Word: arabization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Said, who was an officer in T. E. Lawrence's World War I desert army against the Turks, pushed the treaty through Iraq's parliament. Turkey's National Assembly ratified it unanimously. Since Turkey is a member of NATO, Iraq became the first of the Arab League states to join the pro-Western chain of alliances...
Moscow denounced the pact as "a stab in the back" for the Arab League countries. The U.S., which had carefully taken no hand in the negotiations, was pleased. The pact strengthens the Middle East's "northern tier" (the defense line from Turkey to Pakistan). Pakistan, hitherto isolated on the northern tier's right wing, exulted. "It's good to be a bridge instead of feeling like a chasm," said a Pakistan official. The Pakistani were talking of including Iran too, which like Turkey and Pakistan is Moslem but not Arab...
...Arabs were miffed-particularly Egypt, which has long fancied itself the leader of the Arab world and wants to keep the Arab world uncommitted for now in the cold war. Egypt's pique at Iraq's "betrayal" was shared most loudly by oil-rich Saudi Arabia, whose ruling Al Saud family hates Iraq's Hashemite royal house. Some other members of the Arab League-notably Jordan and Lebanon-are eying the Turkish-Iraqi pact furtively, and under the right circumstances might be persuaded to join. Iraq's bold step has all but finished the Arab League...
With Lawrence the man thus disposed of, Biographer Aldington proceeds to attack his place in history by denying 1) that Lawrence played a major part in the Arab revolt in the desert, and 2) that the revolt itself was a significant aspect of the war. "All the preliminaries which led to the rebellion," he writes, "occurred before Lawrence ever reached Cairo, [and they] would certainly have occurred if Lawrence had never existed...
...them professed to have long known that Lawrence was illegitimate, but based their objections on the propriety of saying so while his 93-year-old mother was still alive. Most of them also conceded that Lawrence was an incorrigible ham, who loved to posture and pose in his outlandish Arab regalia and often embroidered the truth. "Finding they wouldn't believe it," Lawrence himself once wrote a friend, "I told them lies." The ire of Aldington's critics was directed far less at the existence of sordid facts concerning their hero than at the brutal and relentless...