Egypt Moves to Avert Crisis in U.S.-Arab Ties

Egyptian Foreign Minister Esmat Abdel Meguid flew to Washington on Sunday hoping to avert a crisis in U.S.-Arab ties and reassert Cairo’s role as the Middle East’s leading moderate.

Western and Arab diplomats said that the visit, a day after Presidents Hosni Mubarak and George Bush spoke on the telephone, signals that Washington has not closed the door on Mideast peace efforts despite its suspension of dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Bush wants to bolster Egypt’s standing among Arab states, with whom its influence has waned as Middle East peace hopes have faltered in recent weeks, the diplomats said.

“Egypt is the voice of moderation in the Middle East. It is still the main backer of (Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s) peace plan, and the U.S. is not going to abandon Egypt by any means,” a Western diplomat said.

“Something seems to be moving. Perhaps the Egyptians are trying to persuade Bush to compensate for what he did,” the diplomat said.

He was referring to Bush’s decision Wednesday to suspend 18 months of talks with the PLO because it failed to directly condemn an abortive guerrilla raid on Israel’s coast May 30 by a PLO faction.

“Meguid’s visit could just be a gesture. Egypt would like to salvage the U.S.-PLO dialogue, but . . . it is unlikely Washington will reverse its decision,” said another diplomat.

Egypt, the only Arab state with ties to Israel, tried for months to persuade the Jewish state and Palestinians to hold their first direct talks, as Baker has proposed.

But in March, Israel’s coalition government collapsed over Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s refusal to back the plan. Shamir now heads a new rightist administration that is even more hostile to the PLO.

On Sunday, the PLO called for an extraordinary meeting of Arab League foreign ministers “because of the war of extermination Israel is waging against the Palestinians of the occupied territories,” the official Palestinian News Agency WAFA said.