Random picture...

Assembled Arab 'leaders" at the recent Doha (Qatar) summit, picture taken at the closing summary, with the "leaders' lined up in front of a row of flags... By happenstance things lined up so that it looked like a number of them wearing dunce caps. How appropriate!

" Hosni Mubarak has now skipped two summits in a row, without even bothering to provide an official explanation (even if his efforts to convince others to stay away failed miserably). Jordan's King Abdullah reportedly went home early because he was upset that he wasn't met by the Emir at the airport (of such stuff is high politics made in the Arab world). Much of the summit was overshadowed by the pyrotechnics between Moammar Qaddafi and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, and the Qatari Emir's efforts to smooth over the public spat. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki seems to have gone home empty-handed after the Saudi King refused to meet with him, nobody agreed to cancel debt, and the vacuous official statement declined to include boilerplate praise for improved Iraqi security or democracy. Hamas issued a statement complaining that the Summit did nothing for the Palestinians and ignored the threat posed by Netanyahu. (And that's not even getting into the support for Omar Bashir, which I'll write more about later.) Above all, the Doha summit simply punted on all of the major issues facing the region. No effort was made to deal with Palestinian divisions, as Hamas was kept away. No effort was made to deal with disagreements over Iran, as Ahmedenejad was kept away out of deference to Saudi and other Gulf sensibilities and Iranian issues were kept out of the final statement. No real effort was made to overcome the persistent gap between the moderate and resistance camps, despite all of those efforts for the last two months..."

The end of Arab summits?