-I THINK I SHOULD ADD A BRIEF PREFACE ABOUT WHAT YOU SEE BELOW.

ON THE ONE HAND, IT WAS A TERM OF REFERENCE OF WHAT I INDICATE HERE.
BECAUSE OF WHAT YOU FIND IF YOU TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE, I ANTICIPATE EXPECTATIONS THAT EVERYTHING I SUBMITTED TO HIM MAY BE OF INTEREST TO EITHER INVESTIGATORS, AUTHORITIES STRUGGLING TO DETERMINE HOW TO PROCEED BEYOND WHAT HAPPENED--OR DIDN'T HAPPEN--AND/OR THE FAMILIES OF THE GRIEVING STRUGGLING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED TO THEIR LOVED ONES INSTEAD.
I DRAW THIS CONCLUSION FROM WHAT YOU FIND IF YOU TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE.

AND WHILE SOME OF THE CONTENTS MAY SEEM NOW OUTDATED OR IRRELEVANT, THERE IS STILL LINGERING TOPICALITY IN THIS WHICH IS EXPLAINED IN THE ADDITIONAL FOOTNOTES BELOW.

By Mark Gayn
Toronto Star

The Arab leaders, he wrote in his Al Okaz, are much like cavalrymen galloping into action while facing backward, so that they are retreating rather than advancing. In fact, he added, it is time to rename the Arab League, which supposedly unites the true believers, into the camp of "Arab Rebelliousness and Revolt."

Egypt's acting foreign minister Butrus Ghali¹ has listed 36 disputes within the so-called "Arab nation." These range from the war of vitriolic words between Libya and Saudi Arabia to the war of words and long daggers between yesterday's warm friends, Iraq and Syria.

The alignments shift as the fears, interests and ambitions change. Libya's Colonel Qaddafi, with the huge oil and gas revenues to finance his operations, dreams of becoming the Fidel Castro of the Middle East. He has long been at war with Egypt. He has financed and armed radical groups from Lebanon to Uganda, and his troops have just moved into Chad (rich in uranium and oil). Some 20 of his army bases are being used to train foreign guerrillas and terrorists.

Just 10 weeks ago, he and Syria's President Assad agreed to join their states in a new one--which is about as real as Brigadoon, and not half as peaceful.

Three weeks ago, Qaddafi turned on a new enemy. In a sermon, he declared that the holy places in Saudi Arabia were under American occupation, and that the hour had come for "a holy war to liberate Mecca." The Saudi king, Khalid, promptly told Qaddafi that "you have turned into a spearhead against Islam and its hold land." Unrepentant, the Libyan called on the Mecca pilgrims to overthrow the Saudi regime.

Iraq's war on Iran--meant to establish Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein as the "protector" of the gulf oil states--has helped to throw all old alignments out of joint.

Saudi Arabia, which until now dreaded the wild-eyed radicals of Iraq and Syria, has decided to join its lot with Iraq. So has Jordan's wily King Hussein. Compelled to choos e between his old patron, Syria, which he never fully trusted, and Iraq, he has now gone into the Iraqi camp, to the point of committing his tiny army to the support of Saddam Hussein's war on Iran.

These new quicksilver alliances are a product of imperial ambitions--or of anxiety. But there are other strains on the unity of the Moslem world. In this volatile grouping of 41 states and some 700 million people,² the poor resent the oil rich, and the radicals, feud with the reactionaries. Where religion should unite them all, in fact, the major branches of Islam are at war with each other.

There are endless and angry border disputes (and an outsider is flabbergasted by the claims the gulf mini-nations have on each other's territory).³ Thus, tiny Abu Dhabi wants half the real estate of the tinier state of Dubai, while Dubai demands a piece of the Sharja emirate. Even the states which repose on vast pools of oil covet their neighbors' oil fields.

Added to all these are the rival pressures and temptations from the two superpowers. Soviet arms and experts are in Syria and Libya; Soviet MiGs and rockets form Iraq's arsenal; and Jordan's King Hussein had barely decided to join Iraq when a high-level Soviet military mission landed in Amman to offer him a full choice of made-in-Russia hardware.

The Americans, in turn, have given arms to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and have let Iran know they would be quite ready to replenish Iran's depleted stockpiles of the arms the Shah acquired⁴--if the holy men in Tehran would only let the 52 American hostages go home.⁵

It is to forestall the use of the Bomb in the Middle East that Israel this week offered its backing for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's proposal to ban nuclear arms in the region. Israel--which probably has a bomb of its own--knows its move to call an anti-nuclear conference will get nowhere, for no Arabs would agree to sit at the same table with the "Zionists."⁶ But, at least, it is a symptom of the deep new anxiety in the Middle East. The leaders of many of the states there are primitives who, once they have the Bomb, may quite easily use it--against Israel or, more likely, against their own Moslem foes.

¹-YES, THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN THE MAN WHO SUBSEQUENTLY BECAME THE UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY-GENERAL.

