The Arab Summit In Beirut - From A Farce To A Leap Into The World's Greatest Divide.

** With No Arab State Giving Any Support, Bush Is Said To Offer Turkey Northern Iraqi Oil Fields, Among Other Things, In Exchange For Co-operation In Getting Rid Of Saddam Hussein Regime

** Sharon Is Blocking All Moves To Relieve The Palestinians And Will Keep Peace Efforts In A Deadlock; Netanyahu Is Promising He Will Be A Worse Prime Minister Of Israel In Arab Eyes

** There'll Be No Arab Oil Weapon

BEIRUT - That Emile Lahoud was "a dwarf" was too much for frustrated Palestinians to describe a Syria-inspired ruler of Lebanon who prevented Arafat's recorded speech from being shown on a prepared screen just after Syrian President Bashar Al Assad finished his address to the main session of the Arab summit conference in Beirut on March 27. As Assad's long lecturing took the shine out of Saudi Arabia's proposal for pan-Arab peace with Israel, the first day of that summit became a farce. But an overnight effort to please Arafat and to restore the luster of the Saudi proposal on March 28 made the Arabs leap into the greatest divide in today's world. We are on the brink of a war between civilisations.

Before going any further, analysts of the quick turn of events in the Middle East are advised to examine the reasons why Europe's anger at the US has reached a boiling point, and why even the Atlanticists among British politicians like Baroness Williams are warning against the Bush administration causing a "new world disorder". The analysts are also advised to look carefully into the reasons why Crown Prince Abdullah, the day-to-day ruler of Saudi Arabia who made the peace proposal, graced the summit's final session on March 28 with an embrace and kiss for Iraqi leader Izzat Ibrahim - Saddam Hussein's second-in-command who also entered the final session dressed in an identical Bedouin robe - and why the Kuwaiti and Iraqi delegations made up before the summit was closed.

The world's greatest divide has turned out to be between those nations who are with the Bush administration's war on "terrorism" and those who are not. What makes it so dangerous is that it is a divide (more of an instinctive lack of communication over what Bush is against, rather than a conflicting exercise of the intellect over what Bush should be for) between a mafia-like administration in the US and a more conventional school of thought in the rest of the world. The Bush administration is so possessed by its military hegemony - the US defence budget now exceeds those of the rest of the world put together - that it is moving head on with plans to attack Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein's regime, with its pressing trade war against Europe over steel, and with ignoring those institutions without which Baroness Williams says "terrorism will breed like microbes in the shattered and sterile soil of...casualty countries".

Baroness Williams, a long-time member of the British house of Commons, a former education minister and now leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, wrote in the 'IHT" on March 29: the terrorism that will be bred by the US war on terror and on Iraq will be such that "all the armies in the world will not be able to stop it". She added: "The attack on terrorism has to be dual - military and civil - otherwise it will prove to be an expensive disaster". This is where a coalition, including moderate Muslim states, is crucial for Bush to win the war on global terrorism.

The problem, Arab rulers fear, is that George W. Bush and his partners in Washington do not believe in coalitions or in the UN. From W's perspective, it was his father's reliance on a coalition and on a UN Security Council mandate which in early 1991 prevented the then Bush administration from getting the troops to move to Baghdad and get Saddam Hussein's regime overthrown. But, the Arab rulers are worried, Bush Jr. has become an even more docile hostage to dangerous militarists like Ariel Sharon of Israel than his father was to a coalition and the UN Security Council. What makes matters more complicated, Bush Jr. believes it was because his father was not sufficiently pro-Israel that Bush Sr. lost the presidential elections in 1992; hence W's support for Sharon's all-out war against the Palestinians.

Even US sympathisers have come to realise how dangerously Bush Jr has become possessed by his overwhelming military hegemony that he and his "fellow Mafiosi" like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz have become blind to the tricks of Pakistan's intelligence service - a Pakistani "house of horrors waiting to break open", as Jim Hoagland wrote of Pakistan's "failures" in the Washington Post ('IHT' March 29). Hoagland warned the Bush administration that Pakistani ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf's broken promises undermined the US war on terror.

The Arabs' leap into the divide has dire consequences for those regimes which believe they have become immune to the Bush anger. They include the Baathist regime of Bashar Al Assad who, at the Beirut summit, lectured Egypt and Jordan that they should break relations with Israel - and thus abrogate a peace treaty of which the US is a guarantor - and who later gave Hizbollah the green light to attack Israel through southern Lebanon. They also include the regime of Qadhafi who, one day after the summit, said the Arabs should cancel the peace offer which they made to Israel on March 28. While Assad at the summit glorified the Arab resistance fighters whom Bush now calls terrorists, Qadhafi went a step further by urging Egypt to re-occupy the Gaza Strip and Jordan to retake the West Bank. Qadhafi called the occupied territories another Kosovo.

Yossi Sarid, chairman of Israel's Meretz opposition party, also described the deadlock between the Palestinians and Israel as a Kosovo, saying this warranted the stationing of a US-led international force to separate the Israelis and the Palestinians - concluding: "A Kosovo-like reality demands a Kosovo-like solution".

A week before British Prime Minister Tony Blair's meetings with President Bush in the latter's ranch in Texas on April 4, the leading exiled Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), said it will reduce its role to that of a political party. The INC argued that, since it was being "marginalized" by the US, the INC would not take active part in a US-led campaign to overthrow the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein.

The Blair-Bush "war summit", focusing on the planned US-led offensive against Saddam's regime, has been followed by statements from European leaders expressing frustration with the way Washington was handling its Middle East policies. To some of these leaders, the Bush administration was showing an "infantile lack of understanding" of what Sharon was doing to Arab public opinion through his use of excessive force against the Palestinians. Sharon is fanning pan-Arab hatred of the US and Israel in the process. With this build-up in the background, God knows what a US-led war against Iraq will lead to in the Middle East.

The Arab Economic Decline: The Arab World, meanwhile, is mired in stagnation. The economic performance of most Arab countries during the past five decades has trailed other regions, despite the advantage of great oil wealth. In the 1950s, for example, per capita income in Egypt was similar to that of South Korea; today it is less than 20%. Unemployment now is the greatest threat to stability in Saudi Arabia.

A common excuse in the Arab region is that a more rapid introduction of free-market reforms would lead to massive unemployment - with unemployment already having become a dangerous time bomb in this part of the world. Without development and economic growth, this region will continue to fall further behind economically and socially.