Disordered World, page 10
In the months that followed the declaration of the United Arab Republic, a rebellion broke out in Beirut against President Chamoun, who was accused of supporting the French and British during the Suez Crisis. There were calls for his resignation, and some Nasser supporters even advocated that Lebanon should become part of the Egypto-Syrian state. Several other countries began to experience an intense ferment of nationalist activity.
In order to confront these challenges, the pro-Western kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan — which were both governed by young sovereigns of the Hashemite dynasty aged just twenty-three — decided to declare in their turn a united Arab kingdom. But this ‘counter-union’ lasted only a few weeks. On 14 July 1958, a bloody coup overthrew the Iraqi monarchy and put an end to the project. The whole royal family was massacred and Nasser’s old enemy, Nuri es-Said, was lynched by the mob in the streets of Baghdad.
Nasser’s nationalist tide seemed to be well on the way to overwhelming the entire Arab world from the ocean to the Gulf, and at high speed. Never had the theory of the domino effect worked so quickly. Every monarchy was shaken and on the point of falling, especially that of King Hussein, who seemed to be facing an identical fate to that of his unfortunate Iraqi cousin.
Washington and London consulted each other on the morning of 14 July and agreed on an immediate response. The very next day, American marines landed on Lebanese beaches; two days later, British commandos arrived in Jordan. It was a way of telling Nasser that if he went one step further, he would enter into direct military conflict with the West.
This response had the desired effect. The nationalist wave ebbed. In Lebanon, the rebellion lost momentum and President Chamoun was able to serve the rest of his term. In Jordan, King Hussein was not ousted; various threats still lay ahead for him — military rebellions, attacks on his person and on those close to him — but by surviving this first attack, he was able to save his throne.
Nasser was to suffer two further serious reversals. In Iraq, an internal struggle soon began among the architects of the coup, between those who wanted to align themselves with Cairo and those who wanted to keep their distance. Nasser’s friends were beaten and ousted. Rather than joining the United Arab Republic, the strong man of the new regime, General Abdel-Karim Kassem, presented himself as the champion of a specifically Iraqi revolution and clearly anchored on the left. He thereby became Nasser’s sworn enemy overnight and a struggle to the death between the two men began. On 7 October 1959, in central Baghdad, Kassem’s armoured car was riddled with bullets. Kassem got away with only scratches; his attacker, who was wounded in the leg, managed to escape across the border to seek refuge in Syria. He was a 22-year-old militant nationalist by the name of Saddam Hussein.
Nasser’s other failure would turn out to be yet more devastating. At dawn on 28 September 1961, a military coup took place in Damascus. The restoration of Syrian independence and the end of the union with Cairo were declared. Arab nationalists denounced this ‘separatist’ act and accused those involved in the putsch of being puppets of colonialism, Zionism, reactionary forces and the oil-producing monarchies. But no one was unaware at the time that the Syrian population was finding it more and more difficult to tolerate Egyptian control, not least because it was exercised through the secret services. Like Baghdad, Damascus is one of the historical capitals of the Muslim world; Baghdad was the seat of the Abassid caliphate, while Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad caliphate. Both were willing to be a sister to Cairo, but not her servant. Such feelings were widespread throughout the population, especially among the urban bourgeoisie and landowners, whom Nasser’s nationalisations had ruined.
The Egyptian leader’s star seemed irredeemably tarnished. His popularity might have remained intact among the masses in most Arab countries, but his enemies, both in the region and in the West, breathed more easily, believing that the initial nationalist wave was now no more than a memory.
But all of a sudden, the wave broke again, this time stronger and wider than before. During the summer of 1962, an independent Algeria elected as its leader Ahmed Ben Bella, a fervent admirer of Nasser. In September, Free Officers, inspired by the example of Egypt, overthrew the most reactionary monarchy of all, that of the imams in Yemen. A Yemeni republic was declared, to which Nasser promised every assistance. Soon thousands of Egyptian soldiers were arriving in the south of the Arabic peninsula, causing the oil-producing kingdoms to tremble.
