Saudi Arabia's foreign minister said the country opposed an emergency Arab summit to deal with the Iraq crisis, believing it could worsen matters should the session end in discord, according to news reports.
Egypt, meanwhile, continued to push for the emergency session in a bid to generate a united Arab front on the Iraq crisis. A regularly scheduled Arab League meeting was scheduled for March, but Egypt wanted it moved to next week.
Saudi Arabia voiced its opposition after league foreign ministers, who met in Cairo over the weekend, were too deeply divided to agree on a date, let alone an agenda.
"There is no need for an emergency summit following the recent meeting of the foreign ministers in Cairo," Prince Saud Al-Faisal told local reporters late last night in the Red Sea port of Jiddah.
"It is better now to focus on the upcoming ordinary summit in March, while continuing to encourage Iraq to show more cooperation with the UN weapons inspectors."
Saud said the failure of an emergency summit to reach an unanimous resolution on the US-Iraqi standoff "would help make matters worse."
But Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak kept up the pressure for an early summit after a meeting Wednesday with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Berlin. The German leader is a major European opponent, along with French President Jacques Chirac, of US and British plans to attack Iraq if Iraq does not cooperate with UN weapons.
While Arab leaders do not have the power to stop a war, Mubarak said, "through our special contacts with the concerned parties, we (can) work hard to avoid a war because of its negative consequences on the region and the rest of the world."
AP