Word: arabism
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...dream was short-lived. Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser emerged as the personification of Arab nationalism after surviving the Israeli-British-French attack in the Suez Crisis of 1956. But his empty threats led to the disastrous Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel seized huge chunks of Syrian, Jordanian as well as Egyptian territory in a lightning strike...
...American Apache with his old gun?" Saddam was calling attention to what he called Iraq's heroic resistance. He was inadvertently acknowledging that the defense of his regime had been put into the hands of a grizzled old peasant armed with a hunting rifle. So much for uniting the Arabs, for developing the first Arab A-bomb, for "burning half of Israel," for winning the Mother of All Battles, for all the grand promises that Saddam made and could never keep...
...understand the despair and anger sweeping the Middle East, you have to realize that American tanks in Baghdad symbolize something bigger that just the fall of Saddam: the collapse of Arab nationalism...
...Arab nationalism has been wilting almost since it first blossomed during the Ottoman Empire. Britain and France disappointed the Arabs - betrayed, Arabs would say - by preventing the establishment of true Arab independence after World War I. The Arab defeat in their 1948 war to prevent the emergence of Israel had promoted an increasingly militant variety of Arab nationalism. Young army officers - Saddam's heroes - overthrew the old order in a succession of coups in key countries such as Syria, Egypt and Iraq...
...Saddam strove to overcome those disgraces by using Iraq's vast oil wealth to build the Arabs a formidable military machine. His rule was the product of a nationalist ideology that sought to liberate the Arab world by brutally controlling its people: Iraq's ruling Ba'ath party was founded in 1947 to promote an Arab renaissance throughout the Middle East. Saddam turned Iraq's branch of that party into a front organization serving his Tikrit family mafia and his own Stalinist cult of personality. And that inevitably produced the bungling that led Iraq into the disastrous wars with Iran...