The Modern Middle East (22 page)

Like the Baghdad Pact and its successor, the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), the Eisenhower Doctrine proved to be largely a failure, embraced in the Arab world only by Lebanon. The doctrine focused exclusively on Cold War dynamics and ignored the real concerns of Middle Eastern leaders, the most pressing of which was not the threat of communist infiltration but the existence and the policies of the state of Israel.
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Nevertheless, the initiative and subsequent American efforts to gain Middle Eastern support for it added to the region’s existing diplomatic tensions. For a country like Syria, with its chronic political instability, such an international environment was quite unsettling.

Syria’s fears about regional tensions turned out to be more real than imagined. At the time of the announcement of the Eisenhower Doctrine, Syria happened to have a ruling elite closer in orientation to Nasser than to the conservative camp. By 1957, the war of words that had erupted between Damascus and Washington following the announcement of the Eisenhower Doctrine had inched closer to a crisis, culminating in the discovery, on August 12, of a CIA plot to overthrow the Syrian government.
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In September, in an alleged attempt to stem communist infiltration into the country, NATO member Turkey amassed troops along its southern border with Syria, only to back off when threatened with Soviet reprisal.

All of this was happening at a time of profound political instability in Syria. The country had experienced three separate military coups in 1949 alone, followed by further episodes of military intervention in 1952 and 1954. Despite its history of repeated takeovers of the state, or perhaps because of it, up until the early 1970s the Syrian armed forces had never really developed a cohesive organizational hierarchy or a sense of corporate identity. Factions within the military competed with each other for power and influence and, in turn, with civilian politicians, most of whom belonged to the country’s wealthy, old-school oligarchy. Syria thus drifted from one domestic and international crisis to another, headed by leaders generally seen as incompetent and self-serving. Enter Nasserism and the force of all
it stood for. When in late 1957 Baʿthist officers of the Syrian army approached Nasser about unification, he had no alternative but to agree. After all, ever since 1955, and especially after the tripartite invasion of his country, Nasser had positioned himself as the protector of the interests of the Arab “nation,” the region’s chief guardian against imperialism. With Syria threatened from all sides and with the plea for unity coming from within Syria itself, Nasser could not possibly reject the proposal. On February 1, 1958, Nasser and Syrian president Shukri Quwatli announced in Cairo the unification of their two countries under the new name United Arab Republic. Nasser became the UAR’s president. His position was approved in a popular plebiscite held three weeks later, as was a new, “presidential democratic” constitution.

The unity project was doomed from the very beginning because of the haste with which it had been put together and because of the way Nasser set out to govern. Before the actual unification, the two countries had taken few concrete steps to facilitate the process. They had signed a series of trade and economic agreements only the previous September, and Egypt had dispatched a few troops to Aleppo in October during Syria’s border conflict with Turkey. But the details of how a postunification state would operate and what it would be like had not received the treatment they deserved. It was up to the new republic’s executive branch, dominated by Nasser and the rest of the Egyptian leadership, to work out the details of the new state. Nasser, in keeping with the tenor of the times, devised a highly centralized, presidential system. The UAR was to have an Egyptian and a Syrian region, each with an executive council whose powers would be determined by the president. There would also be a four-hundred-member legislative assembly appointed by the president, half from each country’s sitting legislature. Finally, an independent judiciary was supposed to administer Egyptian and Syrian laws separately in each region.
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Cairo would be the UAR’s capital.

It soon became apparent that unification had in effect meant Nasser’s takeover of Syria. Although his cabinet featured two Syrian vice presidents along with two Egyptians, almost all of the UAR’s key ministries were placed in Egyptian hands, and many well-known Syrians, including former president Quwatli, were either demoted or dropped from the cabinet altogether.
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Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, one of the UAR’s vice presidents and a longtime personal friend of Nasser, was put in charge of the Syrian region and given a mandate to implement sweeping economic, industrial, and land reforms. As a precondition for unification, Nasser had demanded that all Syrian parties, including the Baʿth, disband. Instead, political activists could join the National Union, another populist, mass-based party set
up in Egypt in the same mold as the now-defunct Liberation Rally (see below). When the Syrian Communist Party failed to dissolve itself, scores of its members and sympathizers were arrested and its assets were seized by the government.

