NATO/EU Splits & Anti-US Positions Affect The Arab Cause.

*** Turkey, Under An Islamist Govt. Trying To Be As Far Away From Confrontation With Kemalists As Possible, Has Raised Its Price For US Troops To Transit To Northern Iraq By Delaying A Request For Parliament To Vote The Way Washington Had Wanted

*** The Six GCC States And Jordan Have Been Uneasy With Syria's Request For All Arabs To Deny Any Help To The US; So Plans For An Arab Summit Meeting Are Now In Doubt

NICOSIA - Splits in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union (EU) and the fall in the value of the US dollar relative to the euro have affected the Arab cause, with negative implications for the Palestinians. The EU, for years politically weak, will see its volume of trade with the Arab World decline considerably. This will have negative implications for the Palestinians as they depend heavily in EU aid.

The assessment in Arab leadership quarters is that the Franco-German position against the US-led campaign to disarm Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq peacefully will backfire. President Jacques Chirac's warning on Feb. 18 that France would veto a second resolution at the UN Security Council has encouraged Saddam to maintain a strategy of delaying disarmament - or delaying a US-led war - for as long as possible. Chirac's warning also has practically invited US President George W. Bush to take the undesirable step of going to war without UN support, a move which could have negative effects on France. With Paris and Berlin in the anti-war camp, several key EU states - the UK, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Denmark, among others - are lined up behind the US, and the latter group has been prepared also to sideline the Greek EU presidency to take this stance. The persisting splits within NATO and the EU - despite the show of unity at the Union's emergency summit on Feb. 17 - have a negative effect on the Arab states. These states have been split since Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990, and Saddam had split the Muslim World since he invaded Iran in September 1980. The Palestinians are paying the price because, while the world public opinion focuses on the trading of accusations across the Atlantic and anti-war rallies across the globe, Israel and Islamic radicals like Hamas are escalating their a war that seems to be endless.

NATO ended a deadlock on Feb. 17 as its Defence Planning Committee (from which France withdrew in 1966) agreed to provide for Turkey's defence. But where France is elegantly involved as 'le patron', NATO remains split. A divided EU will not be able to help in what non-elected Arab regimes want: act as a check on US pressure for political and economic change expected in the post-Saddam phase. Nor will France and Germany, with fragile economies, be able to deliver financial assistance or political help to the region on the scale envisaged for a new "Marshall Plan" in the Arab World. The ability of the EU to play a significant role in a renewed Arab-Israeli peace process will be undermined further by a combination of stonewalling from Israel and lack of interest from the US.

Arab states giving the US military base facilities believe that, in particular, France has made a mistake in confronting the American-led camp. In so doing Paris encourages the Arab street to rise against the US, thus causing instability in Arab states, and the radical Palestinians to escalate their war with Israel.

The anti-war camp's efforts to bolster its position last week included a request through the French ambassador in Lebanon, which currently chairs the Arab League, for the League to give its backing to the Franco-German line during a meeting of the Arab foreign ministers in Cairo on Feb. 16. The European anti-war side got much support at the Cairo meeting, which was attended also by Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou and EU's Foreign Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten.

The prospect of an Arab summit being held before a US-led war was undermined by the Cairo meeting, however. The meeting's final communique -- reached after hours of wrangling, with an angered Kuwaiti minister leaving before the session ended -- stopped short of naming those Arab states that are giving the US and Britain base facilities: Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The foreign ministers of Iraq and Syria had insisted on stronger language against these states. The text, watered down by Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal and his Egyptian counterpart, urged the 22 Arab states "not to provide any kind of assistance...that can be used to threaten the safety and territorial integrity of Iraq". If the summit does not go ahead, it will be a considerable embarrassment to Egypt, whose President Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 14 had called for an emergency meeting of Arab leaders. Syria, architect of the tougher text, was on Feb. 16 opposed by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which tried to tone down the statement by placing the onus on the Iraqi regime to comply with the terms of UN Resolution 1441 and the inspectors in Iraq. The communique instead praised Baghdad's co-operation with the UN. A week earlier Mubarak had warned there was little Arab leaders could do to influence the US if it was intent on launching a war.

