US President George Bush's summit meeting with President Hosni Mubarak will address a number of substantial differences over US foreign policy. Gamal Essam El-Din reports Crawford, Texas, home to US President George W Bush's sprawling ranch, has hosted an influx of key world leaders over the last three years. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will be no exception, and is scheduled to meet there with Bush on 12 April. Mubarak's meeting with Bush will not only touch on Egypt's strategic relations with the US. The two leaders will have to grapple with several thorny issues, including ongoing violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the US's hostile attitude towards Syria, the deteriorating situation in Iraq and, above all, democratisation in the Middle East. Egyptian and Arab political observers agree that the Mubarak-Bush summit comes at a time when Arab public opinion is particularly hostile to American foreign policy in the region. The Israeli assassination of Hamas's spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Bush's response that "Israel has the right to defend itself" has left the Arab street outraged. The increasing bloodshed in Iraq and rumour of US meddling being behind the delay of the Arab summit scheduled for last month have heightened Arab anger further. Ahmed Abu Zeid, chairman of parliament's Arab Affairs Committee, told Al-Ahram Weekly that President Mubarak, who will be carrying the burden of Arab public opinion with him, must impress upon Bush that indifference to that opinion on issues regarding Palestine, Syria and Iraq will have grave consequences. Egypt and America were planning to hold a new round of strategic dialogues on several issues ranging from bilateral ties to the issue of Palestine. Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher's sudden illness has delayed these talks. Mubarak has not visited the US since April 2002. However, he did meet with Bush in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh in June 2003. Abu Zeid argued that events in the Middle East over the last year have strained relations between Egypt and the US. When Mubarak met Bush in 2003, Abu Zeid said, hopes were high that Bush had at last decided to scrap his ambivalent approach to the Arab- Israeli conflict and become more involved. "Sadly enough, this proved very incorrect," he said. The US's half-hearted support for Egypt's efforts to bring the Palestinians and Israelis back to the negotiating table and obstinate insistence on isolating Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat have dealt a severe blow to prospects for peace in the Middle East. Egypt believes that Arafat is a moderate leader and that the US and Israel's attempts to isolate him will only boost Hamas, the militant Islamist group responsible for most of the suicide attacks against Israelis. Moreover, the US veto of a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel's assassination of Yassin was a slap in the face for Arab allies, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia. President Mubarak, however, tried his best to defuse the consequences of this veto. He told Orbit Satellite Television that "the American veto is not a extraordinary thing and we've gotten used to it in the Arab world." US Ambassador to Egypt David Welch told the Middle East News Agency (MENA) that he does pay close attention to Arab public opinion, but "the problem is that public opinion, even in America itself, is divided over the policies of America." Welch added that it is more important for the US to secure its interests than to seek popularity. Maher said Mubarak's meeting with Bush would also deal with Sharon's plan for unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Sharon declared last December that Israel would withdraw from the Gaza Strip, the coastal area wedged between Egypt and Israel where some 1.2 million Palestinians live in abject squalor. Egypt said it is ready to cooperate with Israel to police the corridor marking the boundary between Gaza and Egypt. Chief of Egyptian Intelligence Omar Suleiman held fruitful talks with Israeli officials on this matter, but Israel's assassination of Yassin threw a spanner in the works of Egyptian efforts. The US's hostile attitude towards Syria is another issue to be raised at Crawford. No sooner was the Syria Accountability Act passed by the US Congress last November than President Mubarak hurried to Damascus to declare Egypt's full support for Syria. Hamdeen Sabahi, an MP with leftist leanings, thinks that if Washington decided to maintain its hard-line stance on Damascus it could cause a real crisis in relations between Egypt and the US. "Syria is a red line to Egypt's national security in the sense that US attempts to isolate Syria will surely exacerbate the military balance in the region in favour of Israel," said Sabahi. However, Egyptian diplomacy may have succeeded in convincing Washington of postponing the implementation of the Syria Accountability Act. Sabahi thinks that Mubarak will do his best to show Bush that sanctions against Syria will neither help US Middle East diplomacy in the region nor improve its image. Sabahi believes that Sharon's meeting with Bush on 14 April (just two days after the Bush-Mubarak summit) could drive a wedge again between Egypt and the US on Syria. Iraq is another sticky point on the agenda of the Bush-Mubarak summit talks. This issue caused a major rift between Mubarak and former US President Bill Clinton when the latter decided to bomb Iraq in 1998, leading to the first strategic dialogue between Egypt and the US. Abu Zeid thinks that President Mubarak's repeated warnings that the war in Iraq could exacerbate the threat of terrorist attacks from radical Islamists have proved credible, especially in recent days which witnessed a sharp rise in the number of insurgent attacks against US forces. According to Sabahi, Iraq is an embarrassing topic for Egypt because the regime is faced with accusations that it played a role in paving the way for both US-led invasions of Iraq through the Arab summits in Sharm El-Sheikh (2003) and Cairo (1990). Abu Zeid agrees that these accusations are widespread but he considers them ludicrous and entirely unfounded. President Mubarak thinks that the US should cede power to the Iraqis as soon as possible as a step towards a final withdrawal. The US does not share this point of view. Abdel-Moneim Said, deputy director of Al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies, told the British-based Financial Times that "Iraq led to a mounting distrust and hostility towards the US." The most pressing issue on the agenda of the Bush-Mubarak summit, however, is democratisation in the Middle East. Sabahi thinks that Washington was caught off-balance when Mubarak took the lead in criticising the US's Greater Middle East Initiative (GMEI), designed to advance democracy in the Middle East. Not only did Mubarak visit Saudi Arabia to issue a joint statement emphasising that "reform can not be imposed from outside, but rather comes from within," but he also ridiculed the GMEI as propagating "push-button democracy that would open the door to chaos". Washington responded by sending two senior US state officials -- Alan Larson and Marc Grossman -- to contain Arab anger stirred up by the initiative. Grossman, however, quarrelled publicly with Maher. While Grossman said the effort for reform does not have to wait until there is full peace, Maher argued that Egypt's position is that one of the basic obstacles to the reform process is the continuation of Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people. Some attribute Tunisia's postponement of the Arab summit to US intervention. Sabahi thinks that the reform initiative submitted by Egypt to the Arab summit was mainly aimed to defuse any attempt to impose GMEI on the conference. The US responded by asking Tunisia to submit GMEI in its name, added Sabahi. On Monday, Robert Pelletreau, the former US assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, admitted that Washington exerted pressure on Tunisia to postpone the Arab summit, according to Al-Wafd newspaper. Tunisian President Zein Al-Abidine Bin Ali visited Washington last April and according to The Washington Post was rebuked by Bush for Tunisia's poor democratic performance. These differences, however, do not mean that relations between Egypt and the US have reached deadlock. President Mubarak told NDP members that "differences between Egypt and America are a normal thing, but the relations between them are so strategic that they cannot be negatively affected by some differences." Ambassador Welch also said: "Bush's reception of Mubarak in his Crawford ranch is a special welcome to President Mubarak and a high appreciation for Egypt and its people." Welch added, "President Mubarak's visit marks an anniversary of 30 years of excellent relations between the two countries."
