Powell Gets Quick Lesson in Arab Mistrust
Saturday February 24, 2001
By Jonathan Wright
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - On a Middle East mission to restore a broad front against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein,Secretary of State Colin Powell is quickly learning the depths of Arab mistrust of American motives.
``I know there is some unhappiness,'' Powell told a news conference in Cairo, the first stop on a four-day tour that includes Jerusalem, Ramallah in the West Bank, Amman, Kuwait, Damascus and Riyadh.
Egyptian commentators tried to rip U.S. policy to shreds, both on the impact of U.N. sanctions on the
Iraqi people and on last week's U.S. and British air strikes on air defense installations near Baghdad.
Those strikes have been widely condemned in the Arab world as a sign of U.S. belligerence.
The victory of Likud hawk Ariel Sharon over Ehud Barak in Israeli premiership elections on Feb. 6 added to the potent mix, given that most Arabs see Sharon as a war criminal.
``Arab leaders should tell Powell openly that the issue is not Iraq but Palestine, where the people are starving under the blockade of Israeli criminals,'' columnist Kamal Abdel Raouf wrote in the pro-government weekly
Akhbar el-Youm.
At the Cairo news conference, Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa of Egypt, whose country
receives about $2 billion a year in U.S. aid, disagreed openly with Powell's view that the Arab-Israeli
conflict should be seen as only one part of the whole picture of Middle East problems.
Moussa said the Arab-Israeli conflict was of paramount importance. Powell's position is one
of the new elements in the Bush administration's Middle East policy.
A Syrian official reiterated Syria's criticism of the air strikes against Iraq, saying they were aimed at diverting attention from Israel's harsh treatment of the Palestinians.
Sanctions A Sensitive Issue
Moussa was also openly critical of the sanctions still in place against Iraq, saying they had more effect on the people than on Iraqi rulers.
``Sanctions should be reconsidered as a weapon or as one of the procedures the Security Council resorts to,'' Moussa said.
Powell said the sanctions had largely succeeded in depriving Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass
destruction and preventing it from threatening its neighbors.
But Powell has shied away from the original phrase for his objective -- to ``re-energize'' sanctions
against Iraq by rebuilding the Gulf War alliance of which he was a part as chairman of the U.S. joint
chiefs of staff 10 years ago.
A senior State Department official said on Saturday the United States was now looking at requests to ease up on Iraq imports of items which can have both civilian and military uses.
``People are telling us that some of the dual-use stuff that is not getting through does contribute to
an impact on the civilian population and that's the area that he (Powell) said we would be looking at,'' the official said.
``We're quite willing to look at the sanctions to try to eliminate any impact (on ordinary Iraqis), if there is an impact like that,'' he added.
One example is refrigerated trucks, which former U.N. weapons inspectors have implicated in Iraq's biological weapons program before the Gulf War.
Diplomatic Feathers Ruffled
Powell was also mildly apologetic about the lack of diplomatic action in conjunction with last week's air strikes.
NATO ally Turkey, where the United States bases planes patrolling Iraq, has complained that
Washington did not consult it in advance. Arab commentators said it made no sense to advocate an
alliance when Washington acted unilaterally.
``It (the reaction) has certainly sensitized us to the need to do a better job of making our friends
aware of the kinds of plans we are executing,'' Powell said.
A U.S. official said Powell did not mean that the United States would tell Arab countries of such
attacks in advance -- an offer that would dismay the U.S. military -- but that it would explain better the rules of engagement for the ``no-fly zones'' the United States and Britain enforce over Iraq.
The new secretary of state will not, however, try to sell Arab leaders on the idea of overthrowing
Saddam through support for the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC).
He has not brought on the trip the State Department official in charge of ``regime change'' and U.S.
officials said he would not make much of the INC in talks with Gulf leaders.
Powell will find a sympathetic ear in Israel, his current stop, but that will not help much in the region
as a whole.
The complaint at the root of Arab grievances is that the United States does not treat Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Golan Heights, and its treatment of the Palestinians, by the same standard as it treats Iraq.
The accusation of a ``double standard'' is likely to come to a head when Powell visits Syria on Monday, with a request that Syria stop importing Iraqi oil outside the sanctions system.
The Syrians will tell him that the key to peace and stability in the Middle East is Israeli withdrawal to the borders as they stood before the 1967 war.
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