The century of Anglo-French domination of the Arab world was finally drawing to a close. Two years later Britain’s remaining substantial Arab ally, the Iraqi monarchy, was swept aside by a popular army-led coup and the Baghdad Pact collapsed. The British quasi-colonial role in the Gulf and southern Arabia would last another decade until its dismantlement was forced by financial constraints. France, although apparently more firmly installed in the Arab West, withdrew even earlier when it conceded Algeria’s independence in 1962 after a prolonged and futile attempt at repression.
The years 1956 to 1959 marked the high tide of Nasserism as he seemed to sweep all before him. His appeal to the Arabs – and especially to the younger generation, who formed the majority – was overwhelming. They saw him as a modern Saladin who would unite them in order to drive out the Zionists – the crusaders of the twentieth century. The danger for Nasser was that he was raising expectations which neither he nor Egypt could fulfil. He was aware of Arab military weakness, which it would take time for Soviet help to remedy, but he could not regulate the tide of Arab fervour. His personality transcended Arab doubts about Egypt’s commitment to the cause of Arab unity, which were shared by the Egyptians themselves.
In June 1956 a new Republican Constitution was promulgated and approved by a 99 per cent affirmative vote. This declared Islam as the religion of the state, recognized Egypt as part of the Arab nation, and provided for government by a president and a council of ministers and a single legislative chamber. Nasser was confirmed as president for a six-year term. Political parties were replaced by a similar political organization, the National Union. Nasser’s hold on power was thus formalized. Although he gave high executive positions to some of his outstanding former colleagues in the RCC, he made sure that no rival centres of power developed. The only partial exception, which ultimately proved disastrous, was that he allowed Abdul Hakim Amer, the defence minister, a large measure of independent control over the armed forces. Amer had charm and presence but lacked self-discipline and was an incompetent military commander.
Nasser’s political mastery of Egypt could not easily be translated to the other Arab states. His appeal among the masses was immensely powerful but the rulers of most independent Arab states, in addition to Nuri al-Said in Iraq, were basically pro-Western and conservative and therefore hostile to Nasserism. They used what means they could to oppose the alarming trend. In Jordan, King Hussein had swum with the tide in dismissing General Glubb and allowing the formation of a pro-Nasser government which, in October 1956, terminated the agreement under which Britain subsidized the Jordanian army. But when in April 1957 the government proposed to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and King Hussein heard that a nationalist military coup was being planned against him he reacted with the support of ultra-loyal beduin elements in the army and dismissed the government. He was helped by the reality that his overthrow would almost certainly lead to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. The harsh realities of Jordan’s perilous position helped to develop the king’s mastery of political combat. His courage and shrewdness also played their part.
In Lebanon the ambitious and resourceful President Camille Chamoun used the strong powers of the Maronite presidency to ensure that an overwhelming majority of his pro-Western supporters were successful in parliamentary elections. Lebanese Arab nationalists – who were mainly, but not exclusively, Muslims – could only protest.
The Saudi Arabian attitude towards the rise of Nasserism was more ambiguous. King Saud, who succeeded Ibn Saud in 1953, was affable and physically impressive like his father but a lesser man in other respects. He was wildly extravagant and foolish. Although he delegated some powers to his able and experienced brother, Crown Prince Feisal, he maintained a system of largely personal rule with the help of a group of frequently corrupt advisers. He lacked the wisdom to cope with either the new flow of oil wealth or the increasingly complex demands of the twentieth century.
His Arab policy was initially guided by the long-standing rivalry between the House of Saud and the Hashemites. This brought him closer to Egypt, despite the incongruity between Saudi traditionalism and the Egyptian Revolution. In 1955 Saudi Arabia agreed to join Egypt and Syria in a joint military command system which was clearly directed against the Baghdad Pact. In 1957 King Saud also accepted that Saudi Arabia should help Egypt and Syria to replace the British subsidy to Jordan.
In the power struggle which was developing in the Arab East, Syria was the key. It was the country in which the desire and need for Arab unity was felt most passionately, but it lacked any strong central authority representing Syria’s identity. Since the fall of Colonel Shishakli, who dominated the country from 1950 to 1954, the old political parties from the days of the French mandate contended for power under the parliamentary constitution. Conservative pro-Western Iraq was not without influence, but the trend in Syria was inexorably leftwards, towards the radical neutralist position of revolutionary Egypt. In 1956 Syria followed Egypt in acquiring arms from the Soviet Union and in recognizing communist China. The leftwards tendency was closely associated with the increase in power and influence of the Baath Party. Although founded as little more than a debating society a decade earlier by two Damascus schoolteachers – Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar – the Baathists succeeded better than any other group in focusing popular feeling. Aflaq, the party ideologist, although shy and uncharismatic, acquired a substantial following for his pan-Arabist ideas among the younger generation. The Baathists won few seats in parliament, but they had supporters in key areas and they were on close terms with a group of officers who were strongly neutralist in feeling and were dominant in the army. From 1956 they were indispensable elements in any government.
