Dabbling in Chaos

Nikita Khruschev's most menacing finger was pointed at Turkey, which was obviously the place where he hoped that it would produce the most effect."The ruling circles c-f the U.S.," he told Timesman Reston, ".are virtually pushing Tur key against Syria. Turkey is even laying bare parts of her frontier with the Soviet Union ... I tell Dulles and [Ambassador Loy] Henderson that it is easy to start a war but far more difficult to stop it.."

Ever since the Syrians made their arms deal with Russia, Turkey has been nervously watching its southern frontier, has sent troops estimated to equal an army corps to "maneuver" near the Syrian bor der. Last week patrols exchanged shots for 45 minutes across the frontier. At week's end, to add to the tension, Egypt announced that "basic elements" of its air, sea and naval forces had arrived at the port of Latakia to bolster Syrian defenses.

Moving into this taut situation with the touch of a blustering gamesman, Khrushchev put himself in a position to boast that only his timely threats had saved Syria from the terrible Turks. For most Arabs know that the seedy Syrian army constitutes no match for Turkey's 500,000 formidable soldiers. To the aroused Arabs, it seemed all too likely that the Turks were eager to take on the job of policing the Middle East for the Western powers.

But the U.S. is unalterably opposed to any such scheme -- if only because revival of the hated Ottoman Empire, even in polite 20th century form, would surely set the Arab world aflame.

Khrushchev's threats took shrewd ad vantage of a moment which found the U.S.'s Middle East position in temporary disarray. In its attempts to rouse the area to the threat presented by a Communist-dominated Syria, the U.S. had displayed its power too nakedly, set Arab leaders off in a whipped-up frenzy of public denunciation of U.S. interference and pledges of confidence in Syria. As a result the bloc of "reasonable Arabs" -- Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia -- which the U.S. hoped to solidify had fallen into suspicious disorder. Jordan's King Hussein, plagued by a $20 million deficit in his army budget and under fire for his close involvement with the U.S., nervously shot off last week to an oil pumping station on the Iraqi-Jordanian border to ask the aid of his royal cousin, King Feisal of Iraq. Arabia's King Saud, even as he conferred with Lebanon's President Camille Chamoun over ways and means of restoring reason to the aroused Arab nationalists, felt obliged to have his embassies through out the Mideast issue a denial that he had ever accepted the Eisenhower Doc trine.

All this was grist to Khrushchev's mill.

"Many Arabs are very remote from Communist ideas," he conceded. "Is Nasser a Communist? Certainly not. But nevertheless we support Nasser. This is coexistence." Whatever the consequences of his diplomatic weight-throwing, Khrushchev did not care, as long as he helped perpetuate fear, suspicion and chaos in the Middle East.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.