Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

The road to Suez began in Aswan. Along with the land reform program, the Aswan High Dam remained a central part of the Free Officers’ domestic development agenda, as it was expected to provide both the country’s energy needs for industrialization and a significant expansion of agricultural area through irrigation. The Egyptian government could not, however, fund the dam on its own. It was one of the largest civil engineering projects in the world, and the price was astronomical—an estimated $1 billion, of which $400 million would have to be paid in foreign currency. The Egyptian government negotiated a finance package with the World Bank in late 1955 to provide a loan of $200 million, backed by a commitment from the United States and Great Britain to provide the remaining $200 million. The British and U.S. governments hoped to use the Aswan Dam project as a means to exercise some control over the politics of Nasser’s Egypt. According to Heikal, the United States and Britain never intended to give the full amount Egypt needed, pledging only one-third the sum requested—not enough to guarantee the dam but rather just enough to exercise influence over Egypt during the years it would take to build it. Dulles allegedly told the Saudi king Sa’ud in January 1957 that “he had decided to help [Egypt] with the Dam because the project was a long term one,” according to Heikal. “It would have tied Egypt to America for ten years, and in that time Nasser would either have learned the danger of co-operating with the Soviet Union or he would have fallen from power.”³¹ The U.S. government also tried to make the loan contingent on a commitment from the Egyptian government not to buy more arms from the Soviet Union. The military expenditure would, it argued insincerely, undermine Egypt’s ability to pay its part of the dam’s construction costs. Nasser had no intention of breaking with the Soviet Union, which was the only power willing to assist his military with no preconditions. Nasser had come to recognize that the rules of the Cold War precluded cooperation with both the Soviets and the Americans. By April 1956 he suspected that the United States would withdraw its support for the Aswan High Dam. Three months later, on July 19, 1956, Eisenhower announced that he was withdrawing all American financial aid for the project. Nasser learned of the U.S. announcement in mid-air on his way back to Cairo from a meeting in Yugoslavia. He was irate; Eisenhower had announced the decision to withdraw financial support for the dam before giving the Egyptian government the courtesy of an advance warning, let alone an explanation. “This is not a withdrawal,” Nasser said to Heikal, “it is an attack on the regime and an invitation to the people of Egypt to bring it down.”³² Nasser believed he had to strike a bold response and quickly. Within twenty-four hours he had a plan, and only six days to pull off his most ambitious coup yet.

Nasser was scheduled to give a major speech in Alexandria on July 26 marking the fourth anniversary of the revolution. His theme would be the Aswan Dam. If the Western powers refused to help the Egyptians, he planned to argue, then Egypt would pay for the dam itself by nationalizing the Suez Canal and diverting the canal’s revenues to meet the cost of the dam. Legally, the Egyptian government had every right to nationalize the Suez Canal, so long as it paid shareholders in the Suez Canal Company fair compensation for their stock. However, as a public company listed in France, with the British government as the largest shareholder, Nasser knew that nationalization of the canal would provoke an international crisis. Britain in particular was determined to preserve its influence in the Middle East and would interpret the nationalization as another hostile measure by the Egyptian government. Nasser estimated the likelihood of foreign intervention to run as high as 80 percent. In the event they opted for war, Nasser calculated that it would take the British and the French at least two months to raise the necessary military force to intervene. The two-month delay would give him crucial time to negotiate a diplomatic settlement. It was quite a gamble, but one Nasser believed he had to take to uphold Egypt’s independence from foreign domination. Nasser tasked a young engineer named Colonel Mahmoud Younes with the actual takeover of the Suez Canal Company’s offices. On the evening of July 26, Younes was to tune into Nasser’s speech on the radio and launch the operation if and when he heard Nasser say the code words, “Ferdinand de Lesseps”—the architect of the Suez Canal. If Nasser did not mention the name during the speech, Younes was to do nothing and wait for further orders. As was his habit, Nasser gave his speech from notes and launched into the background of the Aswan Dam crisis. He recounted the history of Egypt’s exploitation by the imperial powers, he cited the case of the Suez Canal, and he mentioned Ferdinand de Lesseps—many times over. “The President was so worried [Mahmoud Younes] would miss it that he kept on repeating the Frenchman?s