A History of the Middle East (44 page)

It was a time for Nasser’s many enemies both in the Middle East and elsewhere to triumph. Western governments were delighted, but equally the leaders of Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia did nothing to conceal their pleasure.

Nasser himself told the Egyptians, ‘We must have the courage to admit our mistakes.’ But his own analysis was that he should have been more vigorous in imposing Egypt’s socialism on Syria. Three months before Syria’s secession a series of laws had been decreed in Egypt nationalizing cotton export firms, banks, insurance companies and 275 major industrial and trading companies as well as cutting maximum land holdings by half and sharply increasing income tax. Nasser was convinced that Syria’s secession was simply the counter-attack of the Syrian bourgeoisie against such a sharp move to the left. Believing that Egypt’s bourgeoisie might be planning similar action, he launched his own precautionary counter-offensive in which the property of more than a thousand of Egypt’s wealthiest families was confiscated.

He knew that this was insufficient and that he had to give his Arab socialism a clearer ideological definition. He spent the winter of 1961–2 in preparing his 30,000-word Charter of National Action before summoning a National Congress of Popular Powers attended by labour unions, professional associations and other
community groups to debate its terms. Although influenced by Marxism (especially the Yugoslav model) and European welfare-state socialism, he attempted to adapt these to his view of the special needs of Egyptian and Arab/Islamic society. The Charter was secular but not anti-religious. It started from the assumption that Egypt’s pre-revolutionary parliamentary democracy based on Western models was a ‘shameful farce’ because ‘political democracy cannot be separated from social democracy.’ The vote was meaningless unless the citizen was free from all exploitation, had an equal opportunity with his fellows to enjoy a fair share of the national wealth and was assured of an adequate living-standard. Although the Charter endorsed the nationalization of all public services and most of industry and the export–import trade, it ruled out land nationalization and allowed the private ownership of buildings, subject to supervision. It distanced itself from Soviet practice by rejecting the priority given to heavy industry at the expense of the production of consumer goods.

The Charter provided for a new and unique political organization, to be known as the Arab Socialist Union, with a pyramid form based on ‘basic units’ in villages, factories and workshops and rising through elected councils at the district and governorate levels to the National Executive headed by the president. The National Assembly was retained as the ASU’s legislative branch. In this, as in all the ASU’s elected bodies, half the seats had to be reserved for workers or farmers (defined as anyone owning less than twenty-five
feddans
). Nasser believed that his intention was clear: to create a social democracy in which the mass of the Egyptians would for the first time genuinely participate. But such a system can hardly flourish when it is created instantly from above – it was significant that the National Congress approved his Charter without amendment.

Nasser’s absorption with his National Charter and the fact that he was no longer concerned with the problems of governing Syria – which he said had taken up three-quarters of his time for three-and-a-half-years – did not mean that he was turning his back on the Arab world or abandoning his claims to Arab leadership. These
were not his intentions – even if they had been, circumstances would not have allowed them. He remained by far the dominant figure on the Arab scene, and expectations in him remained high among ordinary Arabs. To symbolize his attitude, he retained the name of United Arab Republic for Egypt.

Hostile Arab governments poured out invective. The Saudis concentrated their attack on Egyptian socialism, which they said was atheistic. Even Imam Ahmed of Yemen – ailing, but still awe-inspiring to his subjects – contributed to the anti-Egyptian chorus; the shadowy United Arab States of the UAR and Yemen was dissolved. The most violent abuse emanated from Syria, where a series of highly unstable governments elected under the old constitution replaced each other in rapid succession. Syrian spokesmen accused Nasser and Egypt of oppressing Syria with a reign of terror, as well as embezzling funds of the Syrian state. Cairo’s response was louder and more effective than all these criticisms, because Egypt’s propaganda media were more developed than those of any other Arab state. Nasser’s theme was that there could be no compromise between Arab socialism and ‘reaction’. One of his favourite phrases was that ‘unity of ranks is no substitute for unity of aims.’

