Global Policy Forum

By Neil MacFarquhar

Arab governments voiced collective support today for new weapons inspections inside Iraq, although they want Arab experts added to the inspection teams and warned that the latest United Nations resolution should not be considered a free pass for Washington to invade.

The support, expressed in a resolution at a meeting of Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo, suggests that most governments in the region remain perfectly happy to see Saddam Hussein defanged, political experts said, yet fear the repercussions of another war in the region.

The action by the Arab League stressed that the Security Council vote on Friday was "not a pretext for another military action against Iraq," Naji Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister, said today after the Arab League meeting.

At the same time, Iraq appeared to be bowing toward the inevitable, with Iraqi television announcing that Mr. Hussein was planning to convene a special session of Parliament on Monday to discuss the issue of renewed inspections — the usual choreography for a simulated public stamp of approval for a decision the leadership finds distasteful.

The extent to which Arab governments are concerned about the effects of any action against Iraq on regional stability was expressed today by Syria's foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharaa, on the sidelines of the meeting. He said Syria's decision to join in a unanimous 15-0 Security Council vote to pass the resolution demanding renewed inspections to find potential nuclear, biological and chemical weapons was intended to spare the Iraqis from being attacked by the United States.

"This resolution stopped an immediate strike against Iraq, but only an immediate strike," he said. "Now America cannot strike Iraq under U.N. auspices, although of course the United States can strike Iraq unilaterally outside international law. If this happens, the world will not be with the Americans. It will have to deal with all those demonstrators from Los Angeles to the Far East and the Arab countries."

"This resolution was for the immediate effect," he said. "It avoided an inevitable strike against Iraq."

Iraq's government-controlled newspapers had initially called the Security Council resolution "bad and unfair." But by today, Iraqi officials and news media were hailing it as an international effort to thwart the American desire for war.

Although Iraq has until Friday to declare that it intends to comply fully with the terms of the resolution, Mr. Sabri noted that Iraq had agreed before to renewed inspections and thought there was no need to alter the United Nations guidelines about the way they worked.

"The problem is that we need experts who work in a professional, objective way," Mr. Sabri said, adding that, as the Arab League communiqué said, the new inspection teams should not "try to provoke or incite clashes as they have previously."

He said that such unbiased arms inspections would expose the "great lie" promulgated by the United States. "It is the lie about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," he said.

The Arab League resolution also restated the longstanding Arab position that Iraq must work with the United Nations inspectors and demanded that the inspection teams add more Arab experts.

The resolution emphasized that only the Security Council should evaluate reports from the inspectors. Such cooperation should lead to the lifting of penalties that have been in place against Iraq since it invaded Kuwait in 1990, the league said, adding that ordinary Iraqis had suffered because of the sanctions.

In addition, the league proposed that the United Nations pay equal attention to Israel's weapons of mass destruction and stressed that Arab League members were committed both to maintaining Iraq as a united country and to maintaining the stability of all Arab countries. "They reiterate the absolute Arab rejection to striking Iraq and consider it a threat to the national security of all Arab countries," the league resolution said.

Although an Arab summit meeting in Beirut last March issued a statement that an attack on Iraq would be considered an attack on all Arab countries, commentators have dismissed that as an empty threat. But concern remained that any such conflict would rearrange the existing state of relations among countries in the region and between those countries and the United States.

The official Iraqi news agency reported today that Mr. Sabri had sought assurances from Arab governments that they would take specific steps in the event of an attack. The steps included not only barring American forces from using bases in their countries to attack Iraq, but also committing themselves to further measures like stopping oil shipments to countries that participate in any attack, breaking diplomatic relations and withdrawing financial assets.

Finally, Mr. Sabri proposed that governments should allow their citizens to volunteer to defend Iraq, the report said. None of those specific proposals were reflected in the communiqué issued by the league.

"They have been meeting over and over, and they are trying to justify themselves, to save face in front of their constituency, in front of the Arab people," said Nizar Hamzeh, a professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, referring to the Arab League countries. "They are afraid about what comes after this war against Iraq: which is the next country, what is the next target?"

Worst-case scenarios in the region have raised fears that the United States could redraw the map of the region, much the way the secret Sykes-Picot pact by Britain and France did early in the last century, although calmer heads reject such an outcome.

"All the Arab states that I know would prefer Iraq without weapons of mass destruction," said Abdelmonem Said, the director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, speaking by telephone from Cairo. "It's journalists and the intelligentsia who want Iraq to have weapons of mass destruction because Israel has them."

Governments in the region are also concerned how others will suddenly act — Iran in particular — if a traditional enemy is suddenly rendered toothless by an American invasion.

"You start to shuffle the cards and everybody gets worried," said Mr. Said. "That is what they are worried about, the strategic implications of a war against Iraq."

Commentators in the region have said that when Syria voted with the Security Council, it was less out of a desire to shield Iraq than out of fear of the consequences of ignoring the United States — whether affecting future Mideast peace talks or, worse, making Syria a tempting target for the kind of treatment Iraq has been accorded.

"The price of even abstaining would be high, at the very least it would be complete isolation," wrote Zohair Qussaibati, a columnist for Al Hayat, an Arabic-language daily published in London. He argued that all Arab states would eventually line up similarly. Although Arab states would like to present the resolution as a victory, he wrote, it really reflected the United States' ability to do what it wants.

"Everyone came out of this meeting pretending that they are wise, happy and victorious, including Baghdad, which considered that the international community triumphed over the evil American administration," Mr. Qussaibati wrote. "This is a catastrophe in reading what happened," he added, noting that something as simple as Iraq firing at a plane in its airspace might end up being considered sufficient cause for a war.

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