Word: hafez
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While the Bush Administration concentrates mainly on winning a military victory, other nations in the region are keenly interested in the shape of postwar Iraq. The country's three northern neighbors -- Syria, Turkey and Iran -- may have designs on Iraq. Syria's President Hafez Assad has long claimed to be the sole legitimate leader of the Pan-Arab Ba'ath Party, rival factions of which rule his country and Saddam's. Turkey has historical claims on Iraq's oil-rich Mosul province in the north. And Shi'ite-led Iran could easily justify a land snatch as a means...
SYRIA. Before the gulf crisis, Hafez Assad was most closely associated in Western capitals with major-league terrorism abroad and savage repression at home. Since he contributed 19,000 troops to the anti-Saddam front, however, Assad has become a comrade-in-arms. President Bush held talks with him last November in Geneva, becoming the first U.S. President since Jimmy Carter, in 1977, to meet with the Syrian leader. Meanwhile, Britain restored diplomatic ties and the European Community resumed economic...
...only way to produce a "better" outcome, i.e., one which is less threatening to us, is to continue to kill people, completely annihilate Iraq, and set up a government that fits our precise specifications. The longer we need to hold together a coalition that includes men like Syrian leader Hafez AlAssad, an easy rival of Hussein in the inhumanity sweepstakes, the more we encourage exactly the brutality against which we are fighting in Iraq...
Early risers in Damascus these days are treated to what is ordinarily an unthinkable sight in the Syrian capital: antigovernment graffiti. LONG LIVE SADDAM HUSSEIN, one scrawler proclaimed recently in a bold protest against President Hafez Assad's participation in the U.S.-led alliance against Saddam. The inscriptions are quickly erased, but government authorities know that all the whitewash in the world cannot obliterate the sentiment they express. "To be anti-U.S. and pro-Arab nationalism is what people in Syria have been groomed for, and it's very difficult to shake off," says a Western diplomat in Damascus...
...President, while supporting Bush in principle in private, wanted to be sure the Arab nations were on board. "Everybody takes comfort from everybody else," explained a White House aide. Bush laid on an extra stop in Geneva at the end of his trip to talk to Syria's President Hafez Assad, in part to try to ease Gorbachev's doubts...