On 8 February 1963, Arab nationalist officers seized power in Baghdad. Kassem was summarily executed and his body displayed on television. The new head of state was Colonel Abdessalam Aref, one of Nasser’s faithful allies. A month later, on 8 March, a similar coup d’état took place in Damascus, in which the end of separatism was declared, along with the aim of recreating a union with Egypt and Iraq, perhaps also Yemen and Algeria, and even, in the future, Lebanon, Libya, Kuwait, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and so on.
Suddenly, within a few months, Nasser’s dream of Arabic unity seemed revived, and more vigorous than ever. Iraq and Syria’s new leaders went to Cairo to negotiate the terms of a new union, a project which was solemnly announced on 17 April 1963. Thus, a powerful Arab state was about to be born, uniting the three great imperial capitals, Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus. Arab nationalism seemed to be on the verge of an unprecedented historical triumph. Its supporters were delirious, and its enemies alarmed. Neither group could have imagined then how close the denouement was.
Chapter 7
The new ebb in support for Nasser turned out to be as rapid as the original surge had been. In the weeks following the agreement about the new union, it became known that the Cairo negotiations had in fact gone very badly. The Syrian and Iraqi leaders, who all belonged to the pan-Arabic Ba’ath (‘resurrection’) party, wanted a partnership in which Nasser was the head of the new state, but which gave them the real power on the ground. Remembering the mistakes made during the first attempt at a union, they did not want their countries to be governed by some viceroy subservient to the Egyptian leader. Nasser, for his part, had no desire to be the nominal president of a state dominated by these Ba’athists for whom he had neither trust nor sympathy. They may have been the architects of the two coups, but it was Nasser who was the standard bearer of Arab unity; it was in him that the people saw their aspirations reflected, and him alone whom they desired as their leader. It was not long before this disagreement degenerated into a violent trial of strength. In Baghdad, the confrontation went provisionally in favour of the Egyptian president, but when Nasser’s supporters in Syria rose up against the Ba’athists, the rebellion was violently suppressed and the death toll ran into hundreds.
In Yemen, the royalists, aided by Saudi Arabia, furiously opposed the new republican regime and succeeded in hampering the efforts of the Egyptian expeditionary force. Their mission turned to disaster militarily, financially and also morally when some of the soldiers involved started behaving not as liberators but as occupiers, and even looters.
Another blow for Nasser came in June 1965, when his friend Ben Bella was overthrown in a military coup; Algeria’s new president, Houari Boumediene, was quick to distance himself from Cairo.
The backlash was on a massive scale. Even beyond the Arab world, the Egyptian president lost some of his closest allies. The Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah, an advocate of African unity and a fervent admirer of Nasser — so much so that he had given his son the first name Gamal — was overthrown in February 1966 by a military coup. Then it was the turn of the Indonesian Sukarno, a standard-bearer in the Non-Aligned Movement; on 11 March 1966, he was forced to cede power to the pro-American General Suharto.
Finally, as if to complete Nasser’s isolation, his last faithful ally among the Arab leaders, the Iraqi president Abdessalam Aref, died on 13 April 1966 in circumstances which have never been fully explained. He was visiting the south of the country near Bassora when his helicopter malfunctioned and went out of control. Suddenly the door opened and the president fell out; his head hit the ground and he was killed instantly.
This bizarre accident could not have come at a worse moment for Nasser, who more than ever needed trustworthy allies, since the political landscape of the region was beginning to be populated with movements and individuals which were challenging his authority, such as the Ba’ath party or Fatah, a newcomer on the scene.
When on 1 January 1965 a communiqué announced the first military operation by a previously unknown Palestinian organisation, the Egyptian president knew at once that this action was not solely aimed against Israel or Jordan, but also against him. Up until that point, the Palestinians had been Nasser’s most enthusiastic supporters, because it was they who had had to leave their homes when the state of Israel was created, and who hoped to return there through an Arab victory. In the meantime, most of them were living in refugee camps and had placed all their hopes in Nasser.
