Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

The Algerian war of independence raged for nearly eight years, from the first uprising of November 1, 1954, until the establishment of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria in September 1962. The conflict spared no part of Algeria, spreading from the cities to the countryside. By war’s end, over one million Algerians and Frenchmen had lost their lives. When the Algerians launched their bid for independence, they had every reason to expect high casualties. In 1945 French repression of moderate nationalists in the eastern market town of Sйtif (the nationalists wished to carry Algerian flags alongside French flags in their local Victory in Europe parade) resulted in riots that left forty Algerians and Europeans dead. The French overreaction to the Sйtif demonstrations set off nationwide protests across Algeria through the month of May 1945. The French deployed warships, aircraft, and some 10,000 soldiers to quell the uprising. Whereas about one hundred European men, women, and children had been killed by Algerian insurgents, many more Algerians had been killed by French retaliatory measures. The French government acknowledged some 1,500 Algerian dead, though the army put the figure at 6,000–8,000. Algerians claims ran as high as 45,000 dead. The French intended Sйtif as a warning against further nationalist activity. Predictably, their murderous overreaction had the opposite effect intended, driving many Algerians to embrace the nationalist cause. As Algerian nationalists rose up against the French in 1954, they were still haunted by the memory of Sйtif. The heavy casualties of the 1954–1962 Algerian War reflected an implacable logic of violent retribution. The Algerian nationalists of the National Liberation Front (FLN) believed they had to inflict terror on the French that would provoke a terrible retaliation from them, which would force the colonial power from the country. The French, for their part, had no intention of withdrawing from their oldest and most entrenched North African possession. “Algeria is France,” the French insisted—and they meant it. They believed the nationalists to be a marginal force that could be crushed, leaving the silent majority of complacent Algerians to continue under French rule. The resulting savage war of unspeakable horrors shattered Algeria and France alike. Atrocities against civilians began with FLN attacks on the French settlers in Philippeville in August 1955, when Algerian fighters killed 123 men, women, and children. After the experience of Sйtif, the FLN knew the French would retaliate with a vengeance that would generate broad-based Algerian hatred for the French. They were right. The French acknowledged killing over 1,200 Algerian civilians in retaliation for the Philippeville massacre. The FLN claimed the French had killed 12,000. Thousands of Algerians volunteered for the FLN as a result. In such a way, the small FLN insurgency of 1954 erupted into total war by the end of 1955. As thousands of Algerians volunteered to join the national liberation struggle, the FLN managed to consolidate its hold over Algerian politics through a combination of conviction and intimidation. The aggressive tactics of the French military encouraged a number of Algerian political parties and movements to make common cause with the FLN. Early nationalists such as Ferhat Abbas, as well as the parties of the left, like the Communists, folded their own organizations into the National Liberation Front. The FLN was ruthless with its internal opponents. In the first three years of the war of independence it is estimated that the FLN killed six times more Algerians than Frenchmen in their operations. By July 1956, the FLN had secured unrivaled command of the national liberation struggle, which it declared both a war of independence and a social revolution.

The leadership of the FLN was divided between six internal commanders, who organized resistance within five insurrectionary provinces, or wilayas, and three external leaders based in Cairo. With the outbreak of the nationalist uprising in November 1954, the French used their extensive intelligence network to clamp down on the internal leadership. During the first six months of operations, the French had killed the commander of Wilaya II and arrested the leaders of Wilayas I and IV. With the internal leadership in disarray, the initiative passed to the external leadership. Of the three external leaders of the FLN—Ahmed Ben Bella, Hocine Ait Ahmed, and Mohamed Khider—Ben Bella gained the most prominence (he would later become the first president of independent Algeria). Born in a village in western Algeria in 1918, Ben Bella was in every sense a child of French Algeria. French was his first language, he volunteered for the French army in 1936, and he even played for a French soccer team in the late 1930s. His conversion to nationalist politics was provoked by French repression of the 1945 Sйtif uprising. He was arrested by the French in 1951 but escaped from prison in Algeria and made his way to Tunisia and