should Arab nationalism not have its myth of the fourteenth Muslim century?

In his pioneering narrative The Arab Awakening;' George Antonius portrayed the first modern Arab nationalists of nearly 100 years ago as Christian Arabs studying in Western schools like the Syrian Protestant College (which later became the American University of Beirut). But at about the same time, a Muslim "awakening" was taking place independently, as a few Muslims gradually realized that worldly power had in recent decades decisively passed from the Ottoman Empire to a pack of unbelieving "Franks" in Western Europe who were exploiting new technological developments like the steamship and the telegraph to extend their material power. This was a challenge, not only to the political security of the Muslim world but to the very roots of Muslim belief, for the extraordinary worldly success of Islam in conquering for itself within one century of its Prophet's death an empire greater in extent than the Roman Empire at its height had come to be regarded as an outward and visible sign of Allah's favor for his "chosen people." And though the controlling hands of the Muslim Empire had changed with the passing of the centuries—from Arab to Persian to Turk—those controlling hands were still Muslim, so the divine promise of worldly power to the Realm of Islam (Dar ul-Islam) was not brought into question. The empire had long been based on the principle of religion, not of nationality, and the newfangled nationalism of nineteenth- century Europe had not yet begun to infect Dar ul-Islam; so the pious Muslim, as late as the end of the eighteenth century, could paraphrase Browning's Pippa and say, "Allah's in his heaven; all's right with the Muslim world."

But in the nineteenth century, the impact of European imperialism was to disturb his comfortable repose. To quote Wilfred Cantwell Smith, whose recent study has given us a new depth of penetration in this field: "In Muslim conviction power comes from God, and yet here were the British empire, the Dutch empire, the French empire growing daily more powerful than Islamic society. . . . Islamic backwardness implies that something has gone wrong, not only with the Muslim's own development but with the governance of the universe."⁴ The shock to accepted Muslim belief was as great as the shock of the Babylonian exile had been to conventional- minded Jews of the sixth century b.c.; but whereas the Babylonian exile drew out of the wounded side of Jewry prophets like Jeremiah and the Second Isaiah—who, out of this bitter experience, learned and taught new lessons, at a deeper moral and spiritual level, on the true relationship between God and His chosen people—Islam in its fourteenth century has thus far not produced its major prophet. It has produced only Gamal Abdel Nasser and Abdul Karim Qasim.

But this is not quite a fair comparison, and in any case it anticipates the course of events. At a much earlier stage of Islam's discomfiture under the impact of Western imperialism, it did produce a prophet of importance, Saiyid Jamal ud-Din al-Afghani (he died in 1897), who might be loosely compared with the Jewish minor prophet Nahum. Afghani, in his peregrinations between Istanbul and Cairo, was the first to manifest (in Cantwell Smith's words):

. . . another developing aspect of modern Islamic consciousness: an explicit nostalgia for the departed earthly glory of pristine Islam. With his ebullient rhetoric and tireless repetition, Afghani fired audiences in one Muslim country after another to a reawakened consciousness of how they had once been mighty, but now were weak. This memory was not far below the surface, but it was below and was generally without delineation, a feeling rather than a picture of past greatness. His vivid evocations elicited a spirited response that has since ramified. Indeed in addition to internal reform and external defense, this recalling of erstwhile Muslim grandeur has become a third dominant trait of modern Islam. . . .

Further, Afghani exhibited a partial appreciation of intel- lectualism and of Western values and particularly Western science and techniques. He saw the West as something primarily to be resisted, because it threatened Islam and the community, but secondly, in part to be imitated. He was vigorous in inciting his Muslim hearers to develop reason and technology, as the West is doing, in order to be strong.^:>

In a world dominated by power politics, it would clearly be unreasonable to chide a re-emergent society for wishing to be physically strong. But at the same time, it would be willful obscurantism not to recognize the intoxicating allure which the prospect of power holds for Muslim Arabs. Not only does it offer them, as it did the Zionists, a means of security against alien interference; but it is also, as the Promised Land was for the Zionists, the fulfillment of the Scripture, of Allah's assurance that Dar ul-Islam shall be supreme and that the unbelievers shall meekly pay it tribute. That is why Abdel Nasser's arms deal with the Soviet Union (temporarily disguised as Czechoslovakia) in September, 1955, immediately awakened such enthusiasm among the young Arab nationalists outside Egypt who had hitherto refrained from committing themselves to the Egyptian revolutionary movement. (They all had approved of the expulsion of Faruq, of course; but the quarrel between the young clique of Free Officers and that now-forgotten man, General Mohammed Nagib, had caused misgivings which were increased by Abdel Nasser's acceptance of conditions for the British withdrawal from the Suez Canal Zone and, above all, by his determined repression of the widespread Muslim Brotherhood when it made an attempt on his life.) This enthusiasm was not an expression
of pro-Communist, or even pro-Soviet, sentiment; it arose from the realization that the Arab world was no longer dependent on the goodwill of the Western nations for the arms which were the means for achieving power—that the Soviet Union was now benevolently playing the role of fairy godfather which the extremists of twenty years earlier had hoped

the Germans' desertion of Rashid Ali's Putsch in Iraq in May, 1941).'''

For the Arab nationalist, the final evidence that the West was no friend of his cause—and had, indeed, betrayed his cause—lay in the handling of the Palestine problem, from the British Government's issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to President Truman's support of militant Zionism beginning in 1945 and extending to the armistice of 1949, the state of Israel de facto behind lines

to exaggerate the importance of the Palestine case in the drift

be unreal to pretend that this is the only grievance, that the

if it were not for the Zionist interlopers.

concerns the so-called "broken promises" of which Britain is alleged to have been guilty in her relations with the Arabs during and after World War I. And just as, in the issue, there has grown around the core of _w(Western partiality for the Zionists) a luxuriant crop of lar Arab mythology designed to explain away the Arab defeat/ so the failure of the Arabs to achieve their inde- r World War I, which was due partly to Western but also to their own lea< and e in negotiating with the Western
been explained away by the myth of "broken promises;' which has also found a ready echo in those Western circles that are ready to think the worst of their fellow Westerners.^b

Nor do the grievances or the mythology stop with World War I. The shifting of responsibility for Arab or Muslim weakness at the time of the Western impact has been carried back even further than the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the thirteenth-century Mongol invasions (a favorite whipping boy for some) to the Crusades, which Abdel Nasser has described as "the beginning of the dark ages in our country." Before that there was the dazzling luster of the Muslim "golden age"; but here again, one may find a young Arab nationalist who avers that this "golden age" was curtailed by ^uthe Arab conquests and expansion; the extension of the Arab domain over so many different peoples, which led to the loss of its own harmony, its cohesion, and, ultimately, of its independence. Foreign intellectual trends infiltrated and diluted the Arab spirit inspired and led by Islam."¹⁰ Conversely, some of the most enthusiastic Arab nationalists have not allowed even the rise of Islam and the expansion of the Arabs beyond the borders of their arid peninsula to delimit the range of their mythologizing. A former Director General of Education in Iraq (significantly, during the period of the Nazi heyday in Germany) urged upon Baghdad schoolteachers in 1939:

We have up to now neglected a most vital aspect of our glorious history; we have made it start at the prophetic message, and this is a period of less than fourteen centuries. In reality, however, the history of our illustrious Arab nation extends over thousands of years, and goes back to the time when the peoples of Europe lived in forests and over marshes, in caves and in the interstices of the rock; at that time our own ancestors used to set up banks, sculpt statues, and lay down canons and codes of law; they invented then the first principles of medicine, geometry, astronomy, the alphabet, and the numerals. . . . We find that everything makes us lift our heads high when we consider the histories of the Semitic empires formed in the Fertile Crescent. . . . We have the right to glory in them and to honour their exploits, just as we have the right to cherish and exalt the glories of Nabuchadnezzar, Hammurabi, Sargon, Rameses, Tutankhamen, in the same way that we glory and take pride in . . . Harun ar-Rashld . . .^1!

This cannot be dismissed as an isolated example of megalomania, for in 1957 a booklet issued by the Federation of Kuwaiti Student Missions in Egypt asserted: "Thousands of years ago, successive waves of Arabs [sic] moved from the Peninsula to the Fertile Crescent and the Nile Valley."¹² And at the 1960 Conference of the Middle East Institute, the former Secretary-General of the Arab League advanced these same Arab claims not only to Hammurabi, Sargon, and Thothmes, but to Jesus of Nazareth as well.¹"'

Like Pan-Germanism, Pan-Arabism in its extreme manifestations has developed a mystique of Blut und Erde which makes it seek to appropriate all preceding civilizations that have arisen and flourished on the "sacred" soil of the "fatherland." And whereas the prevailing tone of Arab nationalist thinking twenty-five years ago seemed to be liberal and idealistic as exemplified by men like Taha Husain, Constantin Zuraiq, and Charles Malik,¹⁴ the upsurge of "radical nationalism"¹in the last decade has compelled such men into either tacit acquiescence or cultural exile. It is as if, in one generation, the "wave of the future" had swept this politically immature people along from the inspirations of a Hegel to the mystagogy of an Alfred Rosenberg. And just as, quite apart from the changes and chances of historical fortune, some of the national predispositions that gave Adolf Hitler his oppor- tunity can with hindsight be discerned in the ill-digested German A ufkldrung, if not in the Lutheran Reformation,¹⁰ so can some of the temperamental excesses which have given rise to the rancorous propaganda-spouting dictatorships of the contemporary Arab world be seen foreshadowed in the uncertain "Arab awakening" described by George Antonius, if not in the Arabic "golden age" itself.¹⁷

It is my aim in the following chapters to illustrate and enlarge on these judgments expressed here.

CHAPTER 2

THE SAPPING OF THE SEVEN PILLARS

World War II, with its heavy concentration of the forces of the British Commonwealth and its allies in the Middle East, put the political evolution of that region into temporary cold storage for five years. Those who were responsible for advising on British policy—notably the unassuming and underrated Brigadier (later Sir) Iltyd Clayton, Adviser on Arab Affairs to the Minister Resident in the Middle East—fully realized how temporary this suspension of the normal political fervor in the Arab world must be; and the encouragement which such men gave behind the scenes to the formation of the League of Arab States, for example, was intended as a means of turning off the British-induced refrigeration gradually, in the hope that the more conservative forces within Arab nationalism might themselves thereafter keep the nationalist "bouillon" suitably chilled.¹ Clayton reckoned among these conservative forces not only such obvious figures as Nuri as- Sa'id of Iraq and the Amir Abdullah of Transjordan, but also his personal friend Sa'dullah Jabiri (Prime Minister of Syria until his death in 1946) and probably Mahmud Fahmi an- Nuqrashi in Egypt.- Observant but' never aggressive, Clayton (who was a Roman Catholic) remained aware, throughout the spurious Anglo-Soviet honeymoon of 1941-45, of the challenge which Soviet policy was likely to present to British interests in the postwar Middle East, and his advice probably had something to do with the return to Iran in 1943 of Saiyid Ziva ud-Din Tabataba'i in an attempt to organize opposition to the Soviet-supported Tudeh Party, which then seemed to be carrying all before it in Iran.^::

But it was hardly possible that anyone responsible for the shaping of British policy could have foreseen the immediacy and crudity of the Soviet cold-war offensive against Iran and Turkey less than six months after the end of World War II; as a result, the British Government was even more unwilling than it might otherwise have been to reduce its strategic holdings in the region in response to nationalist pressure. Furthermore, the coming to power of the Labour Party in Britain undoubtedly caused Middle Eastern nationalists, notably in Egypt, to hope that the new incumbents in Westminster would be softer in yielding to nationalist pressure than a government led by Winston Churchill;⁴ and as Walter Z. Laqueur has shown, Communists and fellow travelers were already organized in the Middle East to add their agitation to that of the bourgeois nationalists for an immediate end to "imperialism." The unilateral withdrawal of the United States forces from Iran three months before the date determined for the final withdrawal of the foreign troops from that country undoubtedly encouraged Stalin and his fellow conspirators to think that they could easily break down the nerve of the single-handed and enfeebled British; it was only the stubborn opposition of one man, Ernest Bevin, that held the line of the Elburz range during the winter of 1945-46, until the education of the U.S. State Department was complete and Ambassador George V. Allen could take his place in organizing Iranian resistance to the Soviet bully/

But it was the who played a large part in wrecking the chances for postwar Middle Eastern nationalism at a relatively level. With that myopic disregard for the of their political aspirations which hac from the beginning, the Zionists' skillful combination of

For the raruq a Officers had a U.S.S.R.; the party of that it could

two of

a half years after their expulsion of in July, 1952, the Egyptian Free favorable world press, except in the the Wafd Party as the

for Com- In some by the on

to Egypt Faruq

rid of the British through its it would pave the way munism through its incompetent approval of the

new

: Egypt was

was expressed in terms :affery, the U.S. from 1949 to 1955, had been in favor of as King of the Sudan and had had talks with the until very shortly before the revolution;² but he now the military junta as his "boys" and is reported to h; "They have done more for Egypt in two years than predecessors put together did before them."³ In the view of British Ambassador in Cairo, American policy:

a desire to reach a quick solution almost at any cost and by a pathetic belief that, once agreement was reached, all would be well. These considerations, combined with a horror of

regime, particularly on the parfof the United States Embassy inCairo and also an apparent disinclination by the United States Government to take second place even in an area

where primary responsibility was not theirs, resulted in the Americans, at least locally, withholding the wholehearted support which their partner in NATO had the right to expect. . . . Inevitably the Egyptians exploited the equivocal American attitude.⁴

Objectively, the new Egyptian regime's record in autumn, 1954, was a favorable one. In spite of its increasing smothering of opposition by "Gestapo methods," it seemed "free of some of the vices of the Wafd and showed no signs as yet of those wider ambitions of empire which Colonel Nasser was later to proclaim and pursue.""' The regime had undertaken land reforms which, if they could not cure Egypt's urgent problem of rural overpopulation, were at least an earnest of

grappling with this problem.Its leaders had abandoned the foolish assertion of their predecessors, from Nuqrashi to the Wafd, that the people of the Sudan unanimously desired to be united with Egypt,⁷ and had reached an agreement with the British in February, 1953, to make Sudanese self-determination a reality. The Sudanese general election of November, 1953, which gave a comfortable majority to the party hitherto regarded as pro-Egyptian, seemed to be the reward of Nagib's common sense. In the most difficult matter of all, that of the Suez Canal base, the regime had (after a long tion) compromised with the British by conceding that for a period of seven years the British might reoccupy the base in the event of an aggression from outside the Middle East against a member state of the Arab League or against Turkey. This agreement of October, 1954, which secured a pledge by the British to withdraw their forces within twenty-one months, was presented to the Egyptian public as a great victory and was celebrated by the issue of a commemorative postage stamp; and during the period between the signing of the agreement and its ratification, spokesmen of the regime from Abdel Nasser downward gave such assurances as the following one of their identification with the West: "There seems no doubt that Egypt today holds in all respects to the side of the West. Her culture, her commerce, and her economic life are bound to the West. Ideologically, she is definitely opposed to Communism. Militarily, she considers that the only danger capable of threatening the Middle East is a Soviet invasion. "^s

But this apparent rapprochement with the West had the disadvantage of giving a handle to all the opponents of the regime: the Communists; the Muslim Brotherhood; the Waf- dist supporters, who had been driven underground by repression but certainly not destroyed; the adherents of General Nagib, who had been forced into the background in the obscure struggle of March-April, 1954, and now tried to reassert himself by opposing the agreement with Britain.⁹ There may have been dissension among the inner ranks of the Officers themselves, though there is no definite evidence of this; but certainly the shots fired at Abdel Nasser by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood at Alexandria on October 26, 1954, demonstrated that the basis of the regime's popular support had become dangerously weak. The regime's reaction was a characteristic one. Members of the Brotherhood were arrested, confessions were extracted by beatings in the tra- ditional Egyptian manner,¹" and the assailant and five other leading members of the organization were hanged. But at the same time, the regime's policy was being modified in a more popular—that is to say, nationalist—direction.

There were other reasons for this, besides the need to restore the internal prestige of the regime. John Foster Dulles, during his orientation tour of the Middle East shortly after becoming Secretary of State in the spring of 1953, had reported that he had found the countries of the "northern tier" of the region the ones most aware of the threat to their independence coming from the U.S.S.R. That Turkey and Pakistan should be ready to accept military aid from the United States was not a matter of immediate concern to Egypt, still preoccupied with her efforts to secure the withdrawal of British troops from the Suez Canal Zone; but when the Iraqi Government, led by Nuri as-Sa'id, showed a similar readiness to accept arms from the United States early in 1954, this action brought upon it a violent attack from the Egyptian propaganda machine.¹¹ Apologists for the Cairo regime (notably those well-meaning "liberals" supplying the Economist, Observer, and Manchester Guardian with pabulum for intellectual chiding of the British Government) assured us that this outbreak was occasioned only by the desire to keep the Arab League solid against defense arrangements with the West until the British evacuation was secured. Just get that out of the way, spokesmen like Tom Little¹² assured us, and you will see how accommodating Nasser will be: "He told me so himself!"

However, the personality of Iraq's elder statesman, Nuri as-Sa'id, and the great increase of revenue which Iraq was now receiving as royalties from the Iraq Petroleum Company promised to give that country a degree of independence which could hardly be harmonized with Egypt's pre-eminence in the

Arab League—a position accorded to Egypt at the League's inception and one that it was a matter of prestige for the military regime to maintain. Consequently, when Nuri talked of replacing the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930 (now approaching its expiration date) with a regional defense agreement of the kind provided by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter,¹⁵he made little impression on Abdel Nasser at their meeting in September, 1954; and when the Arab League held its autumn conference in Cairo in December, after the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasser insisted that there must be no contracting of new alliances outside the Arab League Security Pact, which had been originally devised, in part, to preserve Egypt's pre-eminence within the League.¹⁴ It might be that after a year or so of internal indoctrination and external bargaining, Egypt would be ready to enter some sort of defense pact with the West on terms favorable to herself, in which case the rest of the Arab League would be directed to conform; but until that time, no initiative from any of Egypt's satellites would be tolerated.

to Egypt in De-

But after a Turkish 1954, had from Sal ah Foreign Minis* radio, art, the Menderes decided that Egypt and went arv, 1955.

The Baghdad correspondents of the leading U.S. and British newspapers agreed that, in view of Egypt's opposition, in the nature of a pact between Turkey and Iraq was likely; but the joint communique issued at the end of the two statesmen's meeting on January 12 that the two as soon as ment who

name.

fobbed off with an unfriendly ha- and glib talk from the Egyptian "cultural relations in the fields of

was nothing to be expected from with his planned visit to Iraq in Janu-

However, this was not a policy acceptable to the Iraqi elder statesman, who had been the chief personal aide to the Amir Faisal in 1919, when Egypt's self-appointed young rulers of 1954 were still making mudpies in some village street. Nor was the seemingly unending delay acceptable to the Turkish Prime Minister, Menderes, who had also placed a too optimistic interpretation upon the conclusion of the Anglo-Egyptian agreement and had been pressing for an invitation to visit Abdel Nasser as a preliminary to a regional defense agreement. The Egyptians had suggested a more gradual approach, with visits to Egypt by the Mayors of Ankara and Istanbul to get Egyptian public opinion used to the idea of more friendly relations with Turkey; and a fulsome preface to an official pamphlet on this subject had appeared under Nasser's own had "decided to conclude a treaty " Two days later, the Egyptian Govern- by Anwar as-Sadat, as one of the most extreme members of the that the Iraqi Government's action the spirit of the Arab and collective pact'"⁶ and alleged that Turkey a nonaggression pact with Israel, thus insinuating that Iraq was indirectly involved with the enemy of all true Arabs. The Egyptian Government convened an extraordinary meeting of the Prime Ministers of the Arab states with a view to isolating Nuri and compelling him to abandon the proposed pact with Turkey. At the same time, the Egyptian military attache in Baghdad was conducting an intrigue to arouse popular opposition to the Iraqi Government; but the attempt was a failure, and Nuri remained firmly in the saddle.^{1 T}It was urgent that something be done to repair this new blow to Egyptian prestige, still suffering from the repercussions in other Arab countries of the hanging of the six members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Already, in December, 1954, a trial had opened in Cairo of a group of thirteen alleged Israeli agents accused of espionage and attempted fire-raising with a view to arousing public alarm. On January 27, 1955, two of the accused were sentenced to death and six others to terms of imprisonment (the alleged leader of those arrested had committed suicide in prison a month earlier), and four days later the two death sentences were carried out. The Times remarked in a leading article on February 4 that "it was a mistake to ignore the many representations, made by some of Egypt's best friends [including the U.S. State Department] which urged the commutation of the death sentences [imposed for] . . . sabotage too amateurish to be taken seriously"; and the impression was left that the severity was a political device intended to balance the draconic treatment of the Muslim- Brotherhood. Whatever its effect in Egypt, it had the further effect (doubtless unforeseen by Cairo) of bringing the veteran David Ben-Gurion out of his retirement in a kibbutz, to which he had withdrawn after the drastic Israeli reprisals against Arab raiders across the armistice lines (culminating in the Israeli destruction of the Jordanian villages of Qibya and Nahalin in 1953 and 1954) had brought upon Israel the strong condemnation of the United Nations. On February 17, 1955, Ben-Gurion once again became Defense Minister of Israel, and eleven days later the Israeli forces launched a surprise attack on the Egyptian-occupied town of Gaza, killing some forty Egyptian soldiers and giving the Palestine Arab refugees of the crowded Gaza strip an object lesson in the inability of the Egyptian Army to defend them.

