The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (28 page)

Underlying all these and more fundamental than any of them was the exhaustion of British power and resources after six years of war against mighty enemies. Already in March 1947, President Truman had sought and obtained authority from Congress to give Greece and Turkey the help that they needed, and that Britain could no longer supply, in defending their independence and integrity against the Communist threat from the north. This policy was soon after extended to Iran. Toward the end of 1949, the U.S. government was already considering a more active role in the Middle East as a whole. A meeting of U.S. diplomats in the area was held in Istanbul in November 1949 and was addressed by the assistant secretary of state, George G. McGhee. His remarks were summarized by one of those present, the ambassador to Israel, James G. McDonald:

The basis of United States policy in the Middle East, McGhee told us, was to aid the development of all resources in the area, in order to lift the standard of living, and with an immediate two-fold purpose: (1) to avert the threat of Communism from the inside, and (2) to keep armed the defensible border states (Greece and Turkey) as a defence against any outside Soviet aggression.

First and foremost, consequently, the United States could no longer take a back seat in the affairs of the Middle East. For, with the Communist threat mounting, Britain, hard-pressed by other problems, could no longer maintain full responsibility for the protection of Western interests and civilization in the area. The United States must shoulder an increasing part of the burden. In this respect, "complete agreement in principle" had been reached with Great Britain. Both countries, said McGhee, had the same general objectives, though in certain countries specific interests might not be identical. There were, he added, "points of asymmetry."

It seemed to me that this was an understatement of the extent of the divergence between our and British national interests.`

During the years that followed, the divergences-not so much between real national interests as between the two manners of interpreting and defending them-became painfully obvious. In 1951 and 1952, British difficulties reached their climax: the murder of King 'Abdullah in Jordan, the oil crisis in Iran, and the AngloEgyptian deadlock followed by the Egyptian rejection of the fourpower proposal for a Middle East defense pact and, soon after, the Anglo-Egyptian clash in the Suez Canal zone culminating in the five-hour battle at Ismailia on 25 January 1952.

American policy in this period and the following seems to have been based on the belief that too close an association with Great Britain, too careful a regard for British interests, would tarnish the American image and obstruct American purposes. Britain, it was argued, even after its dramatic renunciation of empire in Asia and Africa, was still suspect in Asian and African eyes not only as an ex-imperial power, but as one seeking to return. America, on the other hand, was itself an ex-colonial state-indeed, the first to win freedom by a successful revolution against British imperialism. Where America had led, others were following and would be bound to America by natural ties of sympathy and affinity.

The idea that the emergent nations of Asia and Africa would accept the American Revolution as the prototype of their own struggle against colonialism and spontaneously rally to American leadership was never a very convincing idea, and rested on an analogy that was false to the point of absurdity. The American Revolution, after all, was not a victory against colonialism, but the ultimate triumph of colonialism: when the colonists have conquered and settled the colony so thoroughly that they are able to stand alone without needing the further support of the mother country. It would be unfair and misleading to compare the American colonists of the eighteenth century with the white settler communities of today, but rather less absurd than to identify them with the white settlers' subjects.

If American involvement in the defense of the Middle East began as an effort to shore up the crumbling British defenses against a possible Soviet attack, it was in time realized that such a policy was untenable and perhaps even self-defeating-not, as some believed at the time, because the British communicated a taint of imperialism from which the Americans were otherwise free, but, more simply, because the British no longer had the strength to sustain this task.

In the 1950s, the United States took over the task, with only intermittent success. In 1952, Greece and Turkey were accepted as members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, thus forming a link between the system of alliances that was to defend Europe and the Mediterranean, on the one hand, and the new structure of alliances which it was hoped to construct in the Middle East, on the other.

