Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

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.⁴⁶ 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.”⁴⁷ 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.

At 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.⁴⁸ 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. After the Free Officers gave instructions to loyal soldiers to divert their trucks from the highway toward the capital, the rebel soldiers took up positions in key points of the city. One detachment made its way to the Royal Palace to execute King Faysal II and all members of the ruling Hashemite family. Others went to the homes of high government officials. Orders were given for the summary execution of Prime Minister Nuri al-Sa‘id. Colonel Abd al-Salam ’Arif led a small detachment to take over the radio station to broadcast word of the revolution and to assert the Free Officers’ control over Iraq. “This is Baghdad,” ‘Arif intoned over the airwaves in the early morning hours of July 14, 1958, “Radio Service of the Iraqi Republic.” To the Iraqi listening public, this was the first indication of the end of the monarchy. The edgy ’Arif paced the room between his broadcasts, anxious for word from his co-conspirators on the success of their revolution. Around 7:00 A.M. an officer in a blood-stained uniform burst into the room holding a submachine gun in his right hand and confirmed the death of the king and royal family. ’Arif began to shout “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! [God is great!]” at the top of his voice. He then sat at a desk, penned a few lines, and disappeared into the broadcast studio, repeating to himself, “Allahu Akbar, the Revolution was victorious!”⁴⁹ Yunis Bahri followed the first reports of the revolution through ‘Arif’s broadcasts. “We did not know what was happening either inside or outside the capital,” Bahri recalled. “The people of Baghdad crouched in their homes, confused by the sudden shock of events.” Then ’Arif called the people into the streets to support the revolution and track down its enemies. Though ‘Arif knew that the royal family had already been killed, he called on the Iraqis to attack the royal palace, as though he sought to implicate the Iraqi people in the crime of regicide. He also offered a reward of 10,000 Iraqi dinars for the capture of Nuri al-Sa’id, who had managed to escape his assailants at dawn—only to be caught disguised as a woman and lynched the following day. “When the people of Baghdad heard the incitement to attack the royal palace and Nuri al-Sa’id’s palace, they left their homes overcome with the desire to kill, murder, rob and plunder,” Bahri recalled. The urban poor leaped at the opportunity to plunder the fabled riches of Baghdad’s palaces and to kill anyone who got in their way. Yunis Bahri took to the streets to witness the Iraqi Revolution firsthand. He was appalled by the carnage that greeted him. “Blood flowed in a violent stream down al-Rashid Street. The people applauded and cheered when they saw men dragged to death behind cars. I saw the mob drag the remains of the body of ’Abd al-Ilah after they had made an example of him, gratifying their thirst for revenge upon him. Then they hanged his body from the gate of the Ministry of Defence.” The crowd pulled down the statues of King Faysal I and General Maude, the British commander who first occupied Baghdad in 1917, and set fire to the British Chancellery in Baghdad. In the atmosphere of mass hysteria, anyone could be mistaken for a man of the ancient regime and lynched. ?It was sufficient for anyone to point a finger, saying ?That?s [cabinet minister] Fadhil al-Jamali!? for the crowd to seize and bind the man?s legs and drag him to death without hesitation or mercy, while he screamed in vain and called upon God, the prophets and all the angels and devils protesting [the mistaken identity].? Baghdad was unrecognizable, ?ablaze in fires and drenched in blood, the corpses of the victims scattered in the streets.?⁵⁰ While the violence raged in the streets of Baghdad, Colonel ‘Arif continued to issue statements and orders throughout the day over the national radio station. He ordered the arrest of all former Iraqi cabinet ministers, as well as the ministers of the Arab Union, both Iraqi and Jordanian. As the day wore on, lower-level figures were singled out for arrest, from the mayor of Baghdad to the chief of police. By the afternoon they were calling for broadcasters and journalists who were considered sympathetic to the monarchy. Yunis Bahri, who had assisted Nuri al-Sa’id, was named as a sympathizer of the fallen government and was arrested the following day. He reached the Ministry of Defence just as al-Sa’id’s mangled corpse arrived in the back of a jeep. The men of the old order were rounded up like sheep and led off to a new prison converted from an old hospital in a suburb of Baghdad known as Abu Ghurayb. The prison of Abu Ghurayb would gain notoriety as the torture chamber of Saddam Hussein and, later yet, of U.S. forces following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Bahri was detained in Abu Ghurayb for seven months before being released without charge. He and his wife returned to Beirut early in 1959 to find a new government and the civil war at an end.