name,? Heikal recalled. ?It was de Lesseps this and de Lesseps that until he had repeated it about ten times and people began to wonder why he was making such a fuss about de Lesseps, for the Egyptians had no real love for him.? Nasser needn’t have worried, as the attentive Colonel Younes had heard the name on the first mention, turned off his radio, and went to work. “I’m sorry,” he later confessed to Nasser, “I missed the rest of your speech.” His teams secured the Suez Canal Company branch offices in Cairo, Port Said, and Suez. Younes personally commanded the takeover of the company’s headquarters in Ismailiyya. As one of the men who accompanied Younes recalled, “We entered the offices in Ismailia at around 7pm and there was no staff in the offices, except the nightshift. We called the senior staff, foreigners of course because there was no Egyptian in the decision-making level . . . and they were taken by surprise.”³³ The occupation of all three offices of the company was accomplished by a team of thirty officers and civil engineers. By the time Nasser reached the climax of his speech, the canal was securely in Egyptian hands. “We will not allow the Suez Canal to be a state within a state,” Nasser told his enchanted audience. “Today the Suez Canal is an Egyptian company.” After declaring the nationalization of the canal, Nasser went on to pledge that the Ј35 million revenues from the canal would henceforth be applied to build the Aswan High Dam project. “The people went wild with excitement,” Heikal remembered.³⁴ News of the nationalization of the Suez Canal sent shock waves through the international community. Ben-Gurion’s first thought was that it would provide the opportunity to topple Nasser. He made overtures to the United States but found the Eisenhower administration noncommittal. He confided to his diary: “The Western powers are furious . . . but I am afraid that they will not do anything. France will not dare to act alone; [British Prime Minister] Eden is not a man of action; Washington will avoid any reaction.”³⁵ Yet Ben-Gurion underestimated the depth of British and French anger over Nasser’s move. The French were the first to react. The day after the nationalization, Maurice Bourиs-Maunoury, the French minister of defense, called Shimon Peres, then serving as director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, to ask him how long it would take the Israel Defense Force to conquer the Sinai Peninsula to the Suez Canal. Peres made a rough guess: two weeks. The French minister came straight to the point: Would Israel agree to take part in a tripartite attack on Egypt, in which Israel’s role would be to seize the Sinai, and a joint Anglo-French force would occupy the Suez Canal Zone? Peres was in no position to commit the Israeli government to a war alliance, but he gave the French an encouraging reply and initiated a collusion that would result in the Second Arab-Israeli War. The French next approached Sir Anthony Eden with the plan, in which an Israeli attack on Egypt in the Sinai would provide the pretext for a joint Anglo-French military intervention to “restore peace” in the Canal Zone. The assumptions were that Nasser’s government could not survive such an attack, that Israel would secure its frontiers with Egypt, and that Britain and France could reassert their control over the canal by such improbable means. The whole mad plan reveals nothing so much as a collective lapse in judgment. To conclude the unlikely tripartite alliance, a meeting was convened in Sиvres, on the outskirts of Paris, attended by Christian Pineau and Selwyn Lloyd—the French and British foreign ministers—and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. It was an uncomfortable conversation marked by deep mistrust between the Israelis and the British, reflecting the bitterness of the end of the Palestine mandate. But the conspirators were held together by their shared hatred of Nasser and their determination to see him destroyed. After forty-eight hours of intense negotiations, the three parties struck a secret agreement on October 24, 1956. First Israel would invade Egypt, provoking an Arab-Israeli conflict that placed maritime communications through the Suez Canal in jeopardy. Britain and France would insist on a cessation of hostilities, which would of course be ignored. The Anglo-French alliance would then intervene with their own troops to occupy the Canal Zone. So little did the Israeli diplomats trust their French and English counterparts that they insisted that all parties sign a written agreement, lest the Europeans try to back out after Israel’s initial invasion. Britain and France both had good reason to reconsider their collusion with Israel. France had gained widespread hostility for providing arms to the Israelis after 1948, and for denying Algerian demands for independence. Britain’s imperial past continued to bedevil its relations with Arab nationalists. For the former imperial powers to side with Israel was a plan destined to poison the European powers’ relations to the Arab world. And there was little chance of such a conspiracy long remaining a secret. Yet the