It is remarkable that two such perspicacious analysts of the Middle East crisis as Guy Wint and Peter Calvocoressi should have chronicled the Gaza raid as "one of the most fateful dates in Middle East history'^ns without even mentioning the Egyptian hanging of the two Israeli "spies" as an aggravating cause;

but these two writers were surveying the recent past with the astigmatism which the Suez crisis induced in all good "liberals" and "progressives," some of whom conveniently forgot that they had been aiding and abetting Israel and Zionism in fair weather and foul all their lives. An editorial in The Times of March 2, 1955, had been more comprehending when it remarked:

Allowance must be made for the exasperation caused in Israel by espionage, raiding, and sabotage directed from the Gaza enclave (for which Egypt has been censured by the Armistice Commission), as well as by more open manifestations by the Egyptian Government of implacable hostility. The continued detention of the freighter Bat Galim; the interference with Israel-bound traffic in the Suez Canal;¹¹* the execution of two of the Jewish defendants in the Cairo spy-trial—all these have brought Israeli resentment against Egypt to fever-heat.

Furthermore, the correspondent of The Times in Israeli Jerusalem reported on March 5:

It is believed that the activities in Israel of a well-trained band of spies and saboteurs, which had been particularly active the week before, set off an operation that had been under consideration for some time. The United Nations observers themselves had evidence from a captured Arab saboteur to the effect that Arabs in the Gaza strip were being trained by a military organization to carry out espionage and sabotage in Israel.

But when General Burns passed on these suspicions, "the position of the Egyptian authorities was that persons committing murders and sabotage were being inspired, paid, and equipped by political elements in Egypt inimical to the Government and desirous of aggravating the border situation."²⁰ Six months

Cairo Radio was to of these same The Gaza raid tige of the Egyptian Army and of the

became an urgent necessity for Nasser if he was to retain the loyalty of his Free Officers and the army upon whom his control of Egypt rested."²¹ He could have had arms from the United States on the same terms as did Iraq—that is, an agree-

but it was necessary to make the army and the public think

ability and readiness to return blow for blow/tfiat armaments

against the Israelis; and accordingly, in July, the Egyptian Foreign Minister was reported to have told Mr. Dulles that "Egypt has not asked the United States for a grant of arms e does not want to accept the strings and go with the United States military aid Until this time, neither the United States nor the British in the attempts of each to create some kind of for the Middle East, seems to paid much heed to the signs of a revival of Soviet interest in the area following Stalin's death/' Indeed, the spring of 1955, with the moves toward holding a summit Geneva, was a period in which Western optimists were ing the hope that the cold war might at last be adjudicated as a "draw," without loss of dignity to either side. It is, of course, impossible to know to what extent the Soviet planners for the Middle East were provoked by Dulles' "northern tier" policy.

in the Turko-Iraqi pact signed in Feb- y, 1955;^2J or (as the British opposition were to charge in their frustration at being defeated again in the

1955 election) by Britain's adherence to the Baghdad Pact at the end of March.-"' It is, indeed, possible that the Russians discerned that the British move was not welcomed in Washington,²" and may have decided that the time was ripe for exploitation. We must recall in this connection that Abdel Nasser's attendance at the Bandung Conference in April, 1955, was his first journey outside the limited horizons of Egypt, the Sudan, and that part of Palestine temporarily occupied by the Egyptian Army during the war of 1948. The Egyptian press had duly played up Egypt's budding leader (his prestige urgently in need of refurbishing from the tarnish caused by the Baghdad Pact and the Gaza raid) as one of the "big three" of the conference, along with Chou En-lai and Pandit Nehru. And who is to assess the effect which this international publicity had upon the burgeoning ego of the once-modest bikbashi from the narrow confines of upper Egypt, between those sterile cliffs that hem in both the Nile Valley and the minds of its inhabitants? "The Bandung Conference showed President Abdel Nasser all the advantages he could derive from a 'neutralist' policy";²⁷ but at the same time he was about to begin to surrender his freedom of maneuver.

The defiant announcement of the Egyptian-Soviet arms deal at the end of September, 1955, thinly disguised as a commercial transaction with Czechoslovakia, immediately made Nasser for the first time the darling of all the young nationalists of the eastern Arab world. At last he had achieved what Rashid Ali and the Mufti of Jerusalem had failed to achieve with Nazi Germany in 1940-41²⁸—a rewarding alliance with a great power as a counterbalance to the West's lack of support for Arab aims. The fact that this opportunistic transaction²⁹ was made with the power responsible during thirty-odd years for the repression of more than 20 million Muslims in Turkestan caused no more moral compunction than Arab extremism^ previous intrigue with the men who were sending millions of European Jews to the gas chambers.

The U.S. State Department, alarmed by the sudden turn of Egyptian policy, hastily sent Ambassador George V. Allen (who had been its successful troubleshooter during the Soviet cold war against Iran in 1946-47) to represent to Abdel Nasser the risks he was incurring. Here is the dictator's own account of these proceedings, as he gave it to an Egyptian crowd some nine months later:

I found that dispatches from Washington and news agencies were reporting: Mr. Allen has a warning for Egypt; Mr. Allen carried a threat to Egypt, a threat to sever that, and the other.

a special interview. He said that he regretted very much the state of the relations between the U.S.A. and Egypt. He also said: Allen has a strong note from the U.S. Government which might injure Egyptian national feeling tige. I assure you that this note will have no effec we shall be able to undo its effect. I advise you to

The United Kingdom Government had to

to take if Nasser turned down the proposals of the We wished to refer the issue to the Security Council, if Nasser declared his unwillingness to negotiate. We also desired as many powers as possible to exert

Egypt. The United

us in both thes

The United of

had first to pave the way with the American public for any further steps. In the event, no paving was ever done. On his return to Washington, Dulles spoke to our Ambassador of

in favor of economic measures, but all he could promise was

them. In fact, they never took them. . . .

The course of the Suez Canal crisis was decided by the American attitude to it. If the United States Government had . this issue in the spirit of an ally, they would have _w in their power, short of the use of force, to support the nations whose economic security depended upon the freedom of passage through the Suez Canal. They would have closely planned their policies with their allies and held stoutly to the decisions arrived at. They would have insisted on restoring international authority in order to insulate the canal from the politics of any one country. It is now clear that this was never the attitude of the United States Government. Rather did they try to gain time, coast along over as they arose

ing on the failure of its immediate predecessor. None of these was geared to the long-term purpose of serving a joint cause.⁴⁷

Instead, states the latest American appraisal of Dulles' policy:⁴⁸

Dulles embarked on what proved to be a fatally ineffective course. He played Eden along from week to week, for more than a month. ... He tried to gain time until Eden's resolve to attack Egypt⁴⁰ might weaken. He let Eden gain the impression that Washington would not oppose an Anglo- French invasion if all attempts at negotiation failed. When closeted with Eden, he gave the impression of being at one with him in his aversion to Nasser. In public, however, he infuriated Eden by pointedly disassociating the United States from British colonialism.

One of his main time-gaining devices was a legalistically skillful proposal for a multi-national Suez Canal Users' Association.-"

While Dulles was working on this proposal during a short holiday in Ontario, Eden received on September 3 a "disquieting message" from President Eisenhower, described by Eden as follows:

Hitherto he and his officials had always given us to understand that the United States would not take exception to the use of force, if all peaceful means of settlement had been exhausted. The fact that we had taken military precautions had, furthermore, been approved from time to time. Now the President told me that American public opinion flatly rejected force. He admitted that the procedures of negotiation on which we were then engaged would probably not give Nasser the setback he deserved. But he advised that we should sharply separate the question of the Canal from our

general policy towards the Egyptian dictatorship and the menace under which Africa and the Middle East lay. The he considered a

In fact, as an American military historian has remarked in his review of Eden's Memoirs, what the United States Government

thing up in acceptable fashion and woul< to win the 1956 election as an "apostle of

Eden, on the other hand, emphasized in his reply to the President the conviction of his government and of the French that the seizure of the Suez Canal was:

"We are convinced that if Nasser is allowed to defy the eighteen nations it will be a matter of months before revolution breaks out in the oil-bearing countries and the West is wholly deprived of Middle Eastern oil. In this belief we are fortified by the advice of friendly leaders in

"The Iraqis are the most insistent in Nuri and the Crown Prince have spoken to us

I then gave the President an account of three other warn-

the opening gambit in a planned campaign designed by er to expel all Western influence and interests from Arab He believes that ... if he can successfully defy his prestige in Arabia will be so great that he will be able to mount revolutions of young officers in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. (We know that he is already preparing a revolution in Iraq. ) . . . These new Governments . . . will have to place their united oil resources under the control of a united Arabia led by Egypt and under Russian influence. When that moment comes Nasser can deny oil to Western Europe and we here shall all be at his

ings which we had received, each from a different Middle Eastern country: as the authors of these warnings are still alive, I do not propose to make their names public. . . .

"You may feel [Eden continued] that even if we are right it would be better to wait until Nasser has unmistakably unveiled his intentions. But this was the argument which prevailed in 1936 [Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland] and which we both rejected in 1948 [Stalin's Berlin blockade]. Admittedly there are risks in the use of force against Egypt now. It is, however, clear that military intervention designed to reverse Nasser's revolutions in the whole continent would be a much more costly and difficult undertaking. I am very troubled, as it is, that if we do not reach a conclusion either way about the Canal very soon one or other of these eastern lands may be toppled at any moment by Nasser's revolutionary movements. . . .

^kT can assure you that we are conscious of the burdens

ment is correct, and if the only alternative is to allow Nasser's plans quietly to develop until this country and all Western Europe are held to ransom by Egypt acting at Russia's behest it seems to us that our duty is plain. We have many times led Europe in the fight for freedom. It would be an ignoble end to our long history if we accepted to perish by degrees."⁵³

On September 7, Dulles informed the British Ambassador that '"he would find it very difficult to go along with" the Anglo- French resolution submitted to the Security Council "in its present form," and urged the two governments:

. . . for the time being, merely to inform the Security Council of the situation by letter and ask for no action. . . . Even then, the United States Government declined to add their signature to our letter. We were told that they did not wish to create an identity of interest, which might prove embarrassing to the French and ourselves. . . .

[The Foreign Secretary] urged the absolute necessity for effective action. Delay would be disastrous for a number of reasons. Every day Nasser was strengthening his hold on the Canal. The Western powers would lose face unless they could react clearly and speedily to his rejection of the eighteen- power proposals, which now seemed certain. Meanwhile the friendly Arab states were in great and ever-increasing peril.

Her Majesty's Government ... did not believe that the Canal issue could be separated from the general Egyptian menace to the friendly governments of the Muslim world.-"⁴

It was at this stage that Dulles produced his "latest formulation" of thoughts on a Suez Canal Users' Association:

Putting Mr. Dulles' plan into effect was to be accompanied, he told us, by two further prongs of attack. One prong was provided by the financial measures which the French and ourselves had already taken, but in respect of which the United States continued to lag behind.⁵⁵ The other prong was the rerouting of oil traffic . . . to decrease our dependence upon the Canal.

In spite of certain "unwelcome implications" in the plan, which Eden describes, he decided to take it up. On September 12, he informed the House of Commons of the formation of the Canal Users' Association and employed the formula agreed upon with the U.S. Government in issuing the warning that if Egypt interfered with the working of the scheme, the governments concerned would "be free to take such further steps as seem to be required either through the United Nations, or by other means for the assertion of their rights."¹⁰ Dulles openly dissented, however, and told a press conference on the following day:

We do not intend to shoot our way through. It may be we have the right to do it, but we don't intend to do it as far as the United States is concerned. . . . Each nation has to decide for itself what action it will have to take to defend and, if possible, realize its rights which it believes it has as a matter of treaty."

Eden made the following comments:

It would be hard to imagine a statement more likely to cause the maximum Allied disunity and disarray. The Americans having themselves volunteered that the new arrangements would be less acceptable to the Egyptians than the eighteen-power proposals, Mr. Dulles proceeded to make ... an advertisement to Nasser that he could reject the project with impunity. . . . Whatever happened, the Egyptians had nothing to fear Here was the spokesman of the

United States saying that each nation must decide for itself

man of a principal ally had said/* Such cynicism towards allies destroys true partnership. It leaves only the choice of parting, or a master and vassal relationship in foreign policy.

In the House I had, in fact . . . used the formula agreed with the United States Government. . . . This left the course of future action deliberately vague so as to strengthen pressure on behalf of the Users' Club. The whole purpose of the Users' Club had been, by a display of unity in association with the United States, to avoid having recourse to force. American torpedoing of their own plan on the first day of launching it, left no alternative but to use force or acquiesce in Nasser's triumph."'⁹

A second conference in London of fifteen "Canal users" (meeting at a time when pilots from the U.S.S.R., Yugoslavia, and the United States were being recruited by the Egyptian Government) concluded its work on September 21 with a declaration which was, in Eden's view:

. . . undoubtedly marked by some ambiguity and it had a cool, though not unfavorable, public reception. ... It became clear to us only gradually that the American conception of the association was now evolving so fast that it would end as an agency for collecting dues for Nasser. . . .

Our information from the Middle East at this time confirmed the gloomy views we had been forming in London. . . . Opinion in Cairo . . . had been encouraged to think that Nasser had succeeded. . . .

The United States Government were still reluctant to approach the United Nations and we tried to meet them on this for a while longer. But the closing stage of the London Conference brought increasing pressure upon us to go to the Security Council/'"

On October 1, after receiving a long pro-Egyptian letter from Marshal Bulganin (still the titular head of the Soviet Government, as Nagib had been in Egypt during 1952-54), Eden telegraphed to Eisenhower:

There is no doubt in our minds that Nasser, whether he likes it or not, is now effectively in Russian hands, just as Mussolini was in Hitler's. It would be as ineffective to show weakness to Nasser now in order to placate him as it was to show weakness to Mussolini. . . .

No doubt your people will have told you of the accumulating evidence of Egyptian plots in Libya, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. At any moment any of these may be touched off unless we can prove to the Middle East that Nasser is losing. That is why we are so concerned to do everything we can to. make the Users' Club an effective instrument.⁰¹

While Eden's analogy between Abdel Nasser and Mussolini was no doubt open to debate, the gloss which Dulles put on the situation in a press conference the next day evoked in him "exasperation and dismay":

There is talk [said Dulles] about the "teeth" being pulled out of [the Users' Club]. There were never "teeth" in it, if that means the use of force. . . .

There has been some difference in our approach to this problem of the Suez Canal. This is not an area where we are bound together by treaty . . . such as the North Atlantic Treaty area. . . . There ... I hope and believe [we]

There are also other problems where our approach is not always identical. For example, there is in Asia and Africa the so-called problem of colonialism. Now there the United , plays a somewhat independent role. You have this very problem of the shift from colonialism to

ence which is in process___ I suspect that the United

will find that its role . . . will be to try to aid that process, without identifying itself 100 per cent either with the powers or with the powers which are primarily and concerned with the problems of as rapidly as

Eden comments:

stood the true situation in the area. At lower levels our

to resume close relations with the United States and induce them to recognize the real dangers of Soviet penetration

with Mr. Eisenhower and M. Mollet____ On the 7th I followed the President's suggestion and telephoned to him. The was receptive. I told him I thought it was impor- we should meet and have a full discussion on the He agreed and asked me what date I had in I said the sooner the better and suggested that M.

ized me to invite M. Mollet ... and to tell him that a con-

About an hour later the President telephoned to me and he wanted to be clear that I was not making the journey

him that was not my purpose.

___ he telephoned again and said that he would be

much taken up in the days ahead in leaders of Congress. He had come to the fore, that M. Mollet and I should defer our visit, he

did not rule it out for a later date. . . .

Later that evening I sent the President a The President replied agreeing to a meeting at an early date, but he held that the United Nations resolutions must be carried out. This meant that

: be withdrawn from Egypt without delay. Mr. now considered that the ground would be for a meeting only when this had been done. Thus we and the French were squarely asked to give up the gage we had won, before concerting with the United States any common policy for the Middle East.^,n

This led to a new deadlock, since the British and French Governments were determined to keep their troops in the Canal Zone until the international force was there in strength: "We had to avoid a vacuum between our departure and the

arrival of a sufficient United Nations force." Meanwhile, in that longer stretch of the Suez Canal in which they had not lost control:

. . . the Egyptians were busy sinking ships. By far the greater part of this obstruction to the Canal was done after the fighting was over, when politically and physically it was safe to do so. By the time the Egyptians had finished, they had sunk thirty-two ships in the Canal, while their propaganda was busy blaming the Allied bombing for their own act of

to assist France and Britain with oil supplies from the West-

situation and from a position of weakness were once again allowed to seize a position of strength. They declared that

after the Anglo-French forces had gone. . . . Under this Egyptian pressure the United Nations gave way. Even before Mr. Hammarskjold paid his visit to Cairo on November 16th,

he had largely accepted the Egyptian point of view____

At this juncture the Foreign Secretary flew to New York where he remained for ten days, struggling to inject some sense of values. His efforts were largely wasted. The Presi-
dent a few days earlier had granted a friendly our new Ambassador. . . . [He] said he had differed sharply with us on tactics, but he shared my [Eden's] views on Colonel Nasser. He agreed that the urgent task ahead was to

problems. These were promising words, but the President's attitude was not reflected in the actions of his Administration. Mr. Dulles at this time was ill and the authorities in charge of the State Department during his absence™ were ive when the Foreign Secretary urged our . In the possession of Port Said and the of Sinai, we held strong bargaining counters. Before we agreed to relinquish them, we must ensure that the Canal was promptly cleared and that a general settlement of the problems of the area was under negotiation. Soviet designs for penetrating the Middle East had gone much further than the United States believed."⁷ ...

When the Foreign Secretary used these arguments, he was met with expressions of moral disapproval. ... The United States officials refused to cooperate at any level of policy-making. They declared that Britain, France and the United States must not appear to be conspiring together behind the back of the United Nations. Their only reaction to reports of Russian infiltration in the Middle East was to press us to remove our forces more quickly.

We could not help contrasting the now with our own attitude at the time of

[1954], In that country the United States had

ernment. ... We had understood their action there and lat we could not to hamper them in

______ They were now behaving in a

manner towards us. When this point was put to the they had no answer.'"¹ . . . The attitude was rather that the President had

slighted because the Allies had acted without permission. The Allies must pay for it. . . . The many warnings, both public and private, which had been given by the Allies over the waiting months did not help to assuage official American opinion. On the contrary, they irritated it. . . .

The President had "indefinitely postponed consultation with M. Mollet and myself. He did not receive the Foreign Secretary in Washington, nor the Australian Foreign Minister .. . who was the bearer of a message from the Australian Prime Minister/"' The United States Administration seemed to be dominated at this time by one thought only, to harry their allies. Mr. Dulles, who was still recovering from an operation,¹⁰⁰ deplored to the Foreign Secretary that we had not managed to bring Nasser down and declared that he must be prevented from getting away with it. The actions of the United States Government had exactly the opposite result.¹"¹

Before the meeting of the U.N. General Assembly in plenary session on November 23, Eden reports:

President Eisenhower once more proclaimed in public that he wished to strengthen the Anglo-American alliance. Armed with this authority, the Foreign Secretary and [British] Ambassador in Washington both renewed their exchanges with high American officials. We were allies in NATO and SEATO, the present Soviet threat was directed at the Middle East, which lay between the spheres of these two pacts. We could hardly be allies in two parts of the world and not in a third. These efforts got us nowhere. One senior American authority frankly declared that it was not possible at this stage for the Administration to talk to Her Majesty's Government, We were accused of "staffing" on the resolutions of the United Nations and we were taxed with having created the "black-out" between our countries. . ..

