The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  Of the party’s leaders, none had the popularity of Habib Bourguiba, a tireless orator, a consummate politician, and the party’s most recognizable face. His revolutionary credentials were backed by a total of ten years in French prisons on charges of anticolonial agitation. Genuinely adored by the Tunisians, he was soon called the people’s Supreme Combatant (Mujahid al-Akbar).92

  Bourguiba wanted not just independence from France but also the forging of a new Tunisian nation. By the time independence came in March 1956, Bourguiba’s paramount position within the nationalist movement was unchallenged. In the new government, he became the premier, as well as the defense and the foreign minister. In July 1957, when the beylik was set aside, Bourguiba became the new republic’s president. Even before that, he had set about shaping Tunisia’s modern national identity, and, by implication, defining Tunisian nationalism. Gradually, with neither the bombastic rhetoric of Nasser nor the ruthlessness of Atatürk, he implemented various social reforms: he changed personal-status laws to enhance the position of women, banned polygamy, reformed the educational system, and, on the grounds that it impeded administrative and economic efficiency, even sought to undermine the hallowed tradition of fasting in the month of Ramadan.93

  Bourguiba’s conception and articulation of nationalism fell somewhere between those of Mohammed V and the FLN. Like the Moroccan monarch, he had a more domestic focus. And like the FLN, he wanted to remake the society that he had inherited from the colonial master. But beyond that, he shared little with the FLN, especially insofar as the latter’s attention to Pan-Arabism was concerned. Nasser had actively supported the FLN, and Algeria’s postrevolutionary state became one of the central players in the Pan-Arab phenomenon of the 1960s. For both regimes, the projection of nationalist identity into transnational realities was as much a question of domestic political necessity as a matter of ideological principle. Soon Nasser, at the head of a self-created Arab union of sorts, would pay dearly for his ambitions.

  Nationalism has been one of the most compelling and powerful forces of the nineteenth, twentieth, and now twenty-first centuries. For the countless millions in the Middle East who have been subjected to its manifestations and consequences, the experience of nationalism has been dramatic and indeed traumatic. Here we see the emergence of several nationalist movements, at times overlapping and complementing one another, at other times opposing and feeding off each other’s antagonism. In the recent history of the Middle East, one of the earliest forms of nationalism was Ottomanism, a loose sense of loyalty and commonality centered on the Ottoman Empire. After Ottomanism ended in the early 1920s, there emerged Turkish nationalism and a variety of Arab nationalisms defined, again loosely, by emerging state boundaries and unique national symbols. At this time a distinctly Palestinian identity also began to develop, its seeds having been sown some time earlier in reaction to yet another emerging nationalist phenomenon, Zionism.

  Both Israelis’ and Palestinians’ sense of national identity was largely formulated in the context of a denial of the other: for Zionists and Israelis, Palestine and Palestinians never existed, and for Palestinians, Zionism was never a national movement and Israel never a nation. Thus from the very beginning, the two groups had no dialogue with each other; instead, each took the stance of a frantic, violent rejection of all things affiliated with “the enemy.” The ensuing struggle, of course, was never equal, for it pitted a leaderless, largely rural society, riven by internal divisions, against a far more organized and determined, largely urban and modern one. There was also a larger imperative at work. For Zionists, failure was not an option; the Europe of the Second World War did not welcome Jews even into its ghettos. The Zionist project had no alternative but to succeed. But the Palestinians had not tasted refugee life yet, did not and could not comprehend what awaited them, and thought of their predicament as temporary. Life, they figured, would soon return to normal. Liberation was right around the corner. More than sixty years later, three million Palestinians still live in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.94

  While Ottomanism died along with the dynasty that had sought to inculcate it throughout the region, there remained in the Arab world a strong current of thought that defined the Arab nation in much broader terms, composed of all of those who spoke the Arabic language, shared the same Arab culture, had been the victims of the same historical injustices, and needed to overcome the same set of obstacles. For many of the earliest idealists of the Arab nation, Islam was only incidental, if for no other reason than that many Arabs, Michel Aflaq chief among them, happened to be Christian. Significantly, the constitution of the United Arab Republic made no mention of Islam as the official state religion, a glaring omission in light of its mention in revolutionary Egypt’s constitution a few years earlier. These were resolutely secular nationalists, and the role ascribed to Islam by Nasser, Bourguiba, and many of the other leaders at the time never went beyond mere lip service.

  Arab nationalism, of course, did not begin or end in the 1950s and 1960s. As we shall see in the next chapter, Pan-Arabism, for all its excitement and intensity, turned out to be quite ephemeral, attractive in rhetoric but unworkable in practice. The devil, after all, is in the details. Before long, more localized, state-centered versions of nationalism, like the ones in Tunisia and Morocco, made their presence felt in more countries of the Middle East. As much as revolutionary leaders and intellectuals tried to transcend the borders that had been artificially drawn for them, in the end they remained their victims, circumscribed in the scope of their interests and in the articulation of the nation by more immediate surroundings—those that were shaped and influenced by geography, state leaders, and symbols such as flags, anthems, heroes, and holidays. By the late 1960s and 1970s, Nasser’s Pan-Arabism was a distant dream.

