Power and Ideology in the Middle East
Sherman, Aleph V.
Power and Ideology in the Middle East Lines between Communism and nationalism are blurred in United Arab Republic and Iraq By A. V. Sherman LONDON COMMENTATORS on Middle Eastern politics...
...In countries where there was no bourgeois revolution, there had been no popular tradition of struggle for the rights of man and property...
...in the philosophy of the Chinese revolutionary leader...
...Since Russia is economically and culturally more advanced than these countries and its Communist party is more experienced, it was inevitable that national revolutionary movements in backward countries should draw upon Soviet techniques and policies, thus leading to an apparent blurring of the lines between nationalism and Communism in those countries...
...Several lessons can be derived from the present case...
...The first signs of the rift were either denied by both capitals or attributed to Western "machinations...
...When allied to modern techniques of propaganda, political control, mass agitation and organized hatred of the Western infidel (now bearing the name of imperialism and colonialism), this kind of regime came to bear a family resemblance to Communism...
...Communism" must be scrapped in favor of a more realistic approach based on the degree of actual Communist penetration of nationalist movements...
...It would also lower the West's prestige to try to force independent Arab states with a long anti-Communist record and a generally pro-Western orientation to submit to Nasser's hegemony—an effort which would in any event have little chance of success...
...But neither Cairo nor Baghdad seemed to realize that, as so often happens when revolutionary ideas are exported, Iraq received Nasserism in its more extreme form...
...The West will have to live with it for a long time and will have to understand it better if it wishes to exert world leadership...
...The facts, which are all too easily forgotten in the rush of events, are not nearly so uncomplicated as all that...
...This did not make Nasser a Communist, but it did provide an opening for Communist penetration of the region and stimulated processes which Nasser himself proved unable to halt even when they endangered his own power and security...
...Their importance as talking points has more often been in their power to attract sympathy in the West, where there is a predisposition to endow national revolutionary movements with a "progressive" aura, even when they don't deserve it...
...That is, it was a form that reflected Nasser's political orientation as of 1958 and so was receptive to the advancement of Nasserism's communisant aspects beyond the original intentions of the Egyptian leader...
...Though revolutionary movements of this sort have from time to time paid lip service to political rights and higher living standards for the workers and peasants—incantations learned from the West—these goals have seldom been given high priority...
...Ideological factors alone, however, are rarely decisive in determining policies and loyalties: Power considerations are paramount...
...Sun Yat-sen...
...Most recently, this manic-depressive pattern is reflected in the views of many who once denied the danger of Communist penetration of the region and who now maintain rather frenetically that a Communist take-over is imminent...
...First, it seems clear that as the Soviet Union extends its hold in the region, it will begin to face some of the quandaries which have always confronted the West there...
...The whole problem of nationalists who talk like Communists and Communists who talk like nationalists is now endemic to the Middle East, and to large areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America...
...As a matter of fact, a study of his pronouncements and policies suggests that he has no clear idea of what he wants...
...These resemblances arose primarily from the similarity in background and approach of the revolutionaries, despite the differences in their formal ideologies...
...The Iraqi revolution of last July embodied strong Nasserist influences...
...Secondly, the West must gain much greater flexibility and free itself from emotional involvement with regimes that exploit political slogans which are popular in the West...
...This does not make Kassim a Communist or a Communist agent, nor does it mean he has ceased to be an Arab nationalist...
...State intervention in industrial and economic enterprises became a commonplace in such areas as Asia, Latin America and the Middle East...
...But Nasser overplayed his hand in Iraq, forcing Kassim to lean on the Communists for support...
...This obviously does not mean we should welcome Soviet advances in the region, but we need not assume that Moscow's progress will be either unimpeded and uncomplicated...
...Moreover, since Nasser is trying to outdo Kassim in anti-Westernism and is actively seeking to undermine Western power in the Arab world, to help him now would only place a higher premium on the tactic of playing off the West against the East...