The United States :nt, so the Foreign ome. The

The Canal was handed back to the control of one man, who was picked up, dusted down and put in full authority again. . . . Western Europe would be naive indeed to expect free

has the power to compel it,* which it is not likely to have

Only seven of the country's

forced to rely heavily on what the Egyptians and the Russians see fit to tell them.

Egyptian dailies sell almost as widely here as Syrian, and Egyptian weeklies far more widely. The Egyptian news agency MENA provides the bulk of all published news. The Egyptian newsreel Misr has been distributed free to all movie houses by the Syrian Office of Propaganda for the

market. Radio Cairo is^icked up by the Syrian radio

. . . two Egyptians were stationed at Syrian radio quarters to direct handling of commentaries and news.

The Russians, for their part, have covered Syrian newsstands with attractive publications in Arabic and French. Their news agency, Tass, has a large office in Damascus headed by a thoroughly trained Arabist, who issues two daily bulletins and often prov films and documentaries are shown in at least one movie house each week. Radio Moscow is as frequently as Radio Cairo, and the Soviet a much more elaborate diplomatic staff than any other in

"cultural" stories in the Syrian press that it has made many local editors prosperous, if not rich. . . .

'The Russians don't have to ask us to do anything," says a leader of one of the anti-Communist parties. "We will do anything we think they might want, we are so grateful."¹-¹

The Syrian authorities claimed to have arrested on June 8 three members of an espionage organization providing the British with military and political information on Syria;¹'¹ and on July 1, a Damascus newspaper announced the discovery of a United States plot to subvert the Syrian Government. The U.S. Ambassador and Military Attache in Damascus were alleged to have organized the smuggling of arms into Syria from Turkey, Iraq, and Lebanon with the complicity of the Iraqi Deputy Chief of Staff (already cited in the conspiracy of the previous winter), Syrian fugitives (also involved in that conspiracy), and leaders of the recent Jordanian counterrevolution. All this, and more, was said to have been confirmed to an Arab diplomat by the head of the Syrian desk in the U.S. Department of State!¹⁷ After visiting Damascus, the assistant editor of the New Statesman reported that since the adoption by Washington of the Eisenhower Doctrine for the Middle East, U.S. Intelligence was alleged to have been in contact with the Syrian senior field commanders under the Chief of Staff, General Nizam ud-Dln, who were opposed to the radical policy followed by Serraj and the Ba'th.¹" On August 13, the Syrian Government requested the immediate departure of the Military Attache of the U.S. Embassy, of a Second Secretary, and of a Vice-Consul. They were accused of plotting with al-Hizb al-Qawmi and members of the armed forces to overthrow the government.¹¹' Ten Syrian officers were placed on the retired list, and the Chief of Staff was replaced by Brigadier Afif al-Bizri, an alleged Communist. The U.S. Government replied by declaring the Syrian Ambassador to Washington persona non grata, and a State Department offi- the Syrian tactics—of making un- that the U.S. had plotted to overthrow the the U.S. Embassy to n" of a cordon of thirty to forty "the type of thing that has gone on in

by the

U.S.S.P ;retary Dulles gave an account

of the 1 _ ssistant Secretaries, Loy Hen-

who in the latter half of August had been sent as a of the President to confer with the Turk-

concern at the apparently growing Soviet of Syria and the of Soviet-bloc arms . . . which could not be justified by

was particular concern over

The Soviet Government cannot conceal its concern about the Syrian situation. It is well-known that Syria and Egypt, while following their policy of national independence, have been exposed for some time to hostile political, economic, and military pressures from outside. In recent weeks the pressure on Syria has risen to a dangerous height. The recent journey of the American envoy Henderson to the Middle East clearly reveals the intention to organize a foreign armed intervention in the internal affairs of Syria. It is known that Henderson's task was to arrange a plot against Syria, studying the means of bringing down its national government and changing the whole balance of the country to please the great American monopolies and the interests of the chief imperialist powers.

In this connection the imperialist states openly declare that Turkey has a definite role to play in the military operations to be undertaken against Syria. . . .

We have received with great alarm the news of Turkish military concentrations on the Syrian border, and of the sending of American arms to Turkey for organizing attacks on Syria. . ..

The U.S.S.R. cannot regard all these recent developments with indifference. . . . The reports of Turkish concentrations on the Syrian border naturally raise the question: What would the Turks think if foreign troops were concentrated on their border? We are certain that the Turks would bitterly regret having followed the advice of foreign circles who are not in the least interested in maintaining the peace of the Middle East, but are solely concerned with exploiting its natural resources. We are convinced that, if war should break out in Syria and spread to the Middle East, Turkey would have everything to lose by taking part in it.²³

A month later, Khrushchev, in an interview with James Reston of The New York Times, addressed far blunter threats to Turkey, and in mid-October the Syrian and Soviet Gov- isked the U.N. General Assembly to Turkish preparations (allegedly supported by the ;) for an attack on Syria. The Syrian Army up what seems to have been a largely artificial war all students (including girls) for military practice in street fighting, the digging of and the raising of roadblocks on all approaches to the city of Aleppo, thirty miles from the Turkish border. An offer of mediation by King Saud was at first accepted by the conservative Syrian President, but (apparently undei from the radical officers) he then asked the King to the offer. No resolution emerged from the Genera by the end of the year there were : a behind-the-scene struggle is going on in full Sovietists and those who are glad to use Soviet aid but are wary of becoming subservient to Moscow, and who see the advantage of Soviet support to exact better conditions from the West."²⁴ Among those most ready to flirt with the U.S.S.R., besides the Chief of Staff (Colonel Bizri), was the Minister of Defense and (since mid-November) of Finance, Khalid al-'Azm. This aristocratic landowner had served the Vichy French administration as chief of the Syrian state in 1941;" but having been defeated by Kuwatly in the presidential election of 1955, he had made an opportunistic turn to the left and had successfully negotiated arms and trade deals with the U.S.S.R. during a visit to Moscow in the summer of 1957; on December 9, he became Deputy Prime Minister, in to the two portfolios he already held. The Ba'th disposed of al-Hizb al-Qawmi, their rivals,

the Sha'b and the National Parties, now

by a combination of the
with al-'Azm.²" They therefore renewed the overtures they had made early in 1956 for a federation with Egypt. The Egyptian military junta, for its part, badly needed some new injection of prestige to offset its alienation of King Saud, the Lebanese Government's acceptance of the Eisenhower Doctrine and successful handling of the elections of June, 1957, and King Husain's successful counterrevolution.²⁰

In mid-October, at the height of the war scare generated by the Turkish army maneuvers on the Syrian border, some two battalions of Egyptian troops had been sent to that border as a gesture of "solidarity." A month later, a visit to Syria by forty members of the Egyptian National Assembly (elected under the scrutiny of the military junta according to the authoritarian provisions of the constitution of 1956)²⁷ was made the occasion for a joint session with the Syrian Chamber headed by the Ba'th leader Akram Hawrani, who had been elected President of the Chamber in mid-October; a unanimous resolution invited the two governments to negotiate a federal union of the two countries. The Egyptian regime, however, seems to have been in no hurry to complete the transaction until in mid-January, 1958, President Kuwatly hurried to Cairo and persuaded Abdel Nasser that they should jointly announce the establishment of the United Arab Republic on February 1. Four days later, the Secretary of the Syrian Communist Party, Khalid Bakdash, accompanied by his family and eight other Party members, left Damascus for the U.S.S.R., and a plebiscite ratified this step toward Arab unity by the ritual majority of 99.9 per cent.

From the beginning, however, there was a latent contradiction between Abdel Nasser's subordination of all political activity to his "national union"^2s and his consequent dissolution of political parties in the newly acquired "northern province" as in Egypt itself, and the role which the Ba'th designed for itself as the future ruling party of the U.A.R.:

The "national union" which Abdel Nasser planned for Syria was seen by the Ba'th only from the standpoint of its

own interests___ Michel Aflaq had already declared that the

Ba'th was providing Abdel Nasser with "a an ideology." The president of the United Arab was to be, in the last instance, merely the "secular arm" of the Ba'th for bringing into actuality its plans for the Arab world.-"

The unexpected and, for Abdel Nasser, highly disconcerting turn taken by the Iraqi revolution in 1958-59™ provided a pressing reason why he should seek to regulate this latent contradiction in Egyptian-Syrian relations within the U.A.R.:

... in Egypt, a regime completely centered on the

tary; in Syria, an authority deriving from the association of a civilian party, the Ba'th, and the army. The two-man rule of Akram Hawrani and Abdul Hamid Serraj, which had made some sense while Syria was still nominally under a

From the establishment ^§of the UAR, the struggle between the Syrian military boss [Serraj] and the leader of the Ba'th [Hawrani] was unavoidable and practically an open one. And it followed logically that it should be the Ba'th,

fate followed from its having, ever since 1954, pursued a policy that had alienated from it the sympathies of a large section of public opinion."

This loss of popularity was aggravated by an external factor, the adverse economic effect of two successive winters of drought, during 1957-59. The occasion for a showdown between the U.A.R. ruling junta and the Ba'th was the local

for delegates to the "national union," held in July, 1959:

It was a new proof of Abdel Nasser's adroitness that he did not himself repudiate the party that he had to power, but let the Syrians do it. Very skillfully the and Serraj decided that the elections on July 8 should be as liberal and democratic as possible.

Evidently the Syrians took full advantage of this atmosphere of freedom to which they thought they had said goodbye some time before. The election campaign aroused in the

sharply with the apathy and resignation of the Egyptian rank and file. In a sort of general opposition movement the old parties and groups re-formed their ranks and put forward lists of coalition candidates designed for the most part to oppose the Ba'th. The latter was compelled to carry out a strategic withdrawal from most of the electoral districts on account of the systematic obstruction which it encoun- verywhere in Syria there were demonstrations Hawrani's party . . . [while Hawrani himself was evidently detained in Cairo in his role as Vice President of the U.A.R. and was not allowed to go to Syria for the s].²²

Amir wished it to was solely for the purpose of "We must drive to up with that for those who knew how of independent Syria had been Amir ". .

The Ba'th having thus been permitted to win only 250 out of the 9,445 allotted to the "Syrian province," the next stage in Syria's submergence in the Egyptian tide was Abdel Nasser's appointment of his faithful Egyptian acolyte, Abdul Hakim Amir (already titular commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the U.A.R.), as Gauleiter of Syria, with the executive ministers of the "Syrian province" made responsible to him in all respects.³³ One immediate cause for this appointment was reported to be clashes between Syrian and Egyptian army officers in which at least two Egyptian officers en killed by Syrians, that his up Syria's make Syrian social and of Egypt- much the

of Egyptian In fact, the Field more Egyp- in situ as

ahead of Egypt's.*'¹ With flatly there was any trouble in the Syrian Army resulting from the appointment of some Egyptian officers to Syrian commands. 'The number of Syrian officers serving in the Egyptian Army in Egypt is much greater than the in the Syrian Army,' he mued, the Syrians are ;."³⁰ Abdul Hamid Serraj ister of the Interior and Director of tion; but at the end of the year, Akram other Ba'th ministers resigned from the central cabinet of the U.A.R. (or the provincial cabinet), and a month la more Syrians likewise left the central cabinet. It was that reports of skirmishing between the Syrian and Israeli on the border in the upper Jordan valley were perhaps in order to camouflage the ensuing cabinet re- and at the end of May, a special correspondent could report:

colleagues can now contemplate the prospect with more flood of 3,000 letters daily. ^_

"They're now speaking about economics instead of politics," said the officer with evident satisfaction. The Syrian armed forces, he indicated, were now quiet—after the transfer of the more restless elements to Egypt. . . . Air travel between Cairo and Damascus is costly enough to prevent a Syrian on duty in Egypt from coming home for the weekend.

While, considering the well-known touchiness of the Syrian character, there can be no certain guarantee against sudden turbulence, the country as a whole now seems to be entering a period of increased stability. Economically, a proper development plan is being embarked upon, in conjunction with a thorough study of problems and potentialities. Politically, the Bathists . . . are unhappy and divided as well as disorganized. Such Communists as have not been incarcerated by Colonel Serraj's all-powerful security corps have been pushed deep underground.^;7

In September, Serraj seemed to have acquired still wider powers through his appointment as President of the Executive Council of the "northern region"; but at the same time Abdel Nasser amnestied five Syrian former politicians and one former army officer who had been among those caught in Serraj's intelligence net in 1957 and convicted of alleged conspiracy.

CHAPTER 7

THE LEBANESE CIVIL WAR

Already, at the end of 1957, I had written of "the Syro- Egyptian campaign to harass Lebanon (the 'Austria') into Gleichschaltunfbut I had r

develop, in the course of 1958, into an omparable with that occasioned by the Civil War twenty years earlier. From the point of of the pan-Arab nationalist, indeed, the existence of an was as unnatural as the existence of

the 1930's or earlier. Arabic was the^anguage of the Lebanese people; and to use the Christian religion professed by ap- half their number as a reason for giving Lebanon

vhich the Arab nationalist claimed to In fact, however, the region of Mount Lebanon had known a separate existence for centuries,² and its au-

recogJtion in 1861. The^§French creation of Grand in 1920 was not merely a piece of impe:

delegation that had presented its views to the Peace Conference of 1919/

Lebanon stood out from the other Middle Eastern states, not in having minority communities of political importance, but in having no clear majority community as almost all other Middle Eastern countries had. The clear Christian majority of the former Sanjaq of Lebanon (1861-1914) was almost swamped by the extension of its boundaries into the Grand Lihan of 1920. Even though the French had then conferred Lebanese citizenship on thousands of Armenian Christian refugees who had settled in the country after World War I, the census of 1932 showed a clear Christian majority only if large numbers from the extensive Lebanese diaspora abroad were included.⁴ But the omission of the Armenians and the emigres would not produce a clear Muslim majority either, as some superficial writers have supposed. The balance almost certainly lay with the Druze, who constituted 6 per cent of the population and whose peculiar religion was historically an offshoot of Shfi Islam but, like other heresies, had exposed them in the past to persecution by the majority community in Svria and Lebanon as a whole, the Sunni Muslims. In the nineteenth century, therefore, although Druze and Christians had fought bitterly among themselves between 1841 and 1860, ttiey nad been equally concerned with securing the maximum degree of autonomy from the Sunni Ottoman Empire; and as the Maronites and other Uniate Christians had looked for protection to France, so had the Druze looked to Britain. At the termination of the French mandate (1941-45), there were relatively few⁷ Lebanese Druze who preferred incorporation in a predominantly Sunni Syrian republic to remaining a minority in Lebanon.-'

The Sunni community, on the other hand, had been enlarged by the creation of Grand Lihan to become the largest

HH MOUNTAINS OVER 5,000 FT. EZZl AREAS WITH CHRISTIAN MAJORITY • CENTERS OF DISSIDENT ACTIVITY ARE NAMED

one next to that of the Maronites, numbering some 20 per cent of the total population. The strength of the Sunnis lay in the three traditional Ottoman coastal towns—Beirut, Tripoli, and Sidon (Saidaj—which had not formed part of the Sanjaq, and in the hinterlands of the last two of these. Their leading political families thus felt loyalty not to Lebanon but rather to a "greater Syria" including Lebanon, and they regretted the loss to the Christians favored by the French of the ascendancy which they as Sunnis had enjoyed during the centuries of Ottoman domination. Accordingly, even after the establishment in 1926 of the Lebanese Republic within the framework of the French mandate:

... the Sunnis were reluctant to share in the affairs of Lebanon. . . . While a few ambitious leaders did accept public office in spite of popular censure, the majority of Sunnis refused to take part in the running of a state the existence of which they resented.

While the Sunnis refused to cooperate in Lebanese politics, the affairs of Lebanon tended to become the preserve of Christian politicians. The Shiites, who formed the least advanced section of the country's population, could only play a minor role; and the Druses, who were able and willing to cooperate, were a comparatively small group. Thus, while the Sunnis remained outside, the Christians took virtual charge of state affairs and added considerably to the political and administrative experience they had gained under the mutasarriflik [i.e., the Sanjaq].^G

However, among the Maronites themselves, with their 30 per cent of the population, political rivalries led to divergencies of policy. Some favored continued reliance on the French; others wanted to make a bid for independence through association with the Muslims. By 1943, the weakening of the French as a result of their misfortunes in World

War II enabled Bishara al-Khuri, the leader of the second faction, to reach an unwritten agreement with the Sunni leader Riyad as-Sulh. In this so-called National Covenant (al-Mithaq aUWatani), "Khuri, on behalf of the Christians, recognized Lebanon as an Arab state that should never seek assistance from any European power to the detriment of sister Arab states. In return, Sulh vowed Muslim loyalty to Lebanon and promised never to seek her dissolution in a larger Arab political unit."⁷

After shaking off the French mandate, independent Lebanon retained one peculiar institution that had come down unchanged from the Sanjaq: the treatment of the religious communities almost as the units of a federal state. Article 95 of the Constitution, as amended by the nationalists in November, 1943, read: "As a provisional measure and for the sake of justice and concord, the communities shall be equitably represented in public employment and in the composition of the Cabinet, such measure, however, not to cause prejudice to the general welfare of the State." Thus, the Maronite Bishara al-Khuri became President of the Republic, the Sunni Riyad as-Sulh became Prime Minister, the President of the Chamber of Deputies was usually a Shi'i, the Foreign Minister an Orthodox Christian, the Minister of Defense a Druze, and so on; and the Electoral Law, as successively revised, continued to prescribe, for the country as a whole and for each electoral district, the religious sects from which the parliamentary representatives should be proportionately drawn.⁸

Riyad as-Sulh was so far loyal to the National Covenant

(and to the interests of his family) that he ordered the execution after a summary court-martial of the Orthodox Christian leader of al-Hizb al-Qawmi, who had attempted an

Insurrection in 1949 to further the party's aim of uniting Leba- non with Syria. In retaliation, Sulh was murdered by a party assassin in 195 1. Of the Sunni politicians who succeeded him, none had his gift of leadership. Furthermore, though the powers accorded to the President of the Republic by the Constitution were quite limited and ultimate authority was attributed to the Chamber of Deputies as the representatives of the people, the President had come to exercise, as if by force of local habit, the autocratic authority of the former French High Commissioner or the Ottoman Pasha. This finally led to the overthrow of Bishara al-Khuri in the bloodless revolution of 1952 and the election to the Presidency of one of his principal Maronite critics, Camille Chamoun (Sham'un). But it was not long before Muslim leaders began to give expression to a series of grievances (some of them well founded), charging that their communities were being discriminated against by a predominantly Christian state apparatus.

The delicate balance on which the National Covenant depended was thus already threatened in 1953. The expression of these Muslim grievances in an English-language pamphlet entitled Moslem Lebanon Today led to Christian protests and a judicial prosecution which was countered some months later by Muslim charges against an obscure young Christian writer, who was duly convicted of a libel against the Prophet Mohammed/' The year 1954 had been designated by the Pope as one of special honor to the Blessed Virgin,¹⁰ and in Lebanon its celebration by the Maronites and other Catholics culminated in a well-publicized procession with a statue of the Virgin from Beirut to her mountain shrine of Harisa. The Muslims accordingly felt constrained to demonstrate their rival strength and unity a month later by celebrating the birthday of their Prophet with an exceptionally large torchlight procession in Beirut. But because of the organizers' lack of attention to safety details, this resulted in a fire and stampede in which twenty-one persons died and several hundred were injured,¹¹ not without some malicious satisfaction on the part of some Lebanese Christians.

