Last week, during an interview with ABC News, Prince Saud al Faisal, the Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister, suggested that Saddam Hussein should step down as the leader of Iraq to prevent further damage to his country.

There was a very swift reaction from Iraq's Vice President, Taha Yassin Ramadan:

"Go to hell," he said. "You loser, you are too small to talk to the leader of Iraq, and those who will be swept away from the land of the Arab world are people like you. You are a minion and a lackey."

The exchange illustrates perfectly the dilemma faced by members of the Arab League, who have been so hopelessly divided over what to do about Iraq that even its secretary-general agrees that it is unable to carry on as it is currently organised.

The difficulty members of the League are having with current events mirrors difficulties now faced by the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. It also mirrors the dichotomy of feelings said to exist on "the Arab Street".

Outwardly, the Arab world is enraged by the US invasion of Iraq. In the past, as Thomas Friedman said in the New York Times on Wednesday, American power was used in the Middle East only to preserve the status quo - to prop up friendly Arab kings and autocrats, like those who rule the nations now supporting the coalition in Iraq. The Arab Street is highly suspicious, quite naturally therefore, that US aims in the war in Iraq are only nominally those of deposing a tyrant and giving freedom to his subjects. In the end, they believe, it will come down to an assertion of US might and an insistence that the Arab world do what it is told.

For all that, there is also some keen interest, especially among liberal Arabs, in whether the US is going to be able to do what it claims it is going to do, grow democracy in Iraqi soil.

In the widely-read remarks he made about the Middle East in June of last year, President Bush said this:

"I have a hope for the people of Muslim countries. Your commitments to morality and learning and tolerance led to great historical achievements, and those values are alive in the Islamic world today. You have a rich culture, and you share the aspirations of men and women in every culture. Prosperity and freedom and dignity are not just American hopes or Western hopes, they are universal human hopes. And even in the violence and turmoil of the Middle East, America believes those hopes have the power to transform lives and nations.

"This moment is both an opportunity and a test for all parties in the Middle East: an opportunity to lay the foundations for future peace, a test to show who's serious about peace and who is not."

The President's speech really concerned the Israeli/Palestinian problem. His remarks about the Muslim world were extraneous to his purpose, and needn't really have been made at all. It was that quality that seemed to cause a ripple of interest in the Middle East. Why would the powerful, ruthless Uncle Sam bother to make such remarks? Was it an attempt to reassure the Middle East, post September 11? Was it a speech-maker's rhetorical flourish?

Or was it, as I thought, a declaration, an admission if you like, that a page was in the process of being turned? In context, it certainly had all the earmarks of a pivotal moment.

President Bush seemed to be making the statement that the United States had come to the realisation that the infrastructure that was created after 1946 to maintain a balance of power in the world was no longer capable of working properly, and that the United States had committed itself to doing something about it.

The US has always been, deep down, an isolationist country. The Monroe Doctrine at the end of the Napoleonic Wars might have been a formal declaration of its then foreign policy, but it also expressed something fundamental about the character of the nation. The United States was created and built by people escaping oppression of one type or another. Having designed and created a working society in which oppression could not thrive, they were, and still are, determined not to allow their ideal to be corrupted or watered down for the sake of anything on earth.

The engagement of the United States with the world in the second half of the 20th Century has been almost entirely in the context of its Titanic struggle with the Soviet Union, whose communist society was the evil alter-ego of democracy. When that fight ended, the United States might have thought it had leisure to consider at length how to redefine its relationship with the rest of the world. The attack on the Twin Towers, though, was like giving a kaleidoscope a quarter-turn to the right. All the pieces of the US reality dropped suddenly into a new arrangement.

While it might have been possible for the United States to keep to itself after the Napoleonic Wars, I doubt there are many sane people who would argue that it is possible now.

The United States is, in many ways, the only game in the global village. Some weeks ago, I quoted British historian Paul Johnson as having said the United States had become Leviathan, the giant authority figure that Thomas Hobbes envisioned would be necessary to keep world order three-and-a-half centuries ago.

Some hoped the United Nations would play that role when it was created in the wake of the Second World War. It was designed to prevent the kind of situation that existed between the first and second wars, in which democratic nations were unable to join together to oppose aggression early enough to prevent themselves being picked off one by one.

During the Cold War years, the United Nations was nearly paralysed by the rivalry of democracy and communism. There was hope, though, that once the Cold War was over, it would come into its own.

Sadly, that did not happen. Again and again during the 1990s, the UN was helpless to deal with "unsanctioned" aggression in places like Rwanda, Liberia, the Horn of Africa and in the Balkans. There were two reasons for its inability. First, its members are in more or less permanent disagreement over how to address conflict and about the legality of intervening in conflicts within a sovereign state. Second, the organisation's great limitation is that it cannot act unilaterally. It must await the development of a consensus among its members.

The UN is crucial to the liberal idea of world safety through international law, administered by international institutions. European nations, having made the decision to give up much of their national identity in favour of central government through the European Union, have found it easy to invest heavily in the success of this theory.

Sadly, Iraq may well have been the rock upon which the idea foundered. The UN was easily outmanoeuvred by the duplicitous Saddam Hussein and those who were bent on protecting him. At the same time, NATO, constituted more or less as is the UN, came within an ace of being prevented from fulfilling its perfectly legitimate purpose of helping Turkey organise defences on its border with Iraq.

If these organisations are so vulnerable to being deflected from their purpose, one might ask, why should they continue to exist?

Nonetheless, although the UN might not have been so successful in the field of stopping or preventing aggression, it has often played a valuable role in rebuilding countries damaged by or in the wake of aggression.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell toured European capitals last week to talk about the UN's role in post-war Iraq. Despite pledges of "pragmatism" and "consensus" by European foreign ministers keenly aware of the cynicism the UN's inability to sort itself out over Iraq has generated, there was no consensus among them on what role the UN might play.

Mr. Powell said the United States and its partners in the war must assume the central role in rebuilding Iraq and establishing a government because "it was the coalition that came together and took on this difficult mission at political expense, at the expense of the treasury.and at the expense of lives as well".

"This is not to say," he added, "that we have to shut others out, and not to say that we will not work in partnership with the international community, and especially with the United Nations."

"We are still examining the proper role for the United Nations," Mr. Powell said. "I'm not surprised that there is not consensus yet, because the debate and the discussion has just begun."

His statement is as true for the fate of the United Nations as it is for its role in post-war Iraq.

@EDITRULE:

gshortoibl.bm