President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt warned in an interview published yesterday that the situation in the Arab world would deteriorate radically if the US attacks Iraq. In an interview with the Financial Times in Cairo Mr Mubarak expressed strong hopes for a diplomatic settlement.
The Egyptian president said public opinion in the Arab world has swung towards support for President Saddam Hussein.
"You will not find one (Arab) leader who will say publicly we support the air strikes," he said.
The United States, he said, faces a credibility problem in the Arab world, which criticises Washington for looking the other way even though Israel - like Iraq - has an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Mubarak said Mr Saddam has read the situation very cleverly. "This is not 1991," the Egyptian leader said, referring to the regional consensus against Mr Saddam's invasion of the oil-rich Arab emirate, Kuwait.
On that occasion, Egypt played a key role in securing Arab support for the US-led military campaign against Iraq. Mr Mubarak said he felt "stabbed in the back" by Mr Saddam, who had promised not to invade Kuwait. Mr Mubarak said he had not spoken to his Iraqi counterpart since the evening of the August 1990 invasion. He said he recently sent a message, however, urging Mr Saddam to comply with UN weapons inspections to avert the destruction of Iraq.
Mr Mubarak said he saw the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan's forthcoming mission to Baghdad as a final chance for peace. He said that if the US and its allies manage to topple Mr Saddam, his successor could prove a worse threat.
In addition, an Iraqi leadership vacuum could fragment the country and trigger an endless round of sectarian violence involving Kurds in the north, Sunni Muslims in the centre and Shia Muslims in the south, he said.
"A united Iraq is essential to the peace of the whole region," Mr Mubarak said.
In Amman yesterday Crown Prince Hassan said Jordan would bar Israeli fighter planes from passing through its air space to make retaliatory strikes at Iraq. Asked if Jordan would prevent Israeli aircraft from entering its air space on retaliation missions against any Iraqi attack, he told reporters: "That is correct." He also said a US attack "hasn't been thought through in terms of its ramifications".
He said a confrontation between the US and Iraq could force a closure of the Jordanian-Iraqi border, cutting off 90 per cent of the kingdom's oil supply.
Syria said yesterday that Israel was "the only beneficiary" of any US military strike against Iraq, and was inciting Washington in its confrontation with Baghdad.
The official daily Tishrin wrote that "in launching an attack against Iraq, the United States is distracted from the peace process and (Washington's) peace initiatives come to a halt. Israel can thus escape international pressure for a global solution" to the Israeli-Arab conflict.
It said that Israel also profited from the Iraqi conflict by "blackmailing" Western countries to increase its military arsenal under the "pretext of a possible Iraqi attack."