The measure was not only wildly popular in Iran; it inspired the Arab man-in-the-street. Mossadegh’s name became legendary in the Middle East as Nasser’s would become a few years later. But Mossadegh was unable to carry through his revolution, both because of the strength of the forces opposing him and because of his own inadequacies as a revolutionary leader. The AIOC withdrew from Iran and, in pursuit of their common interest, the major international oil companies successfully imposed a boycott of Iranian oil. Britain resorted to economic pressures and military threats in an attempt to have the nationalization reversed and appealed to the International Court of Justice, which ruled against it, and to the UN Security Council, which refused to intervene. The US government unsuccessfully attempted to mediate. But Iran’s revenues dwindled to a trickle.
Mossadegh’s popularity among the poor Iranian majority increased with his intransigence against the West. He demanded and received authoritarian powers. He broke off diplomatic relations with Britain and closed its consulates. But in many respects his social and political outlook was reactionary. As a member of the landowning class, he opposed the breaking up of the large estates in favour of peasant proprietors and he stopped even the shah’s modest land-distribution scheme. As the doubts about him grew among Iranian politicians, the shah took courage to challenge his actions and appoint the loyalist General Zahedi prime minister. The shah’s attempt failed and he had to flee the country in August 1953, but six days later he returned and Mossadegh was overthrown in a counter-coup which was planned and organized by the CIA, with substantial assistance from British intelligence.
Relations with Britain were restored, but it was the USA which now took over as the principal Western influence in Iran. A group of US, Dutch and British oil companies formed a consortium in which AIOC had a 40 per cent share and negotiated an agreement with the National Iranian Oil Company that had been formed to take over AIOC’s assets in Iran to resume operations. The agreement was for twenty-five years. In August 1955 the Iranian government signed a treaty with the United States. With this and its joining the Baghdad Pact in the following year, against strong Soviet protests, Iran indisputably joined the Western camp in the Cold War.
In 1952, when the Eisenhower administration replaced that of President Truman, the United States still had only a peripheral interest in the politics of the Arab world. It had scant sympathy for what remained of the imperial aspirations of Britain and France. It had good relations with the young revolutionaries in Egypt, and it urged Britain to come to terms over the military occupation. But it had no desire to take Britain’s place. As we have seen, when Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles realized that Egypt and the other Arab states were uninterested in joining an anti-Soviet Middle East Defence Organization, he left Britain as the only Western member of the Baghdad Pact while he concentrated on strengthening the ‘northern tier’ of states confronting the Soviet Union – Turkey, Iran and Pakistan.
However, the United States did have a close interest in Israel, largely for domestic political reasons. Zionist political influence in the United States went far beyond the American Jewish community. The US Congress was overwhelmingly supportive of the young Zionist state in the Middle East and, although he was the least inclined of any post-war US presidents to relinquish the executive’s control of US foreign policy, Eisenhower could not ignore these sentiments.
Although the concept of direct superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence in the Middle East had come to seem part of the natural order in the 1950s, the history and development of Russian and American interest in the region were totally different. The very concept of the Middle East as a geopolitical entity was new to Russia.
Historically, Russia had more reason for interest in the Muslim world as a whole than any of the Western powers. For 250 years Russia had been ruled by Islamized Mongols. After its restoration to Christendom, Holy Russia absorbed millions of Muslim subjects. By the end of the nineteenth century, following the great tsarist expansion eastwards, the Russian Empire not only contained some 15 million Muslims but also shared some 2,000 miles of frontiers with the only Muslim states which could be regarded as truly sovereign – the Ottoman Empire and Persia.
The Russian Bolsheviks retained the tsarist empire and created the six Muslim Soviet Republics to form the southern fringe of the USSR. Pre-revolutionary Christian Russia always regarded Islam as hostile but the fact remained that its southern population from the point of view of culture and religion and to a large extent of race remained part of the Middle East. All had belonged to the Muslim East of the caliphates.
