Word: assad
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...Navy planes that attacked Syrian positions in Lebanon early Fast week were meant to send a message to the government of President Hafez Assad: for every Syrian strike against American forces, such as the previous day's firing on U.S. reconnaissance planes, expect a strike in return. Unfortunately, delivering the message proved costly: two planes lost, one pilot killed, one captured, a Lebanese woman dead in the crash of one of the fighter-bombers. The air attack also sent a number of unintended messages. It told the Lebanese that the U.S. armed forces are neither invincible nor invulnerable. It told...
...Syrians, despite the widely reported but still unexplained illness of President Assad, were determinedly pursuing their objectives in Lebanon and openly boasting about their military prowess in the face of the U.S. air attack. The Egyptians, whose peace treaty with Israel, orchestrated by the U.S. at Camp David, ranks as the most significant diplomatic achievement in the Middle East during the past decade, were publicly expressing shock over Washington's newly proclaimed alignment with Israel. In France, Italy and Britain, critics of those countries' commitments to the MultiNational Force in Lebanon were urging a pullout, though all three U.S. allies...
Though aspirations and methods have been adjusted to the realities of the 1980s, the passion for hegemony lives on in Damascus. Under the shrewd, ruthless, brutally dictatorial guidance of President Hafez Assad, 53, Syria has been making a bid for the past decade to grasp the torch of Arab unity and emerge as the pre-eminent power in the Middle East. By keeping its 62,000 troops in Lebanon and by supporting factions opposed to the government of Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, Syria has become the key player in that fractured country's future. By fueling the raging rebellion within...
...pursuing those goals, Syria is pushing the battle-scarred region perilously close to yet another major war. Even if Syria does not risk confronting the U.S. as directly as it did in the skies over Lebanon last week, Assad has forced both the U.S. and the Soviet Union to become more deeply and more dangerously entwined in the Middle East muddle than perhaps either superpower would like. After its humiliating rout by Israeli forces during their 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon, Syria has rebuilt its stock of military hardware to even greater levels with help from its chief sponsors...
Yasser Arafat's brigades from the Lebanese capital, Assad has helped keep U.S. forces mired there far longer than Washington anticipated. Faced with an Israeli-Lebanese accord that provided for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon but failed to take account of Syria, Assad responded by stoutly refusing to pull out his own soldiers and by stirring the embers of hatred among the country's myriad factions against Israelis and Americans alike. The Reagan Administration, moreover, is convinced that Syria had prior knowledge of, and perhaps even masterminded, the October suicide-bombing of U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut that...