The Suez War inflamed popular feeling in Syria and accelerated the leftwards trend. The government multiplied its ties with the Soviet Union.
The possibility that the entire Arab East might be moving into the Soviet camp intensely alarmed the United States, which saw the world in Cold War terms. The credit it had earned among Arab nationalists for its role in blocking the tripartite aggression against Egypt was quickly dissipated when it joined the Anglo-French economic blockade of Egypt. The USA openly and covertly attempted to rally all the anti-Nasser and pro-Western forces in the Arab world. In January 1957 the president issued what became known as the ‘Eisenhower Doctrine’, which named ‘international Communism’ as the greatest threat to the Middle East and promised financial aid to any government which helped to resist it. Iraq and President Chamoun of Lebanon accepted such aid, as did Saudi Arabia, although in ambiguous terms. King Saud was by now thoroughly alarmed by the radical pro-Soviet trend in the Arab world, but he was not yet ready to join the camp of his old Hashemite enemies in Baghdad. He sent some troops to Jordan as a token support for King Hussein’s regime following the king’s dismissal of his nationalist government. In an improbable attempt to build up the Saudi monarch as a rival to Nasser in the Arab world, or even as an ‘Islamic Pope’ – a self-contradictory concept – the Eisenhower administration invited him on a state visit to the USA. In Lebanon, assistance by the US embassy and the CIA for the pro-Chamoun forces in the parliamentary elections was a badly kept secret, as were their botched attempts to encourage a pro-Western coup in the Syrian army.
In general, these US actions did more to strengthen the nationalist/neutralist trend in the Middle East than to reassure the pro-Western elements. The Soviet Union, which had undertaken to help build the Nile High Dam and to resist the Western economic blockade of Egypt, gained new friends. Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs radio programme poured out propaganda, which was often unscrupulous but nevertheless highly effective, against the United States and the ‘reactionaries’ who were its allies in the Arab world.
As the Middle Eastern Cold War developed, the nervous and vulnerable Syrian regime felt the pressures most strongly. As the United States declared its alarm that Syria was moving into the Soviet camp, the Soviet Union issued a warning to
the West against intervening in Syria. In September 1957 Syria accused Turkey of massing troops on its frontier. The threat was insubstantial, but Nasser sent a token body of troops to Damascus to express support.
Although the government was normally dominated by Syrian politicians of the old school, who would have preferred to keep Syria in the pro-Western camp, real power lay in the hands of the Baath. But the tide of pro-Soviet feeling meant that the communists were also gaining ground – especially in the army. Faced with relentless US pressure but also the prospect of sharing power with the communists – or even a communist takeover – the Baath decided that the best policy was a union between Syria and Egypt which would secure Nasser’s protection. The conservative politicians were forced to swim with the popular tide. On 2 February 1958 the Egyptian and Syrian presidents jointly announced the complete merger of their two states into a United Arab Republic.
The West and its Arab allies were predictably hostile and alarmed. In reaction, the Hashemite monarchies of Iraq and Jordan announced their own federal union. On the other hand the ultra-reactionary and isolationist Imam Ahmed of Yemen decided it was a wise insurance to join the United Arab Republic in a shadowy confederation to be known as the United Arab States, which was also declared in February 1958.
From then on events moved swiftly – 1958 was a momentous year for the Middle East. In March, King Saud was forced to relinquish powers to his brother Feisal after the Syrians revealed details of a plot by the king or one of his advisers to assassinate Nasser and so prevent the union of Syria and Egypt. Feisal was regarded as less pro-Western and more pro-Egyptian than his brother. In May the dangerous political polarization of Lebanon between Lebanese and Arab nationalists, which had been intensified by the Suez crisis, developed into a muted civil war which simmered on throughout the summer with Syria, now part of the United Arab Republic, aiding and encouraging the Arab nationalist rebellion against President Chamoun and his pro-Western government.
It was his decision to help Chamoun which in July 1958 led to the downfall of Nuri al-Said of Iraq. Although always a masterly politician, he and his colleagues were dangerously out of touch with popular opinion – especially among army officers. An Iraqi version of Egypt’s Free Officers organization had been formed under Brigadier Abdul Karim Kassem. When the government ordered a brigade stationed near Baghdad to move to Jordan – almost certainly with the aim of exerting pressure on Syria to destroy the union with Egypt – the troops used the opportunity to seize the capital, overthrow the regime and declare a republic. Opposition was minimal but, in contrast to Egypt’s bloodless coup, the young King Feisal II, his uncle the crown prince and all but one member of the royal family, as well as the premier Nuri al-Said himself, were murdered. A government was formed with Kassem as prime minister and minister of defence and army officers in other key positions. The new republic of Iraq declared its close alignment with Egypt.