This was the reality that the Soviet Union inherited. Lenin’s policy was to renounce all tsarist imperial ambitions in the Middle East and to consolidate the Soviet hold on the Muslim republics. The communists were as hostile to Islam as the tsars, regarding it as a counter-revolutionary force. They maintained a fiction that it was being artificially maintained as an anti-Soviet instrument by Western imperialist intrigue, but over the years they could not fail to realize the prevalence and staying power of Islamic culture both outside and inside the borders of the Soviet Union.
Initially, Soviet policy in the Middle East was based on the assumption that the peoples of the region who had been dominated or exploited by Ottoman, British and tsarist imperialism would be attracted by the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet leaders believed that they had a good chance of gaining control over the secular nationalist movements which were developing in the area. But for the time being the Arab countries remained under British or French control, and the main hopes of the Soviet Union were concentrated on Turkey and Iran, which were always the principal focus of Russian interest. The Soviet misunderstanding of nationalism soon brought disappointment. In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal and his colleagues were quite prepared to accept Soviet arms and money in their struggle against the West, but before long they made clear both that they detested communism and that they still regarded Russia as Turkey’s traditional enemy. Moreover, whereas Lenin at least favoured the idea of supporting bourgeois nationalism, even if it meant the collapse of local communist movements, on the ground that nationalism would enforce the retreat of imperialism and hence prepare the way for the eventual downfall of capitalism, his policy was to a large extent reversed by Stalin. Stalin believed that local communist parties should be the spearhead of Soviet policy and that Soviet interests could best be served by a programme of subversion and, where it seemed appropriate, by direct action.
In Iran this policy was especially disastrous. The Soviet Union’s support for the establishment of the communist Tudeh Party, its attempt to exploit mutinous movements in the army, and constant efforts at subversion through its consulates, commercial organizations, clubs and propaganda agents served only to rally all the anti-Russian feelings of Iranian nationalism in a way which was no different from the days of the tsars. By 1934 Reza Shah had closed down all the Soviet trade agencies and clubs and all but one of the consulates.
In the Arab countries of the Middle East the communist parties were minuscule and dominated by intellectuals who generally came from the religious and ethnic minorities. The Soviet Union tried to gain a political and commercial entrée into the Arab world through the newly created kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but this was a failure and Stalin closed down the legation in 1938.
Until the Second World War the Arab countries were hardly aware of the existence of the Soviet Union. Its entry into the war in 1941 transformed the situation. The Soviet Union’s epic resistance to Hitler’s armies gave it new prestige. As an ally of the Western powers, its diplomatic representation, which had hitherto been confined to Turkey and Iran, was extended to most of the Arab states. The Soviet military occupation of northern Iran was made in agreement with Britain and the United States.
However, in the immediate post-war period Stalin’s neo-imperialist policies were soon rebuffed. Iran and Turkey remained the focus of Soviet interest, but
their hostility was provoked by the disastrous attempt to establish a separatist pro-Soviet Iranian Azerbaijan and by a demand for the return of the provinces of Kars and Ardahan, which were ceded to Turkey in 1921. In 1952 the pro-Western government of the kingdom of Iraq broke off relations with Moscow and the moves began which united Iraq with Turkey, Iran and Pakistan in the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. Soviet policy in the Middle East suffered a blockade.
The situation began to be transformed with the death of Stalin in March 1953. Under Khrushchev’s leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, the Soviet Union, instead of lending support to the small and uninfluential communist parties in the Arab states, reverted to Lenin’s policy of backing popular national leaders who were prepared to show independence from the West. Nasser of Egypt was such an Arab leader par excellence. Daniel Solod, the exceptionally active Middle East expert who was Soviet ambassador in Cairo, laid the foundations of a de facto alliance between the Soviet Union and the Egyptian revolution.
