As the administration of President George W. Bush signals it may seek congressional approval and consult with the United States’ foreign allies before taking military action against Iraq, Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat detects a glimmer of hope. “After weeks of abstruseness and media escalation,” Washington’s willingness to adopt a more “consultative approach” is an important development, the paper says.

It could create badly needed “breathing space” for more diplomatic efforts aimed at avoiding war, for Baghdad to make good on its declared willingness to cooperate with the UN over arms inspections, and for Washington to both clarify its objectives and ponder the “future complications” that war on Iraq would cause in the region, it says in its main editorial. But the key thing about “President Bush’s tilt toward consultation” is that it implies he is no longer listening solely to the advice of the hawks who have been goading him to take unilateral military action without heeding the views of the rest of the world. “But these consultations will remain deficient if they do not include Iraq’s immediate neighbors, i.e. the Arab states who would face the first fallout from any military operation targeting any fellow Arab state,” Asharq al-Awsat writes.

In the Beirut daily As-Safir, editor in chief Joseph Samaha says while the US may have decided to strike a less unilateralist public posture over Iraq, this is only a “pro forma concession.” “The goal is still the same, changing the regime in Baghdad, but the road to it now passes through the US Congress first and perhaps also the UN Security Council,” he remarks. “And one can be certain from now that the Security Council way-station will only be used to impose conditions tailored for Iraq to reject or evade, thus securing the necessary conditions for launching the war.”

The worldwide opposition to war has prompted the Bush administration to “adopt the Leninist tactic of taking one step back in order to take two steps forward,” according to Samaha. The principal aim is to overcome European objections, but they have more to do with America’s unilateralism than its aims, or the fate of Iraq or the region. With the US feigning a more multilateral approach while starting the actual countdown to war, “one can wager that there will soon be changes in the policies” of most European Union members, Samaha writes.

The only European politician who behaves as though he genuinely opposes American policy is German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who could assume a “Charles de Gaulle-like stature” if he sticks to his policy of reconciling his country’s “Atlanticist” leanings with its national interests. He favors pressure on Iraq to force it to readmit the arms inspectors, but underscores the irrationality of the American position by noting that “you can’t put pressure on someone by telling him that if you comply with our demands we will smash you.”
Even so, by going through the motions of trying to enforce UN disarmament requirements, the US could turn around the anti-war climate of opinion in Europe.

“One Charles de Gaulle in Europe is not enough to put the brakes on the American war machine, and his role might diminish markedly if Washington showed a measure of willingness to take others into consideration procedurally, in exchange for gaining their approval for its ultimate goals,” says Samaha. “George Bush has brought new instruments into an orchestra that consisted only of war drums, and has thus made the task of the opponents of war more complicated,” he adds.

Nadim Issa writes in Asharq al-Awsat that one reason the Europeans oppose an American war on Iraq, “disregarding all the legal, moral and humanitarian arguments,” is that they don’t want to be made to foot the bill for it. Discussing the “purely financial aspect” of the anticipated war, Issa says that when the Americans and British approached the Europeans and Japanese about “investing in their regime change venture,” they declined. So did the Arabs. By refusing to allow their territory to be used for any attack, the Arabs implied they weren’t going to pay for it either. Yet despite the enormous financial costs of a war to depose the regime in Baghdad, and the refusal of any other country to share them, the United States and the United Kingdom seem remarkably untroubled about the matter. The only logical inference to make from that is that they expect “Iraq to be the country that pays the price for changing its regime.”

If their plans go right, they stand to reap enormous profits from their “investment,” Issa writes. “Naturally, they will pass their expenses bills on to Iraq’s new ‘rulers,’ who will probably be the same members of the Iraqi opposition who regularly ply the corridors of the State Department and the Foreign Office, and who may already have done deals with the American and British governments in this regard.”
Iraq is a resource-rich country that can pay out billions of dollars and pounds, “and its new rulers will not be in a position to refuse to sign the checks,” according to Issa. “Then will come the turn of various contractors and providers of services and goods.”
Business in post-Saddam Iraq will be awarded to them on a selective basis, with priority going to companies “whose countries were the original investors in the project.” And they will be followed by the American and British arms corporations, which, having made a mint out of the destruction of Iraq, will be expecting, with political support, to be awarded fresh weapons deals, just as they were in the 1970s and 1980s, as the country is kitted out with a new army. “Let us consider this simple notion for a while, far from the resounding moralizing slogans,” Issa says. “Would the US and Britain go about changing any ruling regime in a poor country, if they did not have other economic, strategic or vindictive motives?”

