Word: assads
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...boycott ringleader was Syria, which feared that it would be censured in Amman for backing non-Arab Iran against Arab Iraq. For nearly a decade, Syrian President Hafez Assad has feuded on and off with Iraqi Strongman Saddam Hussein. So great is Assad's anti-Baghdad antagonism that he was willing to risk isolation in the Arab world with his support of Iran. The fact that the summit was in Jordan, Iraq's staunchest Arab ally, also displeased Assad...
Your article could be the outline of a political soap opera. What is Assad's real motive in his friendship with Gaddafi? Can Saddam Hussein pull enough strings to promote his own desires for power? What is the true relationship between King Hussein and the P.L.O.? Was there any hanky-panky at the last office party between Brezhnev and Assad...
There is piquant historical irony in the burgeoning partnership between Iraqi Strongman Saddam Hussein and Jordan's King Hussein. The King's cousin, King Faisal II of Iraq, was slaughtered by the Iraqi military in 1958. Hafez Assad's Syria has negotiated a phony "merger" with Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, even though Gaddafi until recently was suspected of financing the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, an underground organization dedicated to the assassination of Assad's fellow Alawites, members of a minority Muslim sect that controls the Damascus regime, and in 1976 Gaddafi sent his guerrillas into Lebanon to fight alongside Palestinians...
...they side with Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein wants to succeed the Shah as the principal power in the gulf, so he seeks to destroy what is left of the Shah's military machine and ingratiate himself with the conservative gulf states, who then might accept Iraqi hegemony. Syria's Assad feels threatened by Iraq so he allies himself with Iraq's enemy, Iran. Assad strings Gaddafi along on the mostly rhetorical "merger" because Libya has a huge supply of Soviet arms that Syria may need to supplement its own in case of war with Iraq?and also because Gaddafi...
...that relationship is still not as strong or as binding as Syria's Assad would have liked. Some Arab diplomats said they expected Assad to come home from Moscow with a "super treaty" obligating the U.S.S.R. to provide Syria with unlimited military aid and perhaps even to intervene on Syria's behalf in a Middle East war. But the Soviets refused to commit themselves that far. By limiting their obligations to Syria, they hoped to minimize the fear and resentment the pact has inevitably evoked in Jordan and Iraq. In addition, the Soviets recognize that as long as Assad...