After Tamerlane (68 page)

The reason was not simply American eagerness to confront the expansion of the Communist sphere, which had led Washington to consider an all-out war against China–Ho's principal backer – in 1954. A second crucial ingredient was the skill with which Ngo Dinh Diem, a well-connected Catholic notable, built a strong enough network to hold much of the south. Diem was a nationalist. He had been shrewd enough to cultivate American sympathy and reject the semi-independence on offer from France. He was later to be vilified
as an American lackey, but his original aim was to cut Ho Chi Minh down and build a Vietnamese state after his own design.
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Thirdly, the Viet Minh were restrained by their Chinese ally – partly from fear of American firepower, but partly because China did not want to drive either Laos or Cambodia into American arms. (In return, Laos and Cambodia pledged neutrality; Thailand had already joined the West's Manila Pact of South East Asian states.) In mainland South East Asia, much of the friction turned on the state-building projects of Burmese, Thais, Vietnamese, Laos and Khmers: it was largely the conflicts among and between them that drew the outsiders into the region and made it hard to resist foreign offers of aid. Much the same was true in the case of Malaya. Malay political leaders viewed the Communist insurrection after 1948 as a local Chinese challenge to a future Malay state as much as a threat to British colonial rule. To keep it at bay and ward off the bear hug of their Malay ‘big brother' – Sukarno's Indonesia – they combined independence (in 1957) with a British alliance, not non-alignment or neutralism.
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The critical phase of decolonization in Asia between 1945 and 1960 thus followed a course very different from the hopes and dreams that had been aired at Bandung. Far from disdaining as futile the game of Cold War diplomacy – as Nehru had urged – many Asian leaders had accepted the reality of a ‘bipolar' world. Far from maintaining a proud independence, they hoped to turn the Cold War to their local advantage. In reality, perhaps, they had little choice. Economic and military weakness, internal division, social unrest and the century-old habit of looking beyond Asia for the route to modernity were all bound to deflect Asia's post-colonial trajectory. It remained to be seen howfar they would drag the continent into the orbit of a newimperial system.

Decolonization in the Middle East was no less tortuous, embittered and conflict-ridden. The end of the Second World War was greeted there, as much as in the rest of Asia, as a newbeginning. With peace came the promise of an end to the vast military machine that the British had built all across the region – a super-imperialism that had turned the Arab states and Iran (also partially occupied by Russian troops) into mere auxiliaries of the imperial war effort. Once that had
gone, political life might begin again. Better still, the British had decided (for their own convenience) to lever the French out of Syria and the Lebanon, France's pre-war mandates, and secure their independence (1946). This was a promising start. They had also encouraged the formation of the Arab League in 1944–5. The British intended the League to be a channel of their influence, a way of keeping the Arab states together under a British umbrella. But it might also serve as a vehicle for Arab cooperation to exclude or contain the influence of outside powers. The new geopolitical scene in which Soviet and American power was seen to balance (if not outweigh) that of Britain made this far less unlikely than it would have been before 1939. To many young Arabs, there seemed reason to hope that the post-war world would be a new ‘national age'. The false dawn of freedom from Ottoman power after 1918 – which had led instead to Britain's regional overrule – might at last give way to the glorious morning of full Arab nationhood.

