Word: assad
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These days Palestinians celebrate the suicides in newspaper announcements that read, perversely, like wedding invitations. "The Abdel Jawad and Assad families and their relatives inside the West Bank and in the Diaspora declare the martyrdom of their son, the martyr Ahmen Hafez Sa'adat," reads a March 30 notice for the 22-year-old killer of four Israelis in a shooting attack. Palestinian children play a game called "Being a Martyr," in which the "martyr" buries himself in a shallow grave. And the job of bomber comes with established cash bonuses and health benefits for the surviving family. How else...
...Israeli frontier. Compelling the Israelis to mobilize their own army, which would very likely freeze any further action against the Palestinians, would make sense as a piece of military gamesmanship. But strategically it would be catastrophic, because if the Egyptians acted, Syria's young and insecure President Bashar Assad would most likely feel compelled to compete with them by sending his own armored forces--seven divisions with 2,000 tanks--to threaten the Golan frontier. And then even King Abdullah of Jordan, who greatly values his peace treaty with Israel, might come under irresistible pressure from his Palestinian subjects...
...popular enthusiasm to send their own forces to reinforce the frontline states. That would cue Saddam Hussein to demand his opportunity to send armored forces to threaten Israel by marching through Jordan or Syria or both. The King of Jordan would dread such contaminating assistance in his territory, and Assad of Syria too would fear it, but if the rhetorical escalation of the leaders and popular agitation heat up the climate, it might become impossible to deny passage to Iraqi forces in part because they might bring with them the chemical or even biological weapons that evoke the special enthusiasm...
...question of legitimacy is flagrant in Iran, where President Mohammed Khatami and his supporters won all the popular elections but could not win real power, which instead resides with Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. In Syria it seems there is no way out of Hafez Assad's authoritarian legacy. If Saddam Hussein finally falls from power in Iraq, heaven knows who might replace him, so ruthless has he been in suppressing rivals. Yasser Arafat's lack of a mandate has made him unable to make historic decisions in the peace process, so he instead alternates between directions...
...round of diplomacy: the first-ever commitment by NATO to activate Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which considers an attack on one member of the alliance as an attack on all; expressions of solidarity by foreign ministers from Italy to India; a warm letter from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria...