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Arab leaders' loyalties torn over Iraq
By Ben Wedeman
CAIRO, Egypt (CNN) -- For the past two days, Egyptian university students have held noisy protests against a possible U.S.-led war on Iraq. As they burn U.S., British and Israeli flags, they are voicing, among other things, a warning to Arab leaders. "Wake up!," chanted one group of Muslim students. "Who is next after Iraq?" Many Arabs believe other regimes in the region are on an American hit-list. The Israeli media has already reported that after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been deposed, it will be Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat's turn. Then, many people here in Cairo will tell you, it will be Syria, then possibly Iran. But the anger and raw emotions one hears almost daily in the streets often get muddled in the palaces of power in the Arab world. Many pro-American authoritarian governments like Egypt and Saudi Arabia are being pulled in opposite directions. Egypt is the second largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel, and Saudi Arabia is host to a large U.S. military force. Both these governments, and others, can't ignore widespread popular opposition to war, but are also unable or unwilling to openly oppose their American benefactors. Their compromise is to tell their people they are against war, and then do little to prevent it. It's a balancing act by Arab rulers few of their people appear to believe. No Arab leader has come out publicly in favor of war. All are calling for U.N. weapons inspections to run their course, although Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, meeting with German Chancellor Gerhard Shroeder on Wednesday, did say the inspections cannot go on indefinitely. Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait openly host U.S. military forces that could well be involved in an attack on Iraq. "They don't respect the people," says Ashraf Bayoumi, the former head of the World Food Programme Observation Unit in Iraq, who has been outspoken in his criticism of the Mubarak government's policy on Iraq. "They think that the people are fools. That's the arrogance of power .... that puts a shield, a blindfold on the policy makers." It is an open secret that many Arab leaders would like to see Saddam Hussein vanish. But the regime change advocated by the Bush administration sparks profound worries.
"They don't know how to handle the American policy," Imad Ad-Din Adib, an Egyptian television commentator told CNN. "If I help him to get rid of Saddam, does this mean tomorrow he is going to get rid of me?" Another major Arab concern over Iraq is that a war could lead to the breakup of the country into Shi'a [or Shiite], Sunni and Kurdish areas, thereby creating yet another source of instabilty in an area that already has a surplus of it. Arab leaders are discussing the possibility of holding an emergency meeting to ponder the Iraq crisis, but their options are few, and none of them very attractive.
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