Almost immediately the barriers piled up. The British rejected the ‘logic' of withdrawal: instead they dug themselves in.
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Arguments of strategy (as we have seen) and heavy dependence on oil (still mainly from Iran) made retreat unthinkable. The strategic vulnerability and economic weakness with which Britain had entered the peace (London hoped they were temporary) ruled out the surrender of imperial assets unless (as in India) they had become untenable. In the Middle East, the British still believed that they had a strong hand. Their position was founded on their alliance with Egypt, the region's most developed state, with more than half the population of the Arab Middle East – 19 million out of some 35 million.
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The long-standing conflict between the Egyptian monarchy and the landlord class gave them enormous leverage in the country's politics. If more ‘persuasion' was needed, they could send troops into Cairo from their Canal Zone base in a matter of hours. To improve relations after the strains of war, they nowdangled the promise of a smaller military presence. They assumed that sooner or later the Wafd or the king would want to come to terms, because Egypt's regional influence, like its internal stability, needed British support. So, when negotiations stalled, the British stayed put, intending to wait until things ‘calmed down'. They could afford to do so – or so they thought. For they could also count
on their political friendship with the Hashemite monarchies in Iraq and Jordan. It was well understood that the cohesion of both states (demarcated by the British in the early 1920s) and the survival of their monarchs (installed by the British at much the same time) rested on the promise of British assistance against internal revolt as much as external attack. To the south and east lay the Persian Gulf, still a ‘British lake'. Along its Arab shore lay a string of small states from Kuwait to Oman bound to the British by the promise of protection against their potentially predatory neighbours. At Arabia's southern tip lay an old British base at Aden, and a coastal strip under loose British rule. As if all this was not enough, the British were laying plans for bases in Libya, taken from the Italians and scheduled for self-rule under a British-backed king. It went without saying that the British exerted a prescriptive right to
regulate
the politics of the whole Middle East region. Diplomatic support in a quarrel between states, the offer of aid, and refusal to do business with an ‘unfriendly' government were the classic techniques of quasi-imperial control. The British had played this game for a generation or more. Driving them out was bound to be difficult, divisive and perhaps even bloody.

To more radical Arabs the solution was obvious. The imperial juggernaut could be beaten only by the collective force of pan-Arab nationalism. A vision of shared Arab nationhood would discredit the bargains the British had made with the rulers and ‘big men' in the Arab states. It would challenge the complacency of the landed elite and improve the social conditions that kept Arab life expectancy on a level with Indian. But as yet Arab unity was a distant dream. Ethnic, religious and social divisions – the legacy in part of Ottoman and European rule – were deeply entrenched. Pan-Arab nationalism had to compete with the endemic hostility between the region's ruling elites. Nationalists in Egypt felt little in common with the other Arab states (‘a collection of zeroes,' sneered Saad Zaghlul in the 1920s).
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They dwelt on Egypt's pharaonic glory (encouraged by the great Tutenkhamun finds in the 1920s) and regarded themselves as the true custodians of Arab nationalism and culture in their highest form. Egyptian opinion dismissed the Hashemite rulers in Iraq and Jordan as puppets and parvenus, and their claims to leadership of the Arab world as absurd and impudent. The Hashemite kings were equally
certain of their historic claim to head the Arab cause: it was they, after all, who had led the rising after 1916 and proclaimed an Arab nation. Their long-standing ambition was a great Hashemite state uniting Syria (lost to the French in 1920) and Palestine with Iraq and Jordan. Their fiercest enmity, returned with interest, was towards the house of Saud. It was the Saudi monarch who had seized the holy places of Mecca and Medina from their Hashemite guardian, and turned Hashemite Hejaz into a province of what became ‘Saudi' Arabia. Much of the rivalry between Egypt, the Hashemites and the Saudis was focused on Syria, whose religious and regional conflicts made it a fertile ground for influence from outside.
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This rough equilibrium of political forces in the post-war Middle East was quickly upset by the volcanic impact of the Palestine question. The British had planned to keep their regional imperium by a smooth transition. All the Arab states would be independent; some would be bound by treaty to Britain; the rest would acknowledge its de facto primacy as the only great power with real strength on the ground. It was always going to be difficult to manage this change in the case of Palestine, ruled directly by Britain under a League of Nations mandate since the First World War. Reconciling the promise of a Jewish ‘national home', in which Jews could settle, with the rights of the Arabs who were already there had been hard enough in the 1920s. The flood of refugees from Nazi oppression in the 1930s made it all but impossible. London's pre-war plan was to appease the anger of the Palestine Arabs at the growing Jewish migration by fixing a limit to ensure a permanent Arab majority. With its future settled as an Arab state, Palestine could be edged towards a form of self-rule. After 1945 this ingenious solution was soon blown to pieces. The practical difficulty and political embarrassment of excluding Jewish refugees, diplomatic pressure from the United States against the attempt to do so, and the scale and ferocity of the terrorist campaign waged by Jewish settlers destroyed any semblance of British authority by mid-1948.
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The result was the worst of all colonial worlds: an ungovernable territory whose control was disputed between two seemingly irreconcilable foes; outside encouragement that hardened the resolve of both contending parties; and the absence of either the means or a method to impose any decision. The partition proposed by the
United Nations could not be enforced. The war that followed between the Jews and Arabs (local Palestinians and the contingents sent by the Arab states) brought a Jewish victory. The new state of Israel was strong enough to impose a second and more favourable territorial partition. But it was not strong enough to force the Arab states to accept this outcome as a permanent condition.