...The problem posed for the West by the Nasser-Kassim split obviously permits of no easy solution, and comparable situations are likely to occur frequently in other parts of the world...
...Such a move would strengthen him at a time when his prestige in the Arab world is at low ebb, owing to his failure to take over Iraq and other Arab countries from Tunisia to Jordan...
...Throughout the underdeveloped countries, the "nationalist revolution"—from above or from below—tends to display many characteristics of the mature Communism of the 1940s and 1950s...
...It would be inaccurate, however, to attribute this phenomenon exclusively to Soviet influence...
...The momentum of the quarrel soon imposed its logic on the participants: The failure of the Mosul uprising in Iraq this March forced both sides to adopt more extreme positions than they originally intended, further weakening the Nasser forces and strengthening the Communist elements in Iraq...
...Finally, the concept of "nationalism vs...
...Power and Ideology in the Middle East Lines between Communism and nationalism are blurred in United Arab Republic and Iraq By A. V. Sherman LONDON COMMENTATORS on Middle Eastern politics have displayed a remarkable tendency in the last few years to veer from one extreme to another in their analyses of the shifting scene there...
...There is good reason to believe that Moscow would have preferred to avoid the clash between these two, so as to advance its interests on a broad front rather than to find itself in the middle...
...So long as the Army has modern weapons and can use them, it remains the real repository of power and would probably prefer a military dictatorship to an all-out Communist regime...
...Conceited, naive and inconsistent, he has thus far left the making of foreign, social and economic policies to a considerable extent in the hands of Communists or fellow-travelers...
...But it does explain the absence of a psychological barrier to the acceptance of Soviet ideas and to close cooperation with the Communist world...
...Fundamentally similar policies and attitudes could be found in Mohammed Ali's experiments in Egypt a century and a half ago...
...In most underdeveloped countries, the state and the army apparatuses have always constituted the ruling class...
...When the power struggle between Cairo and Baghdad began to emerge, neither Nasser nor Kassim attributed to it the ideological implications it has since received...
...The Nasserist term for this tendency is "positive neutralism...
...At the same time, Kassim is concerned to keep the Communists from gaining too much power at his expense, as is shown by his conflict with them on such issues as death sentences for political opponents, the role of the "popular resistance forces," open CP activity and Communist representation in the cabinet...
...But he never allowed this to interfere with his close watch on Egypt's own dyed-in-the-wool Communists—not because he disagreed with their ideas, but because they owe their allegiance to Moscow rather than to him...
...Nasser never objected to the rape of Hungary or to Soviet oppression of Islamic nations in Russia so long as a pro-Soviet orientation seemed convenient for his own interests...
...Despotic, centralized regimes came to be challenged by nationalist revolutionaries not primarily because they were despotic and centralized, but because they failed to match the West's achievements, failed to give the intellectuals and semi-intellectuals the satisfactions they demanded, whether in the form of prestige, jobs, status or living standards...
...in the Aprista movement of Chile and the Peronist movement in Argentina...
...This does not make Communists of the national revolutionaries...
...For them capitalism was unattractive and therefore was never completely developed...
...in the revolutionary Turkish regimes of the early 1900s...
...Nasser was quite confident he could bring Iraq into his sphere of influence, and Kassim thought in terms of close cooperation with the United Arab Republic, short of actual unification or Egyptian hegemony...
...For example, Nasser's recent tirades against Communist activity in the Arab world make it all to easy to overlook the fact that between 1952 and 1953 his regime adopted and assimilated a great many Communist propaganda and tactical weapons, economic ideas and views of world politics...
...Nasserism" is equated with nationalism and the Kassim forces with Communism, and the two are simply presented as distinct and mutually exclusive phenomena: nationalism vs...
...In this essentially unbalanced view, the conflicting forces in the area are represented as being embodied in the persons of Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iraq's Premier Abdul Karim Kassim...
...It would be a serious mistake for the West to throw its full support behind Nasser...
Vol. 42 • June 1959 • No. 25