ONE OF THE DIFFICULTIES I HAVE ALWAYS HAD WITH DOING THOSE ASPECTS OF THIS "INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC WORK...ON A DIRECT BASIS" FOR THE WORLD'S CHILDREN HAS BEEN THE PROBLEM WITH THE VARIATIONS IN SPELLINGS OF NAMES AS A RESULT OF THE TRANSLATION PROCESSES FROM ARABIC, HERBREW, OR FARSI INTO ENGLISH.
I BELIEVE THE SPELLING OF THE DISTINGUISHED EGYPTIAN DIPLOMAT'S NAME IS MORE WIDELY KNOWN TO BE BOUTROS BOUTROS-GHALI.
MY GENERAL PRACTICE IN THE CONTENTS OF MY "INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC WORK...ON A DIRECT BASIS" FOR THE WORLD'S CHILDREN AND THE CONTENTS OF THE AWARD-WINNING WEBSITE HAS BEEN TO REPEAT THE SPELLING USED BY THE AUTHORS OF THE TERMS OF REFERENCE IN ANY PROCESS OF QUOTATION.

IN MY OWN CASE IN THE WORK IN PAST, I USUALLY DID WHAT RESEARCH I WAS ABLE TO IN ORDER TO TRY TO DETERMINE HOW THE PARTICULAR INDIVIDUAL HIMSELF (OR HERSELF) WAS SPELLING HIS (OR HER) NAME IN ENGLISH, AND THEN I WOULD RESPECT THAT.

THERE IS A CASE WHERE THIS DIDN'T WORK, HOWEVER. THE NEW YORK TIMES, I BELIEVE IT WAS, MADE A BIG DEAL AT ONE POINT OF TRYING TO EXPLAIN HOW THEY DECIDED TO SPELL COLONEL QADAFFI'S NAME--HERE SPELLED THE WAY I DECIDED, FROM OBSERVATION OVER THE YEARS, IS THE NOW-MOST WIDESPREAD WAY, ALBEIT NOT THE WAY THAT COLUMNIST MARK GAYN SPELLED IT--SAYING THEY DREW THEIR CONCLUSION FROM A PARTICULAR ACTION HE HAD TAKEN AT SUCH AND SUCH A TIME IN PAST.
BUT THEN ONLY A SHORT WHILE LATER THE MAN RELEASED A DOCUMENT TO THE PRESS AND IT HAD HIS NAME SPELLED DIFFERENTLY THAN THAT.

ALL I CAN SAY ON THIS SUBJECT IS THAT I MEAN NO INSULT TO THE INDIVIDUALS INVOLVED.
I WILL INEVITABLY SPELL THEIR NAMES THE WAY THEY DO THEMSELVES IF I AM (MADE) AWARE OF SAME.

³-OBVIOUSLY MR. GAYN'S 1980 COLUMN ANTICIPATED THE 1991 IRAQI INVASION OF KUWAIT AND ITS ANCILLARY THREATS TO CONTINUE ON INTO SAUDI ARABIA.

⁴-FIRST, ON THIS SUBJECT OF ARMS SALES IN GENERAL, BEAR IN MIND THE THING RE AMERICAN ARMS SALES I CREDIT THEN-PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH (THE SENIOR) WITH IN THE SEQUENCE DETAILED IN FOOTNOTE² OF WHAT YOU FIND IF YOU TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE.

⁵-THIS OBLIGES THAT YOU TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE AND ALSO TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE

⁶-I DON'T HAVE AT HAND A TERM OF REFERENCE CLARIFYING WHAT HAPPENED IN RESPONSE TO THAT NOVEMBER, 1980 PROPOSAL BY (THE NOW LATE) ANWAR SADAT. BUT COMMON SENSE SUGGESTS THAT IT GOT NOWHERE OR ELSE IT WOULD HAVE RECEIVED WIDESPREAD PUBLICITY...AND I KNOW THERE HAS BEEN NONE.

THAT SAID, TO CONSIDER A TERM OF REFERENCE FROM 1990 ABOUT A SIMILAR PROPOSAL--FROM A HIGHLY UNLIKELY SOURCE--AND TO CONSIDER THE ISRAELI RESPONSE TO IT, TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE.

AS FOR MY STATEMENT IN THE PREFACE THAT THERE IS "TOPICALITY" IN THIS 11-YEAR-OLD COLUMN BY MR. GAYN, MAY I ALSO SUGGEST THAT VISITORS TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE, SPEND SOME TIME EVALUATING THOSE TERMS OF REFERENCE, AND CONSIDER HOW THE JORDAN-EGYPT PEACE PLAN MAY BE MORE RELEVANT IN BOTH THE IMMEDIATE- AND LONG-TERM THAN THE SO-CALLED MITCHELL PLAN FOR SETTLING THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN VIOLENCE ONGOING AS I OPEN THIS PAGE IN JUNE, 2001.
WHICH ONE MAKES MORE SENSE IN VIEW OF WHAT YOU FIND IF YOU TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE?