Word: arab
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...military intervention in an all-out attempt to enforce a long-elusive Pax Syriana. Instead of calming the situation, the move at first brought Damascus into bloody conflict with its erstwhile ally, the Palestinian guerrilla movement, and forced it into an unwanted, possibly only temporary, compromise in which other Arab states are sending token forces into Lebanon...
...week's end the Syrian initiative seemed to have brought the conflict to a new stage. As Arab troops from several countries began to arrive in Lebanon, the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) announced that a ceasefire had been arranged in Beirut and that Syria would begin a phased withdrawal of its forces. By week's end, Damascus had not confirmed any agreement to a ceasefire, and no observers in the Middle East thought that the Syrians were about to pull out more than a token number of their forces. Nonetheless, reports from Beirut indicated that the fighting...
...Syrian President Hafez Assad's decision to force a solution in Lebanon gave the conflict a potentially more dangerous dimension than it had had during the 14 months of fighting between Lebanese leftists, who are allied with the Palestinians, and Christian rightists. The Syrian incursion openly brought several Arab regimes into an arena in which they had all along been playing covert and opposing roles. There was thus the danger that Lebanon would remain a theater of quarrels between the moderate and radical Arab states now directly intervening in the country. The rightist Christians in Lebanon, meanwhile, were distrustful...
...with limited forces, firmly convinced the Lebanese left that Syria's sympathies lay with Lebanon's hard-pressed Christian rightists. For the bulk of Yasser Arafat's P.L.O., it seemed incontrovertible proof that Damascus was intent on emasculating the fedayeen in their last haven in the Arab world, as part of a more subtle movement toward an eventual wider settlement with Israel. As the Palestinians saw it, a "final confrontation" was brewing, the equivalent of King Hussein's bloody Black September suppression of the fedayeen in Jordan six years...
...Palestinian plot of which the fedayeen have been accusing Syria, Israel and the U.S., Washington sources were quick to deny any complicity. "We could not have figured this one out if we had tried to, and we have people working day and night," said a top U.S. analyst. "The Arabs did it all by themselves." Washington officials said that Syria had not consulted the U.S. about its intentions, nor did the U.S. have anything to do with Syria's decision to increase its forces. State Department sources claimed that U.S. leverage was limited in an intra-Arab struggle, that...