In Lebanon, the opposition forces celebrated the fall of the monarchy in Iraq. They believed the Hashemite monarchy was a British puppet state and that the Free Officers were Arab nationalists in Nasser’s mold. They took comfort in the fall of the pro-Western government in Iraq and redoubled their efforts against the Chamoun government in Lebanon. As Chamoun recorded in his memoirs, “In rebel neighbourhoods, men and women had gone into the streets, filled cafes and public places, joyful, dancing with a frenetic joy, threatening legal authority with the fate that had been that of Baghdad leaders. On the other hand, a great fear had spread to those Lebanese committed to a peaceful and independent Lebanon.”⁵¹ The Lebanese state, shaken by civil war, was now threatened with collapse. Chamoun invoked the Eisenhower Doctrine two hours after receiving news of the violent revolution in Iraq (Lebanon had the distinction to be the only country ever to invoke the doctrine). With the U.S. Sixth Fleet on hand in the Eastern Mediterranean, Marines landed in Beirut the very next day. The United States intervened in Lebanon to prevent the fall of a pro-Western government to Nasserist forces. The American show of force on behalf of its Lebanese ally included 15,000 troops on the ground, dozens of naval vessels off the coast, and 11,000 sorties by naval aircraft that made frequent low-level flights over Beirut to intimidate the warring Lebanese. U.S. troops remained only three months in Beirut (the last American forces were withdrawn on October 25) and left without firing a shot. Political stability returned to Lebanon under the brief American occupation. The commander of the Lebanese army, General Fuad Shihab, was elected president on July 31, 1958, putting to rest the opposition’s concerns of an unconstitutional extension of Chamoun’s rule. President Chamoun’s term of office ended on schedule, on September 22. That October, President Shihab oversaw the creation of a coalition government combining loyalist and opposition members. Arab nationalist hopes that Lebanon would throw in its lot with Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic were dashed, as the new Lebanese government called for national reconciliation under the slogan “no vanquished and no victor.”

The Iraqi Revolution left Jordan totally isolated and threatened by the same Arab nationalist forces that had swept away the much stronger monarchy in Baghdad. King Hussein’s first reaction was to dispatch his army to put down the revolution and restore his family’s rule in Iraq. It was an emotive response rather than a rational calculation. Even if his overstretched, underarmed forces had managed to overpower the stronger Iraqi army, there were no surviving Hashemites in Iraq to restore to the throne (the only surviving member of the family, Prince Zeid, was then serving as Iraq’s ambassador to Great Britain and lived in London with his family). Hussein soon recognized the vulnerability of his own position, and how easy it would be for his enemies in the UAR to overthrow him now that he no longer had Iraq to back him up. As he recalled his own army, which had reached 150 miles inside Iraq, Hussein turned to Britain and the United States on July 16 to request military assistance. As in Lebanon, foreign troops were seen as essential to prevent outside intervention in Jordan. It was a great risk for Hussein to turn to the former imperial power, so discredited by the Suez Crisis. Yet the risks of going it alone were even worse. On July 17, British paratroopers and aircraft began to arrive in Jordan to contain the damage of the Iraqi Revolution.

At the height of the Cold War, when political analysts conceived of whole regions of the world as dominoes at risk of falling, officials in Washington, London, and Moscow alike believed the Iraqi Revolution would set off an Arab nationalist sweep. They were convinced that the Iraqi coup had been masterminded by Nasser and that he was intent on bringing all the Fertile Crescent under his dominion in the United Arab Republic. This in part explains the speed with which the United States and Britain intervened to prop up the pro-Western states in Lebanon and Jordan. All eyes now turned to Egypt—to sound out Nasser’s views on recent events—and to Iraq, to see what Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim intended to do. Would he bring Iraq into union with Syria and Egypt, creating the Arab superstate that would redress the balance of power in the region? Or would the traditional rivalry between Cairo and Baghdad be preserved in the republican era? According to Nasser’s confidant, Mohamed Heikal, the Egyptian president had misgivings about the Iraqi Revolution from the outset. Given the extraordinary volatility of the Arab world in 1958, and the tensions between the Soviets and the Americans, further regional instability could only represent a liability for Egypt. Nasser was meeting with Tito in Yugoslavia when he first learned of the coup in Baghdad, and he flew directly to Moscow to meet with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on July 17. The Soviets were convinced that Nasser had orchestrated the whole affair and were concerned about the U.S. reaction. Khrushchev admonished Nasser, saying, “Frankly we are not ready for a confrontation. We are not ready for World War Three.”⁵² Nasser tried to convince his Soviet ally that he had no part in the events in Baghdad, and he tried to secure Soviet guarantees against U.S. retaliation. The most that Khrushchev was willing to offer was to conduct Soviet-Bulgarian maneuvers on the Turkish border to discourage the United States from deploying Turkish troops in Syria or Iraq. “But I am telling you frankly, don’t depend on anything more than that,” Khrushchev warned the Egyptian president. Nasser reassured Khrushchev that he had no intention of seeking Iraq’s accession to the UAR. The new Iraqi government was itself divided on whether to seek union with Nasser or preserve the independence of Iraq. The new leader of Iraq, Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim, was determined to rule an independent state and had no intention of delivering his country to Nasser’s rule. He worked closely with the Iraqi Communist Party, seeking closer ties to the Soviet Union, and was cool toward the Cairo regime that had clamped down upon the Egyptian Communist Party. Qasim’s second-in-command, Colonel ‘Arif, played to the Arab nationalist gallery in calling for Iraq to join Egypt and Syria in the UAR. Qasim ultimately arrested his coconspirator and had ’Arif imprisoned, condemned to death, and reprieved (in 1963’Arif would head the coup that would overthrow and execute Qasim). For the next five years, Qasim took Iraq down the road of rivalry, rather than unity, with Egypt, and relations between Iraq and the UAR deteriorated in mutual recrimination. Iraq?s failure to join the United Arab Republic was a great disappointment to Arab nationalists across the Middle East, who had seen in the bloody revolution the possibility of uniting the three great centers of Arabism?Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad.

