Was Eden Right About Nasser?
SUEZ RETROSPECT
By D. C. WATT
/TIEN years ago the British, French and Israeli I governments in political collusion attacked Egypt. Each had different motives and acted on different interpretations of what was going on in the Arab world. But both the French and the Israeli governments shared with Lord Avon and his closest supporters in the govern- ment of this country the conviction that President Nasser had shown himself to be an evil and dis- ruptive force, a threat to the stability of the whole Middle East. Cairo Radio was going full blast, Egyptian subversive agents were active promot- ing coups d'etat, revolution and assassination plots from Tripoli in the west to Oman in the east. Lord Avon was wont to ask scornfully how such a man could be trusted to run a major international waterway. And to Dulles he is said to have stormed that to accept Nasser's control of Suez would be to live with his hands round Britain's throat. Britain would become another Netherlands, another Portugal—the sorry relict of a once great power.
In the maps and statistics with which we were regaled at the time, one point was reiterated. Not only was an overall 25 per cent of British trade conducted with countries east of Suez; Britain's industry and a large chunk of Britain's balance of payments depended on the unimpeded flow of Middle Eastern oil. Without it the wheels of British industry would grind to a standstill. With- out it, Britain's oil companies would have to buy dollar oil at great cost, not only to keep Britain going but to meet the large contracts they had to fulfil with Scandinavia and West Germany. All this depended on peace, tranquillity, stability in the Middle East. All this Nasser threatened. If he were not stopped now, like Hitler he would become too powerful. Nasser had to be stopped —so went the argument—otherwise the Middle East would go the way Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe had gone after 1936.
The world knows the immediate outcome of these arguments. But it is now a decade since all this took place. Were Eden, Monet and Ben Gurion right? Has Colonel Nasser proved the disruptive force they feared him to be?
The short answer to this is, of course, 'No; but not for want of trying.' The years after 1956 were anni mirabiles for those who believed in the imminence of Arab unity, years of blackness for Britain and France. Every tuppenny-halfpenny revolutionary in the Arab peninsula felt British withdrawal to be so imminent that he reached for the nearest brickbat to speed us on our way. That citadel of twentieth-century enlightenment, the Imamate of the Yemen, revived its long dor- mant claims to sovereignty over Aden. The Saudis began to subsidise the inland tribes of Oman to revolt. The political clubs in Kuwait seethed; and a succession of tribal rulers in the western Aden protectorate thought it as well to insure their future by defecting to the Yemen, so as to be on the winning side. In Europe sober businessmen and soberer bankers, believing an Arab Common Market to be imminent, flocked to join the private development agency, Midec, organised by a former chairman of Unilever to unite Arab business with European money and know-how in the industrial development all be- lieved to be imminent.
The peak year of the movement was 1958. Syria united with Egypt in the UAR, and the Yemen entered a looser association. The Lebanon was rent by civil war. In Iraq, the monarchy and Nun es Said disappeared beneath the rifles of the army and the feet of the mob, all in the sacred name of Arab unity. In a panic, President Chamoun of the Lebanon and King Hussein of Jordan called in American and British troops. The Soviets answered with ominous manoeuvres on the Caucasus and talk of 'volunteers.' The Americans brought in tactical nuclear weapons. The Cold War threatened to get hot over the corpses of the Arabs. The fears this aroused in Arab breasts enabled Mr Hammarskjiild to bring off a minor miracle, obtaining agreement be- tween members of the Arab League on a formula which made British and American withdrawal possible. In the Lebanon, American realism and the business instincts of the people produced a compromise regime which maintained the status quo. The Imam's supporters were winkled out of Oman; and Aden's frontiers returned to com- parative quiet. But the UAR still stood as a model of what Arabs could do for unity.
A space-traveller who left the world in 1958 and did not return until 1966 might be forgiven for wondering if he had been travelling back- wards in time. No UAR or Arab Common Market (save in name), the British still in Aden, the Arab capitals of Cairo, Baghdad and Damas- cus still at loggerheads with one another, Saudi Arabia still a monarchy. Kuwait, Bahrein, the Trucial sheikhdoms, all ruled by the same auto- cratic regimes as before. Where, he would ask, is the Arab unity he was told was so imminent? How has Colonel Nasser ceased to be the charis- matic figure who was to unite the Arab world?
The reasons he would be given would vary according to the speaker. To Arab nationalists, the main cause would be the alliance between western imperialists and old-style autocratic regimes. The western Arabist would discourse on the unstable nature of the Arab character and point to the unwillingness of any of the three main Arab capitals to accept subordination to its rivals. The geographer would emphasise that national unity usually takes place around a cer- tain geographical core of industry, communica- tions, and so on, lacking in the Arab world. The observer of things Arab would argue that Nasser's Egyptians have themselves proved the worst enemies of Arab unity. They talk as Arabs but act as Pharaohs: their attitude to Syrians and Yemenis, for all their professed anti-colonial- ism, has been reminiscent of the worst excesses of colonialism.
Colonel Nasser has failed to live up to the worst expectations of the instigators of Suez. He has been thwarted by Egypt's own military inept- ness, shown in his army's inability to subduce the Yemini royalists, and on his own general caution towards Israel. He has proved unable to control the Pharaonic complexes of his subordinates. He has failed to resolve the eternal Arab triangle— Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad. He is now in direct rivalry with a revived Saudi Arabia, ruled by a reforming monarch determined to end his coun- try's record as the corruptest in the Arab world, and inspired by the puritanism of his Wahhabi forebears. The Yemen civil war is draining his treasury and ravaging the ranks of his soldiery; and he is no nearer to solving Egypt's needs for food and raw materials, even though the Aswan High Dam is now near completion and Egypt near to complete state control of industry, invest- ment, pricing, and so on.
He still has considerable assets of ability and charisma, still the support of the managerial and technocratic elites of Egypt, who ran the Suez Canal despite the prophecies of doom and disaster of the former Canal Company and built the High Dam at Aswan with Soviet money and assistance. He is still one of the main disruptive forces in a sensitive area. But he is no more than a Pilsudski or, in oriental terms, a Mahomet Ali—not the Hitler, the Genghis Khan we were bidden to see in him ten years ago. And the worst threat to the stability of the area at the moment is the imminent withdrawal of Britain from Aden and the supply of arms to the Persian Gulf states which has stemmed from that decision.
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