Cairo, where he established an FLN office. Following the outbreak of the war, Ben Bella moved between Arab capitals raising funds and political support for Algeria’s bid for independence from France. The French succeeded in decapitating the leadership of the FLN in October 1956. Following reliable intelligence, the French air force intercepted a Moroccan DC-3 carrying Ben Bella, Ait Ahmed, and Khider, as well as the supreme commander of the internal leadership, Mohamed Boudiaf, and forced the plane to land in the western Algerian city of Oran. The FLN leaders were arrested and dispatched to prison in France, where they served out the remaining years of the Algerian War. The French public celebrated the arrests of the FLN leadership as if this development marked the end of the Algerian War. Mouloud Feraoun, a celebrated author and member of Algeria’s Berber community, reflected bitterly that the capture of the leaders of the movement would do nothing to restore peace between Algerians and the French. “They present the seizure [of the FLN leaders] as a great victory, prelude to the final victory,” he wrote in his diary. “What final victory? Snuffing the revolt, the death of the rebellion, the renaissance of Franco-Algerian friendship, of confidence, of peace?”³ Written in a tone of bitter irony, Feraoun recognized that whatever the French might hope, the arrest of Ben Bella and his colleagues was the prelude to more, not less, violence. By the time of Ben Bella’s arrest, the violence had already moved from the countryside to the cities. On a Sunday evening in September 1956, the relative peace of the capital, Algiers, was shattered by three bombs set off in the European quarters of the city. It was the start of a violent campaign known as the Battle of Algiers. The FLN took the war to the capital in a calculated bid to provoke a French reaction that would bolster support for the National Liberation Front inside Algeria and generate international condemnation that would isolate France. Through the autumn of 1956 and the winter of 1957, the FLN organized a number of murderous terror attacks. The French retaliated with mass arrests and extensive torture to expose the FLN’s network in Algiers. The Battle of Algiers did attract widespread international attention, and France did face condemnation. But the Algerians paid a terrible price for these gains. Mouloud Faraoun observed the violence in Algiers with horror and condemned both the French and the FLN for the murder of innocents. “The attacks in the cities are multiplying,” he wrote in his diary in October 1956, “stupid, atrocious. Innocents are torn to shreds. But which innocents? Who is innocent? The dozens of peaceful Europeans drinking in a bar? The dozens of Arabs who littered the road near a mangled bus? Terrorism, counter-terrorism,” he reflected with ironic bitterness, “desperate cries, atrocious screams of pain, agony. Nothing more. Peace.”⁴

The FLN mobilized all segments of the society in the Battle of Algiers. Women in particular played a central role, carrying bombs, running guns, serving as couriers between leaders in hiding, and providing a safe refuge for activists wanted by the French. The role of Djamila Bouhired and other women in the movement was captured with a gritty realism in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 film, The Battle of Algiers. Fatiha Bouhired and her twenty-two-year-old niece Djamila played central roles in the Battle of Algiers. Fatiha Bouhired’s husband was one of the first men in her quarter of the Casbah, or old city of Algiers, to join the independence movement. He was arrested by the French early in 1957 and killed while trying to escape. Her husband?s death redoubled Bouhired?s commitment to the liberation struggle, and she allowed the FLN to operate a clandestine bomb factory in her attic. Her niece Djamila served as one of the bomb carriers and delivered correspondence between FLN activists hiding in the Casbah. Both women showed remarkable presence of mind under pressure. Once, Fatiha and Djamila were alerted that soldiers were about to search their house. They made coffee, put classical music on the gramophone, and got dressed up. When the soldiers arrived they were greeted like welcome guests by attractive women with fresh coffee. “I would be most curious to know what lies behind those beautiful eyes,” the captain of the patrol murmured suggestively to Djamila Bouhired. “Behind my eyes,” she replied, rolling her head flirtatiously, “is my hair.”⁵ The officers searched the house no further. The police would soon discover another side of Djamila Bouhired. On April 9, 1957, Djamila was shot in the shoulder while fleeing a French patrol in the Casbah. She was found carrying correspondence addressed to Saadi Yacef and Ali la Pointe, high-level FLN leaders who were at that time the two most wanted men in Algiers. She was taken to a hospital to be treated for the bullet wound, then transferred directly from the operating table to the interrogation chamber. Over the next seventeen days she was subjected to horrific torture, clinically described in her deposition to the kangaroo court that ultimately condemned her to death. She never cracked. Her only comment in court was that “those who tortured me had no right to inflict such humiliation on a human being, physically upon my person, and morally upon themselves.”