is no longer enough? When will they rise to their responsibilities and realise that unless they win over a wide spectrum of forces in the international arena, their future is doomed?