Though never fully articulated, the vision that Baʿthist officers had had for the UAR was hardly consistent with what Nasser was implementing in the Syrian “region.” The Baʿthists were ideologues and visionaries, believing that in the postunification era they could implement their ideals in a federally governed Syria. But whatever ideals Nasser might have started with as a former revolutionary, by the late 1950s he had become a hardened pragmatist, eager not so much to put his experimental ideas into practice as to solidify his grip on power both domestically and internationally.
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Baʿth members were also disenchanted with the union because of their increasing political marginalization. The heavy hand of the Egyptian bureaucracy, Nasser’s penchant for personal political control, and his ill-advised plans to implement statist economic policies in Syria as he had done in Egypt only heightened popular Syrian anger against the unification process.
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Syrian military officers also resented the preferential treatment that their Egyptian counterparts were receiving in postings and promotions.

Sensing tensions, in the summer of 1961 Nasser made some adjustments aimed at placating the brewing opposition in Syria. He ordered the transfer of an unpopular Syrian military commander (Abdel Hamid Sarraj) from Damascus to Cairo, promised to spend four months a year in Damascus, and gave Syrians more visible positions in his administration. But these efforts proved to be too little and too late. On September 21, Syrian army units marched on Damascus and, in yet another of the country’s many coups, proclaimed Syria’s independence from the UAR.

The coup and Syria’s separation from the UAR were a crushing blow to Nasser. In many ways, he was defeated at his own game and by his own actions. This time, unlike in 1956, Nasser could not blame Western imperialism or Zionist conspiracy for his troubles. And he could not, even if he wanted to, turn this defeat into some sort of imagined victory. This was a defeat through and through—political, diplomatic, economic. As if to underscore the futility of the whole endeavor, Nasser made a halfhearted attempt to reverse the coup but then acknowledged the irreversibility of the secession in a radio broadcast the next day. Perhaps to hang on to some vestige of the unity experience, Nasser retained the name United Arab Republic for Egypt. In fact, in April 1963, following military coups in both Iraq and Syria, the three countries entered into negotiations over another
proposed union, this time far less centralized and based on what one joint declaration characterized as “studied and clear foundations.”
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Before it got off the ground, however, this venture was also doomed, with Nasser declaring that “we cannot . . . have any link, any alliance, any unity or objective with a Fascist state in Syria.”
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No sooner was the unification fiasco with Syria over than Nasser found himself in yet another quandary, this time in Yemen. Nasser needed a diplomatic victory and needed it fast. Syria’s secession from the UAR had occurred within the context of—and had in turn heightened—an Arab “cold war” of sorts.
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With Syria taking its case against Egypt before the Arab League, supported this time by Iraq and by the Saudi and Jordanian monarchies, Nasser the Pan-Arabist was finding himself increasingly isolated from the rest of the Arab world. He had also long been at odds with Tunisia’s strongman, President Habib Bourguiba. In fact, by the early 1960s, Nasser’s circle of Arab allies had largely been reduced to one, Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, a fellow revolutionary. Nevertheless, his anti-imperialist rhetoric and his charisma still resonated with the Arab masses, and it was because of this continued popularity among aspiring Arab revolutionaries that he and his country were drawn into the Yemeni civil war.