Yet Egypt was to some extent on the defensive. After a flaming row with the Syrians at an Arab League council meeting in Lebanon, Nasser announced that Egypt was withdrawing from the Arab League. Then, one year after Syria’s secession, events in distant Arabia enabled him to regain the initiative. On 28 September 1962 some pro-Egyptian officers in the Yemeni army revolted against Imam Badr, who had just succeeded his father Ahmed, seized the main towns and declared a republic. The royalist cause was not lost, however, because Badr escaped and his uncle, Emir Hassan, returned to Saudi Arabia from the United States to rally support among Yemeni tribesmen against the new republic. Nasser at once decided to answer the revolutionaries’ call for help, and a substantial Egyptian expeditionary force sailed up the Red Sea to the Yemeni port of Hodeida. The resulting prolonged involvement in the Yemen – described as ‘the Egyptian Vietnam’ – cost Egypt dear. Its troops
were ill-prepared for guerrilla tribal warfare in mountainous territory. The intervention was unpopular among those of the Egyptian public who were directly affected by it and a matter of indifference to most of the rest. Yet the fact of a Nasserist coup in Yemen raised Egypt’s morale at the time and increased its prestige in the rest of the Arab world. In mounting the expeditionary force to Yemen, Nasser showed conclusively that Egypt’s armed forces were the only ones in the Middle East about which Israel needed to worry. It was Nasser’s opponents who were now on the defensive. The defection to Cairo of seven of Saudi Arabia’s precious officer pilots in October 1962, followed shortly by the commander of the Jordanian Air Force and two Jordanian pilots, showed that the loyalty of the armed forces in the two Arab monarchies was dubious.

Pan-Arabist emotion was a powerful factor in a further coup in Iraq, on 9 February 1963. An army revolt, in which Baathist officers played the leading role, overthrew and killed General Kassem. Colonel Aref was installed as president and immediately declared his pro-Egyptian sympathies.

Syria’s fragile government could not long resist the joint pressure from Cairo and Baghdad. Exactly one month after the Iraqi revolt, a military coup in Damascus swept aside all the men who had been in power since the break-up of the Syrian–Egyptian union, and a new Revolutionary Command Council pledged itself to support ‘the new movement of Arab unity’. The Baathists had not led the coup, as they had in Iraq, but they were the only civilian organization outside the old regime which was capable of forming a government. Within a week, Iraqi and Syrian ministerial delegations were in Cairo to discuss plans for the unity of Syria, Iraq and Egypt.

This seemed like another moment of great triumph for Nasser. But disillusion came even more swiftly than with the Syrian–Egyptian union as the mutual mistrust between Nasser and the Baathists came to the surface. Nasser felt he could get along with the Iraqi Baathists – who had borne the brunt of the struggle with Kassem, were in firmer control than their Syrian counterparts and had no heritage of rancour with Egypt – but he had no confidence in the Syrian
Baath. For their part, a few idealistic Baathists in both Syria and Iraq had a genuine doctrinal disagreement with Egypt in their demand for democratic freedoms and collective leadership. But most Baathists simply believed that salvation for the Arabs could come only through the Baath party and to this end were prepared to use methods which were quite as totalitarian as anything in Egypt.

The tripartite unity talks were not helped by the fact that Nasser dominated them with his personality and his long experience of power. (He later made cruel fun of the shy and stuttering Michel Aflaq, who was incapable of expressing his views clearly.) Although a form of agreement on a tripartite federation was reached on 17 April, the union was stillborn. During May and June the Syrian Baathists were purging the army of non-Baathist officers and suppressing Nasserist demonstrations. Following the ruthless suppression of an attempted pro-Nasser coup in Syria in July, Nasser openly attacked the Baath for the first time, describing the Syrian regime as ‘secessionist, inhuman and immoral’ and revealing that Egyptian intelligence had uncovered an Iraqi–Syrian alliance against him.

As Egypt’s relations with Iraq and Syria worsened, Nasser had some satisfaction when in November the Iraqi Baathists, who had already made themselves unpopular by their violent methods and who had renewed the exhausting war with the rebellious Kurdish minority which had so weakened Kassem’s regime, split into two factions and were ousted by President Aref (whom they had tried to keep as a figurehead) and some senior non-Baathist officers. True to his simple-minded notions, Aref renewed pressure for an immediate union with Egypt. But experience had made Nasser cautious. He suggested to the Iraqis that they should first ensure their own national unity, which among other things meant finding a solution to the Kurdish problem.