improbable plan went into effect when Israel attacked Egypt on October 29, initiating a war in the Sinai and a rush to the Suez Canal. The next day, Britain and France delivered the agreed ultimatum to both the Egyptians and the Israelis to cease hostilities and withdraw their forces 10 miles from their respective banks of the Suez Canal. The French and British revealed their hand in the crisis by mistiming their announcement. They demanded the withdrawal of all belligerents from the Canal Zone while Israel was still miles from the canal. As Nasser’s confidant Mohamed Heikal reasoned, “What justification was there in the demand for a mutual withdrawal ten miles from the Canal when the Israelis at that stage had only one battalion of lightly armed paratroopers still forty miles from the Canal?” The only reason why Britain and France might expect the Israelis to be at the canal was if they had played a role in planning the attack. As evidence of British collusion in Israel’s attack mounted—British surveillance aircraft were spotted flying over the Sinai—the Egyptians were forced to accept the unthinkable. As Heikal recalled, “Nasser just could not bring himself to believe that Eden, with all the knowledge he claimed of the Middle East, would jeopardise the security of all Britain’s friends and Britain’s own standing in the Arab world by making war alongside Israel on an Arab nation.”³⁶ The United States was also incredulous as it watched the Suez Crisis unfold. Certainly, the Americans were not above such tactics—the Central Intelligence Agency had itself been plotting a coup against the Syrian government, to be executed on the very day the Israelis began their attack.³⁷ The Syrians had accepted Soviet economic assistance, and the United States wanted to contain the threat of Soviet expansion into the Middle East. Such an operation was entirely consistent with the U.S. worldview in 1956. The Eisenhower administration found the Suez conflict incomprehensible. Britain and France were still acting like imperial powers at the height of the Cold War. For the Americans, the containment of Soviet expansion was the only geostrategic game that mattered, in the Middle East as in other critical parts of the world. They could not conceive of their NATO allies Britain and France going to war over a once-strategic waterway that led to their now-defunct empires in South and South-east Asia. Eisenhower was also furious with his European allies for undertaking such a major military operation without consulting the United States. Had they been consulted, the Americans certainly would have opposed the Suez war. The British and French governments knew perfectly well how the Americans would respond and chose to leave Washington in the dark. From the American perspective, the Suez Crisis was an unmitigated disaster. The disruption to an American covert operation in Syria was completely overshadowed by events in Hungary. On October 23, just six days before the Israeli attack on Egypt, a revolution had erupted in Hungary. Student demonstrations against the Stalinist regime in Budapest had led to nationwide protests. Within days, the Soviet-supported government fell, and a new cabinet was formed under the leadership of reformer Imre Nagy, who quickly moved to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact, effectively ending military cooperation with the Soviets and their allies. It was the first crack in the Iron Curtain separating Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe from the West, and the most important development since the start of the Cold War. Working the halls of the United Nations to protect the movement in Hungary from Soviet retaliation, the Eisenhower administration watched in fury as the British and French began hostilities in Egypt. The Anglo-French intervention provided a better distraction than the Soviets could have dreamed of. After their bombers blitzed Egyptian air bases on October 31, the British and French dropped paratroops into the Canal Zone in early November. Soviet diplomats were able to seize the moral high ground in defending Nasser?s Egypt against Western aggression, all the while deploying their own forces in Hungary to restore their authority over Eastern Europe. NATO solidarity was undermined just when the West most needed to provide a solid front to contain the USSR. Eisenhower placed full responsibility for the loss of Hungary on Britain and France. In Egypt, Nasser found himself fighting a war he could not win against three better-armed enemies. In the opening days of the war he ordered his forces to retreat from Gaza and the Sinai, which fell rapidly to the Israelis, and to concentrate on defending the Canal Zone. Nawal El Saadawi was serving as a doctor in a village clinic in the Delta and remembered hearing Nasser’s speech echoing “from thousands of radios in the houses and on the streets: ‘We shall go on fighting until the invaders leave. We will never surrender.’” His defiance in the face of an unprovoked attack by superior forces once again electrified the Egyptian people, who volunteered en masse to assist the national effort. “I took off my