  4The Arab-Israeli Wars

  After the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, Nasser’s popularity underwent a gradual but steady decline. As it turned out, 1956 was the apex of his popularity, both domestically and internationally. Almost immediately afterward, the Egyptian president started suffering one setback after another. Throughout the 1950s and into the late 1960s, he remained the hero of the Arab masses, the main protector of “the Arab nation.” But he became increasingly a victim of his own successes, intoxicated by a make-believe victory over “global imperialism.” Soon thereafter, with delusions of grandeur and power, he lost touch with his own people and with reality. Admittedly, most of the predicaments that led to Nasser’s decline were thrust upon him by others or by circumstances beyond his control. This was especially the case with Syria’s proposal for union with Egypt in early 1958, and with the plea for military and other forms of assistance by revolutionary Yemenis in 1962. As the self-proclaimed leader of Pan-Arabism, Nasser could not possibly reject either of these requests. Both undertakings turned out to be costly misadventures with disastrous consequences. This same self-constructed trap put a reluctant Nasser on a collision course with Israel in 1967, resulting in his devastating military defeat and humiliation in the Six Days’ War in June. By the time the 1960s drew to a close, Nasser was a shadow of his former self, an empty and spent force. He died a broken man in September 1970. Not until a full three years later, in October 1973, could Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, avenge his loss to Israel in yet another military conflict with the Jewish state. Sadat emerged out of the 1973 War victorious. But the victory was more psychological than actual.

  By the time the dust of the 1973 War had settled, the whole political geography of the region had changed. Nasser, the hero of the 1950s and 1960s, was a distant memory. The hero of the hour was now Sadat, the liberator of nothing but the smasher of Israeli invincibility. However, the new president’s penchant for solo diplomacy and his peace with Israel soon alienated him from international allies and darkened his image before the Egyptians and other Arab masses. By the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s, Sadat was almost universally vilified in Egypt and elsewhere. It was self-
proclaimed heroes from elsewhere—from Libya and, a few years later, Iraq—who sought to resurrect the ghost of Nasserism. As history would have it, their success was as ephemeral and elusive as Nasser’s.

  This chapter begins by tracing the tormented history of Nasser’s steady decline, starting with the ill-advised union with Syria from 1958 to 1961. Nasser’s commitment of troops and resources to the Yemeni civil war from 1962 to 1967 only expedited his downward spiral, sealed by his total and utter defeat by Israel. What occurred in those fateful six days in June 1967 profoundly and permanently changed the history of the Middle East, not to mention its political geography, its balance of power, the fate of the Palestinians, and the status of Israel as a regional and global military powerhouse. These very consequences, as well as the need for the defeated Arabs to redeem themselves, led to the 1973 War. Once again, there were profound ramifications not only for the belligerents but for the region as a whole.

  NASSER’S QUAGMIRE

  The beginning of the end for Nasser can be traced back to 1958, when he agreed to a hastily arranged union between Egypt and Syria. The unification process had actually begun in the closing weeks of 1957 at the behest of a group of young Syrian military officers enamored of Nasser’s progressive social policies and fervent Pan-Arabism. Most were members or supporters of an exciting new political party called the Baʿth (Renaissance), whose ideals and platform closely mirrored Nasser’s domestic and foreign policies. Since independence, Syria had had a functioning, albeit coup-ridden, presidential political system. There were also a variety of political parties, although most reflected larger inter-Arab divisions and rivalries rather than substantive doctrinal differences.1 Unable to find a workable professional or political medium, the Syrian army, which itself had failed to develop a unifying sense of corporate identity, had repeatedly intervened in the political process. Meanwhile, the country’s civilian politicians, an array of whom alternated between the presidency and other high offices, had proven to be equally incapable of governing. Amid chronic turmoil and political instability within the system, elements from the armed forces sought to foster a union with Egypt.

  There were four interrelated and reinforcing causes for the union between Egypt and Syria. First, of great importance was the larger global context of the Cold War, within which domestic political agendas in the Middle East and elsewhere were being formed. Second was the replication of superpower rivalries among Middle Eastern actors and the ensuing division of the Arab states into two camps, “progressive” (i.e., nonaligned) and “conservative” (i.e., pro-Western). Third was a steady growth and ascendancy within the Syrian polity of elements advocating ever-closer ties or actual unification with Egypt. Last was Nasser’s predicament, in many ways self-made, that left him with little alternative to spreading his protective wings over Syria, especially as Cold War and inter-Arab divisions grew more and more polarized.

