Arab Support & The GCC Angle.

A great deal of support for Iraq's Arab nature is coming from within the country itself and the US has played a major role in this in the background. The Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF), the largest Sunni Arab bloc in the House of Representatives (parliament), in July returned to Maliki's cabinet with its five ministers and a deputy PM. This was a major step towards reconciliation among Iraq's ethnic, sectarian and secular groups. It is hoped in Baghdad that, with these groups on board, Iraq will eventually be able to project itself as a pluralist society evolving as a genuine democracy based on federalism.

The US has got the six Arab Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) states to embrace Iraq. As a result and since early 2008, the US includes Iraq in its regional security meet-ings which involve the group's foreign ministers. This has been the initiative of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Her July 21 meeting in Abu Dhabi, in which she discussed the ongoing negotiations between Iran and the big powers over Tehran's nuclear and regional ambitions, involved the foreign ministers of the six GCC states plus Egypt and Jordan plus Iraq's Zebari - and thus the Arab group of "moderates" now is called "6+2+1".

The UAE was the first GCC state to respond favourably to Rice's efforts by cancelling a debt worth about $7 bn owed by Saddam's Iraq and to establish full diplomatic ties with Baghdad. Bahrain and Kuwait have joined the UAE in establishing embassies in Baghdad. They are to be followed by the other GCC states: Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Jordan already has an embassy and recently appointed an ambassador to Iraq. Syria has a full embassy in Baghdad. Egypt and other Arab states are expected to follow suit. Iran has a large embassy in Baghdad and consulates in various parts of the country - mainly in the Shi'ite south.

The 22-state Arab League has named a new envoy to Iraq. Hani Khalaf, a retired Egyptian diplomat, will be the League's next ambassador, replacing Moroccan Moukhtar Lamani, who resigned in 2007 to protest a lack of Arab involvement in Iraq. Hecham Yousef, a senior aide to Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa, says the new envoy will be tasked with "enhancing the Arab presence In Iraq". The League opened a Baghdad mission in 2006.

With a Sunni-Shi'ite war from early 2006 to late 2007 having caused a huge number of Iraqi casualties - a war caused primarily by Neo-Salafis of al-Qaeda and incited from the Shi'ite side by the Iranian theocracy - liberal and tribal groups have begun openly to call for a secularisation of the society. This is not new in Iraq, which was secularised by successive Nasserite and Ba'thist regimes; but the secular dimension of those regimes was offset by a strong doze of Arab nationalism which gave rise to ruthless dictators slaughtering people in the name of "pan-Arab unity"; it was under such a slogan that Saddam's dictatorship invaded Kuwait in August 1990.