The Cairo meeting was also marred by wrangling over text of an open pan-Arab letter to Washington appealing for a peaceful resolution to the stand-off. Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq Al Sharaa wanted the text to condemn any military action against Iraq, thereby criticising the US. Subsequently Arab commentators noted that the lack of initiative in the Arab World reflected deep inter-Arab differences over how to deal with the crisis. The six GCG states have chosen a close alliance with the US against Iraq. Others, led by Syria, have been keener to stress their opposition to the US and to any military action in the Gulf.

The EU Summit Initiative & The US View: The declaration of European unity on Iraq issued on Feb. 17 by the 15 EU heads of state gave a nod to both the anti-war camp and the one led by the US. But there was one point, which expressed the divide between the US and the vast majority of European public opinion: "We are committed to the United Nations remaining at the centre of the international order. We recognise that the primary responsibility for dealing with Iraqi disarmament lies with the Security Council". The emergency EU summit, held to hammer out a common position on Iraq, was saturated with a commitment to world government by the UN. US commentators on Feb. 18 said this was a notion that had long been viewed with suspicion and sometimes outright hostility by Washington.

One comment in the IHT of Feb. 19 said: "In a sense, all the analyses of the cultural differences between Europeans and Americans - about Europeans being less reliant on force and more willing to sacrifice their sovereignty - boil down in practice to this: European governments believe in the United Nations as the center of world order, and the US government, especially the current American government, does not share that view". Said the neo-conservative US historian Robert Kagan (whose book "Of Paradise and Power" is a study of the cultural differences between Europe and America): "Europeans already operate a kind of world government inside the confines of Europe, and they would like to replicate their experience on a global scale. But in the United States, which has never operated in such as system, both Democrats and Republicans are skeptical that you can do this. It's also a question of power. It's historically been the case that weaker powers have sought to constrain stronger powers through the mechanisms of international legal structures".

The EU leaders also warned Iraq to disarm and allowed that force might be used against it, though only as a "last resort". But the most common refrain was the collective expression of trust in a world order governed by the UN Security Council. Present in Brussels, for example, was UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who told the summit the UN was the only source of legitimacy for the use of force in the world, adding: "If the international community fails to agree on a common position and action is taken without the authority of the Security Council, then the legitimacy and the support for that action will be seriously impaired".

Der Spiegel said 53% of the German public believed the US to be the greatest threat to peace in the world, while only 27% chose Saddam's Iraq for that distinction. To most Americans and to many Europeans, the IHT comment said, "that idea seemed ridiculous". But the 53% were not saying they preferred Iraq to the US. More likely, they were saying "their greatest fear was of a superpower untrammeled by international control". The IHT added: "They would rather do nothing about a dictator like Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who, in the European view, is too weak and hemmed in to be much of a threat, than see the United States do something without the approval of the United Nations. It is possible that polls in Europe could show very different results if, in the weeks ahead, the Security Council votes for military action against Iraq and the United States leads a UN-sanctioned coalition there. There is a paradox in this because, despite the unilateralist reputation of the Bush Administration, it has so far more or less accepted the Europeans' multilateralist rules of the game. Indeed, after contemplating unilateral action in Iraq, the administration now finds itself enmeshed in the sort of Security Council machinations and negotiations that American unilateralists - and, of course, not all Americans are unilateralist - find anathema". The comment noted this: "For skeptics about world government, the United Nations is the sort of organization in which the European members could quietly abstain as Libya was voted the new chair of the UN Human Rights Commission. Europeans have no illusions about the human rights record of Libya, but their impulse is to regard the occasional institutional absurdity as the price for having the institution in the first place. Americans, already dubious about the value of world government, are more dismissive. Europeans, of course, are aware of the very good possibility that the United States, frustrated with what it sees as Security Council obstructionism on Iraq, may decide to ignore the United Nations and go to war with an informal coalition of the willing. Europeans know that such an action would be a blow from which the idea of world government might not recover..." (Iraq is a serious candidate to chair the UN Disarmament Commission).