⁶ Her death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Fatiha Bouhired continued to serve the FLN after her niece was arrested. She bought a house in the Casbah to provide a new refuge for Saadi Yacef and Ali la Pointe. They could trust no one else. “They were at home in my home, not hiding among other people,” Bouhired explained. The Casbah was riven with mistrust as the French infiltrated the FLN through collaborators and intelligence obtained by torturing detainees. “I was afraid of those who had sold out,” Fatiha Bouhired confided to an interviewer, “and preferred to do everything myself: I did the shopping, I was their intermediary, I helped them move about. I did everything, but that way I felt more at ease.” The French were relentless in their pursuit of the surviving FLN leadership in Algiers. In July 1957, Yacef’s sister was arrested. Under torture, she revealed Fatiha Bouhired’s role in the movement and her connections to Saadi Yacef and a female bomber named Hassiba. The French authorities immediately arrested Bouhired. “They took me away and tortured me all night,” Fatiha Bouhired recalled. “Where is Yacef? Where is Yacef?” they demanded. Fatiha disclaimed any knowledge of Saadi Yacef and said Hassiba only came to her house to give her financial assistance on behalf of the FLN for the loss of her husband. She stuck to her story through repeated torture and ultimately persuaded the French, who agreed to place agents in her house to catch Hassiba when she next called on Fatiha. Even with French agents in Fatiha Bouhired’s house, Ali la Pointe and Saadi Yacef remained in place. This led to the ironic situation of the French providing security to the FLN’s covert command center, with Ali la Pointe safely in the attic and French soldiers on the ground floor. Fatiha would prepare couscous, the Algerian traditional dish, for the French agents downstairs, always allowing Saadi Yacef to spit in the food before serving it to her unwelcome guests. “This time take them their couscous, and next time we’ll send them a well-seasoned bomb,” growled Yacef.⁷ Fatiha chafed in her new role as make-believe informant to the French, but her play-acting came to a sudden end when the French discovered Yacef’s hiding place and arrested him along with Fatiha in September 1957. She spent months in prison—refusing afterward to discuss her tortures—before being placed under house arrest. With all of the senior leadership of the FLN in the capital dead or imprisoned, the Battle of Algiers came to an end in autumn 1957. But the larger Algerian War raged on.

Buoyed by its hard-fought success in defeating the insurgency in Algiers, the French army renewed its effort to break the National Liberation Front in the countryside. In late 1956 the French initiated a policy of forcing Algerian peasants from their homes and farms into internment camps. The forced resettlement of rural Algerians gained pace after the Battle of Algiers. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were rounded up and forced to live under French surveillance in camps with no access to their farmlands or work. Rather than suffer these French measures, many rural workers fled to the cities, where they congregated in slums. Others sought refuge in Tunisia or Morocco. By war’s end in 1962, some three million rural Algerians had been displaced from their homes, many never to return. The French further isolated the FLN by closing the frontiers between Algeria and its neighbors with electrified fences and mine fields, thus preventing the migration of arms, fighters, and supplies from Morocco and Tunisia. In military terms, the French had contained and defeated the insurgency in Algeria by 1958. However, the FLN opened new fronts in its war of independence, bringing its cause to the attention of the international community. With support from Egypt and other countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, they succeeded in getting the Algerian question on the agenda of the United Nations General Assembly in 1957. The following year, the FLN declared a provisional government in exile based in its Cairo office, with veteran nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas as president. And in December 1958 the provisional government of Algeria was invited to send a delegation to the People?s Republic of China. Algerian nationalists were gaining international attention and support that served to isolate France politically even as it seemed to have won the war militarily. France itself was increasingly divided over the Algeria question by 1958. French taxpayers were beginning to feel the enormous cost of war. The French force in Algeria, only 60,000 men in 1954, had expanded ninefold to over 500,000 by 1956.