The Arab world had been utterly transformed by the Egyptian Revolution. In the course of the 1950s Egypt had emerged as the most powerful state in the region and Nasser the undisputed leader of the Arab world. Nasser rose to the peak of his power in 1958 with the union of Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic. The union sent shock waves across the Arab world that nearly toppled the fragile governments in neighboring Lebanon and Jordan. Arab nationalists welcomed the prospect of the collapse of the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan and of the pro-Western Christian state in Lebanon in the expectation that both would join the United Arab Republic. The Iraqi Revolution of 1958 that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad seemed the harbinger of a new Arab order, uniting Egypt and the Fertile Crescent and fulfilling the hopes of Arab nationalists in a united, progressive Arab superstate. For one brief, heady moment, it looked as though the Arab world might break the cycle of foreign domination that had marked the Ottoman, imperial, and Cold War eras to enjoy an age of true independence. Iraq’s decision to stay out of the United Arab Republic was a major turning point. Without the excitement and momentum that the accession of Iraq, or indeed of Jordan or Lebanon, might have brought to the UAR, Egypt and Syria were left to the mundane business of making their hybrid state work. They would not succeed. Arab nationalism turned a corner, and Nasser, having reached the pinnacle of success in the course of the 1950s, suffered a string of setbacks and defeats that turned the 1960s into a decade of defeats.

CHAPTER 11

The Decline of Arab Nationalism

In the course of the 1950s, Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers had led Egypt and the Arab world through a string of improbable triumphs. “Nasserism” had become the dominant expression of Arab nationalism. Men and women across the Arab world believed the Egyptian president had a master plan for unifying the Arab people and leading them to a new age of independence and power. They saw their hopes realized in the union of Syria and Egypt. Nasser’s remarkable run of successes came to an end in the 1960s. The union with Syria unraveled in 1961. The Egyptian army got mired in Yemen’s civil war. And Nasser led his nation and its Arab allies into a disastrous war with Israel in 1967. The long-promised liberation of Palestine was yet further set back by Israel’s occupation of the remaining Palestinian territories, as well as the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and Syrian Golan Heights. The hopes of the Arab world in 1960 had been worn down to disillusion and cynicism by the time of Nasser’s death in 1970. The events of the 1960s had a radicalizing impact on the Arab world. With British and French imperialism increasingly a thing of the past, the Arabs found themselves drawn into the politics of the Cold War. By the 1960s the Arab states had divided into pro-Western and pro-Soviet blocs. The influence of the Cold War was most pronounced in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which developed into a proxy war between Soviet and American arms. The Arab experience, it seemed, would continue to be one of divide and rule.