Nasser himself never missed an opportunity to lambast the ‘Zionist enemy’, to bring up the setback suffered by Israel during the Suez Crisis or to promise fresh victories to come. The Palestinians had been persuaded that the Egyptian president’s nationalist mobilisation was the only route which would permit them to win. But some of them were beginning to grow impatient. They had had enough of their struggle constantly being sacrificed to other priorities and constantly deferred. Nasser was clearly in no hurry to go to war against Israel. First he had to achieve Arab unity, drive out colonialism, consolidate the socialist economy, overcome reactionary regimes and so on. The founders of Fatah believed that the Palestinians ought to conduct their own fight according to their own agenda. Their first communiqué amounted to a declaration of independence — and also one of defiance — with regard to other Arab leaders and in particular with regard to the most prominent of them, Nasser.
Mockery of Nasser was also growing in various quarters. Hadn’t he had enough time since 1956 to prepare a war against Israel? Hadn’t he been sufficiently well armed by the Soviets? Hadn’t he acquired planes, tanks and even submarines? Wasn’t it strange that not a single shot had been fired against the common enemy in ten years?
The Egyptian president was not insensitive to these criticisms. After all, his accession to power had come about as a direct reaction to the Arabs’ defeat in 1948 and he had arrived promising to repair that affront. This was the context in which he had become a hero. In 1956, he had given the crowds a foretaste of the promised victory, and in his speeches he constantly held up the glittering prospect of other battles to come. The crowds listened to him and trusted him; they did not expect him to launch a battle before he was ready, but his credit had its limits. Especially if others were now taking up arms against Israel.
And that is precisely what happened after 1 January 1965. One Fatah operation succeeded another and its press releases were reported in the media.
The most militant sector of Arab public opinion cheered; and in the conservative monarchies too the exploits of the Fedayeen were admired, and compared favourably to the duplicitous rhetoric of Nasser, ‘who prefers to send his troops to fight in Yemen rather than in Negev, Jaffa or Galilee’.
The Egyptian president’s position became yet more awkward when Israel began to react violently to Fatah’s attacks. On the night of 11–12 November 1966, an Israeli border patrol encountered a landmine which went off, killing three soldiers and injuring six others. Believing that the Palestinian commandos who planted it came from the village of es-Samu in the West Bank — which then belonged to the kingdom of Jordan — the Israelis launched a massive reprisal attack on 13 November. But instead of encountering the Fedayeen, they came face to face with a detachment of the Hashemite army. A violent battle ensued, which at one point involved the air force. Sixteen Jordanian soldiers were killed as well as the Israeli colonel directing the operation. In the village, dozens of houses were destroyed and three civilians killed.
The Israeli reaction was universally condemned or at least strongly criticised, not just by the Arabs, Soviets and non-aligned countries, which were in the habit of condemning everything that Israel did, but also by the Americans, who could not understand why anyone would want to destabilise one of the rare moderate regimes in the Arab world, which had always been the least hostile to the Jewish state.
In Israel itself, many people felt that the operation had been misguided and also badly executed. Moshe Dayan, the former chief of the armed forces and future defence minister, asked why it was Jordan that had been attacked when everyone knew it was Syria that was financing and arming the Fedayeen. The idea that the wrong target had been hit was quickly admitted by most leaders, who promised that next time they would come knocking on the ‘right door’.
In fact, attention was turning more and more towards Damascus, as a result of its support for Palestinian militants and also because of the increasingly frequent engagements between Syrian artillery on the Golan Heights and Israeli troops stationed in the Galilee settlements. On 7 April 1967, a minor border skirmish escalated into an aerial combat in the skies above Damascus. Six Syrian planes were shot down.