Nasser’s growing popularity among the Arabs and his espousal of neutralist policies had two inevitable consequences: one was that his relations with the Western powers deteriorated and the other was that Israel began to regard Egypt as its biggest external challenge. The Zionist state had greatly increased in power and confidence since its birth. Under the ‘Law of Return’, which gives any Jew the right to emigrate to Israel and settle there, nearly 700,000 Jewish immigrants had poured into the country – first from eastern and central Europe and then from Yemen, Iraq and the Arab Maghreb states. Their absorption, combined with a determination to achieve full employment, a high level of social services and a European standard of living, presented formidable difficulties – especially as the new state was cut off from its natural markets by the total economic boycott which the Arab states attempted to impose and also felt the need to exceed the combined military strength of all its Arab neighbours. Although Israel’s economy remained vulnerable, the obstacles were largely overcome through the economic skills and enterprise of the population and the enormous flow of foreign aid, much of it in the form of grants rather than loans, from world Jewry, West Germany (as war reparations) and the United States.
In the absence of any prospect of peace negotiations leading to an Arab–Israeli settlement, Israel from the outset initiated a policy of overwhelming reprisal for any border violations or acts of infiltration – whether these were carried out by individual Palestinian farmers whose lands had been bisected by the armistice lines or by trained fedayeen (commandos), the Israeli military response was much the same. In one incident in October 1953, Israeli forces killed some fifty villagers in Qibya on the West Bank.
When Nasser came to power he had every reason to avoid involvement with Israel. Not only was he confronted by major domestic and foreign problems, but also the Palestine war had exposed the weaknesses of the Egyptian armed forces. The West would sell him arms only in tiny quantities, and he was not yet prepared to turn to the East. When Israel’s first premier, the militant David Ben Gurion, temporarily withdrew from politics in December 1953 and was succeeded by the moderate Moshe Sharett, there was a period of relative Egyptian–Israeli détente. But in February 1955 the scandal of the Lavon affair – the failure of a plan by the Israeli secret service to force the British to stay in Egypt by simulating Egyptian outrages against British institutions – brought Ben Gurion back to power. One week later the Israeli army carried out a massive reprisal for the fedayeen attacks in a raid on Egyptian headquarters in Gaza, inflicting heavy casualties. The action was a milestone in the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Nasser could not ignore this humiliating exposure of Egyptian military weakness. His immediate response was to unleash more fedayeen, who tried to penetrate deep into Israel and blow up installations. Egypt suffered world-wide condemnation, but at least Nasser had staved off all demands for an immediate all-out war with Israel, for which he knew that Egypt was not prepared.
It was more important that Nasser began secret negotiations for the purchase of arms, culminating in the announcement on 27 September 1955 – another landmark in recent Middle East history – of a deal with Czechoslovakia for the supply of very large quantities of arms, including Soviet aircraft and tanks, in exchange for rice and cotton. This was the first deal of its kind by any Arab country. The West was outraged, while Arab public opinion was delighted.
Western hostility and Israeli concern reached new heights. France had joined the ranks of Egypt’s enemies, mainly because it was convinced (incorrectly) that the rebellion in Algeria which had broken out in 1954 was stimulated and financed from Cairo. A Franco-Israeli alliance which was to last for more than a decade was formed, and news of a secret deal to supply Israel with French weapons added to the urgency of Nasser’s search for arms. The British government’s detestation of Nasser was approaching its climax. Anthony Eden, the prime minister, held Nasser responsible for every manifestation of Arab anti-Western feeling, including the young King Hussein of Jordan’s dismissal of the British commander-in-chief of the Arab Legion, General Glubb. Eden had already decided that Nasser’s overthrow was essential. Moreover, Britain and France’s colonial empires in black Africa were yet to be disbanded, and Egypt had begun to play the role in the African Circle which Nasser had predicted. Cairo Radio gave vigorous and often vituperative support in various languages for anti-colonial liberation movements throughout Africa. The United States, which still had fewer direct interests in the Arab world than Britain or France, was chiefly concerned with the Cold War aspect of Nasser’s neutralism. Pro-Zionist congressmen joined the chorus of those who were saying that Nasser’s aim was to unite the Arab states by force and turn them into Soviet satellites. US–Egyptian relations deteriorated further when in May 1956 Nasser recognized communist China, the object of US detestation. Apart from demonstrating his independence, Nasser had the additional motive of evading a possible UN embargo on Middle East arms supplies (China not being a UN member).
