Iraqi delegates stormed out of an Arab League meeting yesterday, accusing other Arab regimes of being biased against their country.
"There were unbalanced ideas, and it was clear to us there was US pressure on the meeting, which led to a negative effect," the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Mr Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, said after leaving the meeting. "We cannot accept such a meeting which again conspired against Iraq and gave the US and Britain the pretext for another attack."
The 18 ministers and four representatives meeting at the Arab League headquarters in Cairo spent much of the day in a closed session debating a draft statement calling on Iraq to recognise Kuwait's borders and comply with UN resolutions before sanctions relief was offered. This fell far short of Iraq's hopes that the Arabs would condemn last month's US-British air strikes and call for UN sanctions to be lifted, and appears to mark a victory for conservative Gulf regimes, which have been pressing Iraq to apologise for its invasion of Kuwait.
According to Mr al-Sahaf, the statement also announced the creation of an Arab contact group to try to convince the UN Security Council to lift the embargo, but he dismissed it as meaningless. This group does not include Iraq but its enemies, he said.
As the meeting took place, US war planes attacked what the Pentagon said was an Iraqi missile base in the northern no-fly zone, the ninth clash in a no-fly zone since the December raids.
Although most Arab states are thought to want an end to the debilitating sanctions, they cannot agree on how this should be done.
Holding yesterday's meeting was something of an achievement: it was supposed to have taken place four days after the US-British bombing of Iraq ended, but strong disagreements among governments led to its postponement. Arab leaders have been divided on Iraq since the Gulf War.
But the December bombings by US and British forces caused outrage on the streets of the Arab world and forced many leaders to take a critical stance, or at least show sympathy for the plight of the Iraqi people. For moderate Arab regimes, such as Egypt, this meant walking a tightrope between popular anger and displeasing their US ally.
President Saddam Hussein, always adroit at spotting weakness, exploited the situation by calling on Arabs to rise up against their leaders, a move which has not endeared the Iraqi dictator to the region's rulers.