All these events reverberated more and more in Arabic public opinion, where the same questions kept arising: what was Nasser doing? What was the Egyptian army doing? When people didn’t ask these questions spontaneously, some sectors of the media took it upon themselves to whisper them in their ears, with a reminder that Nasser ran no risk of being attacked himself, unlike the Jordanians and Syrians, ‘since he was hiding like a timid little girl in the skirts of the United Nations’ — an allusion to the fact that international observers had been posted in Gaza and all along the Egyptian–Israeli border since the Suez Crisis. This had been a condition of the Israeli forces evacuating Sinai, and Nasser had agreed after obtaining a guarantee from the UN secretary general, the Swede Dag Hammarskjöld, that they would be withdrawn as soon as Cairo requested it.
The accusation of timidity had become a recurring refrain at this time for all Nasser’s enemies, on both the right and the left. The Arab media linked to the Jordanian, Saudi and Iranian monarchies — now grouped in an ‘Islamic pact’ in opposition to the Egyptian president — never missed a chance to draw attention to the disparity between his bellicose words and his actual behaviour. But the official press in Damascus was no less virulent; it no longer held back from describing Nasser in language previously reserved for pro-Western leaders. It spoke of cowardice and capitulation, and accused him of leaving the Egyptian army far from the battlefield while the Syrian army was currently at the front, ready to have it out with the enemy and to crush them.
Nasser could not stand for this. If it had just been a matter of invective and tirades, then perhaps he could have brushed it off. But tension was mounting in the region, and there was a persistent sound of marching boots. Was military confrontation really on the horizon? He knew that his enemies wanted to catch him out, and he was just as mistrustful of the intentions of Damascus or of the armed Palestinian movements as he was of Tel Aviv and Washington, London, Amman and Riyadh. In private, he told those close to him that a trap was clearly being set and that he would not allow himself to be caught.
Nonetheless, if tension continued to mount and did indeed lead to war, how on earth could he stand idly by? How could the standard-bearer of the Arab nation leave his army on the sidelines if other Arab armies were engaged in fighting with the common enemy?
On 12 May, press agencies reported statements by a high-ranking Israeli military official claiming that his country had decided to overthrow the Syrian regime if it continued to support the Fedayeen. The following day, an Egyptian figure who had hitherto played only a minor role, Anwar Sadat, then president of the parliament, made a brief stop-off in Moscow on the way back from a routine courtesy visit to Mongolia and North Korea. He was expecting to be politely greeted by some civil servant, but in fact some of the USSR’s top leaders met him to tell him that, according to their sources, the Israelis had amassed fifteen divisions on their northern border and an invasion of Syria was imminent — ‘ten days away at most’. As soon as he returned to Cairo, Sadat went to see Nasser, who had just been given the same information by the Soviet ambassador.
Nasser decided that he had no option but to send his army to Sinai, at the same time requesting that the UN withdraw its contingent, which it did without objection. The Egyptian forces took up position in Gaza and especially Sharm el-Sheikh, which controls the Straits of Tiran and access to the Gulf of Aqaba, through which the Israelis had been receiving deliveries of Iranian oil for years under a secret agreement with the Shah. While this route remained in the hands of international forces, Nasser left it alone, but as soon as his own troops were in place, he could no longer turn a blind eye. He had either to tolerate this traffic or put a stop to it.
The Arab masses who, two weeks earlier, had never heard of the Straits of Tiran, were now demanding that they be closed. The media — both Nasser’s supporters and his enemies — were also speaking with one voice. Everyone was aware that closing the straits would inevitably lead to war between Egypt and Israel; but it was a war which everyone wanted, whether to put an end to the state of Israel or to get rid of Nasser.
Chapter 8
When he received the message about an imminent invasion of Syria, Nasser sent a man he could trust to Damascus: Mahmoud Fawzi, his chief of staff. Fawzi had instructions to show solidarity and offer help, but also to check the veracity of the Soviet intelligence.
