CAIRO/BEIRUT: Rarely since the end of the Cold War have competing foreign powers loomed so large in the background as Arab leaders prepare for their annual summit, opening this year in the Syrian capital Damascus on Saturday.

With Lebanon as the current focus of their proxy conflict, Iran and the United States stand on the sidelines, jockeying for regional influence in a struggle which appears to be deadlocked.

As the sole Arab government allied firmly to Iran, Syria is paying the price in the form of diplomatic isolation. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia will not attend the Damascus summit and other leaders friendly toward Washington may follow suit.

In terms of crude power politics, it is a conflict between Iran, emboldened by its new-found influence in Iraq, and the conservative Sunni governments which have dominated regional politics for the past quarter century.

On the ideological level, the struggle is between competing Arab visions of how to deal with the United States and its ally Israel should Arab states take a stand against US foreign policy, or go along with Washington in the hope of extracting the best possible Israeli-Palestinian settlement?

“The Arab conservatives fault the radicals for not being realistic enough to accept the international balance of power, and of exposing the region to the danger of more conflicts,” Lebanese commentator Suleiman Taqieddin said.

“The radicals fault the conservatives for being too generous with Arab interests and squandering Arab rights in the name of realism,” he wrote in as-Safir newspaper.

PUBLIC OPINION

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, for example, an Arab conservative backed by Washington, states a “realist” position, saying Palestinians have a right to resist occupation but in their struggle they should consider likely “gains and losses”.On the other side of the divide, politicians say that Arabs must take a firm stand against US and Israeli plans to end all resistance to their ambitions for the Middle East.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Iranian-backed Lebanese movement Hezbollah, said in January he expected “a war on Iran to finish it off, weaken Syria, and destroy all the revolutionary and genuine nationalist trends in the region”.On paper the balance of power is tilted heavily against Iran and Syria, whose main formal allies in the Arab world are Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which runs the besieged Gaza Strip.

But their confrontational stance can strike a chord among Arab public opinion, especially when they take on the armed might of Israel, as Hezbollah did in Lebanon in 2006.

Even in Egypt, for example, where Shias are a tiny minority, opinion polls have found Nasrallah to be the most popular Arab politician.

The conservative leaders are on the defensive at home because their policy on reliance on Washington has failed in recent years to achieve anything for the Palestinians.

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa, in an interview on Monday, played down the differences between the two camps, noting that Syria was willing to deal with Washington and that the conservatives were equally unhappy.

“From heads of state down to the little guy in the street, what I hear is the same. All of them are frustrated, all of them are angry and all of them cannot accept the status quo as it exists in the occupied (Palestinian) territories... If there is moderation, some results have to be achieved,” Moussa said.

To compensate for their discomfort, some conservative governments have tried to put a sectarian spin on the conflict.

“There is some manipulation involved. In areas where there are Sunni and Shia populations, you find tensions that have been growing – obviously Iraq, Lebanon, (are) highly tense ...Bahrain, and most recently Kuwait,” said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

“Maybe the most important success of the Saudi bloc, supported by the Americans, is to exaggerate the Iranian danger to represent Iran as the main threat to Arab existence, in Iraq, in Syria,” said Sateh Noureddin, an as-Safir columnist.

Walid Jumblat, a leading member of the anti-Syrian governing coalition in Lebanon, says he sees Iran as so influential now that it will control the Damascus summit.

“In theory it’s a summit held in what used to be an Arab capital but (which is) now under the total tutelage of the Iranian regime, or the Iranian empire. So it’s Arabs versus Persians,” he said in an interview last month.

But as reflected in Lebanon, where the political crisis has now gone four months without a solution, neither side has the clout to deliver a knock-out blow to its opponents.

“Both sides are waiting, most significantly for the US elections ... which is really why one doesn’t see much progress,” Salem said. “A US election might bring a new US foreign policy.”

—Reuters