Who first?
By
Magdi Mehanna*
During former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's tenure, his government adopted the slogan "Lebanon First" in an attempt to separate the Syrian and Lebanese tracks in peace negotiations. This move came after Israel succeeded in delinking the Arab tracks as part of a strategy to isolate each party and maximise Arab concessions.
Hafez Al-Assad, then Syrian president, objected to Israel's slogan, suggesting that a "Syria and Lebanon First" approach would be more constructive. While some quarters in Lebanon supported Syria's position, others believed that separating the tracks might actually be more effective. Regardless of the merits of each argument, the various Arab tracks had become isolated from each other and the Arabs found themselves making more and more concessions as time passed.
Where was the US amidst all this manoeuvring? Arab leaders at the Beirut summit in 2002 unanimously opposed a war on Iraq -- the Gulf countries included. But shortly thereafter, in light of an imminent US attack on Iraq, they backed away from this position, embracing instead the notion of "'My Interests First". Conventional wisdom had it that the US is a crushing force and the Arabs -- whether individually or en masse -- could not oppose or block its plans to attack Iraq.
This gave rise to the aphorism currently being expounded by all Arab countries, namely, "America First", or more accurately complete submission to the wishes of the US, which effectively meant putting Arab interests as a distant second. Each Arab state will eventually calculate its losses as a result of the war and, undoubtedly, those will correlate with the role each played in the campaign and how well they upheld the slogan "America First".
* This week's Soapbox speaker is a journalist and former associate editor-in-chief of Al-Wafd.