Nor was this the only factor in a rapidly evolving situation:

The Egyptian coup d'etat of 1952 and the rapid rise of Nasser captured the imagination of the Muslims of Lebanon, as it did that of Muslim Arabs everywhere. Lebanese Muslim opinion rallied around Nasser, and previously minor Sunni mahsubiyya¹'- leaders stepped in to take advantage of the change. Thus Saeb Salam, who had previously been overshadowed by Sami as-Sulh and Abdullah al-Yafi, rose to prominence as a Nasserist spokesman, with full support from Cairo and Damascus.¹³

Saeb Salanrfs father had been the leader of a Sunni opposition to the French;¹⁴ but as late as early 1956, his relations with the British remained good. He was a director of Middle East Airlines, a local company which became affiliated with British Overseas Airways, and he was on a committee, presided over by the British Ambassador, which was planning the establishment of a British-type public school in Lebanon as an attempt to introduce character-building into a heterogeneous educational system (or lack of system) that seemed, as inspired by the principles of Rousseau or John Dewey, to be deficient in that very respect.

It is possible, however, that the enormous political success of Abdel Nasser's arms deal with the U.S.S.R. (in the guise of Czechoslovakia) in September, 1955, convinced Saeb Salam that the way to do international business was to "carry a big stick." Lebanon's narrow width from east to west was traversed by two oil pipelines, conveying a part of the product of the Iraq Petroleum Company and of the Arabian-American Oil Company to tanker ports on the Mediterranean at Tripoli and Sidon. respectively. Each of the countries traversed by these pipelines received a royalty calculated on the tonnage of oil multiplied by the distance traversed, plus an additional royalty for the provision of port facilities. Successive Lebanese governments had, however, been dissatisfied for some years that Lebanon should receive less than the other transit countries because of the exiguity of her territory; and the IPC's negotiation in 1955 of a new scale of transit payments with Svria (which the company was prepared to extend proportionately to Lebanon) was answered by a Lebanese demand for complete parity of payment with the other transit countries. The conduct of the subsequent negotiations was assumed in 1956 by Saeb Salam, who handled them with a stiffness to which IPC was not prepared to capitulate, especially as it now had a second pipeline operating to the Syrian Mediterranean tanker port of Baniyas which did not pass through Lebanese territory. Salam's stiffness culminated, immediately after Nasser's expropriation of the Suez Canal Company, in a threat by him to nationalize IPC's Tripoli refinery.¹*"'

By the beginning of September, 1956, "the fierce spirit of Muslim nationalism that [was] growing rapidly in the Arab world" was reawakening the tension between Muslim and Christian in Lebanon, and there was said to be reason to fear that Salam's supporters in the Muslim quarters of Beirut would cause disturbances if his intransigent policy were not followed.¹" The Anglo-French military action against Egypt at the end of October (the Suez crisis) presented the Lebanese Government with a dilemma for which President Chamoun's previous policy of offering himself as a mediator in the frequent inter-Arab quarrels (e.g., the Egyptian denunciation of the Iraqi Government for joining the Baghdad Pact) provided no guidance. Pressed by Egypt, the two Sunni members of the Cabinet ( Salam and the Premier, Abdullah al-Yafi) wished to break off diplomatic relations with the British and French "aggressors" and line up solidly with the other Arab states;¹⁷ but the rest of the Cabinet had regard for the thousands of Lebanese (mainly Christians) settled in French or British dependencies. After a long debate, the two Sunnis tried to force the government's hand by presenting their resignation.^ The President accepted it, and found a Sunni elder statesman (Sami as-Sulh, a survivor of the Ottoman tradition of politics) ready to form an alternative Cabinet, with Dr. Charles Malik as Foreign Minister.

Malik, for many years Ambassador in Washington and Delegate to the United Nations, was well known for his pro- Western inclinations, and his very inclusion in the new Government was a declaration of policy; but the Government made its stand even more clear when it accepted the Eisenhower Doctrine in March, 1957.

During the months that followed the Suez crisis Lebanon's relations with Egypt and Syria became steadily worse. Lebanon was never forgiven for having maintained diplomatic relations with Britain and France, and her acceptance of the Eisenhower Doctrine made her the target of constant attacks. When, in April, 1957, Lebanon allowed the Sixth Fleet to stand by in Beirut while King Husain carried out his coup d'etat in Jordan, Cairo and Damascus branded the act as treason, and Lebanon was furthermore accused of being a hotbed of plots against the Syrian regime. All this time the Sunni opposition in Lebanon was denouncing the "treasonable" behavior of the Government and keeping in constant touch with the Egyptian and Syrian authorities. To the Sunnites, the acceptance of the Eisenhower Doctrine was a distinct breach of the National Covenant, and implied that the Christians were calling upon the United States to replace France as their traditional protector and to intervene in Lebanon on their behalf.¹⁹

Once out of office, Yafi and Salam set to work on forming a united opposition front. Parliamentary elections were due to be held in June-July, 1957, and the personal grudges of several Christian, Shiite and Druze leaders against Chamoun-" could be capitalized to embarrass the President's supporters during the elections. Chamoun's term of office was due to end in September, 1958, and the Parliament to be elected was to select his successor; and it was already feared that Chamoun might use a predominantly loyal Parliament to secure a second term of office.-¹ The Opposition demanded a neutral Government to supervise the forthcoming elections. When their demand was rejected they staged a demonstration (May 30, 1957) in defiance of a Government ban. The security forces disbanded the demonstration by force, and among those wounded was Saeb Salam. It was not difficult to attract strong Maronite leaders who cherished hopes of the Presidency . . . to the Opposition camp. The Maronite partisans of Bishara al-Khuri, like the patriarch, were already hostile to Chamoun. Yafi and Salam had little trouble in winning over the Janbalati Druze. Kamal Janbalat had helped Chamoun to office in 1952, but the latter had not allowed him a free hand in the government, as he had expected. He had, therefore, been opposing Chamoun vigorously since 1953; and, although he did not disapprove of the President's foreign policy and had no particular liking for Nasser, he promptly joined²² Yafi, Salam, and their Christian allies in what came to be known as the National Front [the first Lebanese political front to be Muslim-led]. . . . When Chamoun's supporters . . . won the elections by a vast majority, many unsuccessful candidates, some of them unimportant, joined the National Front in illogical protest.--⁵

Already, at the time of the formation of the Sulh- Malik Government, there had been dynamite-throwing against British and French buildings in Beirut, allegedly organized by the Egyptian Military Attache.²⁴ In February, 1957, a Syrian colonel who had been sentenced to death in absentia for alleged conspiracy against the Syrian leftist regime was shot dead in a Beirut street. Other dynamite attacks on United States and Jordanian buildings in Beirut occurred after King Husain's counterrevolution in Jordan, and there was circumstantial evidence of arms smuggling over the border from Syria, organized (it was alleged) by Colonel Serrafs military intelligence in Damascus. The steady deterioration in security as the year drew to a close led the Lebanese Government to decide on swifter justice and sharper penalties for terrorism.²" Early in October, a self-styled "Third Force" consisting of Christian and Druze personalities had issued a manifesto in which they declared that one of the principal causes of the critical situation in which the country was

. . . placed lies in the uncertainty about the renewal of the President's term of office. Such a renewal would be an attack on the inviolable character of the Constitution and would be directed against the very objectives that its drafters had in mind. Those Lebanese in responsible positions, to whichever faction they belong, do not seem aware of the consequences of their actions. Distracted from their proper duties, they are just adding to the uneasiness of public opinion and endangering public order. We see them defying the law and lowering the prestige of authority, while no coherent action is undertaken to deal with economic and social problems. They are thus the best agents of the Communism and the subversion which they claim to be fighting.²⁰

On December 30, a delegation from this group called on President Chamoun and invited him to repudiate any idea of his seeking re-election. The President replied that while he had not changed his mind on the unsuitability of altering the Constitution, he would be obliged to "reconsider his position if he were not certain of finding a successor who would carry on his policy," an answer which naturally did not satisfy his interlocutors.-⁷

The situation was made more acute by the proclamation on February 1, 1958, of the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria The Lebanese opposition leaders Yafi and Salam and others flocked to Damascus to tender their congratulations and were told by the retiring Syrian President that Lebanon might join the union whenever she wished, retaining her own existence and culture;^ a clash occurred on the northeastern frontier when Lebanese officials turned back thirty carloads of Lebanese Muslims, decked with Syrian, Egyptian, and pan-Arab flags, bound for the Syrian capital. Their enthusiasm for the new "union" was a clear challenge to the Lebanese National Covenant, and on March 4, the Maronite Patriarch gave the following equivocal reply to a Maronite sponsor of the Third Force who had asked him to clarify his position:

We do not deny that the internal situation is causing us anxiety: corruption in the public service, an atmosphere of uncertainty, a stiffening on unreasonable principles, polemics that take the form of personal attacks, discord between the religious communities. We are concerned about the personal ambition of some among us who admit no limitation upon their aims. We are concerned about unbridled materialism. . ..

From the bottom of our heart we invite all Lebanese of whatever party or community ... to renew their faith in an independent, sovereign, and free Lebanon and work together in the spirit and the framework of their Covenant.

We love our Arab brethren as we do ourselves. . . . We hope for complete success for every union and every agreement that they conclude among themselves.

We have absolute faith in Lebanon, her independence, sovereignty, and freedom. We are convinced that collabora- tion between Lebanon and the West, based on equality and mutual respect, is to the advantage of Lebanon on the economic and social as on the cultural level; we see in such collaboration every advantage for the Arabs. It is in such collaboration that Lebanon can serve the Arabs and safeguard their rights. Such collaboration is more useful than any action that might lead to a breach of relations between Lebanon and the West. . . .

To our Arab brethren everywhere we say that for the good of Lebanon and of the Arabs the independence of Lebanon must be maintained and strengthened. . . . We shall not join any union or federation, and we shall not accept anything that could weaken the sovereignty and independence of Lebanon.²⁵¹

On March 28, there were riots in the southern town of Tyre (Sur) and sympathetic strikes in other towns of this predominantly Muslim region when five youths were sent to jail for trampling on the Lebanese flag and replacing it with that of the U.A.R.; the Minister of Education stated that a local college largely staffed by Egyptian teachers had had a good deal to do with the incidents. Two weeks later, there were disorders in the predominantly Druze district of the Shuf, revolving around the Druze aristocrat and opposition leader Kamal Janbalat, whose profession of socialism and attachment to the nonviolence of the late Mahatma Gandhi stood in marked contrast to the warlike enthusiasm of his feudal Druze henchmen. On April 19, the Maronite Patriarch spoke out again in a press interview against the "destructive egoism of those in high places in the present regime," and this time declared:

Everyone knows that the Arabs have for many centuries had a fair dream of unity. Providence has now given them honest and brave leaders, especially Gamal Abdel Nasser, who do not shrink from any sacrifice to hasten the revival of this part of the world. No wonder therefore that the Arabs turn with hope to President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his colleagues who symbolize their deepest aspirations. Personally, I am convinced that President Gamal Abdel Nasser desires for sovereign and independent Lebanon the same prosperity and well-being as for the Arab countries over whose future he presides. He asks only that Lebanon should not become a hotbed of plots against the Arab countries.'"'

Without replying directly to this, President Chamoun on the following day concluded a strong indictment of his critics, "the very persons who are directly or indirectly responsible for the attacks on public order and security," with these words: "The struggle for the Arab cause is a duty and an act of faith. I never thought that it could one day become, for some in Lebanon, a source of income, a springboard for attaining cheap popularity, and a stage for dwarfs and mountebanks." The Muslim religious leaders boycotted the official receptions marking the end of Ramadan, and the opposition replied to the President by charging him with financial malpractices: "Who shuttled to and fro between Baghdad, Cairo, Riyad, and Damascus to obtain airline concessions for certain companies? . . . One day we will tell the whole truth, and then the law will have its word to say." And spokesmen for the Third Force attacked the President's past record and impugned his desire to obtain, before the Chamber adjourned, a constitutional amendment which would enable him to be a candidate for the presidency when his present term expired in September.'"¹

In this increasingly tense situation, on the night of May 7-8, Nasib Matni, editor of the opposition newspaper at-Tili- ghraf, was shot dead in Beirut.

Who killed him? A 'loyalist"? But at-Tilighraf s attacks on the President had not been among the most violent. One of the notables whom Matni used to attack without moderation or scruple in his paper? Very possibly. For this reason the editor had been wounded in an attack some time before. People have also said, Cherchez la femme. Whatever the truth of the matter, the cause of the murder has little historical importance; it was only a pretext, an indifferent pretext.³²The murder of Matni came at a very opportune moment for the National Front. A strike in protest, if sufficiently prolonged, could keep Parliament from meeting to consider the amendment of the Constitution. Opposition leaders also hoped that, faced with terror, dots, and street-fighting, Cha- moun would resign and leave the country within three or four days. They were well subsidized by Egypt and Syria to carry on with the terror-imposed strike; and, since the Suez crisis, Syrian arms had been smuggled into Lebanon and distributed among their followers."

On the day following the murder, the opposition called for a general strike, which their henchmen at Tripoli enforced on reluctant Christian shopkeepers. Supporters of al-Hizb al- Qawmi—former opponents of Lebanese independence, but now supporting the Lebanese Government against their bitter enemies of the Ba'th—resisted with force, and sixteen deaths were officially reported in three days. On the evening of May 11, frontier guards at Masna'a, on the main road from Damascus, searched the car of the Belgian Consul-General in Damascus (a fervent admirer of Abdel Nasser whose frequent crossings of the frontier in a heavily laden car had aroused suspicion) and discovered a considerable quantity of automatic rifles, pistols, and ammunition. On the next night, the post was attacked by 200 armed men from the Syrian side, who castrated and disemboweled five Christians manning the post and carried off the sixth, a Muslim, with them."⁴ During these same days, disorders broke out in the Muslim quarters of Beirut, which the insurgents barricaded off against the authorities, and in the Shuf the pacifist Janbalat mobilized his Druze henchmen to attack the Presidential summer palace at Bait ud-Din but was opposed by the rival Druze faction, the Yazbakis led by the Minister of Defense, the conservative Amir Majid Arslan.

On May 11, the U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, Robert W. McClintock, called on the Lebanese Foreign Minister, the Commander-in-Chief, and the President, in that order. He found Dr. Malik "in a considerable state of agitation. Malik claimed that Syria . . . had the night before dispatched a 'horde' of soldiers across the frontier to aid the rebels. Malik urgently requested that the Sixth Fleet be ordered to stand by ready to land in case the Lebanese government troops were overwhelmed." The Commander-in-Chief, General Fuad Chehab (Shihab), a member of Lebanon's most aristocratic family, was relaxing at his home fifteen miles from Beirut and "apparently taking a much less serious view of the situation . . . anxious to keep himself and his Muslim and Christian subordinates'" aloof from internal political troubles. He assured the ambassador that the current trouble was nothing to worry about. However . . . it might be wise for the United States Government to speed up deliveries of certain weapons it had promised the Lebanese Army." President Chamoun's attitude:

. . . had changed markedly since dinner the evening before. ... He charged that Nasser was making a "massive" attempt to overthrow him and replace him with a man less tied to America and more friendly to Egypt. The United States . . . must either promise to support him or else watch his and

every other pro-Western regime in the Middle East, including Iraq and Jordan, fall like ninepins to the Egyptian.

Back at his Embassy office the Ambassador quickly dictated telegrams reporting these views to Washington. To the reports he added his own comment that, while Malik and Chamoun's alarm was not fully justified, America's prestige in the Lebanon was deeply involved and that the State Department should be prepared either to support the current regime in resisting subversion or to cut its losses and learn to live with a great Arab nation presided over by Nasser.

While the guerrilla warfare in Lebanon continued indecisively amidst a population still attracted by the pleasures of feuding,and the opposition continued to demand the President's immediate resignation as its condition for a cease-fire. Dr. Charles Malik appealed to the U.N. Security Council to pay attention to the threat to peace represented by the U.A.R. intervention in Lebanon. The Egyptian spokesman denied any such intervention, declaring that the revolution was a purely internal Lebanese matter. The Council decided on June 11, with the Soviet delegate abstaining, to send a group of observers (UNOGIL) to investigate whether men and arms were being infiltrated across Lebanon's borders. During the following week, fifty-four neutral observers arrived in the country, and on June 19 the U.N. Secretary-General himself arrived in Beirut at the beginning of a tour of mediation among the Arab capitals. On his return to New York, he stated at a news conference: "The phrase you sometimes find used in the newspapers, 'mass infiltration,' has not been and is not warranted at present. I am sorry, I would correct myself on one point. I would delete the words 'has not been' and say just straight that to my knowledge we have no foundation for such a judgment now."³" This equivocal statement was immediately seized on by U.A.R. propagandists as giving them a complete acquittal on the charge of intervention in Lebanon; but Lebanese Government newspapers were not alone in:

. . . raising sharp questions about UNOGIL's adequacy even as an observer force when, for instance, it does not operate at night and its members have no command of Arabic. United Nations sources here point out, however, that although the observers are not running night patrols, they do stand 24-hour watches at their seven field bases, and they begin patrols at dawn each day.

They also expect their four new reconnaissance aircraft to assist greatly in their coverage of the frontier—only 18 miles of which is still in Government control. Meanwhile, they are trying to recruit Arabic translators, possibly from local scholastic circles and from abroad, and they are cultivating cooperative relationships with most of the rebel leaders, especially in the frontier areas. . . .

There is good reason to believe that Mr. Hammarskjold and his assistants have embarked on a deliberate plan of trying to freeze the situation as it is at present until July 24, when it becomes possible to elect a new President. The belief is that this will give both sides time to cool off and encourage them to find a face-saving way out by eventually agreeing on a candidate.⁸⁰

There is little doubt that this was also the desire of the U.S. Government, which had been sharply questioned concerning Mr. Dulles' statement on May 20 that the independence and integrity of Lebanon came within the Eisenhower Doctrine's interpretation of what was vital to the security of the United States. On July 1, Mr. Dulles said: "The presence of foreign troops, however justifiable—and it is thoroughly justifiable from a legal and international law standpoint—is not as good a solution as for the Lebanese to find a solution themselves. It would be ... a sort of measure of last resort."⁴⁰There seems to have been something of a contest of wills between President Chamoun and the U.S. Ambassador in Beirut, each insisting that the responsibility for inviting the intervention of the U.S. Sixth Fleet lay with the other. The Ambassador, who ^uheld strong personal views . . . not all of them in accord with Washington policies," had been pressing "perhaps a little too enthusiastically for a compromise solution of the conflict,"⁴¹ while Chamoun and Malik were perhaps too inclined to identify the independence and integrity of Lebanon with their personal retention of power.⁴² However, the dispatch quoted above from The Times⁴'¹ ended with the admission that the "sensible" notion of finding a compromise candidate for the presidency had received no encouragement yet from either side in Lebanon:

The opposition leader, Saeb Salam,⁴⁴ has just declared that he will not recognize the validity of any election as long as President Chamoun is still in power; and since President Chamoun has repeatedly expressed his determination to continue in office to the end of his term in September, the chances are that Lebanon may still spend the rest of this summer in a state of stubborn and costly anarchy.⁴'"

The powerful spring of the U.S. Sixth Fleet was, however, being wound up to meet the possibility of a sudden emergency, and it was triggered off by the Iraqi military coup d'etat of Juiv 14.⁴" While violent dispute raged for some weeks in the U.S. and elsewhere about the propriety of the intervention (followed by a British intervention in Jordan),⁴⁷ the success of the Iraqi revolution came undoubtedly as an enormous encouragement to the radical opposition in both Lebanon and Jordan and a corresponding discouragement to the supporters of those two hard-pressed governments who had been appeal- ing for Western help; so that, except on the very dubious hypothesis that it was in the Western interest to have the whole of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon (encircling Israel) dominated by an Abdel Nasser still enthusiastically flirting with the U.S.S.R., there was everything to be said for prompt action. The Russians blustered, as at the time of Suez; but those Western judges proved right who averred that the Kremlin was not ready to make the Middle Eastern issue a casus belli nuciearis if the West showed a united front.

