RIYADH: With the belated, and somewhat reluctant, move by President George W. Bush to finally try and adopt the United Nations route for launching military strikes against Baghdad in his bid to get rid of President Saddam Hussein’s regime, the governments of the Arab world are faced with a precarious situation.

Arab governments are now faced with a real dilemma, an almost crisis like situation, analysts believe.

The Arabs were not opposing military action against Iraq because the UN did not condone it. In fact, they had other considerations and the world at large and the US in particular seems somewhat oblivious of it.

That the route to Baghdad through the UN Security Council was a mere requirement for some of the members of the Security Council, who felt sidelined on the issue by the attitude of Washington. Even the British Prime Minister Tony Blair could have found it difficult to justify his all out support to any military offensive against Baghdad, without some sort of the UN endorsement. Hence he and others finally succeeded in persuading Washington to at least give a try to the UN route, so as to make their assignment comparatively easier.

There are also indications that some states were in no mood to let Washington proceed on with its plans on Baghdad, without taking other Security Council members in confidence, so as to ensure their business interests in a post-Saddam Baghdad. With the adoption of the UN route, these states would be satisfied to a great extent, analysts believe.

But nonetheless this does not solve the problem of the Arab world.

Most of the governments in the Arab world, despite their close relations with Washington, were finding it difficult to get along with the Bush plans on Iraq for various reasons.

The foremost among them was the popular sentiment among the people in the streets of the region — diametrically opposed to any aggression against Baghdad. There was a congruence of opinion, and a rare one, among the people and the rulers of the region on the issue. The people on the streets were not ready to condone another US aggression against another Muslim country. Besides the popular sentiments on Arab streets, the governments of the region were also looking at the end result of any such onslaught. It would even have set a precedence in the Arab world. Furthermore, it could end-up in the disintegration of Iraq into three, if not more, distinct fragments.

In case that happens a stream of refugees could start moving from one place to another. Already the Iraqi masses were suffering from more than a decade old embargo. Any mass scale military strike could result in a massive outflow of refugees from Iraq to the neighbouring Arab countries.