Word: arabism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...already heavily committed to the defense of Southeast Asia, last week faced a diplomatic crisis and the unsettling possibility of military involvement on a second front. With Arab and Israeli armies massing in the Middle East for a confrontation that could be ignited by inadvertence, another set of American commitments may well be put to the test before long. Said Lyndon Johnson: "To the leaders of all the na tions of the Near East, I wish to say what three Presidents have said before: that the U.S. is firmly committed to the support of the political independence and territorial integrity...
Potentially Disastrous. Initially, the Administration responded to the gathering clouds in the Middle East with an apparent equanimity in keeping with the air of unreality that enveloped the crisis. After all, the Arab-Israeli confrontation had for years been taken for granted as the normal state of affairs. But as tensions mounted and public concern increased in the U.S., the Administration acknowledged that an edgy situation had indeed been transformed into a potentially explosive one. When Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that he was sealing off the Gulf of Aqaba against all Israeli vessels and other ships that...
Coupled with the President's public expression of concern was a blunt, private warning delivered to United Arab Republic officials in Cairo that the U.S. considered the blockade "an act of aggression" and would consider using force to reassert what Johnson called "the right of free, innocent passage" for all ships. Britain strongly hinted that it would do the same...
...week's end the necessity for such a move seemed remote. Despite Nasser's ego-building bellicosity, he does not really seem to want a showdown, for he is well aware that the Arab world is badly fragmented and that Israel's finely honed army could turn back anything less than a concerted assault by all of its neighbors. In this situation, Johnson's strategy is to leave the problem in the U.N.'s lap for as long as possible in the hope that Egypt will somehow find a way to disimpale itself from...
...Cairo, Nasser's own two sons volunteered for military service, inspired not only by their father's swollen rhetoric but by the martial music that suddenly took the place of whiny Arab folk songs on Radio Cairo. The absentee-prone Lebanese parliament, perhaps the world's most unmartial body, became so incensed that it took the warlike step of ending its emergency session with a wildly off-key singing of the national anthem. National Guardsmen in Da mascus had a fine time stopping all traffic on the city's wide boulevards and ordering everyone to take...