Word: assad
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...Maghdousheh, 25 miles south of Beirut. In retaliation, Shi'ite militiamen mounted a tank-and-artillery attack on the Shatila refugee camp south of Beirut. Arafat promptly appealed to Arab leaders to help stop the "dangerous and beastly aggression," which he blamed on another old enemy, Syrian President Hafez Assad...
Syria, on the other hand, regards the return of Arafat's P.L.O. as bad news. Beset by economic problems and rising Western opposition to Syrian-sponsored terrorism, Assad still wants to dominate both Lebanon and the Palestinians. In resisting Assad's efforts, Arafat is working to reunite the Palestinian factions, though he suspects that the Damascus-based groups may demand his ouster as the cost of reconciliation, and he is not ready to pay that price. Meanwhile, he flits restlessly around the Middle East, directing and planning the comeback of the P.L.O. Still, after four years in the political wilderness...
...episodes to fill), but for people, not politics. 24's ideology--Jack Bauerism, if you will--is not so much in between left and right as it is outside them, impatient with both A.C.L.U. niceties and Bushian moral absolutes. This season, Bauer allies with Hamri al-Assad, a (putatively) reformed terrorist leader, to stop an attack. He thus displays a better grasp of realpolitik than has the Bush Administration, which resisted the Iraq Study Group's recommendation to work with Iran and Syria. A fellow agent asks Bauer if it matters that al-Assad has murdered hundreds of people...
...Saddam's hanging has removed the last Arab strongman willing to fight the fundamentalists in the name of Arab secularism. (The sole remaining candidate is Syrian President Bashar Assad, but his lack of military clout and key alliance with the non-Arab Islamic Republic of Iran undermine his claim to the mantle.) Nor is there much prospect that liberal Arabs will present a new, democratic alternative any time soon. Instead, in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, the future increasingly belongs to the Islamic fundamentalists. Judging by the escalating conflicts in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories as well...
...much as he knew how to manipulate power in Iraq through propaganda and government-sponsored terror, he was inept at international relations and diplomacy. His enemies abroad were myriad. Certainly, he and Assad's regime in Damascus were not friendly, despite the political genetics that linked their ruling parties. But he was also an enemy of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian cleric who had fled the Shah's persecution and sought refuge in Iraq's holy Shi'a city of Najaf in 1965. Saddam did not make it a comfortable stay and Khomeini moved on to exile in Europe. When...