The landing of the U.S. Marines on the beaches just south of Beirut precipitated an opera bouffe situation. The Lebanese Commander-in-Chief, General Chehab, had "dallied and procrastinated" since the beginning of the fighting, "refusing to come to grips with the rebels"—partly because his army was riddled by the same factions as were dividing the country, but also probably because he was widely regarded as the compromise candidate for the presidency who might restore internal peace. On the morning of July 16, Chehab informed the U.S. Ambassador "in no uncertain terms" that if the commander of the American Marines carried out his orders to advance into the city, "Lebanese tanks, already deployed along the airport road, would open fire"; on the other hand, President Chamoun declared "equally emphatically" that if they did not advance, he expected to be kidnaped by the rebels issuing from their Beirut stronghold (the Basta quarter), "leaving the United States in the embarrassing situation of maintaining troops in a foreign country to protect a government which did not exist." The Ambassador devised a "truly desperate expedient" of suggesting that General Chehab and himself should "inject themselves personally between the opposing troops"; and this they did, accompanied by the Ambassador's poodle, finding "a dozen or more Lebanese tanks, recoilless rifles, and other weapons lining the road, their guns unlimbered and aimed directly at the spot where the Marine column was waiting/* As a further face-saver for the Lebanese Army, the U.S. admiral in command agreed to divide the column into segments and place Lebanese jeeps in the intervals, "so that it doesn't look quite so much like an invading army*¹; and after an hour's delay ("General Chehab was clearly having difficulty persuading his staff to call off the resistance"), the cortege advanced, led by the ambassadorial Cadillac containing the Ambassador, the Lebanese Commander-in-Chief, the U.S. admiral, the Embassy kavas, and the poodle who on passing the embassy building was relieved by "a pretty embassy secretary/'⁴^

The next two weeks were spent in an attempt to obtain agreement on a compromise candidate for the presidency and a quorum for the Chamber of Deputies that would elect him. The government, which had issued warrants of arrest against several of the militant opposition deputies, announced a stay of execution for the period of the election. Saeb Salam continued to declare the present Chamber unfit to hold the election because it had been elected under government pressure the year before and now existed "under the menace of foreign troops"; but on July 31, fifty-six of the sixty-six deputies presented themselves, and on the second ballot General Fuad Chehab received forty-eight of their votes and was declared elected. The president-elect, whose term of office would not begin until September 24, prepared to negotiate a truce, but by August 8 there was a renewal of terrorism, probably arising from the failure to reach a compromise on the composition of a new Cabinet. The summoning of the U.N. General Assembly to examine the Middle Eastern situation, in an extraordinary session beginning on August 12, gave the opposition further occasion for resorting to violence in protest against having Lebanon represented in the Assembly by Charles Malik. Then, on August 20, the representatives of the Arab states at the U.N., who had been meeting in secret conclave, surprised the world and perhaps themselves by solemnly confirming, in the best spirit of Tartuffe, their adherence to Article 8 of the Arab League Pact: "Each member state shall respect the systems of government established in the other member states and regard them as exclusive concerns of those states. Each shall pledge to abstain from any action calculated to change established systems of government."

As Chamoun's term of office entered its last days, there was much talk of a new Cabinet to be headed by Rashld Karama, who had been Premier once before and was now titular leader of the revolt in his native city of Tripoli; but this initiative was strongly opposed by the Kata'ib Lubnanlya (Phalanges Libanaises), an organization made up mainly of Maronites who had been among the most effective militants on the government's side (given the abstention of the army, to which the outgoing Prime Minister made bitter reference on his arrival in voluntary exile in Turkey).⁴⁹ On September 22, the Kata'ib called its own general strike, representing the so-called "Christian counterrevolution," which was so far effective that the U.S. Ambassador felt constrained to mediate between the Kata'ib leader, Pierre Jumaiyil, and the Prime Minister-designate, who had meanwhile formed a Cabinet of opposition personalities drawn from the various religious communities. After "weeks of patient mediation, hopping in a helicopter,""⁰ the Ambassador succeeded in bringing the two men together on October 10. Karama tendered his Cabinet's resignation and announced the formation of a new one on October 14, consisting of two Muslims and two Christians only; Jumaiyil himself, hitherto regarded as too extreme to be acceptable as a minister on the compromise basis of the National Covenant,'¹ now became Deputy Prime Minister.

The strike was called off on the following day, the last of the United States forces re-embarked during the next ten days, and Lebanon could begin her slow and painful convalescence. Some 3,000 people were stated to have been killed in the months of fighting, nearly one-third of them Syrians, and material damage had been heavy;'¹² but the commercial aptitude of the Lebanese brought about a remarkably quick economic recovery, and in the summer of 1960 it was possible to elect a new Chamber of Deputies with only the customary amount of brawling.

because it was less physically demanding) occupation of herding. "Surprising as it may seem, in view of the immense antiquity of agriculture in the land of the two rivers, modern Iraq is virtually a new agricultural country. Perhaps as much as three-quarters of the area at present cultivated has been brought under the plough since 1918, and one-third of it since" 1945. In Turkish times very little land was cultivated, and the population was very small."⁴

It was this unpromising human and ecological material which the British had undertaken after World War I to weld together into a self-governing state which would at the same time secure the British Empire's interests in communications and oil. In the absence of any native leader who would be acceptable to all communities and regions, the British had brought in as king Faisal ibn Husain, that son of the Sharif of Mecca who had most distinguished himself in the Arab revolt of 1916-18 and had then in 1920 been ejected from his briefly held throne in Damascus by a combination of French intransigence and provocative Arab irresponsibility. Under British tutelage, Faisal had gradually acquired some of the arts of government/' but the establishment of a constitution in 1924 had inevitably admitted to the political arena a limited class of urban lawyer-politicians whose contacts with the illiterate rural masses or the smaller but growing class of urban workers was only tenuous. A British administrator with fourteen years' experience was reported as writing in 1930:

I do not suppose there is in the whole of history another example of a state with a representative government of a modern type in which the only people who count are two or three hundred at the most. It is in fact a close oligarchy, but without the administrative experience, the education and the tradition of public service, without which as far as I can remember no oligarchies have governed successfully/⁵

In 1920, the urban nationalists, impatient for independence but lacking the physical force for an effective challenge of the British military administration, had exploited the local discontents of the tribal sheikhs along the Euphrates southeast of Baghdad to accomplish their objective, in the so-called National Revolution;⁷ and in the following years, the British, driven by considerations of cost as well as political expediency to make their influence in Iraq an indirect one, had sought to conciliate tribal sheikhs, as the strongest social force in the country, by bestowing material and political favors in return for good conduct. The sheikhs, eager to turn the agricultural progress under the new regime to their personal advantage, exploited their political influence to get the tribal lands {hitherto state domain on which the tribes were theoretically tenants-at-will, but actually virtually uncontrolled by the government) registered as their own freehold; and the status of their tribesmen was thus imperceptibly degraded to that of serfs or peons legally bound to the soil. Dr. Warriner wrote in 1957:

The prestige of the sheikhs rests on their former function of leadership in a tribal society which owed the state no allegiance. The foundation of the new kingdom strengthened them, giving them legal ownership of land and representation in Parliament, while it has at the same time weakened them by removing the need for tribal wars and tribal rule, through the creation of a national army and a national administration. They thus secured a position of privilege in the state, without obligation to it.^s

Once the control exercised by the British had been reduced by the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930, and that of King Faisal I removed by his death in 1933, the urban politicians had split into rival factions which, when in opposition, did not scruple to incite to insurrection against the national government of the day those same Euphrates tribes whom in 1920 they had incited against the British "oppressor:"' So much genuine patriotism (as Arnold Wilson's anonymous observer had predicted in 1930)³⁰ was there in these self-seeking pettifoggers! The army officers, who were called upon to suppress the tribal revolts, finally became disgusted by these sordid practices and ejected the politicians in favor of a military dictatorship (1936-37); but the spirit of factionalism was rife among the officers also, culminating in the murder of the overweening dictator Bakr Sidqi, and there followed an uneasy maneuvering of political and military factions which finally led in 1940-41 to a deep schism between those who saw some value in maintaining the British connection and those who, in this first great crisis of the Middle Eastern campaign in World War II, opportunistically but ineffectually intrigued with Nazi Germany in pursuit of what were supposed to be the "national" or pan- Arab interests.¹¹

Notable among those who had not broken faith with the British were Nuri as-Said, who had been advanced to ministerial rank by Faisal I, and the Regent Abdul Ilah, representing the Crown during the long minority of King Faisal II.¹²It is fairer to represent these men as moderate Iraqi nationalists, not as the British puppets caricatured by their enemies; but the breach between them and the Istiqlal (Independence) Party, which had compromised itself with the Nazis and paid the price of incompetence and defeat in 1941 with exile or wartime internment, was never bridged. After World War II was over, the Istiqlal was recklessly ready to make common cause with the emerging Communists in order to undermine the moderates and the British alliance;¹³ and Nuri (whose personality more and more stood out above the political dwarfs who opposed him)¹⁴ was consequently compelled to rely increasingly for support on that most conservative (not to say reactionary) section of the population, the tribal sheikhs,¹" and to distort the constitutional machinery to combat the demagogic appeal of his no less unscrupulous opponents.

It was doubtless this necessity, of securing ultraconserva- tive supporters (In the absence of others) for the essentially reasonable policies that the ultranationalists rejected, that estranged Nuri from the one moderate leftist group In Iraq, the National Democrats. This group was briefly represented In one of Nurfs cabinets (1946-47), but resigned because It could not agree on what constituted "free" elections In a semi- tribal society like that of Iraq; and in 1954, Nuri suppressed the party for its collaboration with the Communists and sent its leader, Kamil Chadirchi, "a landowner of deep reformist conviction who . . . enjoyed the regard of much of the educated public,"^1<; to jail on a charge of sedition. Nuri s education at the Ottoman military college from 1904 to 1906 had not included any insight Into economic and social questions, and subsequently his early involvement in international affairs under Faisal I had left him with little inclination for what he (and almost all the Arab nationalists of his generation) regarded as the mere "bread and butter" of politics. Lord Birdwood tactfully concedes that, in the view of many, Nurfs failure:

. . . lay in the absorption of the Government with long-term planning at the expense of short-term results with a popular appeal. ... If only Nuri could have made fuller use of his publicity resources, he could have had the public behind him. . . .

To take a practical example; a system of good roads is an essential element in planning the ordered development and progress of a community enjoying an expanding economy.

More particularly it could serve to break down divisions between tribe and town. But if this was not to be explained to people who demanded houses, it would perhaps have been wiser to have built the houses and neglected the roads.¹⁷

But, as a review of Birdwood's book pointed out, the defect lay deeper:

Nuri helped to lay the foundations of the State of Iraq— yet he was given no praise by the nationalists. He presided over the formation of the Development Board [1950-53], and the allotment to it of the greater part of the oil revenues —yet he was never given credit for trying to raise the living standards of his people.^lb Was this just because he was unable to handle modern methods of publicity? Was it because he despised the ordinary people so much that he did not condescend to explain himself to them? Or was it because, although he did the right things, he did not do them in the way that his people valued? Lord Birdwood asserts the first and implies, perhaps unintentionally, the second. But surely the third is at least as important.¹⁹

Basically, the defect was that the capital investment was undertaken in a country "in which the archaic social and mental structures had hardly been changed at all. The development plan was thought of too much in terms of bricks and mortar, and insufficient account was taken of the 'human capital' that had to be improved and made more receptive toward economic progress. Neglect of this was one of the deep-seated causes of the indifference shown to the development plan, which undoubtedly contributed largely to the downfall of the regime."²⁰

The combination of indifference to the good aspects of the development plans with frustration at their shortcomings was strongest in that cross-section of the semieducated who had no part in the immediate material profits to be derived from the plans—namely, "the lower and lower-middle grades of the administration and services, the junior teachers, the part-time lawyers and newspaper editors, and all the underemployed whom the educational system has created."²¹ If Nuri had been willing to be an intransigent nationalist of the Syrian pattern and play the demagogue with this element, he might at least have ended his days in dignified impotence, like ex-President Shukri al-Kuwatly (designated the first Arab citizen of the United Arab Republic) or ex-Premier Mustafa an- Nahhas; but as it was, the semieducated and maladjusted products of Iraq's unequal growth during forty years of tutelage and self-government readily absorbed the malicious envy which the Egyptian and Syrian regimes felt for Iraq's growing oil wealth and consequent influence, as well as their refusal to comprehend Nun's appreciation of the geopolitical implications of Iraq's situation (with her northern border less than 150 miles from the Soviet frontier). For the pan-Arabs, Nun's unforgivable crime was not his social blindness, but his reliance on the British connection. Less than two years before Abdel Nasser made his fateful arms deal with the U.S.S.R., he had turned his formidable propaganda machine on Nuri early in 1954 because Nuri had concluded a much smaller arms deal with the United States; and this was only a foretaste of the vituperation loosed upon Nuri for concluding the pact with Turkey which formed the nucleus of the Baghdad Pact. Henceforth, no abuse was too violent, no lies too outrageous for the Egyptian propaganda mills, assisted by German experts who had served their apprenticeships with Dr. Joseph Goebbels.²² (The Germans found the Egyptians— already adept in the native school of Abdullah Nadlm, Mustafa Kamil, and the Wafd—ready pupils in the techniques of advanced mendacity.) From 1954 onward, those of Nuri's Iraqi critics who slipped abroad to avoid his ban found a ready welcome in Syria and Egypt; and it is safe to say that more of the so-called Communists whose activities made Iraq a Western journalists" byword in 1959 had received their indoctrination in Damascus from the fellow-traveling Ba'th Party in the previous years than behind the iron curtain. Abdel Nasser himself said in Damascus in March, 1959: "When Nuri as-Sa'id expelled them [the ^Communists'] from their country, we gave them shelter. When Nuri as-Sa'id denied them everything in their country, Damascus took them in and fed them."^2;:

The collapse of Nun's regime from the impact of the military coup of July, 1958 (the plans for which seem, significantly, to have originated after the Suez crisis)/⁴ was taken by many observers as an unqualified triumph for Abdel Nasser and his United Arab Republic; and one of the radical critics of British policy in the Middle East could confidently declare: "Only folly could suppose that natural development, free from non-Arab influence of every kind, would lead anywhere but to the unity at least of Egypt and the whole of Arabic-speaking Asia, that is, not only the U.A.R. and Iraq, but also Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Arabian sheikhdoms and, ultimately, Aden, with Lebanon in looser association."²' But an obstacle was soon to arise, apparently from the characteristically Arab factor of personal hubris. The plot which had been hatched for the overthrow of Nun's regime was that a brigade commanded by Colonel Abdel Salam Arif should first attempt to seize the strategic points in Baghdad and, if this failed, another brigade commanded by Brigadier Abdul Karim Qasim should repeat the attempt. The coup succeeded at the first stroke;²⁰and Arif's rapid promotion to the second highest position in the new regime was evidently too much for his sense of discretion. It seems that his 'impulsive, passionate, vain, and indiscreet" temperament soon offended many of the other officers who had been parties to the revolutionary plot, and that they succeeded in convincing Qasim that Arif was a liability to the regime. He had apparently conflicted at an early stage with the left-wing elements among the officers,²⁷and the intemperate haste with which he extolled Arab unity and the merits of Abdel Nasser gave rise to unrest among the Kurdish minority and in the Shfi cities that had no wish to see their influence diminished by the merging of Iraq with the predominantly Sunni U.A.R.²" Arif was therefore successively relieved of his duties as Deputy Commander-in-Chief, Deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of the Interior, and on September 30 was appointed Ambassador to West Germany. He refused to go, however, and apparently drew a revolver in Qasim's presence; after a superficial reconciliation, he was induced to leave for Germany on October 12. Following a brief stay in Bonn, he went traveling in other European capitals and on November 4 returned without authorization to Baghdad, where he was promptly arrested and charged with conspiring to overthrow Qasim.

What the objective facts were that lay behind the charges preferred against him in the People's Court (presided over by Qasim's cousin Colonel Fadil Abbas al-Mahdawi, "a natural buffoon who appears to delight in exhibiting the soul of a dwarf'),²⁹ it is at present impossible to be sure. But one commentator has remarked that while Arif had been making his pan-Arab speeches during August and the first half of September, with the consequent reaction in the Shi'i south and among the Kurds:

... it appeared . . . that the Communists prepared to use these two movements for their own ends in the secret hope of taking control of them. The Iraqi Communist Party in fact took an extremely firm stand against any approach of Iraq to the U.A.R.; in this way it gained increasing support from the Kurds and those Shi'i circles most attached to Islam.

The extreme left thus acquired a formidable hold over the Baghdad government, to the extent that it could, if need be, threaten it with agitation or even serious disorders in the north and south of the country. To sum up, the attempts to strengthen Egyptian influence played into the hands of the Iraqi Communists.

Arifs downfall had been accompanied by the arrest of a number of Ba'thi army officers and of Rashid Ali al-Gilani, the Istiqlal leader in the 1941 coup who had just returned from his seventeen years' exile. They were accused of plotting a pro-Egyptian coup with Arif, and the portraits of the Egyptian leader, with which the streets had been plastered immediately after the revolution, suddenly disappeared and were replaced with portraits of Qasim, the "one and only leader" (az-za'lm al-awhad).

People in Baghdad began to speak cryptically of "Egyptian imperialism." When the Egyptian Minister of Education . . . visited the capital at the end of October, violent anti- Egyptian demonstrations broke out in the streets and at the University. Abdel Nasser's name was reviled, and his few Ba'thi supporters beaten up. The Egyptian rector appointed to preside over Baghdad University immediately after the revolution was asked to leave, and with him a number of teachers and technicians who had been invited to Iraq by two pro-Egyptian ministers in July and August. . . .

In the view of Iraqi opinion the extreme left thus very rapidly emerged as the surest bulwark of the country's independence against the Egyptian designs upon it. To Cairo's dictatorial and centralized idea of Arab unity the Iraqi Communists very cleverly opposed a 'liberal" and federal one. This idea of Arab unity, being more democratic and more "native," '¹ was calculated to attract the Iraqi intellectuals of the left who were offended by Abdel Nasser's dictatorial rule, and also the nationalist elements who prized Iraq's independence.-

Two important motives in this desire for independence of Egypt were the suspicion that Iraq's large oil revenues were coveted by capital-hungry Egypt and the Iraqi officers' scorn for the military prowess of the Egyptian Army as demonstrated in the Palestine War and the Sinai campaign of 1956."

Abdel Nasser himself was said to have disapproved of the intemperate haste which Arif had shown f⁴ but there seems little doubt that the Ba'thi and pan-Arab circles that were implicated in Arifs downfall had been superficial and unrealistic in their underestimation of the opposing tendencies in Iraq. As one of their spokesmen later admitted: "It cannot be denied that the inexperience, hastiness and operational clumsiness of the Arab nationalists in Iraq were as evident as the shrewdness shown by Iraqi Communist leadership. . . . The Arab nationalist movement had been gravely debilitated and its leadership paralyzed for so long under the Hashemites that when the old regime collapsed the vacuum could hardly be filled by the inexperienced nationalist leadership."''" Once again, however, an Arab spokesman could not frankly admit an error without resorting to excuses that were unconvincing. If the nationalist "leadership" was so inexperienced, would it not have been more prudent not to break so utterly with the conservative nationalists like Nuri, rather than plunge the country into an uncharted sea of radicalism with Communist "shrewdness" for an ally? As for the "paralyzing" of the leadership by the "old regime," Nuri had directed his repression more against Communists than against nationalists. If the former were better organized to go underground than the latter, that was just an indication that Communism had more vitality than Arab nationalism;³'⁵ and the failure of the nationalists to see beyond the immediate move in the political game was likewise a demonstration that they should have been content with a pastime like backgammon instead of essaying the complexities of chess.

CHAPTER 9

ABDEL NASSER AT DAMASCUS— OR THE NEW SAINT PAUL

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales (Acts of the Apostles, ix. 18).

