The Arab Leagues decision to cancel Syrias membership with the threat of sanctions should be condemned in all seriousness. It is disturbing that an organisation especially set up to guard the interests of Arab countries is stabbing them in the back. While the Arab League is within its right to urge Syria that it exercise restraint as it copes with protestors and finds a negotiated settlement, it must also appreciate that Syria just like other countries of the Middle East is going through a bad patch. Does that mean isolating it and creating more problems for it? The Syrian Ambassador to the Arab League got it right that the decision was illegal and contrary to the spirit of the Pan Arab organisation, and that the League was subjected to US and Western agendas. There is not one outstanding conflict of the Arab world that the League has resolved. Its stand on the festering issue of Palestine is unsatisfactory. It has been lenient enough with Israel to appease the US. Likewise, it did not take a defiant position on foreign occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan or even now has no roadmap to ensure that they are able to rid themselves of their problems. Instead, as the action against Syria shows, it appears to have become the Arab worlds own enemy. The US and the NATO have, for quite some time, been trying to pressurise and even destabilise the Syrian regime led by President Bashar al-Assad. Recently, President Obama had even made public his plans to dismember the Syrian regime. The Arab League ought to have played the role of a father figure to states caught up in turmoil by warning their common foe, the US, from fishing in their troubled waters. We have the example of Libya, where the US first got the country enmeshed in political unrest, along with its allies bombarded it and then gave military support to the rebels whom it would not have hesitated to dub as terrorists in different circumstances. Now, the US seems all set to zero in on the chance to meddle in Syrias affairs. The Arab League has a right to advise and help Syria in its hour of trial but without taking dictation from the West. Where would the Arab countries go for help? The UN is not an option because it is the West led by the US that calls the shots there.