Word: baath
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...repaid with poor political performance. A trend to the right set in. Nasser began mending his fences with the U.S. A moderate Prime Minister, Abdel Rahman Bazzaz, took over in Iraq. Yemen's little war cooled off, and even in steaming Syria the moderate wing of the socialist Baath Party seized the initiative from the extremists. So Moscow's new men, concluding that Nikita might not have been all wrong, have started the rubles flowing again...
...long-turbulent Syria, no one has yet been able to topple the ruling Baath (Renaissance) Party. To be sure, there has been a dizzying chain of uprisings within the governing hierarchy itself, but they always left the top man intact: Strongman Amin Hafez, 43. Last week the party went through its 15th major reshuffle since seizing power in 1963. Only this time, Hafez himself was shuffled right...
...important pro-Hafez army garrison in the north was still holding out at week's end, but nevertheless the rebels went on the air to call themselves "the provisional command of the Baath Party," and termed the coup a party affair to "correct" a situation that "threatened to impose a dictatorial regime on the country." As their chief of state, they named Noureddin Attassi, a Jadid-style leftist and Hafez' onetime second-incommand. As Premier, they appointed -once again-Youssef Zayyen...
...Hafez officers-counting on Syria's notoriously poor telephone and telegraph communications to keep the word from reaching the capital 90 miles away. The news got back anyway, and the conspiratorial commanders were arrested. In a ten-hour showdown behind closed doors, Hafez retained the support of Baath's eleven-member "International Command," made up of Lebanese, Iraqis and Jordanians as well as Syrians, and Jadid ducked underground...
Picked to form a new government last week, replacing the pro-Jadid Premier Youssef Zayyen, was Salah Bitar, 53, Baath co-founder who holds that "to take Marxism as an absolute and comprehensive ideology conflicts with the Arab revolution, which is basically nationalist." Syria would remain socialist, if somewhat less stridently. Abroad this would mean happier relations with its moderating socialist as well as non-socialist Arab neighbors (last week Damascus received an envoy from Kuwait to renew negotiations for a $56 million Kuwaiti loan), and at home a better break for what remains of Syria's long-beleaguered...