Word: arabists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...main parties will sit idle and permit the Council of State to serve out the two remaining years of Bendjedid's aborted five-year term. There is also no guarantee that the army rank and file, more than half of whom are draftees, will support the military leadership. French Arabist Francois Burgat predicts that the army maneuver will be viewed as an attempt by a select group of officers to hold on to their privileges while Algeria sinks further into economic decay. "I would not be surprised to see factions of the army break away and begin fighting the officers...
Primakov, an Arabist and a member of the Academy of Sciences, is the first civilian to head the KGB's spy network. He vows to civilize intelligence gathering and make it "scientific." The days of "people in gray coats standing on corners," he says, will be replaced by a focus on fighting terrorism, the drug traffic and the proliferation of nuclear weapons...
...fearful of Syria's strengthened presence, may react with greater intransigence, wielding the hostages as protection against Syrian reprisals. Because of their high profile, Terry Waite and Terry Anderson, the best-known hostages, may be the last to walk free. But at least, notes Sir Anthony Parsons, a British Arabist and a former ambassador to Iran, "everybody is facing in the same direction." And that is surely the most promising sign to emerge from the hostage madness in a long time...
PREDICTABLY, Mr. Ben-Gacem's failure to reason beyond the bounds of the Pan-Arabist discourse leads him to the tenuous conclusion that Arabs sympathetic to Saddam's destructive Pan-Arabism "never betrayed" the Kuwaitis; rather, they simply followed a "fake" version of the doctrine...
Thus, two almost indistinguishable Pan-Arabist doctrines lead to diametrically opposed outcomes: Mr. Ben-Gacem's to a Saladinesque Arab utopia, and Saddam's to the wholesale destruction of Kuwait and, consequently, Iraq. In short, Pan-Arabism is a destructive political theory because it bills itself as a moral imperative without regard to the morality of its consequences...