Arabs (65 page)

Al-Azm prepared an extensive response and put forward a compromise union scheme based on a federation of the two states. His proposal gained enough support in the Syrian cabinet to be sent on to Cairo, but Nasser would have nothing to do with the compromise: it was total union or nothing at all. The Syrian army intervened again, preparing an airplane to take the cabinet to conclude the deal in Cairo. The chief of staff clarified the issue for the undecided politicians. “There are two roads open to you,” he is reported to have said. “One leads to Mezze [the notorious political prison outside Damascus]; the other to Cairo.”
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The Syrian government took the road to Cairo and concluded the union agreement with Egypt on February 1, 1958.

It was the beginning of a revolutionary year. The union of Egypt and Syria heralded a new age of Arab unity, generating tremendous public support across the Arab world. Nasser’s standing reached new heights, much to the consternation of the other Arab heads of state.

 

Perhaps the most vulnerable Arab leader in 1958 was the young King Hussein of Jordan, who would celebrate his twenty-third birthday in November of that year. Given Jordan’s history of relations with Britain, Hussein had been a particular target of the Nasserist propaganda machine. The Voice of the Arabs broadcast damning criticisms of Hussein and encouraged the Jordanian people to overthrow the monarchy and join the progressive ranks of modern Arab republics.

In response to these external pressures, King Hussein did all he could to distance himself from Britain. He stood up to British pressures and stayed out of the Baghdad Pact. In March 1956 he dismissed the British officers still running his army, including
the influential commander Glubb Pasha. He even negotiated the termination of the Anglo-Jordanian treaty in March 1957—effectively ending British influence over the Hashemite Kingdom. These measures were followed by conciliatory efforts toward Egypt and Syria and by efforts to demonstrate Jordan’s commitment to Arab nationalism.

Hussein’s boldest concession was to open his government to pro-Nasserist forces. In November 1956 Hussein held free and open elections for the first time in Jordan’s history, which gave left-leaning Arab nationalists a clear majority in the Jordanian parliament. Hussein took the risk and invited the leader of the largest party, Sulayman al-Nabulsi, to form a government of loyal opposition. The experiment lasted less than six months.

The reform-minded Nabulsi government had a difficult time reconciling the contradictions between loyalty and opposition. Moreover, al-Nabulsi enjoyed greater public support and loyalty from the Nasserist “Free Officer” elements in the Jordanian military than did the king. Hussein came to believe that prolonging the Nabulsi government would shorten his monarchy, and he decided to act. In April 1957 Hussein took a real gamble in demanding al-Nabulsi’s resignation, on the pretext of the government’s sympathies for communism. Shortly after dismissing al-Nabulsi, Hussein took forceful measures to reassert his hold over the country and its armed forces. By mid-April, King Hussein had orchestrated the arrest or exile of the leading Jordanian Free Officers who threatened his rule and secured oaths of loyalty from his troops.

The pressures on Jordan intensified following the 1958 union of Syria and Egypt.
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Arab nationalists redoubled their calls for the Hashemite government to step aside and for Jordan to join the progressive Arab ranks through union with the United Arab Republic. Hussein’s own vision of Arab nationalism was more dynastic than ideological, and he turned to Iraq, led by his cousin King Faisal II, to shore up Jordan’s vulnerable position. Within two weeks, he concluded a unity scheme with Iraq called the Arab Union, launched in Amman on February 14, 1958.

The Arab Union was a federal arrangement that preserved each country’s separate national status but called for joint military command and foreign policy. The capital of the new state was to alternate between Amman and Baghdad every six months. The two Hashemite monarchies were connected by blood ties, a shared history under British tutelage, and even had a border in common.

The Arab Union was no match for the United Arab Republic, however. The union of Iraq and Jordan was seen as a rearguard action against the threat of Nasserism. By throwing in his lot with Iraq, host of the Baghdad Pact, whose prime minister Nuri al-Sa’id was reviled as the most anglophile Arab politician of his day, Hussein had exposed his kingdom to even greater pressure from the Nasserists.

 

Lebanon was another pro-Western state that came under intense pressure from the union of Syria and Egypt. The sectarian division of power agreed to in the 1943
National Pact had begun to unravel. Lebanese Muslims (which term grouped Sunnis, Shiites, and Druzes) were particularly aggrieved. They did not approve of the pro-Western policies pursued by the Maronite Christian president Camille Chamoun and wanted to align Lebanon with more overtly Arab nationalist policies. The Lebanese Muslims in 1958 had reason to believe that they outnumbered the Christians. The fact that the government had not authorized a new census since 1932 only confirmed Muslim suspicions that the Christians refused to recognize demographic reality. Lebanese Muslims began to question the political distribution of power that left them with less political voice than their numbers would warrant under a more proportional system. They knew that under true majority rule, Lebanon would pursue policies in line with the dominant Nasserist politics of the day.

The Lebanese Muslims saw Nasser as the solution to all their problems, a strong Arab and Muslim leader who would unite the Arab world and end the perceived subordination of Lebanon’s Muslims in the Christian-dominated Lebanese state. President Chamoun, however, believed Nasser posed a direct threat to Lebanon’s independence, and he sought foreign guarantees from outside subversion.

After the Suez Crisis, Chamoun knew he could not count on France or Britain for support. Instead, he turned to America. In March 1957 he agreed to the Eisenhower Doctrine. First presented to the U.S. Congress in January 1957, the doctrine was a major milestone in the Cold War in the Middle East. As a new policy initiative designed to contain Soviet influence in the Middle East, it called for American development aid and military assistance to Middle Eastern states to help them defend their national independence. Most significant, the Eisenhower Doctrine authorized “the employment of the armed forces of the United States to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence” of states in the region “against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism.”

