A History of the Middle East (41 page)

In his little book
The Philosophy of the Revolution
, published in 1954, Nasser had already shown his awareness of the kind of role that Egypt could play. He wrote of its location at the coincidence
of three circles – the Arab Circle, the African Circle and the Islamic Circle. Still in hazy terms, he saw Egypt as the focus of a vast movement of resistance to the imperialism of the West. Initially, he did not see the Arab Circle in terms of pan-Arab unity – indeed, he was suspicious of the Arab League, which he regarded as a fraudulent imperialist conception, and he reduced its influence by removing from office the League’s eloquent pan-Arabist secretary-general, Abdul Rahman Azzam. But he did see the Arab states as potential allies in ending Western hegemony. Unfortunately, the only other independent Arab state which had the makings of a stable autonomous power – Iraq – was led by a man whom Nasser regarded as the imperialist West’s chief ally – Nuri al-Said. To make matters worse, he was a man of real stature and personality. It was this bitter rivalry with Nuri (which was much more than a mere clash of personalities) that was the main factor in involving Egypt deeply in the politics of Arab nationalism.

Matters came to a head in 1955 with the conclusion of a series of military agreements between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Britain which became known as the Baghdad Pact. The idea of this patently anti-Soviet alliance had originated with the United States, which had dropped it on realizing that the Arabs were much more concerned about Israel than about any Soviet threat. Britain had joined the pact as a means of maintaining some part of its dominant position in the area. Nasser tried every means to prevent Iraq from joining, because he saw the Pact, with its NATO links through Turkey, as an instrument of continued Western domination. But he failed to persuade the indefatigably pro-Western and anti-Soviet Nuri al-Said. The great mass of articulate Arab opinion was on Nasser’s side in this matter, and his influence was enough to prevent Jordan from joining, although the young King Hussein was in favour. But as Nasser’s popularity with the Arabs grew, the hostility he aroused in the West increased.

Nasser’s horizons were broadening. A crucial influence on his thinking was Pandit Nehru, the figurehead of India’s independence, who visited him in Cairo in February 1955 and agreed with him to
oppose all military alliances such as the Baghdad Pact. Nasser also developed a warm admiration for President Tito’s Yugoslavia. While Nehru had succeeded in pursuing an independent non-aligned policy while remaining a member of the British Commonweath, Tito had defied Soviet leadership of the communist bloc (even under Stalin) and accepted American aid without renouncing communism. Nehru, Tito and Nasser would come to be regarded as the founding members of the club of non-aligned states. In April 1955 Nasser headed Egypt’s delegation to the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in Indonesia – an event of immense contemporary importance since it symbolized a concerted attempt by the great majority of the developing world to throw off the hegemony of the white Western nations. The importance of Egypt and its revolution was acknowledged as he was treated as an equal by Asian statesmen such as Nehru and the Chinese premier Chou En-lai. Some of the credit for this was due to his personal qualities – for one so young and inexperienced he acted with remarkable skill and assurance.

Nasser was well on his way to becoming the hero of Arab nationalism; his picture appeared on display throughout the Arab East. But hero status brought new dangers and responsibilities, for he was beginning to arouse huge expectations among the Arabs. Since he was championing the cause of neutralism in the Cold War, he began to arouse the suspicion and hostility of the United States. At the same time Israel was coming to regard Nasser’s Egypt as its principal external challenge.

Although Britain appeared to remain the principal Western power with Middle Eastern interests in the decade following the Second World War, in reality its position was being rapidly overtaken by the United States, for two reasons: the onset of the Cold War and US sponsorship of Israel.

US involvement began in Iran. At the end of the war both Britain and the United States withdrew their troops from Iran, as stipulated in the 1942 treaty, but the Soviet Union refused for several months to evacuate the northern provinces. When the Soviet army finally withdrew, the Soviet Union sponsored a puppet socialist
regime in Azerbaijan which it aimed should secede from Iran and join the Soviet Union. Unexpectedly firm action by the Iranian government suppressed the Azerbaijani separatists, but the Soviet Union continued to exert pressure on Iran through the autonomy movements in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan and the powerful communist Tudeh Party in Iran. The so-called Truman Doctrine of March 1947, under which the USA offered Greece and Turkey aid (which Britain could no longer provide) to maintain their independence, was soon extended to Iran. In October 1947 the Iranian Majlis plucked up its courage and annulled a highly unpopular Soviet–Iranian agreement for joint exploitation of the oil reserves in the northern provinces.

