As
leader of the revolution, Muammar Ghadhafi stated forcefully to President
Mubarak in December 1989: ‘I am against diplomatic representation [between
Egypt and Libya] because the ultimate aim must be a united Arab nation where
there is no need for the exchange of such missions.’30 Occasions of this kind also
provide an important clue to the way in which intra-Arab relations were (and
are) actually conducted. As a rule, they were attended to, personally, by the president
or head of state, often on the telephone to his opposite number or by
personal visit, with only minimal reference to his own foreign ministry or his
diplomatic representatives in the other capital. Another feature was the important
role assigned to senior members of a regime with significant personal
contacts in other Arab states, for example Anwar Sadat in the Nasser period,
who was regarded as having good relations inside most Arab states, or Rifaat al-
Asad, the Syrian president’s younger brother, who had close ties with Prince
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
Just as important, there was a general disregard for borders and for national
sovereignty when it came to trying to influence an Arab neighbour, to put pressure
on it or to try to stop it from pressuring you. Over the years this has taken
the form of direct military intervention, assassinations, kidnappings, bombings,
sabotage, newspaper and radio campaigns, and support for the political opponents
of rival regimes. A few examples of the most flagrant acts of interference,
taken more or less at random, would include: King Saud’s plot to kill President
Nasser in 1958; Egyptian attempts to destabilize King Hussein between 1958
and 1960, including the assassination of his prime minister; the brief Syrian
invasion of northern Jordan in 1970; Jordanian and Iraqi support for the
Muslim Brothers in their struggle with the Syrian regime from 1979 onwards;
Algeria’s provision of base facilities for the Polisario Front during its fight against
the Moroccan army in the Western Sahara; and Libyan encouragement of
armed incursion into Tunisia in 1980. As all such activities were organized by
senior military officers or members of an intelligence agency, their origins are
inevitably shrouded in great secrecy and their exact purpose difficult to discern.
Nevertheless, they are certainly testimony to an habitual willingness to act across
international borders that seems unparalleled elsewhere in the non-European
world.
Attempts to reduce such behaviour to a set of underlying principles or
patterns have not proved particularly successful.31 Nevertheless, it is possible to
hazard a few generalizations about the practice of intra-Arab state relations, its
aims and its consequences. The first is the general assumption that boundaries
are porous and that neighbours will attempt to interfere. This forces regimes to
be much warier than they might otherwise be and, often, to try to pre-empt such
interference by making a first move themselves. More generally, this assumption
has often led to attempts to weaken a troublesome neighbour as a way of
reducing its capacity to make trouble. Second, it follows that there is also an
assumption of potential conflict even when no objective reason for one exists.
Third, the close involvement with events and processes across Arab borders means that there is less of a difference between domestic and foreign policy than
in other parts of the world. Regimes habitually attempt to find support, and even
legitimacy, across such borders while having to pay close attention to rival
attempts to do just the same