Raghida Dergham, New York bureau chief for the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, says in her weekly opinion piece that Washington has no real rationale for waging war on Iraq. Its declared motives ? Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its support for terrorism ? are merely pretexts for mounting an invasion whose military success it takes for granted, and which is unaccompanied by any strategy for what to do after “celebrating” the regime’s collapse.

“Reason has evaporated in the age of machismo,” she comments.

There is no sense in the policies the Bush administration pursued after Sept. 11, when instead of trying to douse extremism in the region it set about inflaming it, particularly by abandoning the search for Arab-Israeli peace in favor of an all-out backing for the hard liners in Israel, Dergham writes. There is no sense in going to war against Iraq while the war in Afghanistan continues, and Israel’s war on the Palestinians escalates and is increasingly blamed on Washington. “And there is no sense in this administration’s insistence on providing ammunition to redouble anger at America and its policies in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and no sense in its deliberate undermining of the forces of moderation there,” she writes.

The fact, she says, is that the circles that wield most influence over the administration are those who give cementing the organic relationship between the US and Israel precedence over all other considerations. It is they who engineered the administration’s abandonment of its “vision” of a two-state solution and its shift to an overtly anti-Palestinian position, in order to radicalize the Palestinians so as to justify extremism on the Israeli side. They succeeded in putting the moderate Arab states “in the dock” after they extended an olive branch to Israel via the Saudi initiative, reflecting their underlying conviction that peace is a “threat” to Israel.
“And it is they who initiated the idea of invading Iraq. Not because the regime there is dictatorial, or because it has a weapons of mass destruction capacity, nor because it has an alleged connection to Al-Qaeda. These are pretexts. The real motive is Israel. Even oil is a secondary motive.”

Dergham goes on to argue that if the Arab states are to prevent an invasion of Iraq calculated to serve Israel’s broader purposes in the region, they will need to radically change their thinking. They will have to adopt policies “that dare challenge the American administration via actions that entail doing without American aid, withdrawing Arab money from the US, categorically refusing to bankroll an invasion of Iraq, and a readiness to sever military relations ? from bases to intelligence.” To do that, the regimes would need to give Arab public opinion a say in policymaking, and that would require serious, rapid strides to be made toward genuine democracy in the Arab world.

The regimes have no intention of either defying the US or democratizing, and neither does the public expect them to, Dergham concedes. But when one considers the alternatives, these two courses of action become “the only safety valve for the Arab world,” she argues.
After all, “the extremists in the US and Israel drafted scenarios that seemed equally unthinkable, entailing the mass expulsion of the Palestinians, the establishment of an alternative state for them in Jordan, the invasion of Iraq, and the partitioning of the oil-producing states. And these scenarios have ceased to be imaginary, and have started to be implemented.

“The Arabs’ fear of democracy has done much to transform them into a viable target, and the surfeit of tyrants in power in the Arab world has provided pretexts and ammunition to those who advocate demolishing the existing Arab order. Arab citizens may shed no tears over the demise of this order, and they may consider the redrawing of the region’s map to be in the Arab interest. But when one considers the real motives, one has to reconsider this does not mean calling for a relationship of enmity with the US. On the contrary, there is a silent American majority that opposes entangling the US in a war that serves only Israel,” Dergham writes.

“There is a ‘center’ in American public opinion that has been overshadowed by organized and effective ‘extremism’ and that needs to be persuaded by the Arabs that its partnership is important and necessary, that it is in the shared American and Arab interest, and also in the interest of Israel. For extremism will ultimately destroy Israel, however victorious it is in wars to come. And, to defeat extremism, it must be confronted by unconventional methods, which means ‘unthinkable’ developments on the Arab scene.”