Word: assads
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...would choose the sword so soon after the end of Iraq's eight-year conflict with Iran. In fact, Saddam's bellicosity ("O God almighty, be witness that we have warned them") was barely noted. The big news from the Middle East was the possibility that Syria's Hafez Assad might finally be serious about negotiating with Israel's Yitzhak Shamir...
Baker arrived in Israel again last week after a visit to Syria, where he picked up President Hafez Assad's formal acceptance of Washington's proposal for a conference. Jordan and Lebanon had also quickly fallen into line. Egypt was on board from the start, and Saudi Arabia and the gulf states had promised to join talks on regional problems such as water supplies and arms control...
None of which necessarily means that a conference will meet anytime soon. At least one of Assad's motives was to put the onus of blocking peace squarely upon Israel, should Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's government balk at accepting the same terms. Shamir is alert to that danger, but he is far from avid for a peace conference...
...Even so, Assad's move underlines the extent to which once unfriendly countries are concluding that it is prudent to please the U.S., the world's sole remaining superpower. The Syrian President had long been a client of the Soviet Union and a leader of the rejectionist Arab states that opposed any dealing with Israel. But, American analysts believe, at the end of the gulf war Assad realized he had reached a turning point: he could become the unrivaled leader of Arab radicals -- or he could bid for status among the moderates. Assad decided, as one American diplomat puts...
...letter to George Bush last week, Assad accepted two U.S. ideas: that the United Nations send only an observer to the peace conference (Syria had originally wanted the U.N. to play a major role) and that, after the conference had broken up into bilateral talks between Israel and individual Arab states, it reconvene only if the participants agree. Israel in effect could veto resumption of the full conference...