BRUSSELS, March 29 (UPI) -- An extraordinary meeting will take place in the Moroccan capital of Rabat next week. On one side of the negotiating table will sit NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and the Brussels ambassadors of the alliance's 26 member states. The other side will see senior officials from the so-called "Mediterranean dialogue" states of Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia huddled together.
The meeting is remarkable for three reasons. To start with, it is the first time NATO ambassadors will get together in a Muslim country. It is also the first time such a high-level meeting has been held at the initiative of a Muslim state.
Secondly, Israel is teamed up with Egypt -- a country it has gone to war with twice in the last 40 years -- and Jordan, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees live after Israel's occupation of the West Bank. A country regularly denounced as the root of all evil in the Middle East and portrayed in the official media of many of the participating Muslim countries in grotesquely anti-Semitic tones, will talk intelligence-sharing and joint maneuvers with senior political and military officers from Cairo, Tunis and Algiers.
Finally, at a time when public hostility to the United States is at an all time high in the Muslim world, when violent demonstrations are taking place across the broader Middle East against the portrayal of the Prophet Muhammed in European newspapers and when commentators are predicting a 'clash of civilizations' between Islam and the West, it is nothing short of miraculous that the representatives of an American-dominated military alliance should be forging closer links with their largely Muslim neighbors to the south.
NATO officials say it is only natural that countries facing the same challenges -- terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, illicit trafficking in drugs, arms and people -- should adopt joint strategies to tackle them. But they admit they face an uphill task in convincing the "Arab street" that the 57-year-old alliance is not a U.S.-dominated, Cold War-style military organization that sees radical Islam as its new enemy Number One.
NATO's Mediterranean Dialogue is not new -- it started in 1994 with just five countries -- but for much of the last decade the alliance was focused on absorbing new members from the former Soviet bloc and transforming itself from a Cold War defensive organization into a security body with global reach. What cooperation there was between NATO members and their southern neighbors tended to be geared towards soft security -- training courses, seminars and exchanges -- rather than hard security.
It took the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to make NATO leaders realize that there could be no peace and stability security in Europe and America without peace and stability in the broader Middle East. At the Istanbul summit in 2004, alliance leaders decided to upgrade the dialogue with the seven Mediterranean countries to a full partnership. They also set up the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative with the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
One NATO official, who spoke to United Press International on condition of anonymity, said Istanbul represented a "quantum leap" in relations between alliance members and the Mediterranean Dialogue states. Since the summit, de Hoop Scheffer has visited all seven countries in the club and foreign and defense ministers have met their NATO counterparts on two occasions in Europe.
There has also been a step change in military cooperation since Sept. 11. In the last four years, NATO forces have monitored more than 75,000 vessels and boarded some 100 suspect ships in the Mediterranean Sea as part of Operation Active Endeavor. Alliance officials said Israel, Algeria and Morocco are expected to join the operation at the Rabat meeting. Egypt, Morocco and Jordan have also sent peacekeepers to NATO-led missions in Bosnia and the United Arab Emirates to Kosovo.
In the Moroccan capital, NATO ambassadors and their southern Mediterranean counterparts will not only discuss progress made over the last decade, but highlight future fields of cooperation -- such as promoting the interoperability of armed forces, combating illegal immigration and sharing classified information with all the dialogue countries, save Egypt. They will also discuss further joint military exercises and ways of managing crisis situations in the Mediterranean region, such as the one that flared up between Spain and Morocco over the latter's invasion of the Perejil Islands in 2002.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Moroccan official said the April 6-7 meeting in Rabat would "send a strong signal on behalf of NATO and the Mediterranean countries that common threats require common responses."
But despite the flurry of activity, there are limits to how much the Mediterranean partnership can achieve. Speaking in Israel last year, de Hoop Scheffer said: "It is fair to say that our dialogue has not achieved its full potential so far. And it is not difficult to guess that the lack of progress in the Middle East peace process has impacted on our relations. As long as this process was stalled, cooperative outreach processes from NATO or the EU's Barcelona Process were going to suffer from a lack of trust."
Francis Ghiles, a senior fellow at the European Institute of the Mediterranean in Barcelona, is also pessimistic about a sea-change in relations between NATO and North African countries as long as the world's most powerful military alliance is viewed as a U.S. proxy.
"Getting the politics right is well-nigh impossible in present circumstances," writes the former Financial Times correspondent in a recent edition of NATO Review. "At least, NATO might try and convince Arabs -- including those who have become citizens of France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and other Allies -- that the Alliance will not, at some point in the future, inevitably be turned against them. That will be hard enough as it is."
A Moroccan diplomat points out that the bulk of NATO's recent military operations -- Bosnia, Kosovo, Pakistan and Afghanistan -- have been aimed at helping free Muslims from tyranny, misery and bloodshed and misery. But any goodwill engendered by these missions has largely evaporated because of the anger caused by the Iraq war and Washington's failure to prioritize the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.