Nasser and Nasserism were triumphant. Not only were they ruling in Syria – the vital Arab heartland – but in Iraq their strongest single opponent in the Arab world and the only effective remaining instrument of pro-Western policies had fallen. It was true that the immediate consequence of the Iraq revolution was that the United States, fearing the final collapse of the pro-Western camp in the Middle East, landed 10,000 marines in Beirut at President Chamoun’s request, while British troops were flown into Jordan. But the marines did not help to keep Chamoun in power – the US wisely encouraged the compromise whereby the Lebanese settled their crisis themselves. General Fuad Chehab, the army commander who had kept the armed forces neutral in the political struggle, was constitutionally elected to succeed Chamoun. The rebels achieved much of what they wanted, since Lebanon became more neutral and less stridently pro-Western than under Chamoun. The short-lived Jordanian–Iraqi federation had collapsed, and it did not look as if a few British troops would be enough to keep King Hussein on his throne.
Though Nasser was at the apogee of his power in the Middle East, a decline from the summit was almost inevitable. In reality Nasser’s extraordinary successes – which were partly due to the mistakes of his opponents and their failure to understand the true nature of his appeal to the Arab masses – had concealed the underlying weakness of his position. Suez and its aftermath had given Egypt an international status which it could not hope to sustain.
Arab expectations of the imminent triumph of the cause of unity were at their highest – like the German or the Italian states in the nineteenth century, the members of the Arab League could unite as a single entity. But there were a host of geographical and political reasons why Bismarck’s role could not be Nasser’s. The political societies of the Arab nation-states – some of them new, like Syria and Iraq; some of them ancient, like Egypt and Yemen – were vastly different and their common culture and the emotional euphoria of pan-Arabism were not enough to unite them.
Nasser’s immediate problem was the government of the United Arab Republic. He said later that when the Syrian leaders came to Cairo to ask for union he felt it would be better to start with a loose federation for a transitional period. When they insisted on a full merger it was his turn to insist that, if he was to have the responsibility, the UAR should be ruled from Cairo. But although Nasser had a remarkable capacity for self-education – and in his lengthy public speeches he always sounded like his people’s teacher – he had not learned enough about Syria. It was wealthier, less populous and more pluralistic than Egypt, and its political society was much less mature. Above all, it was a supremely difficult country to govern.
On their side the Syrian Baathists, who were the force behind the merger, had deceived themselves. They had come to feel that Nasser shared many of their ideals and aims. As they saw it, he had adopted Michel Aflaq’s slogans of ‘Freedom, unity and socialism’ and ‘One nation with an eternal mission’. There was some truth in this, but what Nasser was not prepared to do was to allow the Baath to rule Syria under the umbrella of his authority and prestige. He soon brushed the Baathist leaders aside, into sullen exile or bitter opposition. The post-independence parliamentary constitution was replaced by a single political organization on the Egyptian model. Nasser appointed two Syrian vice-presidents for the UAR and several Syrian ministers in the central government, but he kept most of the executive and legislative power in his own hands.
Some of the Egyptian officials who went to work in Syria were of high calibre, but many were not. Inevitably, Syrians began to feel that they were in the position of junior partners to Egyptians whom they were inclined to regard as less able and energetic than themselves. In particular the Syrian army suffered from wounded pride, while Syrian merchants, businessmen and landowners who had a long tradition of dynamic activity in a generally free economy watched with growing apprehension as Egypt imposed its state socialist principles upon them. In Egypt the move in the economy away from the capitalist West towards the Soviet bloc, the drive towards rapid industrialization and the building of massive public works including the Nile High Dam had made a huge expansion of the public sector almost inevitable. The ‘Arab socialism’ which Nasser was developing may have been restrained by pragmatism in Egypt, but it was not adapted to Syria. The Syrian left was equally hostile. While the Baath had been ousted, the communists were given short shrift – as they were in Egypt.
To make matters worse, Syria’s basically agricultural economy suffered three consecutive years of disastrous drought between 1958 and 1960.
As Syrian disaffection with the union increased, the new revolutionary government in Iraq soon belied the high hopes of the pan-Arabists. Before the end of 1958 Kassem had arrested and jailed his principal collaborator in the military coup, Colonel Aref, who favoured an immediate Iraqi–Egyptian union. He blamed an abortive Arab nationalist revolt in Mosul in February 1959 on Nasser. During 1959 he allowed the Iraqi communists to strengthen their position at the expense of the Arab nationalists (led by the Iraqi Baathists), and for nearly four years he succeeded in main
taining a precarious balancing act by preventing either group from taking over the state. Despite this, Nasser distrusted him and was convinced that Iraqi communism was a danger to the whole Arab world. Kassem, an unstable and inordinately vain man, developed a bitter and jealous hatred of Nasser.
To meet the declining situation in Syria, Nasser in 1960 sent his closest colleague, Field Marshal Abdul Hakim Amer, to Damascus as his proconsul with instructions to alleviate the causes of growing Syrian opposition to the union. But although Nasser retained much of his personal popularity among the Syrian people and drew wildly enthusiastic crowds on his visits, he had manifestly failed to discover a satisfactory method of governing Syria. On 28 September 1961 a group of Syrian army officers rebelled. They arrested Field Marshal Amer, put him on a plane to Cairo and announced Syria’s secession from the United Arab Republic. A new government was hastily formed from conservative Syrian politicians.
A History of the Middle East Page 33