Word: syrian
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...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...
...aloofness is mutual, and for good reason: it is not easy to forget Assad's actions, like the 1982 massacre of some 20,000 civilians in the Syrian town of Hama while routing out Muslim fundamentalists, and his sponsorship of terrorists. "Assad's grisly record makes him unfit to serve as anything more than a temporary and tactical ally," says Daniel Pipes, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia...
...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...
...region. An Iraqi-Israeli battle, for example, would entail massive violations of Jordanian airspace, confronting King Hussein with a critical dilemma. Diplomatic sources say Jordan and Israel have held secret contacts to clarify their positions. Israeli officials, who are acutely aware that any confrontation with Jordan could prompt Syrian intervention, stress that Israel will strike Jordanian air defenses only if Israeli planes are first attacked by King Hussein's jets. For now, Israeli strategists assume that King Hussein will lie low. Given the sympathy for Iraq among Jordanians, that might not be easy...
...planning to go to Greece. Not the perfect spot, given the Papandreou government's sympathy for the P.L.O., but it would do. Fearing that the Greeks would be reluctant to take legal action against Rashid, the American embassy told them only that a man carrying a fake Syrian passport would be landing at Athens airport on May 30. "The Greeks were happy to arrest him," says a former official directly involved in the case. "Once he was in custody, we told them it was Rashid. They said, 'Oh, shit...