Come to the Fair

In Damascus this week the big news was the opening of the fair. The U.S.--which made a great success at the Damascus Fair three years ago with Cinerama--concluded that Cinerama was not enough to save Syria from Soviet penetration, and was not represented. It was left to exhibits from nine Communist countries to dominate the fairgrounds.

If the Russians were trying to put on a show in Syria, it was a show of correct innocence. "Not a single Soviet soldier, apart from the military attache, has been or is now in Syria,'' said Moscow radio, and to make the story more credible, T-34 tanks were withdrawn from conspicuous posts on the road to Damascus. Western correspondents suddenly found the offices of Syrian political and military leaders more accessible than in years, as if to prove all the earlier headlines untrue. The Syrian government, worried by the abrupt ups and downs of its currency, sought to reassure conservative Syrian businessmen that a leftist government in power need not mean expropriation. Three Syrian trade officials flew off to Moscow, anxious to justify the press stories of bountiful Soviet aid "without strings attached." They took with them ambitious requests for Soviet rubles to build roads, railroads and a Euphrates irrigation dam to rival those that Iraq is building downstream with its oil royalties. Now would be seen how much Soviet Russia intended to do for the Syrian people, beyond making their country an arms dump.

The hubbub set off among Syria's neighbors by the rise to power of the pro-Soviet clique continued to echo. "Turkey has been selected by Washington to launch a military intervention against Syria," proclaimed Communist Peking, and added that the U.S. intends "to isolate Egypt by forming a Mediterranean alliance consisting of a number of North African states, with Spain as its center." Actually, U.S. plans were considerably less grand than that. Washington's Middle East Expert Loy Henderson had been sent off to consult with Arab rulers and the Turks largely because the Turks, in particular, thought that the U.S. was taking too complacent an attitude about Syria. The U.S. is intent on staying in the background and keeping an Arab label on any anti-Syrian moves. But it is speeding arms deliveries by air to Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

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