Al-Ahram Weekly | Books Supplement (November 2002)

		21 - 27 November 2002 Issue No. 613 Books	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

1958 revisited
A Revolutionary Year: the Middle East in 1958. Wm. Roger Louis and Roger Owen eds. London and New York: I B Taurus and Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002. pp340

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Nasser right after announcing the nationalisation of the Suez Canal; Nixon and the re-elected Esienhower and their wives, 1956
This excellent collection of essays, edited by Wm. Roger Louis, professor at the University of Texas at Austin and honourary fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and Roger Owen, professor of Middle East history at Harvard University, could not have come at a more appropriate time. As the title indicates, the essays included here all deal with the re-drawing of the map of the Middle East in the 1950s in the context of post-World War II and Cold War politics. 1958 was a "revolutionary year", or, rather, a year of revolutions, that witnessed a change of regime in Iraq, as well as significant unrest in Lebanon and potential unrest in Jordan. The outcome of the politics played by domestic, regional and international actors in that fateful year shaped the map of the Middle East over the following period. Today, the balance of power and regional map established in 1958 are undergoing significant revision, and the threatened war on Iraq, the outcomes of which are at best pure conjecture, may well lead to a very different regional map.
February 1958 saw the unification of Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic, followed two weeks later by a merger between Iraq and Jordan intended as a counterweight to the UAR. This latter Jordanian-Iraqi merger was short-lived, since in July revolution broke out in Iraq. Lebanon witnessed its share of crisis in May, one that caused American troops to intervene in an attempt to stabilise the government of the day. Similarly, the British intervened to support King Hussein's regime in Jordan and stop the Iraqi revolution from engulfing Jordan and potentially other states of the region as well.
Several of the essays here deal with external and foreign players in the political game of the day. That these players -- the US, Britain, France and the former Soviet Union -- had key roles to play cannot be denied, and these are now being made more accessible to the scrutiny of historians, as more and more archives are being declassified after the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, this is a situation that does not always apply in the Arab states, and as a result while the insights this book provides are invaluable, especially at this historical juncture, they remain incomplete. Without access to the corresponding Arab archives, we are still only seeing parts of the picture.
The book's cover bears a painting of Nasser -- majestic, looking East, almost larger than life, his forehead reflecting the light, and behind him a background of Pharaonic-looking reliefs. Nasser casts a heavy shadow over the articles in the book, especially as the authors have worked to revise the common obsession of Western leaders in 1958 -- that an expansionist Nasserism, working closely with international communism, was posing a threat to Western interests in the Middle East. However, closer analysis reveals, for example, that Nasser was not interested in destabilising Lebanon.
In her article The Emergence of the United States as a Middle Eastern Power, 1956-1958, Diane B Kunz outlines the beginnings of America's political role in the Middle East, starting with the Suez Crisis of 1956 and relying on a variety of American archives, including the records of the US National Security Council and Council on Foreign Relations. In the aftermath of the Suez crisis, the US administration developed the "Eisenhower Doctrine" which pledged $200 million "to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such nations, requesting such aid, against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism". The Eisenhower administration hoped that this programme would be enough to lure the Arabs away from Soviet influence, while curbing the spread of Nasserism in the region. However, as the years unfolded it became clear to the Americans that international communism was not a real threat to their interests in the Middle East.
In fact, as Irene L Gendzier argues in her chapter Oil, Politics and US Intervention, by the end of 1958, according to a US Special National Intelligence estimate, the Americans had come to believe that "the objectives of radical Arab nationalism are not invariably in conflict with US interests... [and that] the Arab objectives of maintaining independence and of utilising the profits of Arab oil are compatible with two crucial US interests -- denial of the area to Soviet domination and maintenance of Western access to Middle East oil." Nasser, it was realised, was in no way close to being a communist threat or even a communist sympathiser, and by the end of the 1950s Britain's traditional role in the Middle East had been replaced by American power.
