The following undated audio tape details a meeting between Saddam Hussein and High‐ranking officers. 00‐54 minutes contain the following subjects: Saddam spoke regarding Iraq's past difficult situations, the Iraq‐Iran war, and the Iraqi use of helicopters. The transfer of Lieutenant General Hamid, who was in the Air force and now in the General Command. An unknown officer reported to Saddam the army's status in the battlefield (Translator Comment: Probably Iran‐Iraq War). " Saddam asked a person called Ahmad about his opinion regarding Al‐Faw and Ahmad reported to Saddam what happened there. " Lieutenant General Nizar spoke about the Liberation War, Tawklna 'Ala Allah war, and the Iranian Army. " Concerns from the Iraqi Army and the Military Intelligence to conceal plans and intentions from the United States.   Discussions on Saddam's orders regarding retaking the Al‐Faw.

This audio file from a meeting dated 1 May 1991 between Saddam Hussein and the General Command of the Army regarding the enlargement of the Army, the political changes which affect the Army and its training. Saddam Hussein admired the forming of the Republican Guards groups, soldeirs who participated in Qadissyah Saddam (Iran-Iraq War). In addition, this file includes a discussion regarding the invasion of Kuwait and the low morale of Iraqi soldiers, the American request to cease-fire because of the Iraqi soldiers' brevity, the gradual erosion of Iraqi morale on the front, and the increase of Divisions' numbers within the Army. Major General Sultan discussed the use of high-technology weapons by the American forces in the First Gulf War.

This 97 minute audio file comes from a meeting between Saddam Hussein and some other Iraqi officials, possibly Ba'ath Party members. During the meeting, Saddam explains to the others his personal philosophies on the difference between the terms "democracy," "freedom," "liberty," and "capitalism."

Contains correspondence between the Army Staff, Military movements Directorate and leadership of military units regarding a speech by Saddam Hussein.

As other documents in this collection on Moroccan nationalists in 1947 and 1950 have exemplified, the United Nations was an important arena in decolonization struggles for Arabs, as it was for Asians and Africans as e.g. Alanna O’Malley’s The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo crisis, 1960-1964 (2018) has shown. In this regard, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964 and taken over by the Fatah movement in 1969, was no exception.

To be sure, Palestinian organizations including Fatah and the PLO decried key UN actions. One was the UN Palestine partition plan of 1947; another was UN Security Council resolution 242 of November 1967. Calling upon Israel to withdraw “from territories occupied” during the Six-Day War in June and calling for the “acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace,” it did not mention Palestine or the Palestinians. Even so, the PLO sought to get access to the UN and UN recognition. A crucial landmark on this road was the address to the UN in New York in November 1974 by Yassir Arafat (1929-2004), a Fatah co-founder in 1959 and from 1969 PLO chairman.

Arafat did not speak at the Security Council, which was and is dominated by its five veto-carrying permanent members Britain, China, France, the United States, and the USSR/Russia. Rather, he addressed the UN General Assembly (UNGA), where from the 1960s Third World states were in the majority; his speech was the first time that the UNGA allowed a non-state representative to attend its plenary session. The UNGA invited the PLO after having decided, in September, to begin separate hearings on Palestine (rather than making Palestine part of general Middle Eastern hearings), and after the PLO was internationally recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, a landmark accomplishment for the organization. The UNGA president who introduced Arafat, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (1937-2021), was the Foreign Minister of Algeria, which since its independence in 1962 had supported the Palestinian cause organizationally, militarily, and politically. Arafat spoke in Arabic; the below text is the official UN English translation. Arafat did not write the text all by himself; several PLO officials and Palestinians close to the PLO, including Edward Said, assisted, as Timothy Brennan has noted in Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (2021). Later in November 1974, the UNGA inter alia decided to give the PLO observer status and affirmed Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

From the 1880s to 1914, about half a million Ottoman citizens from Bilad al-Sham (present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine/Israel) emigrated, principally for economic reasons. A majority were Christians. Most hailed from what after World War I became Lebanon and Syria; some were from Palestine. While some travelled to Africa—a story analyzed in Andrew Arsan’s Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (2014)—a large majority headed to the Americas, where they worked mostly in lower-class professions, soon launched newspapers, and founded numerous local but interlinked migrant societies. Although only few returned permanently, equally few renounced their Ottoman citizenship. Moreover, a good number of emigrants stayed in touch with their place of origin: socially, e.g. through letter exchanges, marriages, and the occasional visit; economically and financially, e.g. through remittances; and politically.

As Stacy Fahrenthold has shown in Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925, political involvement grew after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution in the Ottoman Empire. For one thing, Ottoman freedom of expression improved for a few years; for another, the Young Turk regime hoped to politically recruit migrants for the Ottoman cause, though had little success. Migrants’ own political involvement increased in World War I. A clear majority turned against the Ottoman Empire. This was reflected also in numerous South- and North-American-Syrian journals.

One was the New York-based al-Fatat, whose founder in 1916, Shukri al-Bakhkhash, wrote the below text; he was born in 1889 in Zahle, present-day Lebanon, and arrived in the United States in the early 1910s. Moreover, thousands sought to, and did, join the war as volunteers on the Allied side, organized by Syrian American recruiters across the Western hemisphere. From 1914-17, migrants enlisted in the French and British armed forces and from 1917 also in the US military, fighting in Europe and the Middle East. (Al-Bakhkhash himself enlisted in the US army in 1918.) This was a political act that they and their communities hoped would further Syria’s liberation from Ottoman rule and give Syrians a voice in the postwar world, though they did not quite agree how post-Ottoman Syria would or should look like and whether a (and if yes, which) foreign country—principally, France or the United States—should play a role in it.

America sends warships into Syrian territorial waters, and regional powers calibrate their postures.

A plan emerges to exploit Lebanese uranium ore, and an American diplomat discusses prospects for the Lebanese government, a recent resolution forbidding army supplies, and other regional issues.

The Baath Party gains strength in Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon in its objective to fight colonialism, preserve the current Syrian regime, oppose the Baghdad Pact, and achieve other goals.

An American visit to plan a fight against communism in Jordan has dangerous ramifications, including increased tension between Arab states.