This Middle Eastern defensive system at first consisted only of the northern tier of states abutting directly on the Soviet bloc-that is, Greece, Turkey, and Iran. In 1955, the government of Iraq was persuaded to join in a new alliance known as the Baghdad Pact, consisting of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, the rulers of which were by now acutely conscious of the threat from the north. Britain, too, was retained as a member of the Baghdad Pact, but the United States for the time being preferred to be an informal associate rather than a formal member of this alliance, for whose creation it was in large measure responsible. Although the alliance with the states of the northern tier was successful in preventing a direct Soviet attack, it failed to prevent-indeed, some have argued that it directly causedthe Soviet masterstroke of leapfrogging the northern tier and establishing positions of strength in the heart of the Arab world.

The final stage in the British withdrawal from Egypt began in July 1954, when a few weeks after the conversations between Eisenhower and Churchill in Washington, an Anglo-Egyptian agreement was reached, providing for the evacuation by the British of the Suez Canal zone within twenty months. The last British troops were in fact withdrawn on 2 April 1955. It was obvious that the abandonment of the great Suez Canal base, for seventy years the keystone of the edifice of British power in the Middle East, would have immediate and far-reaching effects. Great expectations were placed on the agreement. At the time, the hope was widely entertained and still more widely expressed that with the removal of the last Egyptian grievance against the West, real friendship and cooperation would at last become possible.

For those who held them, these hopes were swiftly disappointed. The general situation, far from getting better, got rapidly worse. The Egypt-Israel border, after a period of comparative calm, became once again the scene of new military clashes. The anticipated improvement in Egyptian relations with the West failed to materialize. The liberation of their own soil left the Egyptians free to take up larger Arab and African causes; the attempt by the West to form a Middle Eastern alliance and persuade Egypt to join it provoked increasingly hostile reactions in Egypt, culminating in the signature in September 1955 of an agreement with Czechoslovakia for the supply of arms. At one blow, the Soviet Union had established itself in a position of power and influence in the very heart of the Middle East.

In Turkey and Iran, American aid was welcomed, and American leadership accepted. Neither of these was an ex-colonial country. For them, America was not the ancient pioneer of anticolonialism, but the new leader of the West and, as such, their natural defender against the old and familiar threat from Russia. In the Arab countries there was no such awareness, based on experience, of Russian expansionism and therefore no such desire to seek or accept WesternAmerican or other-support. Only one Arab country-Iraq-actually entered the pact. It was taken in by an unpopular and unrepresentative regime, which had not long to survive. There can be little doubt that its pro-Western alignment was one of the main causes of its overthrow. In the light of what later became known of Nuri al-Sa`id's secret approaches to the Germans in 1940, we may wonder how effective the alliance would have been if the regime had survived and been put to the test.

Whatever its apparent military advantages, the attempt to involve Iraq in a Western defensive system can now be seen as a major political error. In other Arab lands, it aroused bitter hostility and led directly to negotiations with the Communist bloc, the way for which was prepared by President Nasser's participation in the neutralist conference at Bandoeng in April 1955-his first introduction to international, as distinct from Middle Eastern, politics. It was a portentous beginning.

The interest of the Soviet Union in the Middle East was not new. At the meeting between Hitler and Molotov in November 1940, the Soviet government, according to captured German documents, demanded German agreement to a Soviet military and naval base on the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles and recognition of "the area south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf ... as the center of the aspirations of the Soviet Union.i4

After the German attack on the Soviet Union, these plans were shelved. They reappeared at the end of the war when circumstances seemed favorable for their fulfillment, with northern. Iran under Soviet occupation, Turkey isolated by its protracted neutrality, and the Soviets part of the victorious alliance. On that occasion the attempt failed; the "people's republic" set up in Iranian Azerbaijan was overthrown, and the demand for bases in the Turkish straits was steadfastly refused. Apart from the abortive agreement with Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, the Soviets made no further attempt to intervene at the government level in Middle Eastern affairs but preferred to stay on the sidelines, waiting for the "inevitable contradictions of capitalism" to disrupt the political and economic structure of the Middle East and thus prepare the way for Communism. Where convenient, the working of these contradictions was aided by what one might call routine subversion.

