Word: meto
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Britain, fed up with trying to please or appease Egypt, decided that proven friends are best, and made a big fuss over its new Baghdad pact (METO) partners, particularly its old partner-in-oil Iraq. By proving that it pays, militarily and economically, to be friends, the British hope to recruit as another METO prospect, Jordan, whose national budget and Arab Legion they underwrite at the rate of $24 million a year. The British are determined to show Egypt's Nasser that flirting with Communists is not the way to get arms or anything else from the West. The British...
France, which grudgingly left Syria and Lebanon in 1946, has misgivings about British ascendancy in the Middle East, deplores METO, and would like to reassert its old influence in its lost territories.* Therefore, France works to help the other half of the Arab world: three weeks ago it resumed arms shipments to Egypt. Egypt reciprocated by ceasing its own fiery broadcasts to the Moslems of French North Africa (while persisting in stirring up hatred against the British by broadcasts beamed at the Sudan, Kenya and Uganda...
...METO adds only the forces of Iraq and Iran-and a defense position...
...would mean abandoning to the invader most of Iran's territory, nearly two-thirds of its population, and Teheran itself. Not unreasonably, Hussein Ala objected. Iran, he warned, proposed to defend "every inch" of its territory. In other words, Iran was not interested in providing the site of METO's rampart if most of Iran was left outside...
...METO nations had declared their trust in the West-and that was perhaps the greatest importance of the Baghdad meeting. In the end, METO will be strong or weak in the exact degree that the West is willing to make...