doctor’s coat,” Saadawi recalled, “and put on fatigues.” Saadawi, like many other Egyptians, was prepared to go to the war zone to assist the effort, but in the disorder that followed she never got the call; she thus followed events from her village in the Delta. When, on November 6, British and French paratroops laid siege to Port Said, she—like all Egyptians—was horrified. “Rockets and bombs were dropped by thousands from planes, naval ships bombarded it from the sea, tanks roared through the streets, and sharpshooters were parachuted on to the roofs of houses,” Saadawi wrote. The Egyptians mounted civilian resistance that fought alongside their army. “Groups of guerrilla fighters, most of them very young, were formed and began to fight with guns, grenades and Molotov cocktails.”³⁸ In all, some 1,100 civilians were killed in the fighting in the Canal Zone. The Americans placed great pressure on Britain and France to stop fighting and withdraw their troops. American efforts in the Security Council were stymied by Britain and France exercising their vetoes to prevent the passage of any resolutions constraining their actions in Suez. With the Soviets and their allies threatening to intervene in the conflict on Egypt’s side, the Eisenhower administration resorted to outright threats against Britain and France to secure compliance with their demands for an immediate cease-fire. Both countries were threatened with expulsion from NATO, and the U.S. Treasury warned it would sell part of its Sterling bond holdings to force a devaluation of the British currency, which would have had a catastrophic impact on the British economy. The threats were effective, and Britain and France conceded to a United Nations cease-fire on November 7. All British and French troops were withdrawn from Egypt by December 22, 1956, and the last Israeli forces withdrew from Egypt in March 1957, to be replaced by a United Nations peacekeeping force. For Egypt, the Suez Crisis was the classic example of a military defeat turned to a political victory. Nasser’s bold rhetoric and defiance were not matched by any military accomplishments. The very act of survival was deemed a major political victory, and the Egyptians—and Nasser’s mass following across the Arab world—celebrated as though Nasser had in fact defeated Egypt’s enemies. Nasser knew that his nationalization of the Suez Canal would face no further challenge and that Egypt had achieved full sovereignty over all of its territory and resources. For the Israelis, the Suez war represented a stunning military victory and a political setback. Although Ben-Gurion was embarrassed to have to retreat from territory the IDF had occupied by force of arms, he had demonstrated Israeli military prowess to his Arab neighbors once again. Yet Israeli participation in the Tripartite Aggression reinforced the widespread view in the Arab world that Israel was an extension of imperial policy in the region. Israel’s association with imperialism made it all the more difficult for the Arab world to accept the Jewish state, let alone to extend recognition or to make peace. Rather, the defeat of Israel came to be associated with ridding the Middle East of imperialism, as well as the liberation of Palestine—powerful ideological impediments to any peace process in the 1950s. France lost a great deal in the Suez Crisis. Its position in Algeria was undermined and its influence in the Arab world more generally decreased. For the remainder of the 1950s, the French gave up on the Arab world and threw their support behind Israel. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the Suez Crisis the French armed the Israelis and helped them to establish their nuclear program, providing a reactor in 1957 twice the original capacity promised. Britain, which had hoped to preserve a major influence in the Arab world, was undoubtedly the greatest loser of the Suez Crisis. The decision to go to war had engendered tremendous domestic opposition in Britain and provoked a number of high-level resignations from both government and Foreign Office officials. Anthony Eden suffered a major breakdown in the aftermath of Suez and resigned his premiership in January 1957. The impact of Suez on Britain’s position in the Middle East was even more devastating. As Heikal concluded, “No Arab leader could be Britain’s friend and Nasser’s enemy after Suez. Suez cost Britain Arabia.”³⁹