  Throughout the 1950s, Britain and the United States searched for ways of containing what they perceived as the threat of Soviet and communist expansion in the Middle East. Such efforts had actually begun soon after the end of the Second World War, when in 1946 the Soviet Union had temporarily occupied Iran’s northern province of Azerbaijan and set up a puppet republic there. Western efforts to combat the potential for increased Soviet influence in the Middle East had crystallized in Turkey’s admission into NATO in 1952, a CIA-sponsored coup in Iran in 1953, and the abortive invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956. A year earlier, in February 1955, Washington had sponsored the establishment of the Baghdad Pact, which was intended to serve as a diplomatic and military alliance of pro-Western states against the Soviet Union and its regional allies. The pact was originally composed of Turkey and Iraq, joined a year later by Iran, Pakistan, and Britain. Soon after its establishment, the United States also joined the pact’s Military Committee. Although in the long run largely ineffective, especially after Iraq’s withdrawal in 1958 following the country’s Baʿthist coup, at the time the alliance was seen as a serious threat to Nasser’s populist regime and as inimical to the interests of the peoples of the Middle East.2 Britain had also sponsored the establishment of the Arab League in 1944, intended largely as an instrument of its Middle East policy, although by the late 1950s Nasser had effectively turned the league into a forum for his own agendas.3

  Following the outcome of the Suez Canal invasion, the United States sought to fill the vacuum left in the Middle East as a result of France and Britain’s diplomatic retreat from the region. In January 1957, President Eisenhower launched a major Middle East foreign policy initiative that came to be known as the Eisenhower Doctrine. Its main goal was to foster close economic and military cooperation between the United States and any Middle Eastern country threatened by communist infiltration.4 Toward this end, the U.S. president proposed a two-year aid package of some $400 million earmarked for America’s Middle Eastern allies. In a not-too-subtle reference to Nasser, Eisenhower justified his policy initiative by arguing that “in the situation now existing, the greatest risk . . . is that ambitious despots may miscalculate. [If they] estimate that the Middle East is inadequately defended, they might be tempted to use open measures of armed attack . . . [and] that would start a chain of circumstances which would almost surely involve the United States in great military action.”5

  Like the Baghdad Pact and its successor, the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), the Eisenhower Doctrine proved to be largely a failure, embraced in the Arab world only by Lebanon. The doctrine focused exclusively on Cold War dynamics and ignored the real concerns of Middle Eastern leaders, the most pressing of which was not the threat of communist infiltration but the existence and the policies of the state of Israel.6 Nevertheless, the initiative and subsequent American efforts to gain Middle Eastern support for it added to the region’s existing diplomatic tensions. For a country like Syria, with its chronic political instability, such an international environment was quite unsettling.

  Syria’s fears about regional tensions turned out to be more real than imagined. At the time of the announcement of the Eisenhower Doctrine, Syria happened to have a ruling elite closer in orientation to Nasser than to the conservative camp. By 1957, the war of words that had erupted between Damascus and Washington following the announcement of the Eisenhower Doctrine had inched closer to a crisis, culminating in the discovery, on August 12, of a CIA plot to overthrow the Syrian government.7 In September, in an alleged attempt to stem communist infiltration into the country, NATO member Turkey amassed troops along its southern border with Syria, only to back off when threatened with Soviet reprisal.

  All of this was happening at a time of profound political instability in Syria. The country had experienced three separate military coups in 1949 alone, followed by further episodes of military intervention in 1952 and 1954. Despite its history of repeated takeovers of the state, or perhaps because of it, up until the early 1970s the Syrian armed forces had never really developed a cohesive organizational hierarchy or a sense of corporate identity. Factions within the military competed with each other for power and influence and, in turn, with civilian politicians, most of whom belonged to the country’s wealthy, old-school oligarchy. Syria thus drifted from one domestic and international crisis to another, headed by leaders generally seen as incompetent and self-serving. Enter Nasserism and the force of all it stood for. When in late 1957 Baʿthist officers of the Syrian army approached Nasser about unification, he had no alternative but to agree. After all, ever since 1955, and especially after the tripartite invasion of his country, Nasser had positioned himself as the protector of the interests of the Arab “nation,” the region’s chief guardian against imperialism. With Syria threatened from all sides and with the plea for unity coming from within Syria itself, Nasser could not possibly reject the proposal. On February 1, 1958, Nasser and Syrian president Shukri Quwatli announced in Cairo the unification of their two countries under the new name United Arab Republic. Nasser became the UAR’s president. His position was a
pproved in a popular plebiscite held three weeks later, as was a new, “presidential democratic” constitution.

  The unity project was doomed from the very beginning because of the haste with which it had been put together and because of the way Nasser set out to govern. Before the actual unification, the two countries had taken few concrete steps to facilitate the process. They had signed a series of trade and economic agreements only the previous September, and Egypt had dispatched a few troops to Aleppo in October during Syria’s border conflict with Turkey. But the details of how a postunification state would operate and what it would be like had not received the treatment they deserved. It was up to the new republic’s executive branch, dominated by Nasser and the rest of the Egyptian leadership, to work out the details of the new state. Nasser, in keeping with the tenor of the times, devised a highly centralized, presidential system. The UAR was to have an Egyptian and a Syrian region, each with an executive council whose powers would be determined by the president. There would also be a four-hundred-member legislative assembly appointed by the president, half from each country’s sitting legislature. Finally, an independent judiciary was supposed to administer Egyptian and Syrian laws separately in each region.8 Cairo would be the UAR’s capital.