Yemen had remained one of the world’s most isolated and conservative countries for more than a thousand years, ruled as a theocracy by a successive string of absolutist imams who governed under Ottoman suzerainty. In 1893, Britain occupied the southern dry port of Aden and established what came to be known as the Protectorate of Aden. Once the British withdrew in 1967, the leftist National Liberation Front seized power and, in 1970, renamed the country the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. The north, meanwhile, had won its independence from Ottoman rule in 1918 but had remained isolated and deeply steeped in tradition. Palace coups had occurred in 1948 and again in 1955, but the overall nature of state-society relations and the absence of social progress had not changed.
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Imam Ahmad, the kingdom’s ruler, had been initially attracted to the ideals expounded by Nasser, to the extent that on the day the UAR was established, Yemen joined the two countries in a loose confederation called the United Arab States. But there was little substance to the confederation beyond the exchange of diplomatic pleasantries, and, along with Syria, Yemen terminated its association with the UAR in 1961. On September 26, 1962, a group of Yemeni officers launched a military takeover in the hope of ending their country’s conservative monarchy and replacing it with a progressive, republican regime. Despite declaring the establishment of a
Yemen Arab Republic, the coup makers did not immediately succeed in overthrowing the monarchy. The day after the coup, Nasser rushed Egyptian troops to Yemen to help republican officers fight against royalist forces. But Nasser had miscalculated. Yemen was about to plunge into a protracted civil war that would last for five years—a nightmare for the people of Yemen and an intractable dilemma for Nasser. Yemen became “Nasser’s Vietnam.”
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Nasser’s dispatch of troops to prop up the fledgling Yemen Arab Republic was a product of his efforts to reclaim his position as the undisputed leader of the Arab world.
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For revolutionaries, revolutions never end, and Nasser had to keep on fighting, even if thousands of miles away from Egypt. Yemen had originally offered Nasser the perfect opportunity to carry out the various facets of his revolution. It had all the right ingredients: a “revolutionary” military leadership willing to follow his lead; a chance to create state structures from scratch based on the Nasserist model; and, perhaps most important of all, a foothold deep inside the Arabian peninsula, long a bastion of monarchical conservatism as epitomized by the Saudis. But if Nasser saw Yemen as his golden opportunity, the Saudis saw it as a mortal threat, fearing that a republican victory in Yemen might inspire their own subjects to challenge the Saudi monarchy. Before long, therefore, the Yemeni civil war became a war by proxy between Egypt on the one side and Saudi Arabia and some of its allies—such as Jordan, Iran, and Pakistan—on the other. At their peak, Egyptian forces in Yemen numbered some seventy thousand.
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As it turned out, such a massive commitment of troops and resources only deepened what soon became Nasser’s Yemeni quagmire.

For Nasser, involvement in Yemen turned out to be far from the quick military and hence political victory he had hoped. Initial estimates of the extent of the republicans’ success turned out to be exaggerated, and in less than a year it became obvious that a more sizable commitment of Egyptian troops was needed than originally thought.
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However, the numerical weight of the additional Egyptian troops was offset by their lack of preparedness to fight in Yemen and by the Saudis’ proportionate increase in their support for the royalists. The Egyptian army, trained and equipped for conventional warfare, found itself in unfamiliar terrain and facing an enemy adept at using guerrilla tactics. Moreover, Yemen’s porous northern borders with Saudi Arabia enabled the Saudis to send additional supplies to their royalist allies with relative ease. The balance of power was made all the more complicated by the tendency of many Yemeni tribes, with which the country was replete, to change sides
on the basis of practical considerations.
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By the summer of 1963, the civil war had degenerated into a stalemate that would last for nearly three more years.

The longer it dragged on, the more of an obsession the Yemen war became for Nasser. By 1966, he was locked into a series of increasingly dangerous cat-and-mouse games with the Israelis, but he stubbornly refused to waver on his commitment to Yemen’s republicans. A series of diplomatic initiatives sponsored by the United Nations, the Arab League, and other regional actors all failed to bring a peaceful end to the Yemeni conflict. Only because of mounting expenses and increasing resentment at home did Egypt slowly begin reducing the number of its troops in Yemen in late 1966. But even after Egypt’s humiliating loss to Israel in June 1967 and the occupation of its territory, Nasser remained obsessed with his Yemeni venture, refusing to back down.
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In the end, however, he had no option but to withdraw his forces. He finally accepted the implementation of a 1965 agreement with Saudi Arabia for the joint withdrawal of all foreign forces from Yemen. By late summer 1967, Egypt’s military presence in Yemen had been significantly reduced. By October, with the last vestiges of the monarchy gone, Yemeni republican leaders finally assumed control over the country. And, as the victorious so often do, they also resumed their own internal squabbles.
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