Nasser’s remarkable string of successes propelled him to a position of dominance in the Arab world. His anti-imperial credentials and calls for Arab solidarity made him the champion of Arab nationalists across the region. Nasser took his message to the Arab masses across the airwaves, as the power of long-distance radio broadcasting combined with the spread of affordable and portable transistor radios in the course of the 1950s. In an age of widespread adult illiteracy, Nasser was able to reach a vastly broader audience via radio than he ever could have through newspapers. At the time, the most powerful and widely followed radio station in the Arab world was the Cairo-based Voice of the Arabs (Sawt al-’Arab). Launched in 1953 to promote the ideas of the Egyptian revolution, the Voice of the Arabs combined news, politics, and entertainment. It connected Arabic speakers across national boundaries through a common language and promoted the ideas of pan-Arab action and Arab nationalism. Listeners from across the Arab world were electrified: “People used to have their ears glued to the radio,” one contemporary recalled, “particularly when Arab nationalist songs were broadcast calling Arabs to raise their heads and defend their dignity and land from occupation.”⁴⁰ Nasser conquered the Arab world by radio. Through the Voice of the Arabs, he was able to pressure other Arab rulers to toe his line, bypassing the heads of Arab governments to address their citizens directly. In a political report on the situation in Lebanon in 1957, the director of intelligence in Lebanon, Amir Farid Chehab, wrote: “Political propaganda in Nasser’s favour is what mostly occupies the spirit of the Muslim masses who consider him the only leader of the Arabs. They care for no other leader but him thanks to the influence of Egyptian and Syrian radio stations and his achievements in Egypt.”⁴¹ Some Arab nationalists began to take Nasser’s calls for Arab unity more literally than the Egyptian president intended—nowhere more so than in Syria. Politics in Syria had been relentlessly volatile since Husni al-Zaim overthrew President Shukri al-Quwatli in 1949. Between al-Quwatli’s fall in 1949 and his return to power in 1955, Syria had witnessed five changes of leadership, and by the late summer of 1957 the country was on the verge of complete political disintegration. Caught between the Soviet Union and the United States (which were plotting the overthrow of the Quwatli government in 1956), and between inter-Arab rivalries in an age of revolutionary ferment, the country was also being torn from within by deep political divides.⁴² The two most influential parties in Syria in the late 1950s were the Communists and the Arab Renaissance Party, better known as the Ba‘th (literally, “Renaissance”). The Ba’th was founded by Michel ‘Aflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar in the early 1940s as a secular pan-Arab nationalist party. Their motto was “One Arab nation with an eternal message.” The Ba’th eschewed smaller nation-state nationalism in individual countries in favor of a greater Arab nationalism uniting all Arab people. The ideologues of the Ba’th held that the Arabs could only achieve full independence from outside rule and social justice at home through full Arab unity—a utopian vision of a single Arab state freed from the imperial boundaries imposed by the 1919 Versailles settlement. Branches of the party had cropped up in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq in the late 1940s. Although Ba‘athism would become a major political force from the 1960s through the present day, the party was still quite weak in Syria in the 1950s. A middle-class intellectual’s party, the Ba’th had no mass support base. In the 1955 elections the party secured fewer than 15 percent of the seats in the Syrian parliament. The party was very much in need of a powerful ally, and its members found it in Egypt’s Nasser. They gave their wholehearted backing to Nasser both out of conviction—his anti-imperialism and pan-Arab rhetoric so closely matched their own—and to harness Nasser’s massive popularity in Syria to their own cause. The Communist Party in Syria had less need of Nasser, as its position was growing with the expansion of Soviet influence in the country. The Syrian Communists also were wary of Nasser because he had suppressed the Egyptian Communist Party. Yet they too sought to profit from Nasser’s mass appeal in Syria. By 1957 both the Ba‘th and the Communists approached Nasser with proposals to unite Syria and Egypt, with the rival Syrian parties outbidding each other in their efforts to court Nasser’s favor. Whereas the Ba’th proposed a federal union, the Communists raised the stakes with the suggestion of a full merger of the two countries into a single state—confident that Nasser would reject the offer. It was all a bit of a game, as neither the Ba’th nor the Communists had the power to conclude a union with Egypt. The game became serious, however, when the Syrian army got involved in the merger. The army had already staged three coups against the Syrian government, and many of its officers were avowed Ba’thists. They were drawn to the military-led government of Nasser’s Egypt and believed that union would favor them as the dominant power in Syrian politics. On January 12, 1958, without prior warning to their own government, the Syrian chief of staff and thirteen of his top officers flew to Cairo to discuss a union with Nasser. A high-ranking Syrian officer called on cabinet ministers—including Khalid al-Azm, then minister of finance—to inform them of the army’s actions only after the chief of staff had left for Cairo. “Wouldn’t it have been better for you to inform the government of your decision and discuss the matter with them before going to Cairo?” al-Azm asked the officer. “What’s done is done,” the officer replied, and withdrew. Al-Azm was one of the patrician nationalist politicians who had fought for Syria’s independence from the French mandate and had withstood the terrible bombardment of Damascus in 1945. He was convinced that the military would bring disaster to Syria. “If Abdel Nasser agrees to this proposal,” he reflected in his diary, “Syria will disappear altogether, and if he refuses the Army will occupy the offices of state and bring down both the government and the parliament.”