Editorial
Arab League sets new standard for failure Arab League Secretary-General
Amr Moussa said in an interview published Thursday that it was “unfortunate”
that the Arab League failed earlier this week to agree to hold an emergency summit to
discuss the twin challenges of Iraq and Palestine. “Unfortunate” in this case is
far too kind a description of what must rank as one of the most troubling and persistent
weaknesses in the modern Arab order the shocking inability of the 22 member states of
the Arab League to formulate and implement a consistent foreign policy, and, in
particularly ignominious situations like this week’s, an even more shocking inability
even to agree to meet to discuss an issue on which they would subsequently prove unable to
formulate a common policy. It behooves us all in the Arab world to ponder the full
implications of this embarrassing situation, and to attempt to come up with some remedial
actions for the Arab League role and credibility.
Most Arabs have adjusted to the fact that the Arab League does not function very well when
it comes to collective political action. But the times demand a more coherent response to
this condition, because the times are changing. Hundreds of thousands of foreign troops
are massing in our area to carry out an operation whose aims and consequences remain very
unclear, certainly to us in the region, and perhaps also to those who are poised to
strike. If we wish to avoid yet another century of foreign hegemony, vulnerable
nationhood, staggering economies, and fractured regional integrity, we must soul-search
more seriously and finally come to grips with the real underlying reasons for our national
and collective constraints.
The single most important reason stares us in the face on a daily basis: In every Arab
polity, the divisions between power and money are blurred to the point of invisibility.
Those who control the sovereign assets and power of the state and those who own major
chunks of the commercial and material wealth of our lands are often synonymous. King
Abdul-Aziz (Ibn Saud), the wise founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, believed that
there should always be strict separation between imara and tijara (the realm of governance
and the realm of commerce). That wisdom has been long forgotten in all parts of the Arab
world; instead, we suffer a situation where rulers and owners cannot be easily
distinguished. The resulting distortions in economic and political life have virtually
wiped out any semblance of accountability, transparency and checks and balances that once
acted as a constraint on power.
The socioeconomic disparities and political tensions that have plagued so many individual
Arab countries have been compounded when the Arabs have tried to work together through the
Arab League to forge common positions on life-and-death issues like Iraq and Palestine.
The continued failure of pan-Arab action in such situations cannot be tolerated any
longer, when the consequences menace us in the form of a region broached yet again by
invading armies, and reconfigured yet again by distant powers. We must urgently
reconfigure ourselves, before others do it for us. The place to start is the point of
weakness in every individual Arab country: that terrible nexus between power and money
that results in public policy being formulated according to the distortions of political
and economic self-interest, rather than the public interest, the common good, the rights
of the individual, and the dignity of an entire national community of Arabs.
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