The United Arab Republic would prove more of a challenge than Nasser had ever anticipated. Shukri al-Quwatli, the twice-deposed president of Syria, reportedly warned Nasser that he would find Syria ?a difficult country to govern.? He explained: ?Fifty per cent of the Syrians consider themselves national leaders, twenty-five per cent think they are prophets, and ten per cent imagine they are gods.?¹ The Syrians chafed under Egyptian rule. The Syrian army, which had initially shown such enthusiasm for the union, hated taking orders from Egyptian officers. The Syrian landowning elites were outraged when Egypt’s land reform program was applied to Syria. By January 1959 over one million acres of farmland had been confiscated from large landholders for redistribution to Syrian peasants. Syrian businessmen saw their position undermined by socialist decrees that transferred their companies from private to state ownership, as the government expanded its role in economic planning. The average Syrian was crushed under the weight of the notorious paperwork of Egyptian bureaucracy. The Egyptians alienated the Syrian political elites by excluding them from government. Syrian society was intensely political, and the Syrian politicians resented the dissolution of their parties and their subordination to Egypt’s single state party. Nasser named his own right-hand man, Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer, to be his viceroy over the Syrian regional government, relegating his supporters in the Ba‘th party to posts of second importance. By the end of 1959, leading Ba’thists had resigned from the UAR cabinet in protest—including some of the architects of the union, such as Salah al-Din Bitar. In August 1961, Nasser decided to dispense with the Syrian regional government altogether and to rule Syria through an expanded cabinet based in Cairo. Having led its country into union with Egypt in February 1958, the Syrian army now organized a coup to sever ties and take Syria back again. On the morning of September 28, 1961, Syrian army units moved into Damascus before dawn, arrested Field Marshal Amer, and secured the radio station. The Syrian interim government, an entirely civilian cabinet, expelled Amer and ordered the deportation of all Egyptians from Syrian soil on September 30—some 6,000 troops, 5,000 civil servants, and an estimated 10,000–20,000 Egyptian guest workers. Nasser was perplexed by Syria’s bid for secession. His first reaction was to dispatch the Egyptian army to repress the coup with force. He relented hours later and recalled his forces, accepting Syrian secession “so that no Arab blood would be shed.” “Nasser was tormented by the breakup of the UAR,” journalist Mohamed Heikal recalled. “It had been the first international expression of his dream of Arab Unity and it was not revived in his lifetime.”² In the aftermath of the Syrian coup, Nasser initially pinned the blame for the breakup of the UAR on its opponents—the Jordanians, the Saudis, even the Americans. Yet the Syrian secession forced Nasser to ask hard questions about his own political orientations and the direction the Egyptian revolution had taken. He never recognized the obvious problem with the UAR—that Egypt had ruled in a quasi-imperial fashion over the proud Syrians. Instead, Nasser came to the conclusion that Egypt and Syria had failed to achieve the degree of social reform necessary for such an ambitious Arab unity scheme to work. His response to the breakup of the UAR was to introduce a radical reform agenda to strip the ?reactionary? elements from Arab society and pave the way for a future ?progressive? union of the Arab people. Starting in 1962, Nasser took the Egyptian revolution down the road of Arab socialism—an ambitious if quixotic reform agenda fusing Arab nationalism and Soviet-inspired socialism. The Egyptian government accelerated the nationalization of private enterprise, which had begun in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez Crisis, to create an entirely state-led economy. Already in 1960 the UAR government had introduced its first Soviet-style five year plan (1960–1965) with overly ambitious targets for economic expansion in industry and agricultural output. In the countryside, the land reform measures begun in 1952 were intensified as new laws lowered the maximum land holding from 200 to 100 acres, with expropriated lands redistributed to landless and smallholder peasants. Egyptian industrial workers and peasants were given new prominence in state institutions. Egypt’s new political orientation was enshrined in the 1962 National Charter, which sought to weave Islam, Arab nationalism, and socialism into a coherent political project. Not only did the National Charter envision a new political culture for Egypt, but it set out ideals for reshaping Arab society at large. And the ideological orientation of the country was entrusted to the official state party, the National Union, which was renamed the Arab Socialist Union. With his turn to Arab socialism, Nasser gave up trying to subvert the rules of the Cold War and threw in his lot with the Soviet Union, following its model of a state-led economy. Leaving the door open to future unity schemes, Nasser retained the name “United Arab Republic” for his country. It was only in 1971 that the UAR was laid to rest and Nasser’s successor renamed the country the Arab Republic of Egypt. Arab socialism would exercise great influence in Egypt and divide the Arab world. The language of politics in Egypt grew much more doctrinaire. The ultimate target of Nasser’s critique after the breakup of the UAR was the “reactionaries,” the men of property who put narrow national self-interest before the interests of the Arab nation. By extension, those Arab states that were supported by the West—conservative monarchies like Morocco, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and liberal republics like Tunisia and Lebanon—were dismissed as “reactionary” states (in the West they were known as “moderate” states). The revolutionary Arab states all aligned themselves with Moscow and followed its social and economic model. They were known in the Arab world as “progressive” states (dismissed as “radical” Arab states in the West). The list of progressive states was initially quite small—Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—though their ranks would expand with the conclusion of successful revolutions in Algeria, Yemen, and Libya. Egypt was fairly isolated in this new division of the region, as it had poor relations with the other emerging “progressive” Arab states—Iraq in particular. However, in 1962 Nasser had just gained an important ally. After the bloodiest anticolonial war in the region’s history, Algeria had finally secured its independence from France.