[Mb-civic] Arab League futility - Boston Globe Editorial

[William Swiggard]

  Arab League futility

March 30, 2006  |  Editorial  |  The Boston Globe

THIS WEEK'S ARAB LEAGUE summit in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, 
appeared to validate the group's reputation for idle chatter and obtuse 
decisions.

If the site of the summit was not callous enough -- the host government 
is the perpetrator of an ongoing genocide in Darfur -- the participants 
made things worse by rejecting a proposal to supplement 7,000 
ineffectual African Union monitors in Darfur with a substantial United 
Nations peacekeeping force. In so doing, the league's 22 members were 
accepting the cynical line of Sudan's genocidal ruler, Omar al-Bashir, 
who characterized the plan for a UN peacekeeping force in Darfur as a 
violation of Sudan's sovereignty.

This gesture of solidarity with the forces behind mass murder, 
systematic rape, and the ethnic cleansing of non-Arab African tribal 
groups in Darfur cast a pall on everything else that was said, or left 
unsaid, by the dignitaries -- mostly autocrats -- in attendance in Khartoum.

The summit's pledge of solidarity with the Palestinians, in conjunction 
with a repetition of the 2002 Arab League offer of peace with Israel in 
return for a withdrawal from all Arab lands, belongs under the rubric of 
idle chatter. The vapidity of the members' stance was evident in their 
refusal to increase last year's commitment to contribute $55 million per 
month to the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians are asking for $170 
million.

But the most dramatic -- and pathetic -- failing of the summit was its 
effort to address the twin specters of sectarian warfare and Iranian 
influence in Iraq. In a barely veiled lament at the prospect of 
US-Iranian talks about Iraq's future, the Arab League's secretary 
general, Amr Moussa, said: ''Any solution for the Iraqi problem cannot 
be reached without Arabs and Arab participation. Any result of 
consultations without Arab participation will be considered insufficient 
and will not lead to a solution."

This was a coded way of expressing deep Arab fears that the United 
States and Iran are preparing to subtract Iraq from the Arab world, 
allowing it to be absorbed into a swelling sphere of Iranian influence. 
At the summit's closing session, Iraq's foreign minister told the other 
Arab states that they shared the blame for what is happening today in 
Iraq because of their indifference to decades of Saddam Hussein's 
''authoritarian rule and wars." And he rightly said they had an 
obligation now to help Iraq in ''isolating terrorism and drying up the 
sources that finance its activities."

It is in the interest of the Arab states to heed this plea, because the 
jihadists now wreaking havoc in Iraq will likely be coming after them next.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2006/03/30/arab_league_futility/
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