⁸ This massive occupation force could only be sustained through conscription and extended national service—always unpopular measures. The young conscripts found themselves caught up in a war of unspeakable horror. Many returned home appalled by what they had witnessed and traumatized by what they had done: violations of human rights, forced resettlement, house demolitions, but worst of all, the systematic use of torture against men and women.⁹ French public opinion was shocked by reports of French soldiers resorting to methods associated with the brutal Nazi repression of the French Resistance in the Second World War. Leading French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre grew increasingly outspoken against the war at home, while France suffered isolation in the international arena for the violence of an imperial war during an age of decolonization. The army and the settler community in Algeria were alarmed by the wavering French support for the Algerian colony. In May 1958 a group of French settlers rose in rebellion against the anemic government of French Premier Pierre Pflimlin, whom they suspected of seeking accommodation with the FLN enemy. Their slogan was “the Army to Power!” On May 13 the settlers overran the governor-general’s offices in Algiers to declare effective self-rule under a revolutionary “committee of public safety” with General Jacques Massu, commander of the elite paratrooper units, as its president. The French military in Algeria was in full sympathy with the settlers’ movement. General Raoul Salan, commander in chief of French forces in Algeria, had dispatched a long telegram to his superiors in Paris on May 9. Salan conveyed his officers’ concerns that “diplomatic processes” might lead to “the abandonment of Algeria.” He continued: “The army in Algeria is troubled by the recognition of its responsibility towards the men who are fighting and risking a useless sacrifice if the representatives of the nation are not determined to maintain Algйrie franзaise.”¹⁰ Salan warned that only determined government action to preserve French Algeria would prevent a military putsch—not just in Algeria, but in metropolitan France as well. The crisis in Algeria risked toppling the French republic itself. The settler insurrection sent shock waves through Algiers. Mouloud Feraoun captured the fear and uncertainty in his diary on May 14: “Atmosphere of revolution. People barricaded in their homes. Demonstrators march up and down the major arteries of the city, shops closed. The radio speaks of a Committee of Public Health that has taken all in hand and occupies the Governor General?s office and controls broadcasts.? The Muslims of Algiers recognized that this was a fight between the French that did not involve them. Feraoun questioned the Fourth Republic?s ability to withstand the pressure. ?At base, the Algeria War will prove a very hard blow for France, perhaps a mortal blow to the Republic. After which, no doubt, this blow will bring the remedy to Algeria and Algerians.?¹¹

Soon after, Pfimlin’s government fell, and the hero of the French resistance in World War II, General Charles de Gaulle, was returned to power by public acclaim in June 1958. Within three months, de Gaulle submitted a new constitution to plebiscite and in September 1958 launched the Fifth Republic. One of de Gaulle’s first acts was to fly to Algeria to face the rebellious settler community. In a famous speech delivered in Algiers, de Gaulle calmed the restive army and settlers by promising that Algeria would remain French. “I have understood you!” de Gaulle reassured the rapturous crowds. He put forward an ambitious reform platform to develop Algeria and integrate its Arab citizens into the commonwealth of France through industrial development, land distribution, and the creation of 400,000 new jobs. De Gaulle’s proposals were clearly intended to reassure the army and settlers in Algeria and bring an end to General Salan’s Committee of Public Safety. However, his comments demonstrated how little he understood the nationalist movement behind the FLN’s war. Reflecting on de Gaulle’s pronouncements, Mouloud Feraoun wrote bitterly: “Algerian nationalism? It doesn’t exist. Integration? You’ve got it.” It was as though de Gaulle were going back to the idea of assimilation as first set out in the Blum-Violette proposals of 1930. Assimilation might have held some appeal even as late as 1945. By 1958 it was an irrelevance. To Feraoun, it was as if de Gaulle were saying: “You are French, old man. Nothing else. Don’t give us any more headaches.” In the face of stubborn FLN resistance, de Gaulle was forced to come to terms with Algerian demands for total independence. In spite of his early promises, de Gaulle reversed his position and began to prepare his countrymen for Algeria’s secession from France. In September 1959 he spoke for the first time of Algerian self-determination, provoking a round of violent demonstrations by settlers in Algeria in January 1960. De Gaulle persisted and in June 1960 convened the first direct negotiations with the provisional government of the Algerian Republic in Evian. Hard-liners in the settler movement and their allies in the army began to see