The Western powers had, however, not entirely given up hope of keeping Egypt within their orbit. The new Egyptian regime had set its heart on the building of a giant dam on the Nile, near Aswan. By increasing the cultivated area by 30 per cent, providing year-to-year water storage to prevent flooding and drought, and enormously increasing the hydroelectricity supply, this would form the cornerstone of Egypt’s development programme. In February 1956 a provisional agreement was reached whereby the World Bank would loan $200 million on condition that the United States and Britain loaned another $70 million to pay the hard-currency costs. The USA and Britain imposed conditions which Nasser found difficult, since they involved some Western control over the Egyptian economy. When he finally made up his mind to accept, however, the USA abruptly announced that the offer was being withdrawn, because Egypt’s economy was too unstable for so large a scheme.
The USA and Britain believed that, even if Nasser did not fall from power, he would become more pliable. They were not convinced that the Soviet Union would make good its hints that it was prepared to finance the dam. They were surprised and outraged when Nasser chose the fourth anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution, 26 July 1956, to announce to vast cheering crowds in Alexandria and, via Cairo Radio, to the rest of the Arab world that he was nationalizing the Suez Canal Company and creating an Egyptian Canal Authority to manage the Canal. The entire Third World was thrilled. There existed no more potent symbol of Western colonial domination than the Suez Canal. But there was apprehension about the consequences – the West would surely not allow Nasser to succeed.
Three months of negotiations in London and New York followed, in which Britain took the lead in trying to enforce some international control of the Canal. They failed largely because the US Eisenhower/Dulles administration refused to consider the use of military force to coerce Egypt. But the British and French governments were determined to use force. The secret Franco-Israeli alliance devised a plan for a joint invasion of Egypt with Britain. Eden finally agreed to this,
with reluctance due only to his fear that the collusion with Israel would be discovered, with disastrous consequences for Britain’s remaining interests in the Arab world.
On 29 October 1956 Israel invaded Sinai, and on the following day Britain and France issued a joint ultimatum (seventy-six years after their Joint Note threatening Arabi Pasha) calling on Egypt and Israel to cease fighting and to withdraw their forces ten miles from the Canal. Israel, as part of the plan, accepted the ultimatum, although its forces were still much more than ten miles from the Canal. Nasser rejected it and ordered his troops which were suffering heavy losses in Sinai to return across the Canal. When the ultimatum expired on 31 October, British and French planes began to bomb Egyptian airfields, destroying almost the entire Egyptian airforce except for those planes which had been sent to Syria for safety. On 5 November an Anglo-French force, assembled in Cyprus, landed near Port Said and, after capturing the city, advanced southwards along the line of the Canal, which the Egyptians had already blocked with sunken shipping.
World opinion was overwhelmingly hostile to the tripartite invasion. The threatened break-up of the British Commonwealth, Soviet warnings and especially the opposition of the United States, which refused to provide help and to relieve the alarming drain on sterling, all contributed to Britain’s decision to halt its Suez action. The UN General Assembly decided on 4 November to create a UN Emergency Force (UNEF) to supervise the cease-fire it was calling for and which Britain and France accepted on 6 November. Israel could not continue alone. Britain and France had made two major mis-calculations: one was that the Egyptians would be incapable of managing the Canal on their own and the other was that as soon as hostilities began there would be a popular uprising against Nasser. In fact after nationalization the Egyptians showed that they could manage the Canal efficiently, and Nasser’s popularity in Egypt and among Arabs elsewhere reached new heights. Egypt suffered military defeat against overwhelming force but scored an almost total diplomatic victory. An angry President Eisenhower compelled the Israelis to withdraw from Sinai and Gaza early in 1957, leaving Egypt in full control of the Canal and its immense quantities of British military stores. With US assistance the Canal was cleared and reopened in April 1957. All British and French property in Egypt was sequestered. About 3,000 British and French nationals were expelled, and many thousands more left because of the loss of their livelihood. Britain and France attempted to retaliate by imposing an economic blockade of Egypt, but the gesture was futile.
A History of the Middle East Page 32