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'Don't ask me what to do,' Arab League chief says
 | | Either Amr Moussa or Jerry Lewis, I'm not sure which. I'm sure it's not Dean Martin or Ethel Merman, though... |
CAIRO: The spiraling Middle East crisis has exposed deep divisions within the Arab world and forced its leaders into a frank admission of helplessness. After an emergency meeting of Arab League foreign ministers on Saturday, the 22-member bloc admitted it was impotent in the face of Israel's deadly attacks on the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. "Don't ask me what to do," the League's secretary general, Amr Moussa, told reporters after the meeting.
Without Jerry's Amr's decisive leadership the Arab world would be in sad shape, by golly... |
Analysts said the huge rift between Western allies such as Egypt and Jordan and radical states like Syria had proved impossible for diplomats to bridge. "The main structure of the Arab League is the idea of consensus, so meetings always come up with the lowest common denominator," said Nadim Shehadi, a Middle East specialist with the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs.
| An apt description. "How low can you go?" |
Saturday's meeting "was a bit more revealing," he said. "There are real divisions at this time especially to do with relations with Iran on the one hand and with the United States and Israel on the other." Western allies, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have all tempered condemnation of the scale of the Israeli reprisals with criticism of the "adventurism" of Hizbullah in seizing two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday. Jordan's King Abdullah II and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warned on Friday of the risk of "the region being dragged into adventurism that does not serve Arab interests." Saudi official media have also used similar language.
| Not as surprising as it appears on the surface, since many Arabs lump Jews and Persians in the same category... |
But for states like Yemen, the crisis should force countries like Egypt and Jordan to cut all ties with the Jewish state. "We must take swift steps with sincere intentions to solve the Arab-Arab differences which create an obstacle to reaching a unified Arab position," Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Kurbi said, calling on all Arab states to "end any cooperation with Israel." At the post-meeting news conference, Moussa pronounced the Middle East process "dead" and called on the UN Security Council to take back responsibility from the so-called quartet of the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States.
Posted by: Fred 2006-07-17 |