de Gaulle as a traitor. They formed terrorist organizations, like the Front of French Algeria and the notorious Secret Armed Organization, better known by its French acronym, the OAS, and actively plotted de Gaulle’s assassination. The OAS also unleashed a violent terror campaign within Algeria that inflicted random violence on Arab civilians. The Evian negotiations, combined with the breakdown in public security, provoked a political crisis among the settlers and military in Algeria. In January 1961 the French government held a referendum on self-determination in Algeria, which carried with a resounding 75 percent vote in favor. In April 1961 the Foreign Legion parachute regiment in Algiers mutinied in protest against the French government’s moves to concede Algerian independence. However, the mutiny did not gain wider support among the French military, which remained faithful to de Gaulle, and the coup leaders were forced to surrender after only four days. As the settlers’ position in Algeria grew more tenuous in 1961 and early 1962, the OAS stepped up its terrorist violence inside Algeria. “Now it seems that the OAS doesn’t warn anyone,” Mouloud Feraoun noted in one of his last journal entries, in February 1962. “They murder in cars, on motorcycle, with grenades, with machine-gun fire, with knives. They attack cashiers in banks, post offices, companies . . . with the complicity of some and the cowardice of all.”¹² Feraoun’s brave voice of reason was silenced by OAS guns on March 15, just three days before the signing of the Evian Accords. While violence continued to rage in Algeria, the FLN and de Gaulle’s government made steady progress in their negotiations in Evian. On March 18, 1962, the two sides signed the Evian Accords, conferring full independence on Algeria. The terms of the accords were put to public vote in a plebiscite held in Algeria on July 1. Algerians voted in near unanimity for independence (the vote was 5.9 million in favor, 16,000 opposed). On July 3, de Gaulle proclaimed the independence of Algeria. Celebrations in Algiers were delayed for two days to coincide with the anniversary of the French occupation of the city on July 5, 1830. After 132 years, the Algerians had finally driven the French from their lands. Ongoing terror and an uncertain future drove the French community from Algeria in massive waves—300,000 left in the month of June 1962 alone. Many settler families had lived for generations in North Africa. By the end of the year, only some 30,000 European settlers remained in Algeria. But most destructive was the bitter fighting that swiftly broke out between the internal and external leadership of the National Liberation Front in a desperate bid to seize power in the country they had fought so hard and sacrificed so much to win. For the battle-weary Algerian people it was too much. The women of Algiers took to the streets to protest the fighting between their own freedom fighters, chanting “Seven years, enough is enough!” It was not until Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumedienne secured Algiers in September 1962 that the fighting came to an end. Ben Bella took his place at the head of government; a year later, after the ratification of the constitution in September 1963, he was elected president. Three years later, Boumedienne displaced him in a bloodless coup, reflecting the continued factionalism within the FLN leadership. For many, independence proved a hollow victory—particularly for Algerian women. After their courage and sacrifice, they were appalled to hear FLN leader Mohamed Khider insist that women should “return to their couscous.” Baya Hocine, one of the veterans of the Battle of Algiers who suffered torture and years in prison, reflected on the mixed emotions that came with independence:1962 was a black hole. Before then it was a great adventure and then . . . you found yourself all alone. I don’t know how the other sisters felt, but I had no immediate political objectives in mind. 1962 was the greatest comfort, the end of the war, but at the same time it was the great fear. In prison, we so believed we would . . . get out, that we would make a socialist Algeria.... And then we saw an Algeria made practically without us . . . without anyone thinking about us. For us, it was worse than before, because we had broken all of the barriers and it was very difficult for us to go back to that. In 1962, all of the barriers were restored, but in a terrible way for us. They were put back in place to exclude us.¹³

Algeria had achieved independence—but at a high price. Its population had suffered death and dislocation on a scale unprecedented in Arab history. Its economy was shattered by war and willful destruction by the departing settlers. Its political leadership was divided by factionalism. And its society was divided by the different expectations of what roles men and women should play in the building of independent Algeria. Yet Algeria quickly set about forming a government and took its place among the progressive Arab states as a republic born of revolutionary struggle against imperialism.

