Nudging Time

One dawn last week one of the world's largest aircraft carriers, the U.S.S. Forrestal, her vast grey bulk towering out of the blue Levantine waters, steamed slowly into Beirut harbor. Hours later a party of Lebanese dignitaries headed by President Camille Chamoun climbed aboard, and the carrier headed back to sea for a demonstration of its capabilities. Among them: tight formations of dive bombers and jet fighters screaming over Beirut's rooftops, lifting away over the snowcapped mountains to the east and fanning out through the Bekaa valley between Lebanon and Syria.

By purest coincidence the Forrestal paid her call the same day Lebanon's Parliament voted 30 to i in support of the government's decision to accept Eisenhower-plan aid. (Just before the vote five deputies resigned their seats in protest.) The carrier's first presence in an Arab port was directly relevant to the tortured processes of side-choosing going on in two neighboring Arab lands.

Both Syria and Jordan were teetering between East and West. In Syria conservative elements around President Shukri el Kuwatly had not managed to unseat Strongman Colonel Abdel Hamid Serraj, partisan of Soviet cooperation, from his job as army security chief, but they did manage to transfer some of his followers out of key posts last week, and felt a little safer.

To the south, in the precarious artificial kingdom of Jordan, anti-Communist King Hussein, 21, failed in a roundabout maneuver to shuffle Red-leaners out of Premier Suleiman Nabulsi's cabinet. Nabulsi, 48, is the Palestinian ex-soap manufacturer who took office after pro-Nasser parties swept last October's parliamentary elections. Nabulsi refused the king's demand for his resignation and instead proclaimed that the Cabinet had voted to establish diplomatic relations with "our loyal friend, the Soviet Union." In a speech at his refugee-crammed home town of Nablus, he defended what he called his "positive neutralism." Said Nabulsi: "We are with the East when the East is with us. We are not with the West because the West cannot be with us. The West wants to colonize and exploit us."

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