At the time of the Iraqi revolution in 1958 and the subsequent landing of U.S. troops in Lebanon and British troops in Jordan, Abdel Nasser had been visiting Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia. He flew immediately to Moscow and conferred there on July 17-18 with the Soviet leaders. During the debates in the extraordinary session of the U.N. General Assembly, harmony between the delegates of the U.A.R. and the U.S.S.R., in opposition to the American and British "aggressors," seemed complete. In October, Nasser's faithful acolyte, Defense Minister and Commander-in-Chief Abdul Hakim Amir, visited Moscow and concluded an agreement there by which the U.S.S.R. would finance the Egyptian High Dam to the extent of 400 million rubles and provide technical assistance. About the same time, the Ministry of Education ordered that Russian should be taught in place of French in Egyptian schools, and an Egyptian correspondent reported that in a year's time there would be 2,000 students from the

U.A.R. studying in Communist China, instead of the twenty- two there at present.¹

However, in a speech in mid-November, Abdel Nasser indicated that these friendly relations with the Communist countries existed "despite the difference of our social systems":

When I visited the Soviet Union and met their friendly people I declared in the name of the U.A.R. that we are a people that is friendly to those who behave as friends, and that struggles against those who are hostile. . . . We are a people that remembers kindnesses. . . . They have their social order, we have ours. . . . Arabism is a socialist, democratic, cooperative society uniting the sons of this land.²

This element of unity was emphasized In a reorganization of the central government of the U.A.R. announced on October 7. It set up under Abdel Nasser a central government of twenty-one members, of whom fourteen were Egyptian and seven Syrian. Of the Syrian Ba'th leaders, Akram Hawrani and Salah ud-Din Bitar were called to Cairo as Ministers of Justice and National Orientation respectively; and though Colonel Serraj remained in Syria, it was as Minister of the Interior in the northern province, subordinated to a trusted Egyptian Minister of the Interior (Zakariya Muhi ud-Din) in the central government. This was considered a strengthening of Egyptian control over a Syria that might now (the first rapture of the U.A.R. honeymoon being over) be tempted to draw closer to a republican Iraq.³ In August, a former organ of the outlawed Syrian Muslim Brotherhood had been suspended for stating that a Syrian-Iraqi union was more natural than one between Syria and Egypt, and Syrian students had been forbidden to study in iron curtain countries because of the "disloyal" attitude of the Syrian Communist Party toward the U.A.R.⁴

On November 27, consistent with his statement two weeks

earlier about the friendly relations existing with the Soviet bloc, Abdel Nasser declared that "the imperialists are now trying to sow discord between the U.A.R. and the Iraqi Republic and between their respective leaders. But in vain will they try to provoke differences; between Cairo and Baghdad there is full collaboration in confronting imperialism and Zionism."" On December 7, however, the Beirut Sunni politician Saeb Salam, who was in Cairo apparently to give an account of his stewardship during the Lebanese civil war/' told a reporter after a long interview with Nasser that "Communism in Iraq was the greatest danger threatening the Arab world" and blamed the United States for serving the Soviet Communist turn by not siding with the U.A.R. against Qasim's "separatist" policy.⁷ On December 8, the Baghdad radio announced the discovery of another alleged plot, this time apparently by the nationalist Istiqlal, though the government- controlled Middle East News Agency of Cairo accused the U.S. of being behind the plot.⁵ By mid-December, a U.A.R. official could tell a reporter that "unless Britain and America change their policy in Iraq quickly, there is no hope of saving that country from Communism"; the Cairo weekly Akhbar al-Yawm for the first time informed the Egyptian public directly that Iraqi Communists were hostile to Arab nationalism and accused them of attacking Arab unity and the U.A.R.; and in response to the return to Syria of the Communist leader Khalid Bakdash and his public criticism of the U.A.R., the Damascus radio for the first time attacked Communist tactics.⁰The stage was now set for Abdel Nasser to reveal himself, which he promptly did in a speech delivered at Port Said on December 23 to celebrate the "victory" of 1956:

When the people of Egypt united with the people of Syria, when the standard of Arab nationalism again streamed victorious, then enemies lined up against us. They felt that the victory of Arab nationalism and the standard of Arab nationalism would ruin all their interests, whether they looked toward exploitation or opportunism. . . .

Reactionaries knew that Arab nationalism would forbid exploitation; the Communist Party knew that Arab nationalism would destroy opportunism; so reactionaries and the Communist Party declared themselves against Arab nationalism and Arab union. . . .

During these last days, since the creation of the U.A.R., I have proclaimed that the nation must constitute a National Union.¹" We must unite our efforts so as to destroy Zionism and crush imperialism. We shall not be able to struggle against Zionism or against imperialism if we are struggling against ourselves. But the Syrian Communist Party has refused that. . . . Still more, it has rejected Arab nationalism and Arab union. Some of its members last week preached in favor of separation and rejected any union of the Arab nation. That is what Zionism preaches.

He went on to admit that there had been some delays in reorganizing the economy and administration of the "Syrian province" after its incorporation in the U.A.R. and said that he had now appointed a commission of three (Akram Hawrani and two of Nasser's Egyptian Army colleagues) "to accelerate the rhythm of modernization."¹¹ The attack on the Syrian Communists was echoed two days later in an interview which his Syrian acolyte Serraj gave to the Egyptian newspaper al-A hram :

At the beginning the opportunist elements—the Communists—were carried along by the current of Arab nationalism and accepted the union, but against their will. For a time they watched and waited; but having realized that their hopes were vain and that the union was going its course step by step, they became the resounding spokesmen of reaction and opportunism. . . .

Recently the Communist Party has openly shown its hand. Its leaders in their statements have urged secession, by a hidden and vile means. They have spoken, not of union, but of federation, a Utopian idea.¹'-

The day before Nasser made his speech, commented the Lebanese businessman and politician Emile Bustani, "many people had been of the opinion that Arab nationalism and Communism were synonymous," but now "local nationalists echoed his words and rounded up their local Communists"^1:to the number of several hundred in Syria. This led Khrushchev, at the Twenty-first Communist Party Congress of the U.S.S.R., to extend a warning to "certain leaders of the United Arab Republic" that "to struggle against Communist parties and other progressive parties is the work of reaction"; and this was followed by an attack by the Syrian Communist leader Khalid Bakdash (who had again slipped away behind the iron curtain) upon "those adventurers, the leaders of the Ba'th Party, who have lost all prestige in the eyes of the people. They are trying to use the slogan of the struggle against Communism to incite the liberated Arab country to abandon the policy of positive neutralism, to stifle democratic liberties, and finally to open the doors to imperialist capital investment from Western Germany, Italy, Japan or the International Bank dominated by American capital."¹⁴ Nasser, however, was anxious not to forfeit the advantages of Soviet economic aid, notably the construction of the first stage of the High Dam and of a new shipyard at Alexandria for which agreements were now being signed with the U.S.S.R.; and in his speech on February 21, 1959, to celebrate the first anniversary of the establishment of the U.A.R., he was accordingly concerned with finding scapegoats:

Immediately after my speech at Port Said, plots were set afoot for the purpose of making trouble between us and the

U.S.S.R. Our relations with the U.S.S.R. have always been friendly, based on mutual respect and on the principle that each country would choose the political and social regime it wished and would collaborate with the other without interfering in its internal affairs. But naturally imperialist circles seized on the opportunity to sow discord. . . .

Foreign news bulletins directed at Russia said that the U.A.R. was turning toward the West, separating itself from the U.S.S.R., beginning to realize the Russian danger. . . . The news that reached Cairo said that Khrushchev had decided to get rid of Gamal Abdel Nasser because he was an obstacle in the way of his policy. News directed at other countries said that Russia had organized a plot to have Abdel Nasser murdered and that Yugoslavia¹"' had drawn the attention of the U.A.R. to this plot. These were only lies and devices to sow discord. We had to pay attention to them because the imperialist powers and also the opportunists were trying to achieve the same end.

He went on to describe his recent exchange of letters with Khrushchev, and then discussed his relations with the Iraqi Government since the revolution of 1958:

We knew that the traditional imperialist policy had been at all times based on the creation of differences between Baghdad and Cairo. We knew that the enemies of nationalism would not fail to use these old methods again. A first attempt aimed at dividing the people into two clans, one calling for union with Egypt, the other asking for a federation. I then gave my frank opinion. I said that there were some points I could not discuss, union being one thing and federation another,¹⁶ but that I was ready to discuss Iraq's relations with the U.A.R. We could arrive at a military and economic agreement, thus expressing the sense of union. If union was to be achieved, we would prefer it to be done unanimously. I also pointed out the danger for the Iraqi people of becom- ing divided between supporters of union and supporters of federation. I naturally felt that some of those who were advocating federation and attacking union did not have the situation in Iraq in mind at all, but Syria. They wanted to rouse the Syrian people against union.³⁷

Two days later, he declared in Damascus, "We shall not allow opportunists to divide the U.A.R. and Iraq. We form a single people and the Iraqi people is part of the Arab nation/'¹⁸

Already at the beginning of February, Qasim had reformed the Iraqi Cabinet, excluding the remaining supporters of the U.A.R. and consequently strengthening the left:^1,1 and the People's Court had tried Colonel Arif and sentenced him to death.²⁰ From this time on, those pan-Arab Iraqis who had left the country to escape the new "persecution" began to plot a coup d'etat with agents of the U.A.R.; the Mediterranean correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, who in his Beirut headquarters was absorbing and reflecting these emigres sentiments, reported that "it is almost certain that Communist control of Iraq now could be overthrown only through armed action of some kind";-¹ and it was significant that Abdel Nasser prolonged his stay in the Syrian province. The northern Iraqi city of Mosul, whose leading families were hostile to the proposed Iraqi land reform and, indeed, to control from Baghdad in general, was situated conveniently near the eastern frontier of the Syrian province. Arms were smuggled in with the complicity of an Iraqi brigade commander, Abdul W^rahhab Shawwaf, and officers of the Syrian intelligence made contact with Iraqi officers. But Qasim had his informers at work and sent a large contingent of the Communist-directed Popular Resistance Forces (al-Muqawama ash-Sha'blya) ~ from Baghdad to reinforce a congress of the Partisans of Peace authorized in Mosul from March 5 to 7. Clashes between them and the Mosul supporters of Abdel Nasser led Shawwaf on March 8 to come out openly against the Baghdad regime, which he accused of having "thrown thousands of innocent citizens into internment camps, the like of which had never been seen in the past under the rule of the oppressor Nuri as-Said and the criminal Abdul Ilah."²⁸ The U.A.R. flag was run up the citadel, and warriors of the Shammar tribe, whose lands on either side of the Syrian-Iraqi frontier were exposed to the effects of the land reform, approached the suburbs of the city. But Qasim's air force bombed the rebels; the Popular Resistance Forces and Kurdish irregulars sprang into action against the apparently irresolute regular army garrisons; Shawwaf was wounded by a bomb fragment and then, as he lay on a hospital bed, finished off by a noncommissioned officer with his own revolver. The rebellion fizzled out, to be followed by a terrible revenge on the part of the Popular Resistance Forces: thirty to fifty officers were said to have been shot out of hand, civilian suspects were hunted down and killed, and the Iraqi air force took a pitiless toll of the fugitive Shammar as they fled back to the Syrian frontier.²⁴

Following the Mosul revolt and its failure, the floodgates of Arab mutual vituperation were opened between the capitals of the U.A.R. and Iraq, and the depths to which human nature could sink in "envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness" were revealed. The Baghdad radio accused the U.A.R. of having fomented the revolt, and Nasser replied from Damascus by accusing Qasim, "the divider of Iraq,"²⁵ of "using the methods employed by Nuri as-Sa'id and the enemies of Arab nationalism." A fugitive Iraqi officer who had died in Syria of wounds received at Mosul was given a state funeral at Damascus and buried near the tomb of the great Saladin, whom the U.A.R. Government had from the start proclaimed as its spiritual forerunner.-" Placards carried in the funeral procession read: "Qasim the traitor has sold his country to the Communists"; "Death to Qasim and Mahdawi"; ^4kShaw- waf. you shall be avenged"; "Honor to Arif, hero of Arab nationalism/' In return, the Baghdad radio described Abdel Nasser as:

... a bloody dictator and dangerous charlatan who claims to be the champion of Arab nationalism; but we may ask if Arab nationalism is a synonym for conspiracy, murder, and shameless dictatorship. The Mosul rebels in Cairo's pay have massacred innocent civilians, men, women, and children, have sacked and plundered the city like highway robbers. To justify these massacres Abdel Nasser has found no better excuse than to accuse the Iraqi Government of Communism and atheism. In fact everyone knows that he wants to impose on the Iraqi people his dictatorship and his imperialism, whose ferocity is not to be compared even with that of the nineteenth-century Ottoman domination.

Nasser, still in Damascus, replied: "When we see what is happening in Baghdad seven months after the death of Nuri as- Sa'id, we realize that terrorism has reached a pitch that it had never known under Nun's rule; we realize that the domination of an atheist and subservient minority is even more ferocious than in Nuri's time."-⁷ This exchange of verbal courtesies was accompanied by rival parades; in the one at Baghdad, a photograph of Nasser's head was mounted on various obscene model bodies, while at Cairo Nasser's acolyte, "Field-Marshal" Abdul Hakim Amir, presided over a silent procession in which Qasim was represented as a cat hanging from a rope.-^v

On March 19, Khrushchev—who had already extended a mild reproof to Nasser three days earlier, to which the Egyptian leader had replied with insufficient deference—said to press correspondents: "The President of the U.A.R. has rather gone off the handle. He is still young for his position, he's impulsive. He wants to take upon himself more than he can carry." To this, Nasser replied at Damascus on November 22:

It Is not only Abdel Nasser who is young and impulsive, but the whole Arab people that is enthusiastic and Impulsive. Without this enthusiasm and ardor we should not have been able to achieve the great miracles at a time when we counted only on God and ourselves. . . .

On October 29, 1956, when Egypt was invaded, we rose to defend our country. From October 29 to November 6 [the day of the cease-fire], we stood alone facing Israel, Great Britain, and France. . . . During those days we saw no sign of help from any country whatsoever, including the Soviet Union.-'*

Less than two months earlier, however, Nasser's confidant, the editor of al-Ahram, while already talking back to Khrushchev, had spoken of "our thanks for the help which the Soviet Union gave us ... in our struggle and fight for life and liberty,"*' and earlier statements had been still more explicit with reference to the Suez crisis.

On April 17, Abdel Nasser gave an interview to the editor of the Indian left-wing magazine Blitz, who asked: "Haven't you been rather rough in resisting the [Communist] danger? After all, Qasim and the Communists are Arabs. Couldn't you be patient in the hope that they will recover their senses and understanding?" To this and the following questions, Nasser gave these very revealing answers:

The Arab Communists have sold themselves to foreign influence and forfeited their standing as Arabs. They are tools in the hands of Russia, and that country's agents in Iraq, Syria, and all parts of the Arab world. That is why we cannot trust them as Arabs. Because of their behavior in Iraq and Syria we can wait no longer. I did all I could to con- vince them, but they decided to turn against their fatherland. It was therefore my duty to draw my fellow-citizens' attention to this new danger and arouse them against this threat. As for us Arab nationalists, we have no ally either in the Communist or in the imperialist camp. Similarly, the arms we possess are neither those of the Communists nor of the imperialists. That is why I turned to mv people. My people is my army and my strength, and the armor of my faith. . . .

We have our own doctrine of Arab nationalism based on Arab solidarity and on the idea that we form a single nation. . . . Hence every Arab state has the right to detend the independence and the Arab character of Iraq against Britain, America, Russia, or any other great power. ¹

The refuge which Russia has given to Arab Communists like Bakdash, and the tront seats given them at Moscow, Sofia, and elsewhere while their hostile attitude to their fatherland was perfectly well known, seemed to us a flagrant violation of international diplomatic etiquette. Suppose I did the same with Bulganin, Shepilov, and Zhukov! . . .

The stand I took against the Iraqi Communists was an Arab matter and had nothing to do with the Russians; but Khrushchev . . . accused me of using the language of the imperialists. ... I had therefore no other course than to tell the Russians that we did not like this new kind of imperialism. . . . Russia lost in less than three weeks all the good repute she had gained among us in three years. . . .

All we ask is that people should not interfere in our affairs. Khrushchev knows the harm that the Baghdad Pact did in our part of the world by bringing into it the poisonous atmosphere of the cold war. Why repeat the mistake the West made at Baghdad? Is the group of Communists who do not honor their fatherland more important in Khrushchev's eyes than the friendship of a great ocean of Arab peoples extending from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic? . . .

Until quite recently Khrushchev supported us. For every

move on his part in favor of the Arabs, we have been grateful ten times over. But for every blow that he levels against us, we will give him ten in return.

That is our policy. Perhaps you will say it is not a policy of patience or wisdom. But we are proud of our honor. . . . For all our lives we have struggled against imperialism. . . . We know how to use the proper means to defend ourselves against it. Now this new danger threatens us. . . . The battle is just beginning. We sincerely hope not to have to fight this battle on an international scale. The Communists and the imperialists must understand that we are the masters in our own country and that . . . neither Eisenhower nor Khrushchev has the right to behave in this way in our country.

The British are still suffering from their attack of "Suez dizziness." They are like wounded wolves. They want to take revenge on me because I snatched Suez out of their hands. That is why, to destroy me, they are using every tool that comes into their hands, from Qasim to the Communists.-⁵²

In Iraq, as the summer came on, Qasim evidently followed a policy of temporization. His statement in May that the country was not yet ready for a return to interparty rivalries seemed a rebuff to Communist pressure for seats in the Cabinet, and the anti-Communist majority in the National Democratic Party deferred to the "one and only" leader's fiat by voluntarily suspending its activities.³-'* The death sentences passed by Colonel Mahdawi's demagogic tribunal against such survivors of Nuri's regime as the ex-Prime Minister Fadil al-Jamali were still not executed, in spite of Communist demands; the unlimited power hitherto given to the Popular Resistance Forces to arrest and search was withdrawn, and they were brought under stricter military control; and the Chief of Staff and Military Governor of Baghdad, General Ahmad Salih al-'Abdi, became increasingly prominent as a non-Communist upholder of the army's authority. Faction- alismu however, remained endemic in the country and seemed not so much a consequence of the new-fangled ideologies of Communism and nationalism as a retrogression to the historic Arab factionalism <Yemen and Gays, Hinnawi and Ghifari, etc.) in village and, to some extent, urban society."⁴ It now- found expression in:

... the strange political map which every Iraqi carries about in his head these days. This map divides all the sections of Baghdad, and all the provincial capitals, indeed all the villages of the country up into "Nationalist" and ^Communist." . . . The striking feature of this map consists in its really having a concrete rtality. To cross from the Communist-dominated Kadhimiye section of Baghdad to the Nationalist Adhami section means to cross an invisible border. Even the political slogans on the walls . . . change radically. The inhabitants of the two sections face each other with knives at the ready; they would certainly be at each other s throat were it not for the army standing between them.

Out in the country the situation is quite the same: Kerbela is Nationalist, Nejef is Communist, Musaiyeb is Nationalist, Mahmudive Communist. Every Iraqi can extend this list ad libitum. . . , This map dividing the country up into a chessboard pattern of red and black squares . . .^::r>

At the celebration in July of the first anniversary of the revolution, serious rioting broke out in the oilfield center of Kirkuk, with its mixed population of Turkomans and Kurds:

The Turkomans, who have lived in the old city since Ottoman times . . . represent the stable city-community; merchants and proprietors of all kinds are Turkomans. The Kurds . . . are more dispersed and on the average less prosperous. There had been trouble between the two communities ever since Colonel Shawwaf s revolt in March.

Although it would be gross oversimplification to class all

the Kurds of Iraq as pro-Communist, a large section among them have long considered Soviet aid essential to their goal of an autonomous or independent Kurdistan. . . .

The Turkomans, however, proved resistant to Communism; in several trade unions, they outvoted their pro- Communist Kurdish and Arab colleagues. Approving KassenTs attempts-to contain the Communists, the Turkomans prepared to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution by erecting 133 triumphal arches at the expense of their community. . . .

Quarrels broke out between the Turkoman celebrators and the Kurdish Communists. Fights at the city's bridge, in the two cinemas, and in one of its biggest cafes, ended with several persons wounded, and most of the Turkoman triumphal arches were burned. Then the Communist-dominated People's Resistance Forces stormed the police station, looted the arms stored there, and drove the Turkomans into their homes.

Troops of the Second Division, composed largely of Kurds, were sent to Kirkuk to restore order, but instead took the side of the Kurds. Some of its units shelled Turkoman houses and the troops were soon in command of the whole town. . . .

On July 15 and 16, the Communists, with the help of the Second Division, ruled in Kirkuk. Refugees coming in to Baghdad reported that a red flag flew over the town and army cars were roving the deserted streets, their loudspeakers giving orders in the name of the National Front. A committee consisting of the secretary of the local Communist party, the mayor (a Communist), and six Kurdish officers, exercised supreme power, and had designated the homes of anti- Communists to be looted by the "mass organizations" and the People's Resistance Forces. The mayor, according to the refugees, had ordered the executions of several groups of Turkoman notables and had them buried in mass graves outside the town.

