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Divided but Worried, Iraq's Neighbors Confer
By SUSAN SACHS
[C] AIRO, April 25 ? With varying degrees of dread, Iraq's neighbors are coming to grips with a new Middle East that is dominated as never before by the United States.
The leaders of these nations found themselves sidelined as mere observers during the war. So they have scrambled in the past two weeks to contain, as well as to accommodate, the expanded American military and political presence on their doorsteps.
Arab officials and their counterparts in Turkey and Iran, in a series of consultations and meetings, have sought to keep American attention focused on Iraq and to reassert their own roles in regional affairs.
To that end, they rallied recently to exert intense pressure on Syria to moderate its policies. That helped defuse the tensions caused by the Bush administration's accusations that Syria was harboring fugitives from the deposed Iraqi government.
At the same time, Egypt emphasized its own importance as a regional go-between when it intervened this week to resolve a conflict between Palestinian leaders that could have derailed efforts to restart peace negotiations with Israel.
But Iraq's neighbors also find themselves even more divided than before in confronting American supremacy in the region and more at odds with their own populations.
During the war, for example, many Arab governments effectively encouraged rampant public hostility to the United States by staying silent as their newspapers and television stations confidently reported that American forces deliberately killed Iraqi civilians and looted museums.
"They have pushed themselves into a blind alley," said a Cairo-based diplomat from one of the regional powers. "They've created a huge public that is very hostile to the United States and believes that America is promoting core values that are in conflict with their own."
The war also exposed the deep rift between the rich Persian Gulf nations, which were already hosts to the American military, and the rest of the Arab world.
It upset the traditional alliance between the United States and Turkey, where the five-month-old government proved unable to get political backing for helping the American war effort. At the same time, the position of Israel, the pivot of much of the region's politics, has been strengthened by the elimination of Saddam Hussein's government and the installation of an American interim administration in Iraq.
"It's a totally new game, and it's difficult to foresee all its dimensions," said Muhammad Sid Ahmed, a veteran political commentator in Egypt. He predicted that traditional American allies might find themselves usurped as regional players, especially as mediators in the Arab-Israeli conflict, because the United States will be preoccupied with Iraq.
"America has obtained enormous power by succeeding so easily in Iraq," Mr. Sid Ahmed said. But other countries might make it difficult for the United States' friends in the region, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, because "a newcomer has come to occupy that privileged place."
The larger countries in the region are still feeling their way as they try to decode American intentions. Faced with angry publics that oppose even a short-term American occupation of Iraq, they have tried to present themselves as a loyal opposition, ready to work with the United States but not to submit to it.
A meeting of Iraq's neighbors this month in Saudi Arabia produced a consensus position that called for a speedy withdrawal of American and British forces from Iraq and a central role for the United Nations in rebuilding Iraq's economic and political life.
But even that position has started to wilt as Iraq's neighbors begin to worry publicly that untamed ethnic and religious conflicts in Iraq could overrun its borders.
In the view of many diplomats and officials, the region's leaders are torn between their desire to see the United States go and their fear that Iraq may be too volatile to be left to its own devices any time soon.
That ambivalence has begun to appear in Arab news reports after weeks of condemnation of any American administration of Iraq.
"Should they decide to leave the Middle East, the Americans would simply lick their wounds, learn new lessons, change their views on many issues and get on with life, as they have done before in other theaters," said Wael Mirza, a political analyst writing today in the Saudi daily newspaper Al Watan.
"The people who will have to pick up the pieces," he warned, "are the Arabs and Muslims whose region will be racked by conflicts, civil wars and ethnic strife."
Many countries are especially concerned about the shape of a post-Hussein Iraqi leadership that may develop if American attention flags.
While the Bush administration talks of bringing democracy and representative government to Iraq, for example, many of its moderate allies in the region fear that real democracy would bring well-organized Islamic militant groups like the Muslim Brotherhood to power.
The Brotherhood constitutes the main political opposition to the Jordanian and Egyptian governments, which have tried to suppress it over the years. Even in Turkey, where the five-month-old Islamist government has ties to the group, the powerful army would be likely to regard with hostility any Iraqi government based on religious affiliation.
There is evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood is already active in Baghdad, where it played a role in organizing a huge anti-American demonstration this month, and the group's supporters in Cairo are already predicting that it will play a major role in Iraqi politics.
"The Muslim Brothers were in Iraq before the American invasion," said Montasser al-Zayat, a Cairo lawyer with close ties to the organization. "Now they are spreading. People fear the influence of the United States and will see the Brothers as their savior."
Turkey has also made it clear that it would not tolerate another effort by Iraqi Kurds to assert political control over the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, as the two main Kurdish groups tried to do in the last days of the war before American forces established control.
Income from the oil wells in those cities could encourage thoughts of independence, not only among Iraq's long-suffering Kurds but also among restive Turkish Kurds living along the border. Syria, with a fast-growing Kurdish population of its own, would also fear any arrangement that would make an autonomous Kurdish region economically viable.
Governments in the gulf region also worry about the political potential of Shiite Muslims, who constitute the majority of Iraq's population but have historically been denied any power by the largely urban Sunni minority.
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman have substantial numbers of Shiites who have started to claim broader political rights and might be energized by a new Shiite political role in Iraq. The war also created provocative opportunities for Iran, historically mistrusted by the Arab states, to expand its influence through support of some Iraqi Shiites.
The new situation in the region has also raised expectations of change among Arabs outside Iraq.
"For sure you'll find some political and economic reform in the Arab world," said Ibrahim Nafie, the editor of the influential Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram. "In the end, that's the message that the region should learn from what happened in Iraq." |