The return of the Soviet Union in 1955 to an active role in Middle Eastern politics was not-or should not have been-in itself surprising. The timing was masterly. The Arab states were divided and angry about the pro-Western alignment of Iraq; Egypt was bitterly hostile and had just received a flattering initiation into the society of the great Asian neutralists. Arab-Israeli relations were more than usually bad and continued to distort political thinking in the region generally. The British Middle Eastern base at Suez was being dismantled and transferred to Cyprus, which in turn was convulsed by a fierce conflict. This again had embroiled Turkey and Greece, on whose friendship and goodwill the southeastern comer of NATO so largely depended.

The Soviet move seems to have begun in April, when Izvestya published a Foreign Ministry statement deploring "the recent deterioration in the situation" and expressing the intention of the USSR to develop closer relations with the countries of the Middle East. During the spring and summer, there were intensive diplomatic activities, including exchanges of visits and missions with several Arab countries. Attempts to ignore and then play down reports of an arms deal between Egypt and the Soviet bloc were abandoned at the end of September when news of the agreement was officially released.

Far more strikingly-and alarming-than the arms deal itself was the wave of almost ecstatic joy with which it was received all over the Arab world. The Syrian, Lebanese, and Jordanian chambers of deputies at once voted resolutions of congratulation to President Nasser, and almost the entire Arab press greeted the news with rapturous acclamation. Even Nuri al-Sa'id felt constrained to send a message of congratulation and approval to the Egyptian leader.

This response was not due to any special love of the Soviets or to any desire to see either Communism or Soviet power extended in the Middle East; it was due rather to a lively appreciation of the quality of President Nasser's act as a slap in the face for the West. The president's slap and the red-faced, agitated, and ineffectual Western response to it gave a dramatic and satisfying expression to a mood and wish that united many if not most Arabs: the mood of revulsion from the West and the wish to spite and humiliate it. "Most Westerners," says W. Cantwell Smith, "have simply no inkling of how deep and fierce is the hate, especially of the West, that has gripped the modernizing Arab."'

The first of the postwar Arab revolutions, that of Egypt in 1952, was initially neither socialist nor pro-Soviet, but in time it became both. In 1958, a revolution in Iraq-to no small extent provoked by hostility to the inclusion of that country in a Western allianceoverthrew the monarchy and established a strongly anti-Western regime, which soon drifted into a close relationship with the Soviet Union. The pro-Western monarchy in Jordan narrowly escaped overthrow, from which it was saved by a small but sufficient British airlift of troops.

In Lebanon, the policy of local separatism and Western alliance had always displeased the Arab nationalists, and in a time of intense national and communal fervor and of violent anti-Western feeling, it enraged them to the point of civil war. This brought the first American military intervention in the region, whose purpose-if purpose may be judged by results-was to replace a pro-American government by another that was less pro-American and therefore more viable.

The northern tier alliance was reconstituted without Iraq and renamed the Central Treaty Organization, based on Turkey and Iran. At the same time, the first steps were taken toward establishing a new American strategic relationship with the state of Israel.

In the early years of the state's existence, American policy toward Israel, though generally friendly and sympathetic, had been cautious and somewhat distant, principally for fear of antagonizing Arab opinion. The Soviet Union had preceded the United States by some time in according de jure recognition to Israel, and encouraged its satellites to be helpful, with decisive effect in Israel's first war, in 1948. The small quantity of arms smuggled to Israel from the United States at that time was due to private and illegal initiatives, in defiance of an otherwise strictly enforced official U.S. arms embargo. American financial and military aid to Israel was on a very small scale and did not reach substantial proportions until the late 1960s and early 1970s. The weaponry that enabled Israel to survive in 1948 came from Czechoslovakia; the planes and tanks that won the dazzling victory of the Six-Day War in 1967 came principally from France.