With the success of the Algerian revolution, Nasser had a new ally in his battle against Arab “reaction.” Egypt, still known as the United Arab Republic after the Syrian secession, had set its sites on wholescale reform of the Arab world as the prelude to achieving Arab unity. Revolutionary Algeria, with its emphasis on anti-imperialism, Arab identity politics, and socialist reform, was a natural partner. Nasser’s new state party, the Arab Socialist Union, drafted a joint communiquй with the FLN in June 1964 to assert their unity of purpose to promote Arab socialism.¹⁴ Nasser took some credit for having supported the Algerian revolution from inception to independence. He was moving away from an earlier role as standard bearer of Arab nationalism and now sought to present himself as the champion of progressive revolutionary values. Carried away by his rhetoric, Nasser found himself providing unquestioning support to Arab revolutionary movements wherever they occurred. When a group of officers toppled the monarchy in Yemen, Nasser gave immediate support?in his own words: ?We had to back the Yemeni revolution, even without knowing who was behind it.?¹⁵

Y emen, long autonomous within the Ottoman Empire, had secured its independence as a kingdom in 1918. The first ruler of independent Yemen was the Imam Yahya (1869–1948), who as head of the Zaydi sect, a small Shiite community found only in Yemen, provided both religious and political leadership to his country. In the 1920s and 1930s,Yahya extended his rule by dint of conquest over tribal lands across the territory of northern Yemen, much of it inhabited by Sunni Muslims. Throughout his reign, Yahya faced pressures from Saudi Arabia to the north, which seized ’Asir and Najran from what Yahya considered “historic Yemen,” and from the British in the south, who had held the port city of Aden and its hinterlands as a colony since the 1830s. Nevertheless, Yahya’s ongoing military conquests gave the illusion of unity to a society deeply divided along regional, tribal, and sectarian lines. Under his rule, Yemen had very little exchange with the outside world, remaining focused on pursuing policies that preserved the country’s isolation. Yemen’s isolation came to an end with Imam Yahya’s rule. Yahya was assassinated by a tribal shaykh in 1948 and was succeeded by his son, the Imam Ahmad (r. 1948–1962). Ahmad had a reputation for ruthlessness that was reinforced when he ascended to power and had his rivals imprisoned and executed. He departed from Yahya’s xenophobia and established diplomatic relations with both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China in his search for development assistance and military aid. Yet Ahmad was not secure on his throne. An attempted coup in 1955 made him increasingly suspicious of domestic rivals and threats from abroad—particularly Nasser and his relentless calls for overturning “feudal” regimes. The Egypt-based Voice of the Arabs reached as far as Yemen, carrying its electrifying message of Arab Nationalism and anti-imperialism.¹⁶ In Yemen as elsewhere in the Arab world, Nasser’s direct radio appeal to the people placed Imam Ahmad under pressure and was a source of tension between Yemen and Egypt. Yet Nasser was not consistently hostile to the Yemenis. In 1956 Yemen, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia concluded an anti-British pact in Jiddah, and in 1958 Imam Ahmad gave his full support to the union of Egypt and Syria, joining a federation scheme with the UAR known as the United Arab States. However, Ahmad opposed Nasser?s vision of Arab socialism, with its state-led economy and nationalization of private companies, which he condemned in verse as ?taking property by forbidden means? that was ?a crime against Islamic law.?¹⁷ Coming right after Syria’s secession from the UAR in 1961, Ahmad’s lecture on Islamic law infuriated Nasser. Egypt severed ties to Yemen, and the Voice of the Arabs stepped up its rhetoric, putting pressure on the Yemenis to topple their “reactionary” monarchy. The opportunity arose the following year. Imam Ahmad died in his sleep in September 1962, putting the kingdom in the hands of his son and successor Imam Badr. One week later, Badr was overthrown in an officer’s coup, and the Yemen Arab Republic was declared. Supporters of the Yemeni royal family challenged the coup, with support from the neighboring Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Egypt threw its full weight behind the new republic and its military rulers as part of what Nasser saw as the larger battle between progressives and reactionaries in the Arab world. The Yemeni revolution quickly devolved into a civil war within Yemen itself, and an inter-Arab war between the Egyptians and the Saudis, between the “progressive” republican order and the “conservative” monarchies in a battle for the future of the Arab world. There were no Egyptian interests at stake, only a confusion between rhetoric and realpolitik. This was Nasser’s first war of choice, and it proved to be his Viet Nam. Egyptian troops began to flood into Yemen after the September 1962 coup. Over the next three years the total deployment swelled from 30,000 at the end of 1963 to a peak of 70,000 in 1965—nearly half the Egyptian army. From the start, the war in Yemen was unwinnable. The Egyptians faced tribal guerrillas fighting on their own terrain, and more than 10,000 soldiers and officers were killed over the course of five years of war. High casualties and few successes took their toll on troop morale, as the Egyptians failed to advance their lines much beyond the capital city, Sanaa. Whereas the Saudis bankrolled the royalists, and the British gave them covert assistance, the Egyptians had no surplus wealth to underwrite the huge expense of a foreign war. Yet such practical concerns had no impact on Nasser, who was blinded by his mission to promote revolutionary reform in the Arab world. “Withdrawal is impossible,” Nasser told his commander in Yemen. “It would mean the disintegration of the revolution in Yemen.”¹⁸ Nasser readily acknowledged that he saw the Yemen War as “more a political operation than a military one.” What he failed to appreciate was the Yemen War’s impact on Egypt’s military preparedness to confront the more immediate threat of Israel.