The mutiny in Kirkuk was finally put down by 50 armored cars under Colonel Fuad Aref, the brother of the imprisoned Abdul Selim Aref [Abdel Salam Arif]. A few days later, Kassem gave out the number of dead as 120, the majority "executed" by the Communists in conditions of great cruelty. Kassem himself is said to have visited Kirkuk on July 21 or 22. On his return, he showed the press photographs taken there and blamed "a faction which I do not wish to name" for the atrocities. Furious, he claimed to have proof that the unnamable faction had planned risings all over the country.

Faced with this official condemnation of the Kirkuk massacres, the Communist Party saw fit to publish a lengthy manifesto drawn up by its central committee at a meeting later in July. After deploring the refusal of the National Democrats to participate in the National Front, which had led to a series of "negative results," the Party proceeded to evade responsibility for recent excesses:

Recently the encroachments on citizens' rights and freedoms have grown worse, and some persons have consequently been driven to adopt a negative attitude toward the national authority. This negative attitude has prevented the government from seeing the real danger, which comes from imperialism, reaction, and the enemies of the republic. Faced by the continued provocations on the part of reactionaries who have shed the blood of citizens and violated their sacred rights, and faced by the hateful attitude of some reactionary elements who have escaped the purge of the state administration, the people (moved by the will to defend their existence, to preserve the advantages they have gained, and to safeguard the republic) have sometimes reacted violendy. These reactions have sometimes led to abuses and ill-considered punitive measures. . . .

Bet the revolutionary drive of the Iraqi people is a positive thing which has always . . . played a very important part in bringing down the foundations of the former regime. . . . It has deep roots and beginnings going far back into the history of the Iraqi people. In the course of centuries, the people underwent the worst forms of oppression and enslavement at the hands of invaders and usurpers. That is why in many risings and revolutions the people have reacted very violently and often with much bloodshed. The popular masses have consequently preserved for many generations a spirit of vengeance against the reactionary forces. . . .

The lynchings perpetrated by certain politically backward popular masses, the tortures practiced on detained persons, the looting of property, the infringement of the rights and freedoms of innocent citizens, are methods deplored by all those engaged in the revolutionary struggle against the enemies of the republic. . . . But our Party, not having shared the responsibility of government for a single day, is the one which least of all, in these conditions of unrest and conspiracy against the country, is able to stop the tortures practiced on the internees. '⁷

In its own suffocating jargon, the manifesto examined the reasons for certain mistakes of policy:

From the earliest days that followed the revolution, all applicants were admitted as members of the Party. ... As a general rule, those who were enrolled as members before the revolution became, at various levels and degrees, the nucleus for expansion after the revolution. . . .

While our organizations have made important advances as far as their quantitative development is concerned, the Party managers have found that qualitatively the development has not followed a parallel course. . . . The contradiction between the Party's quantitative development (which has advanced) and its qualitative development (which has shown some shortcomings) has increased. The reason for this lies in the fact that all the organizations have had to apply themselves to different and numerous political tasks of major importance, which has prevented them from achieving a qualitative development parallel to or approximating its numerical advance.

This situation has had negative aspects, since the capacity of the organizations to grasp and remain faithful to the Party's ideology and policy has declined, consequently impairing the guiding role which they should have secured in the mass movement, to cope with the spontaneous pressures from below. Thus some comrades have behaved as individuals—putting themselves on the same level as the masses that belong to no party and thus lack adequate understanding —instead of giving directions and guidance to these masses.^;s

Finally, the report criticized both an excess of "bureaucratic centralism" in the Party and the existence of certain "deviations":

Titoist revisionism has not been entirely unsuccessful in finding support in the Arab countries. The opportunists who call themselves Arab Communists dream of splitting the Communist movement in our country and all the Arab countries. However, they have not succeeded and will not succeed in undermining the unity of our Party. " . . .

The opportunist elements have tried in vain to form a hostile faction. In spite of their setback, the opportunists and revisionists will nevertheless go on with their maneuvers. They will doubtless find individuals, among those who have been expelled from the Party and other suspect elements, who will lend a willing ear to their claptrap. . . .

Mistaken behavior and acts are the reflection of mistaken concepts and ideologies. Insofar as we mav commit errors, mistaken concepts contrary to Marxism-Leninism are born in our minds, the product of vanity and of the dizziness that

comes from success. Groups belonging to the petty bourgeoisie are at the root of these concepts.. ..

In present circumstances the process of re-education aims above all at eliminating mistaken leftist concepts. . . . Some comrades who have a leftist mentality see the situation not as it is but as their imagination presents it. Their plans and concepts are therefore not based on a correct estimate of the real forces at work, but on an overestimate of our strength and an underestimate of the part played by the nationalist bourgeoisie in the national struggle. . . .

Furthermore, the general political struggle calls for caution so as not to make mistakes on the right in reaction to the leftist mistakes. It is a mistake to hold the Party responsible for measures taken against the democratic movement, and to overlook the role of the nationalist bourgeoisie marked by its uncertain wavering to and fro. . . . Important sections of the bourgeoisie have at present antidemocratic concepts which they themselves fought against under the former regime. . . .

We must play our part in educating the non-Party masses. We must strongly oppose mistaken slogans and excesses, and once and for all give up the idea that "to oppose excesses weakens the revolutionary spirit of the people." The indifference we have shown in the past toward the commission of excesses should be a lesson to us. The Party must take disciplinary measures against those who are shown to have violated the Party's principles and taken part in these excesses.

At the same time we must firmly resist all ideas and behavior that spread a feeling of defeatism and surrender among the masses or weaken their confidence in their own strength, the strength of the Party and of the national movement, for safeguarding the republic and guaranteeing the rights of the people.⁴"

For the time being, it was clear that the drive toward Arab-world revolution under Abdel Nasser's leadership had stopped short of its objective; and in the middle of 1959, he turned, not unlike Stalin some thirty years earlier, to an alternative of socialism in one country—his United Arab Republic—with a new slogan promising to double the standard of living in ten years.⁴¹ This change was accompanied by a marked surface improvement in relations between the U.A.R. and the U.S., which was probably prompted by the disclosure that the former's holdings of foreign exchange had been depleted by one-quarter during the year ending on September l;⁴² by a month-long tiff between the U.A.R. and Communist China over an official reception given in Peking for the Syrian Communist leader Bakdash; and by the withdrawal of U.A.R. students from the Soviet-bloc countries that led to premature self-congratulation that "the honeymoon between the Communist bloc and the Middle East is over."⁴³American propagandists for the U.A.R. were soon in full cry;⁴⁴and when the Ba'th made an abortive attempt in October to murder the Iraqi dictator, "liberal" correspondents were positively ghoulish in their anticipation (based on assurances from those pan-Arab emigres whose third failure in twelve months this was) that the next time the plot might be more successful/"' The U.A.R. acknowledged having received U.S, surplus farm products in the value of $107 million over the past year; and in December, the International Bank made a grant of $56.5 million for the deepening of the "nationalized" Suez Canal (work which the former "imperialist" Company had planned to finance out of revenue),⁴⁰ despite the U.A.R.'s continued seizure of cargoes purchased from Israel, in disregard of a compromise formula devised as recently as July by the U.N. Secretary General.⁴⁷

While West German, Italian, Japanese, Austrian, British, and American entrepreneurs were said to be touting round the Egyptian dictator with offers of loans, he asserted his "positive neutralism" by encouraging the nationalists of Cuba and Panama in their anti-U.S. campaigns and by allowing Egyptian "civilian patriots" to found a museum at Port Said to commemorate the suffocation of a British lieutenant (overpowered by six Egyptians) during the fighting in 1956⁴^— this last as an immediate offset to the reluctant re-establishment by the U.A.R. of diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom and Australia. At the ceremonial starting of work on the Aswan High Dam in January, 1960, Abdel Nasser boasted of "the victory of the Arab nation" over the "forces of tyranny, occupation, enslavement, and domination,"⁴⁹ and the Moscow radio reported that he had awarded Khrushchev a gold medal to commemorate the U.S.S.R.'s exclusive role in the first stage of the dam; but simultaneously, the U.A.R.'s Minister of Culture was inviting other nations to provide $100 million to prevent the ancient Egyptian monuments upstream from the grandiose new "monument" from being submerged by its waters. The Mediterranean correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor printed a dispatch (January 14, 1960) entitled, with characteristic optimism, "Political Maturity Grows in Mideast"; but in February, the U.A.R. was trying to resurrect the phantom Arab Palestine "state"^:>" and consequently renewed its attacks on the Jordan Government for its unwillingness to relinquish the territory on the west bank of the River Jordan for what was, in effect, the cause of U.A.R. self-aggrandizement. In March, Abdel Nasser, returned from a month's much-needed reorganization of the government of the northern province (i.e., Syria), called for thousands of volunteers to go to fight the French in Algeria.

The Arab boycott against Israel had proceeded from an embargo on her goods and shipping, through an embargo on third-party shipping carrying goods to or from Israel, and thence to a blacklisting of foreign firms trading with Israel and of ships and their crews that had called at Israeli ports.⁵¹

After the U.N. Secretary General admitted on April 8. 1960, that his efforts to bring about a mitigation of the second of these practices had thus far failed, Finnish and Swedish seamen's unions announced their refusal to handle cargoes from ships flying the U.A.R. flag; and on April 13. an Egyptian ship (the Cleopatra) in New York was picketed by American seamen and longshoremen; the president of the Seafarers' International Union complained that a month earlier the crews of three vessels under contract to his union had been "abused, maltreated, and held virtual prisoners" in Egyptian ports.^v- A week later, the Sw-edish counter-boycott was called off, and the U.S. State Department declared that while it did not condone the Arab boycott, the New York counter-boycott was embarrassing the conduct of U.S. foreign relations. Amid reports from Cairo that Abdel Nasser had narrowly escaped poisoning by an Israeli agent recently, '¹ the executive committee of the International Confederation of Arab Trades Unions (notoriously a creation of U.A.R. pan-Arab policy,'⁴now meeting in Cairo) gave the U.S. a seven days' ultimatum to end the New York counter-boycott or face a counter- counter-boycott of U.S. shipping in all Arab ports. Nasser stated in a television interview broadcast in the U.S. on April 26 that Arab workers regarded the New York counter-boycott as "an action against their country and affecting our dignity"; and on the following day, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Fulbright, accused "special pressure groups" of trying to push U.S. policy "in special-interest directions." While President Eisenhower, in a press conference on April 27, disclaimed knowledge of "any idea whatsoever of making a new step" toward securing free passage for all nations through the Suez Canal (thus belying his confident assurance three years earlier),"' Congress overrode the protestations of Senator Fulbright and others and wrote into the foreign-aid program an amendment inviting the President to withhold foreign aid from any nation waging economic warfare against any other nation benefiting from the program.

On April 30, the Arab counter-counter-boycott "from the Arabian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean" began to take effect, and among the first U.S. ships affected were some carrying wheat and flour to Arab countries, to be paid for in their local "soft" currencies, which payment would then be returned to the Arab governments as a loan; the transfer of these relief cargoes to third-party ships would be at Arab expense and might imperil the continuation of this form of U.S. aid. On May 6, however, this crescendo of folly was ended by a compromise whereby the New York counter-boycott was lifted in return for a State Department undertaking "to renew its effort to assure freedom of the seas and to protect the interests of our shipping and seamen now being discriminated against by the Arab boycott and blacklisting policy." On May 8, the day before the Arab counter-counter-boycott was lifted, Abdel Nasser proclaimed an Arab victory; coupled the U.S. with Britain, France, and Israel; expressed "thanks and appreciation to the Soviet Union for her wise and noble policy toward us"; and gave his assurance that "the strong friendship binding the peoples of the U.A.R. and the Soviet Union will never be affected by political and social differences."™ Apparently, the bakhshish of more than $150 million which the U.S. had dispensed to the Egyptian dictator during the past year and a half had, despite Senator Fulbright's effort to retrieve it now by a hasty visit to Cairo, been washed under the Cleopatra's stern. Coming to the U.N. General Assembly in September as the U.A.R.'s "neutralist negotiator for peace," Abdel Nasser on his arrival in New York paid the conventional verbal tributes to the United States; but less than a month earlier, on

August 29, 1960, his government-controlled organ, al-Gum- huriya, had declared: "Russia has supplied us with a loan of 900 million rubles for the High Dam, while America has supplied us with 900,000 refugees from Palestine. . . . Russia gave us experts and officials, and America spies and intriguers." While ancient Egypt had been ruled under the "double crown," revolutionary modern Egypt, and now the U.A.R., was kept going by a systematic practice of double-talk. "'⁷

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. This is only gradually being understood by inhabitants of the United States, who have been taught that their forefathers made a revolution 200 years ago. though it was. in fact, primarily just a secession, a much milder and less radical operation; see Frederick Gentz and Stephen Possony. Three Revolutions Compared (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1959).

2. John C. Campbell, Defense of the Middle East (New York: Harper & Brothers [cloth ed.], Frederick A. Praeger [paper ed.], 1960), p. 370.

Chapter 1

THE MYTH OF THE FOURTEENTH MUSLIM CENTUR Y

1. Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, eine Wertung der seelischgeistigen Gestaltenkampfe unserer Zeit ("The Myth of the Twentieth Century, an Evaluation of Conflicting Mental and Spiritual Types in Our Time") (Munich: 1930).

2. See Albert R. Chandler, Rosenberg's Nazi Myth (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1945), p. 6: "The term ^kmythf in this title does not mean something that is untrue, but something which is true in a profounder way than science or common sense. It means a view of life and nature that is accepted on faith and inspires social action. It is a kind of cult or religion or intuitive philosophy.¹'

3. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1939.

4. Islam in Modern History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 112.

5. Ibid., pp. 49-50; italics added.

6. See Kirk, The Middle East in the War, 1939-1945 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 56-78; I. S. O. Playfair, The Mediterranean and the Middle East (History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Military Series [London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1954-56]), vol. II, chap, ix; Majid Khadduri: Independent Iraq (2nd ed.; London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 177 ff.

7. See Gideon Weigert, "Arab Writers Look at Israel," The World Today, no. 15 (1959).

8. See Kirk, A Short History of the Middle East (6th ed.; New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960), pp. 315-21.

9. See ibid., pp. 309-14.

10 Nissim Rejwan, "Arab Nationalism in Search of an Ideology," in Walter Z. Laqueur (ed.), The Middle East in Transition (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1958), p. 148; he is citing

11. Quoted in Sylvia G. Haim, "Islam and the Theory of Arab Nationalism," in Laqueur, op. cit., pp. 280-81.

12. Quoted in Rejwan, op. cit., p. 155.

13. Abd ur-Rahman Azzam, in Washington on May 5, 1960.

14. See Hazem Zaki Nuseibeh, The Ideas of Arab Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956), index (for

15. See Leonard Binder, "Radical Reform Nationalism in Syria and Egypt," The Muslim World, no. 49 (1959).

16.See Rohan D'O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism (London: Faber & Faber, 1941).

17. See Sir H. A. R. Gibb, "The Evolution of Government in Early Islam," Studia Islamica, no. 4 (1955), p. 17: "The nemesis of the over-rapid conquests of the Arabs—and the political tragedy of Islam—was that the Islamic ideology never found its proper and articulated expression in the political institutions of the Islamic states."

Chapter 2

THE SAPPING OF THE SEVEN PILLARS

1. Of contemporary journalists, Hal Lehrman was perhaps the only one percipient enough to explain the British motive; see the quotation in Kirk, Middle East in the War, p. 344 n. 5.

2. Nuqrashi's leader, Ahmad Mahir, a more robust personality who was perhaps better equipped to withstand the gusts of popular extremism, was murdered by Egyptian extremists a month before the establishment of the Arab League.

3. See Kirk, Middle East in the War, pp. 472-73, 482-83.

4. See Kirk, The Middle East, 1945-1950 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 119-20; note the Egyptian reaction to the Labour Government's appointment of the consistently "soft-centered" Lord Stansgate to lead the British delegation negotiating a revision of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty.

5. See ibid,, pp. 57-67; and Robert Rossow, Jr., "The Battle of Azerbaijan, 1946," Middle East Journal, no. 10 (1956).

6. For the reaction of one Zionist (and holder of a British passport) to this achievement, see Jon Kimche, Seven Fallen Pillars (1st ed.; London: Seeker & Warburg, 1950). The title of the present chapter is adapted from his title.

7. For examples, see Viscount Montgomery, Memoirs of Field-Marshal Montgomery (London: William Collins Sons & Co., 1958; Cleveland, Ohio: The World Publishing Company, 1958), pp. 418-20, 422,424-25.

8. The term "old oligarchs" is borrowed from Alfred E. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (5th ed.; London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1931), p. 458.

9. See Pierre Rondot, "Tendances particularistes et tendances unitaires en Syne," Orient, no. 5 (1958), p. 143; he speaks of "the leaders of the first governments of independent Syria, dedicated to the national struggle but with little administrative experience, consumed by patriotic fervor but incapable of sustaining the effort against Zionism."

10. See Jon Kimche, "Iraq Breaks with Britain," Nineteenth Century and After, June, 1948.

11. See Gideon Tadmor, "The Syrian Scene," Middle Affairs, no. 3 (1952).

12. See below, chap. 5.

13. There are passages from Nagib's Egypt's Destiny (London: Victor Gollancz, 1955; New York: Doubleday & Company, 1955) that are worth quoting at length because they tell quite

In July, just before the second truce, my forces were badly defeated at the battle of Negba. Mawawi [Major-General Ahmad Ali al-Mawawi] had rejected my own plan of action in favour of one of his own, which was so faulty, in my opinion, that I refused to carry it out. He relieved me of my command but, as soon as he realized that we were going to be defeated, he asked me to command our

A few days later I appealed to Mawawi for ments to make up for the heavy casualties that we had suffered. He refused to believe that our losses had been as great as I said they were and accused me of trying to blame him unjustly for our defeat. In front of several staff officers he berated me in terms that I could not accept, and so I demanded that he apologize. When he refused to do so I told him what I thought of him in terms as strong as those he had used in describing me. I then returned to my H.Q. and drew up a written report of what had happened. I submitted it to Mawawi with the request that he apologize in writing. Instead he ordered me to report to G.H.Q. in Cairo. . . .

in Cairo I cursed myself for what I had allowed to , It was not the first time, nor the last, that I have had to regret my violent temper. All I had achieved on this occasion was to place the entire responsibility for the war in Palestine on the inadequate shoulders of Mawawi [pp. 22-23].

how, when he was about to mount an

one of his brigadiers "made a bitter remark . . . 'May God send you a bullet if you get us into any more trouble than we're in already' " [pp. 26-27]. Those familiar with the Middle East will recognize the leitmotiv, the attempt to shift responsibility on to someone else.

20. U.N. Document S/3373, in Noble Frankland (ed.),

Affairs; London and New York: Oxford University

, p. 354; and Eden, op. at., p. 515 (Br. ed.), p. 575 (U.S. ed.).

21. Richard H. Nolte and William R. Polk, "Toward a Policy for the Middle East," Foreign Affairs, no. 36 (1958), p. 655; cf.

of Egypt: The Search for Dignity (Cam- i Books, 1959), pp. 116-17. "22. The New York Times, July 8, 1955, p. 8; cf. Dana Adams Schmidt, in ibid., August 31, 1955, p. 1, and Abdel

1956: "Do we want arms to lead and guide us as these arms wish or as the sellers wish, or do we want arms to be used to realize our

course there is no reason at all for us to buy arms and pay for them with our personality and principles" (Noble Frankland [ed.], Documents on International Affairs, 1956 [Royal Institute of In- London and New York: Oxford University

1959] , p. 90). See Wheelock, op. cit., pp. 145-49, for a

23. See Walter Z. Laqueur.V^ Soviet Union and the Middle ' (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959), part II, "The it Breakthrough" (pp. 189-348).

24. According to the Ankara correspondent of The New

York

28, 1954), as

12, 1955, the

from Egypt, Iraq, and as was "strongly supported by the

many

of April 4, 1955, :ct on Israel (ibid.,

25. On "No one

That is quite a new idea" (

vol. 547, col. 833). The de most entirely upon the Pact's vol. 539, cols. 834-903).

26. "A surprise to the State Department as well as to 1 (John Robinson Beal, John Foster Dulles [New York: H; Brothers, 1957], p. 249). "Having played a leading part to

it. .'. . Worse still, they tried to take credit for

Cairo, which were hostile to the Pact. Thus by a

not joining it. An ounce of ill the havering and saved a ton of trouble later on" (Eden, op. cit., p. 336 [Br. ed.], p. 375 [U.S. ed.].