⁴³ The Syrian government decided to send the foreign minister, Salah al-Din Bitar, who was also one of the cofounders of the Ba’th, to Cairo to sound out Nasser’s views and report back to the cabinet. Once in Cairo, Bitar got caught up in the excitement of the moment and traded observer status for that of self-declared negotiator. Bitar entered into direct discussions with Nasser as an official representative of the Syrian government. Nasser was bemused by the steady stream of Syrian politicians and military men who flocked to Cairo to fling their country at his feet. Although he had always promoted Arab unity, he understood the expression to mean Arab solidarity, a unity of purpose and of goals. He had never aspired to formal union with other Arab states. Egypt, he recognized, had a very distinct history from the rest of the Arab world. Prior to the revolution, most Egyptians would not have identified themselves as Arabs, reserving the term either for the residents of the Arabian Peninsula or for the desert Bedouin. The proposal was all the more unlikely given that Egypt and Syria shared no borders but were separated by the iron wall raised by Israel. Yet Nasser saw how a union with Syria could advance his interests. As head of a union of two major Arab states, Nasser could secure his position as the unrivaled leader of the Arab world. The union would be hugely popular with the Arab masses beyond Egypt and Syria, reinforcing their greater loyalty to Nasser than to their own national rulers. It would also demonstrate to the great powers—the Americans and Soviets, the British and French—that the new political order in the Middle East was being shaped by Egypt. Having overcome imperialism, Nasser was now circumventing the Cold War. Nasser received his Syrian visitors and imposed his terms: full union, with Syria ruled from Cairo by the same institutions that governed Egypt. The Syrian army would come under Egyptian command and would have to stay out of politics and return to the barracks. All political parties were to be disbanded and replaced with a single state party to be known as the National Union, party pluralism being equated with divisive factionalism. Nasser’s terms came as something of a shock to his Syrian guests. The Ba‘th representatives were appalled by the prospect of dissolving their party, but Nasser reassured them that they would dominate the National Union, which would prove their vehicle to shape the political culture of the United Arab Republic (UAR), as the new state was to be called. The name was deliberately open ended, as the union of Syria and Egypt was to be but the first step toward a broader Arab union and toward the Arab renaissance to which the Ba’th aspired. Though Nasser set terms that disenfranchised both the Ba’th and the military in politics, both groups came away from the Cairo discussions under the illusion that they would exercise predominant influence in Syria through the union with Egypt. After ten days’ discussion, Bitar and the officers returned from Cairo to brief the Syrian cabinet on the union scheme they had agreed with Nasser. Khalid al-Azm made no effort to hide his opposition to their proposals, but he found himself in the minority. Al-Azm watched in dismay as the elected leadership of Syria blithely surrendered their country?s hard-gained independence on what he saw as an Arab nationalist whim. He mocked President al-Quwatli?s opening remarks, using ?words like ?Arabness? and ?the Arabs? and ?glory?? to ?fill an otherwise empty speech.? Al-Quwatli then gave the floor to the foreign minister. Bitar told his colleagues that he and Nasser had agreed to a full union of Syria and Egypt into a single state, and that they proposed to put the matter to a public referendum in both countries?knowing full well that the union would enjoy massive public support in both Syria and Egypt. When Bitar finished, many of his cabinet colleagues affirmed their support for the union. “When they all had had their say,” al-Azm related, “I asked for the session to be adjourned to give those present the opportunity to study the proposal. They all looked astonished by the suggestion. It was now my turn to be amazed. I could not believe that the Cabinet would be presented with so significant a proposal, which entailed nothing less than the dissolution of the Syrian entity, without allowing the ministers sufficient time to study the matter and to sound out the views of their parties, members of parliament, and policy makers in the country.”⁴⁴ He succeeded only in securing a twenty-four hour adjournment. 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.”⁴⁵ 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.