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The common denominator of all these unholy alliances is the old Arabic proverb, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." The Saudi princes fear Khomeini's antimonarchist Islamic revolution, so they side with Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein wants to succeed the Shah as the principal power in the gulf, so he seeks to destroy what is left of the Shah's military machine and ingratiate himself with the conservative gulf states, who then might accept Iraqi hegemony. Syria's Assad feels threatened by Iraq so he allies himself with Iraq's enemy, Iran. Assad strings Gaddafi along on the mostly rhetorical "merger" because Libya has a huge supply of Soviet arms that Syria may need to supplement its own in case of war with Iraq—and also because Gaddafi, in exchange for Syrian cooperation in the merger charade, has pulled back help from Assad's other enemies.
Perhaps most convoluted are the motivations of Jordan's King Hussein. He too fears the contagion of Khomeini's revolution, particularly if it were to spread to Iraq, which has a Shi'ite majority and is on Jordan's own borders. Also, there is some evidence that Hussein wants to re-establish himself as a spokesman for the Palestinian residents of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which was ruled by Jordan until the 1967 Middle East war. Hussein bitterly recalls how other Arab leaders humiliated him at the 1974 Rabat summit by designating the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. Although he dare not challenge the P.L.O. directly, the King would like to play a major part in some future round of peace negotiations. That means regaining the good will and, if possible, the gratitude of other key Arab leaders, notably the Saudis, the gulf sheiks and the region's self-proclaimed new protector, Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Says Amos Perlmutter, an Israeli expert at Washington's American University, who has served as an occasional adviser to Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign: "The King has made a big difference. He has made it possible for Saddam Hussein to create a new Middle East axis of Iraq-Saudi Arabia-Jordan to replace the old axis of Iran-Saudi Arabia-Egypt. That old one fell apart when the Shah collapsed and Anwar Sadat isolated himself by signing the Camp David treaty. That left a vacuum, which Saddam Hussein, with a lot of help from King Hussein, is now trying to fill."
For all the participants, and for many of the bystanders as well, this welter of perishable alliances and far more durable antagonisms is fraught with risks. King Hussein has complicated his already strained relations with the various Palestinian guerrilla organizations by siding with Iraq against Iran. The Palestinian groups saw the late Shah as their own enemy because he maintained relations with, and supplied oil to Israel; they back Khomeini because he cut off the oil shipments to Israel and turned the official Israeli mission building in Tehran over to the P.L.O.
King Hussein has been providing the Iraqis with more than just moral support and an overland resupply route from the Jordanian port of Aqaba on the Red Sea. TIME has learned that he has also secretly sent antiaircraft weapons to Iraq to help against the Iranian air force.