Arab States Could Balk at Backing U.S.

CAIRO —  If President Clinton decides on a military strike to punish Iraqi President Saddam Hussein for blocking U.N. weapons inspections, he might want at least verbal support from U.S. allies in the Arab world.

If so, it may be hard to find.

Although friendly Arab states like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia may sympathize with the U.S. position in the dispute, believing that Hussein has been deliberately provocative, there has been only muted public backing for the United States and chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler.

The silence of the region’s leaders speaks volumes about the disenchantment with U.S. policy in the Middle East among ordinary Arabs.

“At this moment, with the deterioration in the peace process in the Middle East, I think any military action against Iraq will inflame the area against the United States,” Egyptian political scientist Abdel-Moneim Said predicted.

“Everybody will scream . . . that the United States is using the U.N. and Security Council for only one purpose: to strike at Arab people.”

It is a far cry from seven years ago, when then-President Bush was able to persuade most of the Arab world to join the U.S.-led coalition to oust Hussein’s forces from Kuwait.

Fearful of becoming Hussein’s next conquest, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Gulf states quickly joined that alliance. Egypt, Syria and Morocco eventually also sent troops. Arab countries sympathetic to Iraq, including Jordan and Libya, found themselves isolated.

Today the pendulum has swung back. Although the memory of Iraqi aggression remains, for most Arabs the present-day, weakened Iraq does not seem like that much of a threat. They are more likely to be moved by the plight of Iraqis after seven years of U.N. sanctions: What was one of the region’s richest and most advanced countries is now a place where professionals hawk their personal possessions simply to eat.

Instinctively, the man on the Arab street favors anyone who stands up to U.S. “bullying,” and anti-U.S. feelings are running especially high now because Clinton is viewed as having forsaken the Palestinians in their peace talks with Israel, analysts say. Arabs accuse the U.S., the main sponsor of the peace process, of not putting pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make even minimal concessions.

“Why is it always the Arabs that the Americans bully? They haven’t done anything to Israel,” said Said Sombol, an Egyptian political analyst. “There ought to be equality in treatment.”

Jordanian political analyst Mustafa Harmaneh said he was surprised by the bellicose rhetoric coming from Washington. Military action “will complicate the situation in the region much farther,” he said. “There is absolutely no need, and it is an act of aggression.”

A veteran Arab diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that under the current circumstances he would advise the United States to try to turn down the temperature on the crisis with Iraq and leave its resolution as much as possible to the United Nations. Military action should be taken only if the United States can prove that Iraq has acquired illegal weapons, he said.

He added that any American attention just inflates the Iraqi leader: “The moment that a big power deals with Saddam, he starts to feel grand again. . . . The big power should not be dragged along.”

He said most Arab leaders would rejoice if Hussein was removed because that would allow Iraq to rejoin the international community and end the suffering of ordinary Iraqis. But that does not seem likely in the short run.

In a statement earlier this week, the Arab League secretariat in Cairo made a mild appeal for a “cooperative spirit” by Baghdad but emphasized Arab countries’ “complete rejection” of military action against Iraq.

There was a drumbeat of virulent anti-American commentary in most of the newspapers in the Arab world, and groups with a well-established track record of criticizing U.S. policy did not flag in their rhetoric this time.

“We support Iraq in its rejection of America’s provocative stand, and we condemn the aggressive position of the United States,” declared Abdel Aziz Rantissi, a leader of the Islamic militant group Hamas.

Many Arabs sympathize with Iraq’s argument that the United States has no intention of lifting economic sanctions as long as Hussein is the country’s leader even if Baghdad cooperates completely with the weapons inspectors. Many suspect that the United States is doing everything it can to avoid giving Iraq a clean bill of health on its weapons program in order to continue the sanctions.

“I think they have good reason to doubt the intentions of the American members of the inspection team,” said Salama Ahmed Salama, a prominent columnist for Egypt’s semiofficial Al Ahram newspaper.

Most commentators have warned that any U.S. military action would cause a backlash against the United States. “Past experience has shown that retaliatory American missile strikes are ineffective, serving only to highlight the double standards Washington employs and cast it as a bully,” said Khairallah Khairallah, the political editor of the respected pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat.

The United States has struck at Iraq during various mini-crises since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, including knocking out several antiaircraft missile installations in September 1996 in response to a military incursion by Iraq’s Republican Guard into the country’s Kurdish-held north. But Hussein has absorbed the hits with no visible long-term impact on his rule.

Despite the lack of enthusiasm among Arabs for any more such strikes, there remains a note of contempt toward Hussein personally among Arab commentators. Mohammed Fahmy, a correspondent for Egypt’s government newspaper Al Akhbar, laughed at Hussein’s claims that he will deal the United States a severe blow.

“Provocation of Washington [by Iraq] is like a deer provoking a lion,” Fahmy wrote. “The audience is getting sick of these calls that come out of Baghdad every now and then, saying, ‘Devour me, lion!’ ”

But Kuwaiti political scientist Abdullah Shaygi summed up the U.S. dilemma: “From our perspective here, Saddam Hussein’s decisions are reckless and unwarranted. The problem is that the use of force now could probably shore up his popularity in the Arab and Islamic world.”