ABSTRACT
The strategy chosen to accomplish the ambitious task has been the familiar Maoist protracted revolutionary warfare approach that was successfully employed in China and Vietnam. The success that the insurgents enjoyed during the late 1960s and early 1970s was due in no small way to a physical setting that was conducive to guerrilla warfare. Though the Palestinian resistance has been well publicized in the West, lesser known but quite sanguinary internal wars have convulsed a number of states or areas such as Iraq, the Sudan, Spanish Sahara, Lebanon, the Yemen Arab Republic, Oman, and, more recently, Iran. Oman, a state that has enjoyed the longest tradition of independence in the Arab world during the past three centuries, lies astride both the critical Strait of Hormuz and the Indian Ocean oil shipping lanes. It is this location, rather than its modest petroleum production, that has made Oman significant to the West.