In his chapter Perceptions and Reality: the Arab World and the West, Rashid Khalidi discusses how the two sides, the US and the Arabs, had very different perceptions of the crises of 1958 as they unfolded, a situation that often remains true of contemporary crises as well. He compares Western diplomatic and journalistic accounts of events with their Arab counterparts, and, while the reality probably lay somewhere in between the two, Khalidi argues that in retrospect Arabic press accounts seem more accurate.
Western diplomatic sources tilted towards clear-cut divisions and perceptions of the factions operating within the region, divisions such as pro-West and pro-Soviet, and perceptions such as pro-Nasser meaning anti-Western, and so on. However, closer scrutiny reveals a more sophisticated picture. Opposition to the pro-Western government of Camille Chamoun and to the Eisenhower Doctrine in Lebanon was not limited to pan-Arab Muslim elements, for example. And unrest in the country was not instigated by Egypt and the Soviet Union, as was claimed at the time, but had indigenous Lebanese roots.
The opposition to Chamoun included leading members from across the Lebanese political spectrum, with leading Christian figures such as Hamid Frangié, former President Bechara El- Khoury, Philippe Takla, Henri Farnoun and even the Maronite Patriarch Mar Boulos Meouschi, expressing their opposition, as well as Sunni, Druze and Shi'i political leaders, such as Saeb Salam, Raschid Keramé, Walid Jumblatt, Sabri Hamadé and Kamil El-Assad. The domestic roots of opposition were to be found in Chamoun's violations of the 1943 National Pact, by, for example, curbing the power of Lebanon's Sunni Muslim prime minister. These violations were compounded by blatant rigging of the 1957 elections, carried out with CIA funding, and Chamoun's attempts to seek an unconstitutional second term as president.
Khalidi also points to the role of "external forces" other than Egypt and the USSR, namely to the Western powers themselves, including the US and Britain, as well as Iraq and Saudi Arabia in Lebanese affairs. Such "external forces", he argues, were also at work in Jordan. Here, the 1958 crisis that led to the dismissal of the elected government of Sulayman Al-Nabulsi came not so much out of fear of a communist threat in Jordan, but rather because Al-Nabulsi's government could have posed a threat to traditional, authoritarian and pro-Western Hashemite rule. When revolution broke out in Iraq in July 1958, Britain sent troops into Jordan lest the Iraqi revolution spread and engulf the country.
Similarly, while Egypt and the USSR were strongly opposed to the policies of the Iraqi monarchy, such as the Baghdad Pact, they cannot be said to have instigated the domestic opposition that finally toppled the Hashemite regime in Iraq. While there were contacts between the Iraqi officers that overthrew the Iraqi regime and Nasser in Egypt before the revolution, there was never any question of the Iraqi officers acting at Nasser's behest. Nor was the Iraqi communist Party controlled by the Soviet Union: the Baathists, Iraqi Nasserists, and communists who led the revolution in 1958 were responding to indigenous Iraqi social and political forces. In his contribution, Khalidi argues against the simplistic divisions perceived by Western leaders at the time, which tended to divide Arab regimes into pro-Western, on the one hand, and pro-Nasser, and hence pro-Soviet, on the other. Over time, for example, sharp differences grew between the regimes of Abdel-Karim Qasim in Iraq and Gamal Abdel-Nasser in Egypt, sparking sharp inter-Arab conflict. Similarly, Egypt was in favour of the peaceful resolution of the Lebanese crisis.
Khalidi's analysis also questions whether there was anything truly "revolutionary" about the events of 1958 and their outcomes, despite contemporary Western perceptions. After all, he points out, the year's events did not lead to changes of regime in Lebanon or Jordan, and the Iraqi regime that emerged following the overthrow of the monarchy was far from being composed of the unified front that had led the revolution, soon splitting into different factions. The social reforms implemented in Iraq did not go beyond those carried out in Egypt and Syria.
