Saddam Atrocities Top Story In Arab Media

by Jalal Ghazi

Arab commentators refer to the war in Iraq today as a political earthquake. In fact, since the war, Arab media have both described and influenced a huge shift in Arab thinking. Before the conflict, Arab news organizations mirrored and reinforced the Arab world's vehement opposition to an American invasion of an Arab country. Since the fall of Baghdad, however, the 280 million people in the Arab world have been mesmerized by media revelations of Saddam Hussein's crimes against his own people.

In an unprecedented move, Arab media have broken the norm of making the plight of Palestinians their top daily news story and replaced it with the brutal oppression of the Iraqi people by Saddam and his Arab nationalist Baath party. At the same time, the once-powerful creed of pan-Arab nationalism preached by Arab leaders has lost its potency. Today, Arabs no longer prioritize the need to resolve the Palestinian question, but rather the need to resolve the oppression they are experiencing at the hands of their own regimes.

Now, Arab leaders publicly voice their desire to make peace with Israel. This is very different from the time when Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David peace Accords in 1978. Then, most Arab countries cut their ties with Egypt and moved the Arab League headquarters from Cairo to Tunis.

The Arab League, once considered the main platform of pan-Arab nationalism, has lost the respect of people throughout the Arab world. Increasingly, Arabs say that pan-Arab nationalist dogma has been used by Arab regimes to keep Arabs focused on Israeli abuses and distract them from regime crimes similar to those of Saddam Hussein.

The former Baath regime, once considered a major bulwark of pan-Arab nationalism, now stands accused of having turned its back on the 5,000 Arab volunteers from Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and other countries who went to defend Iraq from a Western invasion. Those few who managed to return home have testified on Arab TV that when the fighting started, Iraqi forces stood by and watched the Arab volunteers get decimated. Some Iraqis even handed the volunteers over to the U.S. forces in exchange for money. Volunteers who returned to their countries wound up getting arrested by their own governments.

If there is any country reeling from the aftershocks of the Iraq war, it is Iraq's next-door neighbor Syria, whose president, Bashar Al-Assad has good reason to fear that his ruling party may share the fate of Iraq's Baath Party. Until Saddam's regime collapsed, both Syria and Iraq had the same nationalist ideology and political structure because the two were founded by the same man, Michel Aflaq. In the 1960s and '70s, his ideas were the rage in the Arab world, where pan-Arab nationalism fed off hatred of Israel.

Even though Iraq and Syria became enemies, neither changed its ideology. In fact, they rivaled each other in their attacks against Israel, while doing little to ease Palestinian suffering.

Today, in an about-face similar to that of Ariel Sharon, Bashar Al-Assad has closed the offices of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and various Palestinian nationalist organizations in Damascus. Sharon, for his part, has suggested that he would return to Syria all of the Golan Heights except for the northeastern coast of the Sea of Galilee.

In response to U.S. demands, Al-Assad has also tightened Syria's borders and demanded that all Iraqis apply for a visa before entering the country. Although he gives Hezbollah political support, he no longer allows the organization to acquire arms via Syria. Most important, Assad now says of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, "We won't interfere. Our concern is the Golan."

The end of Saddam Hussein's regime cleared the way for Bush to restart the strategy of the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, which put priority on regional accords between Israel and its neighbors. By contrast, the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords of the Clinton administration sought to make peace first between Israel and the Palestinians.

Egypt and Jordan have already signed peace accords with Israel; Syria and Lebanon have not. But with 30,000 Syrian troops stationed in Lebanon after that country's civil war, Syria is the main peacekeeper there. Israel cannot make peace with Lebanon without Syria's support. Syria fears that if it doesn't make peace with Israel, the United States' could cut off Iraqi oil to Syria, or support Sunni opposition groups in Syria or Christian opposition groups in Lebanon.

Now, as the potency of pan-Arab nationalism is ebbing, there is a good chance Syria could become the third signatory of peace with Israel. As a result, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is being transformed into a local conflict, one that no longer controls Israel's relations with its Arab neighbors.