Britain and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company remained the principal targets for the powerful force of Iranian nationalism, of which a veteran aristocratic politician, Mohammed Mossadegh, became the spokesman. In 1949 the Iranian government launched an ambitious and much needed seven-year development plan based on the country’s revenues. But whereas between 1944 and 1950 AIOC’s profits had increased more than tenfold, Iran’s revenues had increased only fourfold. Negotiations started with the company in 1948 to increase Iran’s share were frustrated by Mossadegh and his followers in the Majlis, who insisted on Iran’s right to regain control over the country’s principal natural resource. Public opinion was so roused that in May 1951 the young shah was forced to appoint Mossadegh as prime minister and give his assent to a bill nationalizing the Iranian oil industry.

The measure was not only wildly popular in Iran; it inspired the Arab man-in-the-street. Mossadegh’s name became legendary in the Middle East as Nasser’s would become a few years later. But Mossadegh was unable to carry through his revolution, both because of the strength of the forces opposing him and because of his own inadequacies as a revolutionary leader. The AIOC withdrew from Iran and, in pursuit of their common interest, the major international oil companies successfully imposed a boycott of Iranian oil. Britain resorted to economic pressures and military threats in an
attempt to have the nationalization reversed and appealed to the International Court of Justice, which ruled against it, and to the UN Security Council, which refused to intervene. The US government unsuccessfully attempted to mediate. But Iran’s revenues dwindled to a trickle.

Mossadegh’s popularity among the poor Iranian majority increased with his intransigence against the West. He demanded and received authoritarian powers. He broke off diplomatic relations with Britain and closed its consulates. But in many respects his social and political outlook was reactionary. As a member of the landowning class, he opposed the breaking up of the large estates in favour of peasant proprietors and he stopped even the shah’s modest land-distribution scheme. As the doubts about him grew among Iranian politicians, the shah took courage to challenge his actions and appoint the loyalist General Zahedi prime minister. The shah’s attempt failed and he had to flee the country in August 1953, but six days later he returned and Mossadegh was overthrown in a counter-coup which was planned and organized by the CIA, with substantial assistance from British intelligence.

Relations with Britain were restored, but it was the USA which now took over as the principal Western influence in Iran. A group of US, Dutch and British oil companies formed a consortium in which AIOC had a 40 per cent share and negotiated an agreement with the National Iranian Oil Company that had been formed to take over AIOC’s assets in Iran to resume operations. The agreement was for twenty-five years. In August 1955 the Iranian government signed a treaty with the United States. With this and its joining the Baghdad Pact in the following year, against strong Soviet protests, Iran indisputably joined the Western camp in the Cold War.

In 1952, when the Eisenhower administration replaced that of President Truman, the United States still had only a peripheral interest in the politics of the Arab world. It had scant sympathy for what remained of the imperial aspirations of Britain and France. It had good relations with the young revolutionaries in Egypt, and it urged Britain to come to terms over the military occupation. But it had
no desire to take Britain’s place. As we have seen, when Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles realized that Egypt and the other Arab states were uninterested in joining an anti-Soviet Middle East Defence Organization, he left Britain as the only Western member of the Baghdad Pact while he concentrated on strengthening the ‘northern tier’ of states confronting the Soviet Union – Turkey, Iran and Pakistan.

However, the United States did have a close interest in Israel, largely for domestic political reasons. Zionist political influence in the United States went far beyond the American Jewish community. The US Congress was overwhelmingly supportive of the young Zionist state in the Middle East and, although he was the least inclined of any post-war US presidents to relinquish the executive’s control of US foreign policy, Eisenhower could not ignore these sentiments.

Although the concept of direct superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence in the Middle East had come to seem part of the natural order in the 1950s, the history and development of Russian and American interest in the region were totally different. The very concept of the Middle East as a geopolitical entity was new to Russia.