Peter Sluglett concurs with Khalidi in his estimates of Egyptian and Soviet involvement in the events of 1958 in his chapter the Pan-Arab movement and the Influence of Cairo and Moscow. "Nasser may have been the prime cause of Britain and France being chased out of most of the Middle East," Sluglett writes, "but this was more because of what he represented, and because the United States supported him, than because of anything he did. Similarly, the US landings in Lebanon and the British landings in Jordan, which took place within days of the overthrow of the ancien régime in Iraq, were preemptive strikes to give public support to faithful clients rather than because of any real danger of intervention on the part of Egypt or its minions -- let alone of the Soviet Union."
Sluglett concludes, again contrary to the wisdom of the time, that neither pan-Arabism nor the Soviet Union played a decisive role in pre- or even post-revolutionary Iraq, and that neither seriously threatened Western interests. The main effect of increased Soviet influence in the Middle East after 1958 was that the Western powers no longer enjoyed the same unfettered influence in the region as they had before. But there were also serious limitations on what Moscow was able to achieve in the Middle East.
Gendzier's article argues that ensuring access to Middle Eastern oil supplies was one of the prime forces behind American and British policy in 1958. This is a theme that Roger Owen takes up in his chapter, The Dog that Neither Barked Nor Bit: The Fear of Oil Shortages, which discusses the international oil situation in 1958 and compares the role of oil in the crises of 1958 with that during Suez in 1956. Owen explains that Western European and American consumption of oil was sluggish at the time, due to economic recession, while oil output in the US, Canada and Venezuela was falling, leading to an increase in Western reliance on Middle Eastern oil supplies.
The tensions of early summer 1958 were followed by a change of leadership in Saudi Arabia in March, the cutting of the Iraq Petroleum Company's pipeline near Tripoli, Lebanon, in May, and the Iraqi revolution in July. Both American and British officials established emergency measures to protect Western supplies of oil -- indeed, one crucial difference between 1958 and its 1956 precursor was that the two Western powers remained firm allies throughout. A second difference was that Iraq was an important producer of oil, unlike Egypt, and it depended on its oil revenues to a significant extent. In both crises, Nasser, who controlled the oil transit routes -- the Suez Canal in 1956 and the Syrian pipelines in 1958 -- had reasons not to disrupt supply. Thus, in 1958 the West had few reasons to intervene, since existing arrangements were bringing them the oil they needed.
While Israel had played an important role in regional politics during the 1956 crisis, in 1958 its role was limited. It did, however, manage to extract benefits from the crises, most importantly an American commitment to include Israel in the Eisenhower Doctrine, paving the way towards closer military cooperation. In his chapter, The Junior Partner: Israel's Role in the 1958 Crisis, Ilan Pappé argues that despite Ben Gurion's efforts Israel did not achieve its major goals in 1958, whether in terms of expanding to become a "Greater Israel" that included the West Bank, or in terms of showing off its military.
Finally, the title of the book, A Revolutionary Year, could very well have had a question mark added to it. How truly "revolutionary" were the crises of 1958 is a question dealt with by most of the essays collected here. Perhaps ironically, the overall picture, as Owen himself points out in his conclusion, is that local actors had greater roles to play than was assumed by Western powers at the time. However, while the crises were perhaps not as sharp, or as dangerous, as the Western powers thought them to be, they did leave lasting repercussions on the region.
"By shifting our attention to the internal dynamics of each country," Owen writes, "we can see how the events of 1958 were part of a larger and more general process of regime change, or regime accommodation, that began with the creation of the new states of Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq after the end of the First World War, and which has yet to produce anything that looks like the final answer to all these particular countries' particular economic, social, political, ethnic and religious problems."
By focusing on the unfolding events of a few months in the year 1958, the contributors to this collection of essays have shed light on the internal dynamics of regional politics in a time of crisis, in some cases subverting standard narratives of events and giving more credit and attention to local and indigenous forces than to international actors and the international balance of power. At the current political juncture, when the Middle East is going through another, albeit quite different crisis, scholars could do well to follow a similar approach.
Reviewed by Amina Elbendary

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