Doha  - Arab League summits often go like a bad wedding party. Everything begins grandly, but then rapidly slides into farce. Either one erratic leader storms out at a perceived slight, or another bores everyone else to sleep. Now and then the guests call each other names.

But on Monday, when the two-day summit begins in the Sheraton Hotel in the Qatari capital of Doha, a little more interest should be expected. The summit promises to be one of the most crucial Arab League gatherings in recent years, and one of the most controversial.

Part of the issue is in the venue. Doha is the seat of a monarchy under Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, who has ruffled feathers in the Arab world of late with a daring diplomatic outreach to so-called "extremist" forces, such as Iran, Syria and the militant Palestinian movement, Hamas.

That outreach has angered the other supposed camp in the Arab world, the "moderates" - such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak has already said he won't attend the summit, not least because Doha is also the seat of al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite TV channel that gets under the skin of Arab dictators from Riyadh to Rabat.

Adding to the potential strife is the fact that one of the invited participants, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague for war crimes, and an arrest warrant for him has now been issued.

Although Bashir has recently flaunted his supposed freedom to travel despite the warrant, his appearance in Doha is still in doubt - and will prove highly distracting if it occurs.

The December-January war between Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has deepened long-standing rifts between Arab states to the extent that some observers opine that things can hardly get any worse, and this summit is a make-or-break meeting.

Abdullah al-Shayji, professor of International Relations at Kuwait University wrote recently in an article for the UAE's Gulf News that "disunity and fragmentation have bedeviled the Arab political structure and allowed non-Arab countries, such as Israel, Iran and even Turkey, to advance their interests, designs and agendas through soft and hard power at the expense of Arab national interests."

"Are we at the dawn of a new, lasting Arab alignment? Or is this just wishful thinking?" al-Shayji asked.

Al-Shayji called on the Arab states to present a unity front now that a new administration has taken office in Washington.

But the splits between the states that are seen as pragmatic and pro-western (the "moderates") and those that are either nationalistic or Islamist ("the extremists") is great.

Arab diplomats estimate that the gulf is in fact too great for the Arab League to be able to master the current challenges coherently. In Somalia anarchy rules. The rival Palestinian factions have yet to conclude a meaningful deal for a unity government. A right-wing government, comprised of long-standing enemies of a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, is about to take over.

The only source of good news since the last Arab League summit in Damascus is the improved security situation in Iraq. Iraq, however, is an exception in more ways than one. Instead of the official head of the Iraqi state, Jalal Talabani, travelling to attend the summit, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will be there. The first, of course, is a Kurd, the latter, an Arab. (dpa)