May 20, 2002	Monday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 7, 1423

LONDON, May 19: The Arab world, where Egypt’s influence was once preponderant, is now looking to Saudi Arabia to champion the Palestinians and avert a US attack on Iraq.

In March, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah persuaded Arab leaders to adopt his plan for peace with Israel at an Arab summit in Beirut which Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak declined to attend.

Mubarak has grudgingly endorsed the Saudi plan, but had to watch last month as the prince spent hours with George W. Bush at his Texas ranch, prodding the US president to put flesh on his vision of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

When US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Cairo at the end of a mission to calm the crisis over suicide bombings and Israel’s West Bank assault, Mubarak took to his sick-bed.

“The Egyptians have run out of breath,” said Murhaf Jouejati, resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “Their leadership of the Arab world began to be contested several years ago by Saudi Arabia due to its wealth and its power in the West. Egypt is slowly being displaced.”

Mubarak has not denigrated the Saudi land-for-peace plan, but gave it only a lukewarm welcome and conspicuously stayed away from the Beirut summit where it was showcased.

“On the one hand he is sulking at losing the mantle of Arab leadership, but he is also under pressure from the street, so he slights Colin Powell,” said Jouejati, who is of Syrian origin.

Egyptian officials dismiss any notion of competition with Saudi Arabia and deny their country has lost any of its clout.

“We welcome the Saudi initiative and consider it a positive step that such a major Muslim country should become involved in peacemaking,” said one official, who asked not to be named.

“This does not undermine Egypt’s influence. There is no rivalry,” he said, adding that the Saudi initiative vindicated the line taken by the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat who made peace with Israel quarter of a century ago.

FADING ROLE: Egypt, the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, has played a key role in keeping talks going between Israelis and Palestinians for the past decade.

But Mubarak’s close involvement in the collapsed Oslo process and his cosy ties with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat are not automatic plus points in today’s Washington.

Saudi Arabia, which signalled grave concern about Middle East peace prospects before September 11, grabbed the diplomatic limelight partly to improve an image sullied by the involvement of Saudi nationals in the attacks on the United States.

Like the rest of the Arab world, it opposes any US assault on its neighbour Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein — and Washington must consider the views of a nation that hosts vital US military bases and is the world’s biggest oil exporter.

“What the Arabs do not want is an invasion of Iraq,” said Youssef Ibrahim, senior fellow at New York’s Council on Foreign Relations. “They may be ready to call Arafat on reform, but not to accept troops on the scale required to invade Iraq.”

Arab rulers fear any move against Iraq could ignite fury on their streets, where the advent of Arab satellite television channels has already brought images of Palestinian suffering into every home and shredded state control of information.

Despite lingering distrust of Saudi Arabia in some American minds, the United States seems to view Egypt and Jordan as more vulnerable to popular unrest than the kingdom.

UNCERTAIN FATE: While Bush has shown he is ready to listen to Crown Prince Abdullah, this does not necessarily mean the Saudi peace plan, overshadowed by last month’s violence, is going anywhere.

Ibrahim said the Saudi initiative was “all but dead” with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon trying hard to defer indefinitely any negotiations on a final peace settlement.

“So Mubarak is more than happy to let Crown Prince Abdullah carry the burden,” Ibrahim said.

For now Arabs may be more comfortable following the lead of Saudi Arabia, which has long shunned Israel, rather than that of Egypt, often under pressure to cut ties with the Jewish state.

Syria has powerful misgivings about making any apparent concessions to an Israeli leader it deeply distrusts, especially against a backdrop of Israel’s tough military actions.

But Syrian President Bashar al-Assad accepted the Saudi initiative ahead of the Beirut summit, giving Prince Abdullah the support he needed to put the kingdom’s prestige on the line.

Jouejati said Saudi Arabia, as a financial donor to Syria, could wield more influence over Damascus than Egypt.

US and Saudi officials declared last month that their countries would work together for peace. The Americans were to influence Israel, while Saudi Arabia was to help bring the Arabs into line — a task that might once have fallen to Cairo.

“The United States is not sidelining Egypt, but they needed another element of support in the region,” the Egyptian official said of Saudi Arabia’s new diplomatic prominence.

Sharif Elmusa, at the American University in Cairo, said Arab leaders were laying aside their traditional quarrels.

“The Arabs are willing to forget about rivalries because of the popular pressure on them,” he said, citing last weekend’s meeting of Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi leaders.

The three men condemned violence in words that came as close as they dared to rejecting Palestinian suicide bombings.

“Arab leaders are just crossing their fingers,” Ibrahim said. “They know there is no solution given the fierce US support for Israel across all strata of the political establishment, so all they can do is hope that if Arafat cooperates and Saddam does too, violence will stop.”—Reuters