The question being asked in different Arab countries these days is: Will the Arab Summit convene in Damascus by the end of this month as scheduled or not? There is no doubt that the meeting of the Arab leaders has not met with such a level of uncertainty since the League of Arab States was established in March 1945.
Arab people are having doubts about the summit because of discouraging statements released by officials in both Cairo and Riyadh in the past two weeks. Those officials hinted at a possible boycott by the leaders of 'influential Arab countries' - namely Egypt and Saudi Arabia - of the Damascus Summit.
The leaders in the two capitals have accused the host of the summit, Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, of his 'unhelpful stand' towards resolving the issue of presidential elections in Lebanon.
Syria, which maintains a powerful influence over Hezbollah and other political factions in the opposition camp, is being blamed by the two capitals for not exercising enough pressure on the Lebanese opposition - the March 8 bloc - to accept the league's initiative set to fill up the post of president that has been vacant since November 26, 2007.
The situation in the Arab world is quite frustrating and it recalls the pressures on the Arab-Arab relations in the era of the cold war in the 1950s and 1960s, when Arab regimes were divided into two camps - one led by the late president of Egypt, Jamal Abdul Nasser (1952-1970) and called the Nationalist bloc - against the camp of the Arab regimes, which maintain good relations with western powers.
Lines of division
With few but crucial differences, the same division line of the 1960s can be felt in the Arab world today. Anyone can sense a sort of cold war between the US and Iran in which proxies are being used to avoid more serious battles, exactly like the tense relations between the US and the Soviet bloc. The tension between Iran and the US has been growing since the Iranian Islamic revolution against the Shah regime in 1979.
The tension between the US and Iran was manifested in different incidents in the past three decades with quite catastrophic impacts on the Arab world. The first was the Iraq-Iran eight-year war started in 1980, a few months after the revolution in Iran. During the war, Syria had sided with Iran, while the US and the majority of Arabs supported Iraq.
The second shock to inter-Arab relations was not isolated from the Iranian factor. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the war to liberate the latter and to minimise the power of Iraq after it decided to end the war with Iran, has severed Arab-Arab relations and created a kind of instability in the region.
Iran strengthened its alliance with Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas to deter any US attacks against it. The July 2006 war by Israel against Hezbollah in Lebanon was seen by many analysts as a proxy anti-Iranian war by the US through regional agents representing the two poles of the conflict.
The conflict in Gaza and the political deadlock in Lebanon are considered additional arenas of the US's cold war against Iran. The Damascus Summit scheduled to convene on March 29 amid intensified tension in the region will most probably be used as another platform of the cold war.
It is definitely a coincidence, though it is strange, the summit as an institution was proposed by seven Arab foreign ministers - then the only members of the league which has 22 members now.
The ministers of Egypt, Saudi, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Yemen met at the Syrian resort of Bludan on May 19, 1946 to discuss the situation in Palestine and the report of British-American fact-finding committee that recommended not establishing an Arab state in Palestine and to renew the mandate of British troops over the country.
Ten days after the ministers' meeting in Syria, the first emergency summit was held in the small town of Anshas, near Cairo, in which the leaders of the seven countries unanimously rejected the report and emphasised the Arab identity of Palestine.
Millennium gift
Since then it took Arabs 23 summits with 11 being held on emergency basis in 44 years before the year 2000 in their meeting in Cairo, where Arab leaders decided to ensure the regularity of the summit annually in March in different Arab states.
The regular summit was considered by Arabs as the new millennium present by Arab leaders to the people and the right entrance to the era of globalisation with unified stands. Since then, Arab leaders have met seven times during which they came up with a unified peace proposal for the Arab-Israeli conflict for the first time since the establishment of Israel in 1948.
The Arab Summit should be kept away from day-to-day Arab conflicts. The League of the Arab States and the March Summit of their leaders should become like any other global institution that guarantees a minimum level of coordination in order to move to higher-level harmonisation.
The disagreement over Lebanon, Palestine and the stand towards Iran should be discussed openly and clearly in the general meetings of Arab leaders rather than the corridors and Arabs should for the first time decide on the basis of majority over minority.
The Arab summit which is to be held for the first time in Damascus should go on. The suspension of the meeting might see an end of the Arab system in the new world. It is true that the summits have never come up with crucial results but the absence of such meetings might lead to chaos.