Given the deepening of Soviet-Egyptian relations since the Czech arms deal and the Suez Crisis, the Eisenhower Doctrine seemed to many a policy designed to contain Egyptian as much as Soviet influence in the Arab world. Egypt rejected the new American policy as the Baghdad Pact all over again—another attempt by the Western powers to impose their anti-Soviet priorities on the Arab region, ignoring Arab concerns over Israel. Thus, when the president of Lebanon formally accepted the Eisenhower Doctrine, he entered on a collision course with both the Nasser government and Nasser’s many supporters in Lebanon.

Matters came to a head in the Lebanese parliamentary elections, held in the summer of 1957. In Lebanon, the parliament elects the president of the republic for a single six-year term. The parliament resulting from the 1957 elections would thus elect the next Lebanese president in 1958, so the stakes were high.

In the run-up to the elections, Chamoun’s opponents—Muslims, Druze, and Christians alike—formed an electoral bloc called the National Front. The front brought together a formidable group of politicians: the Sunni leader from Tripoli, Rashid Karami; the most powerful Druze politician, Kamal Jumblatt; and even Maronites hostile to Camille Chamoun’s rule, like Bishara al-Khoury’s Constitutional Bloc. The National Front represented a far larger share of the Lebanese public than those supporting the beleaguered President Chamoun.

Lebanon became a battlefield between the Americans, trying to promote regimes sympathetic to the West, and the Nasserists, who were trying to unite Arab ranks against foreign intervention. As parliamentary elections neared, the U.S. government feared Egypt and Syria would promote the National Front and undermine the position of the pro-Western Chamoun. So the Americans subverted the elections themselves. The C.I.A. provided massive funds to underwrite the election campaigns of candidates running in Chamoun’s bloc in an operation overseen personally by the American ambassador to Lebanon, who was determined to achieve “a 99.9 percent-pure pro-U.S. parliament.” Wilbur Crane Eveland, the C.I.A. agent who hand-delivered the funds to Chamoun in his distinctive gold Ford de Soto convertible, had grave misgivings about the operation. “So obvious was the use of foreign funds by the [Lebanese] president and prime minister that the two pro-government ministers appointed to observe the polling resigned halfway through the election period.”
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Electoral tensions gave rise to large-scale fighting in northern Lebanon, where many civilians were killed and wounded during the voting.

Chamoun won in a landslide. The victory was not so much an endorsement of the Eisenhower Doctrine as evidence of the corruption of the Chamoun government. The opposition press took the election results as proof that Chamoun sought to stack the parliament in his favor in order to amend the Lebanese constitution to allow himself an unlawful second term as president.

With the opposition shut out of the parliament, some of its leaders turned to violence to prevent Chamoun from gaining a second term of office. Bombings and assassinations wracked the capital city of Beirut and the countryside from February to May 1958. The breakdown in order accelerated after the union of Syria and Egypt, as pro-Nasser demonstrations gave way to violence.

On May 8, 1958, Nasib Matni, a pro-Nasser journalist, was assassinated. Opposition forces blamed the government for his death. The National Front held Chamoun’s government responsible for the murder and called for country-wide strikes in protest. The first armed disturbance broke out in Tripoli on May 10. By May 12, armed militias were fighting in Beirut as Lebanon dissolved into civil war.

The commander of the Lebanese army, General Fuad Shihab, refused to deploy the army to prop up the discredited Chamoun government. The Americans prepared
to intervene in Lebanon as the situation deteriorated and the pro-Western Chamoun government looked in danger of falling to the Nasserists.

A
t the height of the fighting in Lebanon, Iraqi journalist Yunis Bahri turned to his wife and suggested they leave the turmoil of Beirut for the relative calm of Baghdad. Bahri, a native of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, was an outspoken critic of British imperialism in the Middle East and had been one of many Arab nationalists drawn to Hitler’s Germany. He was renowned in the Arab world as the voice of Radio Berlin’s Arab service in the Second World War. “Hail, Arabs, this is Berlin,” was his famous call sign. After the war he moved between Beirut and Baghdad, writing for the leading Arab newspapers and working as a radio broadcaster. Fatefully, in 1958 he accepted a commission from the Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Sa’id to broadcast a series of reports critical of Nasser. When war broke out in Lebanon, Bahri’s Beirut home was taken over by popular resistance forces. He told his wife they should go to Baghdad to take refuge from the shelling and shooting.

“But Baghdad is a burning hell at this time of the summer,” she replied.

“The flames of Iraq are more comfortable than the bullets of Beirut,” he insisted.
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Little did he know.

Bahri and his wife arrived in Baghdad on July 13, 1958, to a warm reception. The local press had covered their return, and their first night in town was spent in a string of engagements thrown in their honor. They awoke the next morning to a revolution.

 

A group of military conspirators led by Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim and Colonel Abd al-Salam ‘Arif had been plotting since 1956 to overthrow the monarchy in Iraq and establish a military-led republic. They called themselves the Free Officers, inspired by the example of the Nasser and his colleagues in Egypt. Driven by Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism, the Iraqi Free Officers condemned the Hashemite monarchy and the government of Nuri al-Sa’id for being too pro-British—a particularly serious charge in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis. The Free Officers sought to sweep away the old order installed by the British in the 1920s and install a new government created by the Iraqi people themselves. They believed the monarchy could only be overthrown by a singular act of revolutionary violence.

The Free Officers’ opportunity came when the Iraqi government ordered the deployment of army units to the Jordanian border to reinforce their Arab Union partner state against further threats from Syria and Egypt, on the night of July 13–14. The route from the army base to the Jordanian border took the rebel officers past the capital city. The conspirators decided to divert their troops to central Baghdad and seize power that very night.