WITH Syria and Libya aflame, with Iran challenging the Gulf Arabs for mastery of the region and with America questioning its role as ultimate guarantor of stability, this ought to have been a time, one might have thought, for the Arab League to assert itself. Instead, the body appears to drift ever deeper into irrelevance. Its idea of renewal, it seems, is simply to replace its octogenarian secretary-general with a septuagenarian, an uninspiring transfer that is due to happen on July 1st.
Once, it promised to bind the various Arab countries together and forge a superstate, much as Bismarck did Germany or the Risorgimento did Italy. Founded in 1945 in Cairo when Egypt was an anti-imperial beacon, the Arab League helped make the careers of such 20th-century titans as Gamal Abdel Nasser and Houari Boumedienne. Many of the Arab League’s leaders rallied the masses against British and French colonial rule and dispatched their armies in successive waves against Israel. These days it can barely gather the energy to choose a new head. When, earlier this year, Egypt insisted on yet another retired foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, other Arab states, led...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1WvnEBS
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