27. Marcel Colombe, "L'Egypte et le Orient, no. 5 (1958), p. 127. A graduating student of can University of Beirut, asked to

benefit from both sides."

28. See Kirk, Middle East in the War, pp. 64-78; Khadduri, op. cit.

29. See Regis Agostini, "Egypte du neutralisme," Orient, no. 6 (1958).

30. Speech at Alexandria, July 26, 1956, in Documents on International Affairs, 1956, pp. 93-94.

Council of the Egyptian Federation of Industry), "The Aswan High Dam," Middle Eastern Affairs, no. 6 (1955), p. 384; and- Joachim Joesten, "Nasser's Daring Dream: The Aswan High Dam," The World Today, no. 16 (1960).

32. The Times, November 11, 1954, p. 6.

33. See Wheelock, op. cit., pp. 183-86.

34. Department of State Bulletin, vol. 35 (July 19, 1956), p. 188.

35. Eden, op. cit., p. 420 (Br. ed.), p. 468 (U.S. ed.).

36. Speech at Alexandria, July 26, 1956, loc. cit., pp. 97102; cf. Beal, op. cit., pp. 255-56.

37. Sam Pope Brewer, in The New York Times, June 21, 1956, p. 5; cf. Wheelock, op. cit., pp. 186-94.

38. Abdel Nasser had recently affronted the United States by establishing diplomatic relations with the Chinese Communist

assodatSTwith^he Baghdad Pact.

39. Eden, op. cit., p. 422 (Br. ed.), p. 470 (U.S. ed.).

40. Cf. ibid., p. 421 (Br. ed.), p. 469 (U.S. ed.): "Already at the beginning of the year the Iraqi Government were complaining that the Egyptians had done better out of the West by bullying than they had by cooperating."' Dulles' biographer refers to the

kistan in this connection. il. Beal, op. cit., pp. 258-60. The Alsop brothers had com- at the time: "An alliance of Democrats from the cotton states and right-wing Republicans in the Senate opposed the dam project. . . . The least the State Department can do is to use the »ower of the United States . . . to cut the Egyp- down to size" (New York Herald Tribune [Euro- ed.], July 23, 1956; cf. U.S. News and World Report, 8, 1957, pp. 82-85)..See also Roscoe Drummond and Coblcntz, Duel at the Brink, John Foster Dulles' Command of American Power (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1960), p. 171.

Chapter 4 THE GREAT DIVORCE

on January 28, 1960. ^Y

2. See Drummond and Coblentz, op. cit., p. 148: "From the start Dulles disliked associating the United States with Britain in the Middle East.^-'

3. Eden, op. cit., pp. 212-13 and cf. p. 208 (Br. ed.), pp.

235 and 231 (U.S. ed.); cf. Drew

29, 1960: the postwar years when th

in the making of Sir Anthony failed to of anti-Communist sentiment in the

its

34 (1958), pp. 22-23 5. "If the insatiableness of man is denied its proper meat in

more things and more and more activity to escape the feeling of

of Capitalism [London: Faber & Faber, 1952* p. 175).

see'J. B. Kelly,'"The Legal and Historical Basis of

Number 1 (St. Antony's Papers, Number 4; London: Chatto & Windus, 1958; New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959), p. 139,

: see

7. See J. B. Kelly, Sultanate and Imamate in Oman (Chatham House pp. 4-8, 10-11.

8. J. B. Kelly, "The Affairs, vol. 32 (1956), p. 319; see and State in the Middle East (Ithaca, N.Y. Press, I960), pp. 142-45. ^

The Reporter, January 23, 1958, p. U. ^P

10. Kelly, Sultanate and Imamate in On

11. The Cairo correspondent of The 1956. For an Arab version of these events, see in Southern Arabia (New York: Arab part III.

op. cit., pp. 145-46, refers to the good offices of the U.S. Government in effecting the agreement on arbitration, but makes no mention of the Aramco activities in support of the Saudi

13. Howard, op. cit., p. 14.

14. The Times, January 23, 1956, by the British at Buraimi; cf. The New York

27, 1956, p. 4.

15. Lenczowski, op. cit., p. 149. implies that Ghalib was helped by the Saudis and Egyptians only after his defeat in Oman late in 1955; but this is contrary to the evidence. On the

see Kelly, Sultanate and lmamate in Oman, pp. 12-13.

16. See a British Foreign Office statement in The October 5, 1955; and cf. British Imperialism in Southern Arabia, pp. 78, 84-85. Lenczowski is silent on this point.

17. See Howard, op. cit., pp. 13-14, for details of Young's

18. The Sunday Times (London), October 23, 1955. to have warned the Saudis, "You will los

you cannot believe that a good case can be won by ^ Years in the

e" (Philby, Forty [London: Robert Hale, 1957], p. 3, and cf. pp. 231 and 239). Two years later still, Philby was asserting that allegations of Saudi bribery over Buraimi "are not facts but myths, and they do not interest me, except as such" (Middle East Journal, No. 13 [1959], p. 487); but by this time he was reinstalled in Saudi Arabia and the view expressed was now that of his Muslim alter ego, "Hajj Abdullah." A senior Aramco official who, in a review of Lenczow- ski's Oil and State, declares roundly that "it is at the British door that the blame for failure of arbitration must be laid" (James Terry Duce, in Middle East Journal, no. 14 [1960], p. 339) does not to these circumstantial charges of Saudi bribery.

19. The Times, September 17, 1955.

20. See Newsweek, October 17, 1955, p. 58; and The Econo- , 177 (October 9, 1955), 379.

21. See The Economist, 176 (September 24, 1955), 1040; editorial in The Times, October 6, 1955.

22. See British Imperialism in Southern Arabia, pp. 80-81

See

of the Saudi Embassy in no. 10 (1956), p. 61.

on the basis of law and (The Sunday Times, October 23, 1955). 23. Howard, op. chp. 16. ^ ^ ^ ^

200-1. The

or wounded (The New York Times, November 14, 1955, p. 3); but the charge was not confirmed by

(British Imperialism in Southern Arabia) and may be dismissed as

cols. 1460-61.

26. Howard, op. cit., pp. 13 and 16.

27. Eden, op. cit., pp. 334-35 (Br. ed.), p. 373 (U.S. ed.).

28. The Observer, February 12, 1956.

29. See Parliamentary Debates, House of 549, cols. 2111-2334, March 7, 1956; and cf. 342-43 (Br. ed.), pp. 382-83 (U.S. ed.). For an

tors in Jordan and other Arab countries', lee The New York Times,

Tl/uS d G h d "d 1 t k

view rf the CypSrprobtem^roL that of the U.S. Consul- in Cyprus itself; see Eden, op. cit., pp. 406-7 (Br. ed.), pp. 454-55 (U.S. ed.).

Thomas J. Hamilton, in The New York Times, March 18, 1956.

Marguerite Hiesins. in the New York Herald Tr March 29, H

Dana Adams Schmidt, in The New York Times, April 1, 1956.

Eden, op. cit., p. 336 (Br. ed.), p. 375 (U.S. ^ed-)_RP°^r

Cairo, which was not merelv attacking the Baghdad Pact in its "Voice of the Arabs" , in Swahili ar 28 and 29, 1956.

See the President's press conference of April 4, 1956; the comments of The Christian Science Monitor's London corre-

on April 5; Stewart Alsop, in the New York Herald e, April 12; and the Washington correspondent of The April 12. Eden is strangely silent on this episode. 36 italics added

31. Eden, op. cit., p. 99 (Br. ed.), p. 110 (U.S. ed.).

38. Ibid., p. 440 (Br. ed.), p. 490 (U.S. ed.).

were those who justified Hitler's just as there have been those who to be still at war, though in a strictly

Just as a legal case could be made for the confiscation of itler had a legal case for the remilitarization of the

Man Named Serraj," The Reporter, June 27, 1957, p. 16.

16. Oriente Moderno, vol. 37 (1957), pp. 437 and 571.

17. Ibid., p. 439, reporting an-Nasr, July 1, 1959.

18. Paul Johnson, "The Struggle for the Middle East; Part I: America Takes Over," New Statesman, July 6, 1957, p. 21.

19. The informer, a Syrian army captain, stated that he had been told by the Syrian Military Attache to Italy, while vising

400 million from the U.S. and permission to take over Lebanon and settle the questions of Syria and Iraq (Oriente Moderno, vol. 37 [1957], pp. 563-64, reporting an-Nasr).

20. The New York Times, August 22, 1957, pp. 1 and 10;

21. Ibid., September 8,⁽ 1957,p.

22. Ibid., September 9, 1957, p. 3; September 10, 1957, p. 9; September 11, 1957, p. 10; and cf. the Beirut correspondent of

23. Oriente Moderno, vol. 37 (1957), pp. 632-33, quoting

a critical examination of his argument, see Kirk, "The Syrian Crisis

24. Moshe Perlmann', "The Syrian Affair,"' Middle Eastern Affairs, vol. 8 (1957) p. 407.

ed Egitto," Oriente Moderno, vol. 38 (1958), pp. 101-6; and Simon Jargy, "La Syrie, province de la Orient, no. 8 (1958), pp. 23-24.

27. See J. Harris Proctor, "The National Assembly of 1957-8,'

13 (1960).

" Orient, no. 8

28. See Anwar as-S (1958).

29. Jargy, "Le declin d'un,

30. See below, chap. 8.

31. Jargy, "Le declin d'un parti," p. 32.

32. Ibid., pp.

to make him a

5. This >ve, p. 189 n. 16) a "purely Arab

by th,

in Amman . . . began to raids across Jordan's

6. Ibid., pp. 391-92; cf. ed.), pp. 381-88 (U.S. ed.

7. See Ann 1958), pp.107-8.

8. Ibid., pp. 123-24. Abu on the frontier was

by a

juads to carry out pp. 141-42).

p. 72, quoting Sir op. cit., pp. 124-25. pp. 74-75,

to information cited by Glubb (op. cit., pp.

military coup on April 7 vol. 37 (1957), pp. 302-3,

to force the King's abdica- cf. Oriente ; an interview given by

), in The of

i to L'Orient (Beirut).

!7, p. 3. : role of

New York Times, April 26, 1957,

the U.S. in

14. April 28, 1957. For the

Tension (New York: Council for 1959),pp. 355-58.

15. The New York Times, April 25, 1957, p. 13.

for the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. 2d Session (Washington: U.S. Government 9, 1960), pp. 14-16.

THE LEBANESE CIVIL WAR

1. Macadam (ed.), Annual Register of World Events, 1957 (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1957), p. 288.

2. See Philip Khuri Hitti, Lebanon in History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1957), chap. xxiv.

. 288,

3. See Sir E. Llewelyn Woodward and Rowan Butler, Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939 (London: Her esty's Stationery Office), series I, vol. IV (1952) no. 199, p. and no. 300, pp.439-40.

4. See Pierre Rondot, Les (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1947), pp. 25-27.

5. Likewise, those Druze who in tl

baggers from Damascus (see Hourani, op Aft., p. 214)^ and in the Palestine War of 1948, the from the Druze of Western Galilee against the

6. K. S., "The Lebanese Crisis in Perspective," The World Today, no. 14 (1958), p. 372.

7. Ibid., p. 373.

who be

8. The Electoral Law of 1960 provided for a Chamber of

arabe," Orient, no. 7 (1958), pp. 33-36; and Pierre Rondot, in Revue Frangaise de Science Politique, vol. VII (1957) p. 83.

10. The centenary of the adoption of the dogma of her Immaculate Conception.

11. See The New York Times, November 21, 1954, p. 19.

12. The traditional clientele dependent on a patron; now politically directed.

13. K. S., "Lebanese Crisis in Perspective," p. 375.

14. Ibid., p. 369 n. 4.

15. See "Shall Lebanon Copy Nasser?" (by the special correspondent in Beirut), The Economist, vol. 180 (September 29, 1956), pp. 1058-59; The Times, October 3, 1956, p. 10; and a letter from Salam himself, in The Times, October 10, 1956, p. 11.

16. See Sam Pope Brewer (from Beirut), in The New York Times, September 1, 1956, p. 3, and September 3, 1956, p. 2; and The Times, October 3, 1956, p. 10.

17. Iraq and Jordan, having treaty relations with Britain, broke with France only, and there was a hint at the time that Lebanon might, in turn, break with Britain only.

18. See Paolo Minganti, "In margine alia crisi libanese," Oriente Moderno, vol. 38 (1958), pp. 492-93, and cf. p. 399 with n. 2; and Jean-Pierre Alem, "Troubles insurrectionnels au Liban," Orient, no. 6 (1958), pp. 37-38. For the version of the Sunni dissidents, see Walid al-Khalidi (Salam's brother-in-law), in Middle East Forum, vol. 34, no. 4 (1959), p. 34.

the League of Arab States in the U.S.: "Another more subtle but malignant way of causing a breach in the Arab wall of unity is the so-called 'Anti-Communist Doctrine.' Lebanon was about to be drawn into its web. Its salvation was achieved only by a violent

internal civil war [s/e]___ Lebanon was saved through the courage

of her own children from being drawn outside the orbit of Arab unity" (Arab News and Views [New York: Arab Information Center], vol. VI, no. 5 [March 1, I960]).

20. For the basis of these grudges, see Alem, op. cit., pp. 41-42; Nabih Arnin Faris, "Reflections on the Lebanese Crisis," SA1S Review (Johns Hopkins University), Autumn, 1958, p. 12; and below, p. 209 n. 30.

21. Article 49 of the

was

but this had once been case" by a was

this

; see Kirk, Today, no. 13 (1957),

(see below, p. 125) was over the terms on run on the government " The World 263-64; and cf. Nour, "Par- p. 30.

Crisis in Perspective," pp. 376-78. no. 38 (1958), p. 508, on May 27, 1958.

25. Ibid., no. 37 (1957), pp. 168, 561, 639, 733-34. 814; no. 38 (1958), p. 508; also Brewer, in The New York November 16 and December 25, 1957, January 5, 1958.

26. Oriente Moderno, no. 37 (1957), pp. 636-37.

27. Ibid., no. 38 (1958), pp. 138-39.

Ibid.', pp. 220-21.

Ibid., pp. 317-19 and 399-401. "The present Maronite Patriarch (who by reason of circumstances special to his community was not elected by its archbishops, as is generally the case, but

cannot fail to affect his attitude in the local He is impelled by his personal links with the to that of President Chamoun" (Pierre Rondot, "La " L'Afrique et L'Asie, no. 43 [1958], pp. 50 and

tion, by this time in open rebellion, was not shared by some of the Maronite bishops, but declared that they were in the pay of the government (Oriente Moderno, vol. 38 [1958], p. 511, L'Orient [Beirut]).

Oriente Moderno, vol. 38 (1958), pp. 396-99.

Alem, op. cit., p. 42; cf. Oriente Moderno, vol. 38 (1958), p. 401.

K. S„ "Lebanese Crisis in Perspective," p. 378. For an opposition version of these events, the reader may consult an account written by a British "angry young man" of mond Stewart, Turmoil in Beirut (1 lishers, 1958). Unfortunately, Mr. Wilfred Blunt in Egypt seventy-si

ent to leave the country before the "turmoil" reached its , so that his firsthand account is incomplete.

See Alem, op. cit., pp. 43-44; and Oriente 38 (1958), pp. 403-4.

The army was about 40 per cent Muslim. In the blood- of 1952, General Chehab had carefully avoided d had left the matter to be settled by

9, in

21. Ellis. In The 1959.

same name

22. An organization of

Syria by the Ba'th during its vol. 36 [1956], p. 485), bu

from U.A.R.

from

23. Orient, no. 9 (1959), p. 145, a Mosul radio transmitter furnished to the rebels by (see Oriente Moderno, vol. 39 [1959], pp. 185-86, al-Bilad [Baghdad]).

24. This paragraph is based on de Mossouir Orient, no. 9 (1959).

25. Al-Qasim is properly an epithet of

26. See Gaston Wiet, "Uembleme de la unie," Orient, no. 9 (1959).

27. Ibid., pp. 148-51.

28. Montserrat, "L'affaire de Mossouir p. 28.

29. Ibid., pp. 157 and 159.

for the U.A.R.'s intervention in the Lebanon (see above, p. 208 n. 19) and

was, of to say im- with a justi- war" in to murder

of the Arab

30. Ibid., p. 129.

31. This "doctrine of_ Arab nationalism" (

The^Tu

^ in the fall of 1958 in

18, 1959, translated in Orient, no. 10

to murder 32. Al-Ahram, (1959), pp. 173-87;

a ...................................

836-39, May 11, 1959. The establishment in July, 1959, of a chair of Shi'i doctrine in the Cairo University of al-Azhar looked like another move in the Egyptian-Iraqi cold war; see Pierre Rondot, ^(eLes Chiites et Vunite de VIslam no. 12 (1959).

a leftist in a

see Arnold

"An Eye-Witness Report on Iraq," Swiss Review of World A\ vol. IX, no. 6 (1959), p. 13.

34. See Hamilton A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Is, Society and the West, vol. I: Islamic Society in the

, Part I (London and New York: Oxford 1950), p.

(pseud.), "Baghdad's Year of no. 28 (1959), pp. 198-99; note the close with Hottinger, "Eye-Witness Report on Iraq," ^in 1959, when the Ba'th Party had tried to

on Iraq," p. 14. It was traditionally Shi'i and

see

pp. 15-16. La Qasim, it was ,p. 167.

23, 1959, in Orient, no.

-Sha'b,

! from

11 (1959), pp.191-93.

was agair Communist

Ibid., pp. 205-6.

When the existence of ized in Iraq in January, 1960, two

a minority representing a more Communism than the majority that took its

rirak d'aujourd'hui," Orient, no. 15 (1960), pp. 87-89.

Orient, no. 11 (1959), pp. 214-20.

Qasim replied in April, 1960, with a boast that Iraq's

Ellis, in The Christian Science Monitor, November 19, 1959.

Joseph C. Harsch, ibid., October 23, 1959.

James N. Wallace (from Cairo), in The Wall 29, 1959.

openly canvassed on all sides in Baghdad" (Michae^Adams [from Beirut], in The Guardian [Manchester], December 7, 1959). "Pri-

removal as their only way out of the present dilemma. . . . the

[from Beirut], in The Chriiian Science Monitor, December 7, 1959). For the place of such tendentious reporting within the

"L'Irak et ses voisins," Orient, no. 12 (1959), pp. 15-16.

46. But see Ragaei El Mallakh and Carl McGuire, "The Economics of the Suez Canal Under UAR Management," Middle East Journal, no. 14 (1960), p. 128 n. 10.

47. See Dana Adams Schmidt, in The New York Times, December 25, 1959; Thomas J. Hamilton, in ibid., January 3, 1960; and below, p. 169.

48. This proposal did not appear to have been the work of "Cairo's official propagandists," but was "channelled through to Cairo and sanctioned" by the Ministry of National Guidance (The Times Weekly Review [London], December 10, 1959).

49. The Times, January 11, 1960.

50. Goaded thereto by Iraqi broadcasts chiding Nasser for his inaction over Palestine. The roles had been reversed since Nuri's fall.

51. It was further reported on May 9, 1960, that the Arab would discuss a motion to boycott Ceylon tea unless broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. Later in the

summer, the Iranian Government was denounced for having diplomatic relations with Israel.

52. The New York Times, April 23, 1960.

53. The Times, April 21, 1960.

54. See Lenczowski, op. cit., chap. xiv.

55. See above, p. 87.

56. Dispatch from Cairo, in The Times, May 9, 1960.

57. For an earlier example, see Kirk, "Turco-Egyptian Flirtation of Autumn 1954," pp. 449-50.

CONCLUSION

1. Quoted in Terence Kenny, The Political Thought of John Henry Newman (London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1957), p. 140.

2. Oded Remba, "The Middle East in 1959—An Economic Survey," Middle Eastern Affairs, vol. 11 (1960), p. 74; and Daniel Lerner, in a review in The Muslim World, vol. 50 (1960), p. 325.

3. The Libera! Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960),

PP- 22-23. ^ ■ _t 1-b 1 " 1 h " W M t

gomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 96.

5. From the Litany of Archbishop Cranmer (1544).

THE EGYPTIAN LAND REFORM

[1]

k now, that the Isr for their action. ... The marked is not to be condemned if h noose is round his throat.

If we were not prepared to condemn