The Arab catastrophe marked a crucial stage in the end of empire in the Middle East. It galvanized the sentiment of pan-Arab nationalism and gave it a cause and a grievance. It was a crushing humiliation for the ruling regimes in the main Arab states, where post-war inflation and hardship were fostering mass discontent: the violent demonstrations of the Wathbah (the ‘Leap') in Baghdad in January 1948 had already stopped the renewal of the Anglo-Iraqi treaty.
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It provoked bitter resentment in the ranks of the armies, who blamed their defeat on their civilian leaders. The impact on Egypt was the greatest of all. The king had insisted on sending an army, to boost his domestic prestige and assert Egypt's first place among the Arab states.
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The shock of defeat was felt all the more deeply. To make matters worse, he could make little progress towards evicting the British from their massive Canal Zone, the great visible symbol of Egypt's subaltern status. Nor indeed could his old political foes, the leaders of the Wafd. Where diplomacy failed, direct action stepped in. The struggle with the British became increasingly violent. Strikes, assassination and other acts of terror exploited British dependence upon Egyptian labour and the vulnerable state of British installations and personnel. Retaliation and revenge spread to Egypt's main cities. As the sense of order broke down, the king planned a putsch to purge discontent in the army. Before he could act, the ‘Free Officers' movement seized control of the government in July 1952, and forced him into exile.

The effects at first seemed far from radical. The newregime set out to restore order. It crushed the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that enjoyed mass support. It accepted the loss of Egyptian influence in the upper Nile when the British-ruled Sudan was promised independence as a separate state (the British rejected Cairo's demand to respect the ‘unity of the Nile valley'). Above all, it secured British agreement to leave the Canal Zone base by conceding a right of return if its use were needed to repel an outside attack (code for a Soviet
invasion) on the Middle East region. The British had concluded that, with a nuclear deterrent that they could deliver by air, the base was redundant in its present form as well as politically costly.
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What they probably hoped was that the new Nasser regime would turn its attention to internal reform. Egypt, they thought, would exert limited influence in the Arab world.
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Meanwhile they would remodel their imperium around a closer alliance with the Hashemite states and a newmilitary pact. American influence, helpful in making the Suez agreement, would be thrown on their side. Egypt would be isolated and on its best behaviour. But Nasser's response was not to comply. Instead, his astonishing revolt against the British ‘system' was the central event in the Middle East's decolonization.

As an Egyptian nationalist (one of the first acts of the newofficers' government was to bring a statue of Ramses II to Cairo), Nasser had every reason to mistrust the British and plot their departure from the Middle East as a whole. He was also influenced by pan-Arab feeling and the Palestine war. He wanted a cleansing tide of revolutionary politics to smash the old regime of landlords and kings, left over from the Middle East's colonial era. He also feared that time was against him. Any ruler in Cairo would have faced much the same dilemma. The Sudan was lost. There was high tension with Israel. The Arab East (the Mashreq) was being closed to Egyptian influence and perhaps even its trade. Without markets or oil, he faced stagnation at home and growing social unrest. He would be dangerously dependent on economic aid from the West. His regime was untried. His critics would multiply. His revolution would fail. So, as the British assembled their ‘Baghdad Pact' (with Turkey, Iraq and – they hoped – Jordan: Syria was next on the list),
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Nasser launched a counter-attack. He embraced pan-Arabism. With Saudi support, he backed the anti-Iraqi faction in Syrian politics. He encouraged opposition in Jordan to joining the pact. Then in September 1955 came a spectacular coup. Nasser broke free from the embargo on arms imposed by the West and arranged a supply from the Soviet bloc. Egypt would now be a real military power. By early 1956 he had declared an open political war on Britain's Middle East influence. The rising level of violence along the borders with Israel played into his hands. With what seemed amazing ease, he had seized the initiative in regional politics. He had made
Egypt the champion of the pan-Arab cause, and pan-Arab feeling into a dynamic force. The reaction in London was one of panic and rage.