Although Nasser regarded Arab political union as impossible for the foreseeable future, he saw the urgent need for some kind of joint Arab action. The Israelis had completed the diversion of some of the waters of the River Jordan to the Negev Desert, though this
was something he and other Arab leaders had rashly sworn to prevent. This was no time to insist on ‘unity of aims’ before ‘unity of ranks’. In the Arabs’ divided condition there was little hope of their taking effective common action, but there was a very real danger that one Arab state – Syria, where the most irresponsible ultra-left elements were in the ascendant – would act on its own and plunge the others into a war with Israel for which they were not prepared. Nasser therefore issued an invitation to all Arab kings and presidents, which he knew they would find it difficult to refuse, to meet in Cairo in January 1964, setting a precedent for the holding of regular summit meetings. He used the occasion to mend his bridges with pro-Western Arab leaders such as King Hussein, the ailing King Saud, and President Bourguiba of Tunisia and to emphasize the isolation of the Syrian Baath. A second summit was held in Alexandria in September. The Arab heads of state agreed to set up a Unified Arab Military Command under an Egyptian general, and also a Palestine Liberation Organization (but not a government in exile), with its own army, to represent the Palestinian people. They all agreed, although with little enthusiasm, on the choice of the verbose and flamboyant Palestinian lawyer Ahmed Shukairy to head the PLO. King Hussein made clear that the PLO would not have any authority inside Jordanian territory. The heads of state also decided on plans to divert the sources of the River Jordan in Arab territory, in order to forestall Israel’s irrigation schemes.

The pressing problem of how to satisfy Arab public demands for action over Palestine without provoking a potentially disastrous war with Israel had been postponed rather than solved. Arab opinion was deluded in thinking that some positive action was at last being taken. Lebanon and Syria were reluctant to carry out the diversion of the Jordan tributaries in their territory without more adequate protection than the Arab states could provide, and the mutual trust which was essential if the Unified Arab Military Command was to function was lacking.

During 1965 and 1966 the division deepened between the radical Arab camp (led by Egypt) and the conservative (led by Saudi Arabia).
In December 1964, King Saud had abdicated and had been succeeded by his brother Feisal. Although Nasser agreed publicly with Feisal on the need to settle the disastrous royalist/republican civil war in Yemen, neither was prepared to make the necessary compromise.

In Feisal, Nasser for the first time since the death of Nuri al-Said faced a rival star-personality, although one of a very different kind from himself. The most they had in common was the puritanical restraint of their private lives. Reserved, dignified and reflective, Feisal commanded immediate respect. Like Nuri, Feisal made little appeal either to the intelligentsia or to the urban masses, but he was the custodian of the holy places of Islam and the ruler of an Arab state which, however backward and underdeveloped, had never been under imperialist control and therefore lacked the complexes of the colonized. As a diplomat and statesman he was in a different class from his brother Saud: while refusing any kind of liberal constitutional reform, he was encouraging a much more rapid and intelligent social and economic development at home. This made it all the easier for him to rally to his banner those elements in the Arab world afraid of or antagonistic towards Nasserism.

Feisal’s appeal was naturally more Islamic than nationalist. In December 1965 he went on a state visit to Iran, and in his address to the Iranian Majlis he suggested the need for Islamic unity against subversive alien influences from outside. Although he was deliberately unspecific, no one doubted that he was referring to Egypt’s Arab socialism. Feisal had embarked on creating a conservative ‘Islamic Front’ against Nasser.

Nevertheless, it was Nasser who continued to play the commanding role on the world stage. His differences with the Soviet Union, which had arisen over Nasser’s hostility towards the Iraqi communists, had been overcome and Moscow still regarded Cairo as the focus of its Middle East policy. The relationship was symbolized in the much publicized visit to Egypt in May 1964 by the Soviet premier Khrushchev for the inauguration of the second stage of the building of the High Dam – the gigantic project which not only aimed to change the face of Egypt but was also the flagship of Soviet
aid to the Third World. On the other hand, the United States also accepted the inevitability of Nasser’s Arab leadership. Towards the end of the second Eisenhower administration, the US State Department came to the conclusion not only that Nasser was not a communist but also that in reality he promised the best defence against communism in the Middle East. This revised attitude was consolidated by President Kennedy, who came close to establishing cordial and confident relations with Nasser and was warmly admired by him in return. Between 1958 and 1964 the USA provided Egypt with over a billion US dollars in aid – mostly in cheap long-term loans.