Historically, Russia had more reason for interest in the Muslim world as a whole than any of the Western powers. For 250 years Russia had been ruled by Islamized Mongols. After its restoration to Christendom, Holy Russia absorbed millions of Muslim subjects. By the end of the nineteenth century, following the great tsarist expansion eastwards, the Russian Empire not only contained some 15 million Muslims but also shared some 2,000 miles of frontiers with the only Muslim states which could be regarded as truly sovereign – the Ottoman Empire and Persia.

The Russian Bolsheviks retained the tsarist empire and created the six Muslim Soviet Republics to form the southern fringe of the USSR. Pre-revolutionary Christian Russia always regarded Islam as hostile but the fact remained that its southern population from the point of view of culture and religion and to a large extent of
race remained part of the Middle East. All had belonged to the Muslim East of the caliphates.

This was the reality that the Soviet Union inherited. Lenin’s policy was to renounce all tsarist imperial ambitions in the Middle East and to consolidate the Soviet hold on the Muslim republics. The communists were as hostile to Islam as the tsars, regarding it as a counter-revolutionary force. They maintained a fiction that it was being artificially maintained as an anti-Soviet instrument by Western imperialist intrigue, but over the years they could not fail to realize the prevalence and staying power of Islamic culture both outside and inside the borders of the Soviet Union.

Initially, Soviet policy in the Middle East was based on the assumption that the peoples of the region who had been dominated or exploited by Ottoman, British and tsarist imperialism would be attracted by the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet leaders believed that they had a good chance of gaining control over the secular nationalist movements which were developing in the area. But for the time being the Arab countries remained under British or French control, and the main hopes of the Soviet Union were concentrated on Turkey and Iran, which were always the principal focus of Russian interest. The Soviet misunderstanding of nationalism soon brought disappointment. In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal and his colleagues were quite prepared to accept Soviet arms and money in their struggle against the West, but before long they made clear both that they detested communism and that they still regarded Russia as Turkey’s traditional enemy. Moreover, whereas Lenin at least favoured the idea of supporting bourgeois nationalism, even if it meant the collapse of local communist movements, on the ground that nationalism would enforce the retreat of imperialism and hence prepare the way for the eventual downfall of capitalism, his policy was to a large extent reversed by Stalin. Stalin believed that local communist parties should be the spearhead of Soviet policy and that Soviet interests could best be served by a programme of subversion and, where it seemed appropriate, by direct action.

In Iran this policy was especially disastrous. The Soviet Union’s
support for the establishment of the communist Tudeh Party, its attempt to exploit mutinous movements in the army, and constant efforts at subversion through its consulates, commercial organizations, clubs and propaganda agents served only to rally all the anti-Russian feelings of Iranian nationalism in a way which was no different from the days of the tsars. By 1934 Reza Shah had closed down all the Soviet trade agencies and clubs and all but one of the consulates.

In the Arab countries of the Middle East the communist parties were minuscule and dominated by intellectuals who generally came from the religious and ethnic minorities. The Soviet Union tried to gain a political and commercial entrée into the Arab world through the newly created kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but this was a failure and Stalin closed down the legation in 1938.

Until the Second World War the Arab countries were hardly aware of the existence of the Soviet Union. Its entry into the war in 1941 transformed the situation. The Soviet Union’s epic resistance to Hitler’s armies gave it new prestige. As an ally of the Western powers, its diplomatic representation, which had hitherto been confined to Turkey and Iran, was extended to most of the Arab states. The Soviet military occupation of northern Iran was made in agreement with Britain and the United States.

However, in the immediate post-war period Stalin’s neo-imperialist policies were soon rebuffed. Iran and Turkey remained the focus of Soviet interest, but their hostility was provoked by the disastrous attempt to establish a separatist pro-Soviet Iranian Azerbaijan and by a demand for the return of the provinces of Kars and Ardahan, which were ceded to Turkey in 1921. In 1952 the pro-Western government of the kingdom of Iraq broke off relations with Moscow and the moves began which united Iraq with Turkey, Iran and Pakistan in the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. Soviet policy in the Middle East suffered a blockade.