Middle East Weather Forecast

...His grandson Hussein has no such preoccupation...

...But they were clearly worried...

...There is now little room for doubt that if he fails to live up to his revolutionary slogans he risks being swept aside, for the UAR is in a sickly state: Its population of over 25 million is growing faster than that of any other country, and could reach the 50 million mark in the 1990s...

...Under the heading "crisis averted in middle east," a leading Conservative daily reported on its front page of December 28: "Swift military moves in an all-Service emergency effort have brought the Middle East situation under control...

...The re-emergence of Syria as an independet state has already had repercussions in Iraq and the UAR as well as in Lebanon...

...Only 10,000 of 200,000 landless peasant families have been allocated holdings in the three-and-ahalf years of the Iraqi Republic's existence...

...Left-inclined deputies occupy only 50 or so of the 172 seats in the new Parliament, but the Left is more popular in Syria than this figure indicates...

...At the moment, Jordan is calm and even modestly prosperous...

...The one certainty in AngloArab relations is still explosive uncertainty...

...Propagandist fantasy rapidly obscured reality not only in foreign policy but in such vital domestic spheres as education, social reform and the "Liberation Province" fiasco...

...These officers agree with Kassem that Kuwait is a political anomaly and an "imperialist beachhead...

...They did not have long to wait...

...Western diplomats discounted suggestions in the Israeli press that the Kremlin might have made arrangements with Nasser to stock supplies and spares at Alexandria to compensate for the loss of its Albanian base...

...Syria has been coveted throughout history by the rulers of both Mesopotamia (today Iraq) and Egypt...

...He has also announced that the Army would receive three more divisions and a National Militia would be established...

...Both Nasser and Kassem have tried on several occasions to overthrow Hussein...

...But it would be rash of Kassem to launch an attack without first securing a minimum of support in the Arab League and Afro-Asian bloc...

...Unemployment is widespread in the towns...

...This month Nasser is holding a 1,500-member National Congress of Popular Forces to approve a "Socialist" National Charter for Egypt and the "isolation" from public life of scores of thousands of "reactionaries, self-seekers and other enemies of the people...

...The country's intellectuals are the most restless and extroverted and its middle class one of the most enterprising in the Arabicspeaking world...

...For Middle-Easterners, AngloArab relations are a real-life rendering of "Little Red Riding Hood," with Britain in the role of the wolf —a ubiquitous beast whose spoor can be detected in the vicinity of every bazaar-deal, every palace revolution...

...But, they add, while he may have struck the fancy of the Baghdad mob, he has also disturbed many officers who, owing their promotions to him, have hitherto been among his staunchest supporters...

...Seven British warships and 200 British troops were despatched to warn him off...

...And the huge refugee population—whose resettlement the Arab League governments refuse to contemplate, for a variety of political and economic reasons— is peculiarly vulnerable to extremist agitation...

...The nationalization of businesses and property would be accelerated...

...The Iraqi Army is about 60,000 strong, possesses British and Russian tanks and jet aircraft, and could probably take Kuwait without difficulty...

...He made no attempt, however, to reorganize Egyptian agriculture on Socialist lines...

...Nearly a third of his troops are Kurds whose sympathies lie with their rebellious kinsmen in the north...

...Just before Christmas the British Defense Ministry learned from a low-grade intelligence report that Iraqi dictator Abdel Karim Kassem, impressed by India's successful occupation of Goa, was reinforcing his base at Basra with a view to invading Kuwait, Britain's principal source of sterling oil...

...In Levantine politics only the successful are popular ("When a camel falls," the Arabs say, "every man's knife hacks at it...

...Intellectuals and entrepreneurs alike feel cramped within the limits of their own small state (population 3,800,000...

...His press has revealed that new "naval units" arrived from the Soviet Union in the latter half of December to reinforce the Egyptian fleet, "now the most powerful striking force in the eastern Mediterranean.' The arrival of these ships apparently coincided with the official visit to Egypt of Admiral S. G. Gorshkov, Commander of the Soviet Navy, and seven other senior Soviet naval officers...

...It was a stirring sight...

...But their opponents lost no time in linking the plot with British and Kurdish restlessness...

...As far west as Paris, official radio commentators expressed the view that the Lebanese coup had been inspired by an outside power and timed to coincide with developments elsewhere...

...A conspiratorial, fascist-minded body, the Hisb el-Qawmi aims to establish a "Greater Syria" incorporating Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel...

...he finds survival a fulltime job...

...It will inevitably disturb the region's uneasy equilibrium...

...The country is not yet economically viable and would collapse without Western aid...

...it already outpaces productivity increases in agriculture and industry...

...But in 1961—partly in response to the prompting of Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, to whom he turned for economic and doctrinal advice...

...Watkinson, the Minister of Defense, is keeping Ministers informed and Mr...

...The liberation of Syria stimulated this development by knocking the bottom out of Nasser's pan-Arab propaganda...

...But the vision of a tiny British force bringing the whole Middle East "under control" was food for Tory morale, and Whitehall contentedly allowed the tinseled emergency to linger awhile...

...The late Aneurin Bevan, to the annoyance of Nasser and his entourage, once stated publicly in Cairo that Egypt had experienced a revolt, not a revolution...

...Ever since the 1945 Labor Government's essay in Levantine Machiavellism, the party has been suspected—quite unjustly, in recent years at least—of being an instrument of British foreign policy...

...When he spoke to them of his plans for "social justice" they exclaimed, "God, what a shock these things are...

...STORMY YEAR AHEAD IN THE ARAB WORLD Middle East Weather Forecast By Ray Alan London For British Conservatives the Middle East is still something of an imperial playground, with Anglo-Arab relations an esoteric sport, rather like polo, of which Britain would be world champion but for malicious outsiders who dope its horses and occasionally substitute a hand-grenade for the ball...

...Baghdad's Shiite businessmen are appalled by the hazy economic notions and heavy military expenditure of the regime...

...Ray Alan is a British correspondent who has reported on Europe, Africa and the Middle East for many years...

...Its internal problems are such that they can only be resolved within a wider framework...

...There have been signs in the last two weeks of a reconciliation between the two...

...The probability of the Israeli Army occupying the western half of Jordan if the country were attacked from Iraq or Syria has also been a stabilizing factor...

...In the last hours of the old year, the Right-wing Hisb el-Qawmi esSuri (variously known as the Syrian National Social party and the Parti Populaire Syrien) unsuccessfully tried to seize power in Lebanon...

...Its King, while nowhere strikingly popular, is no longer ominously unpopular...

...Last November in a public statement he admitted that while certain of his close supporters are "prepared to shout Socialist slogans twenty times stronger than my own, they do not want Socialism applied...

...For years his propagandists appeared to be exploiting the word "Socialism" merely because, like "nationalism" and "anticolonialism," it was popular in the Middle East...

...For over a generation, the principal advocate of a "Greater Syria," as well as the self-sponsored candidate for its throne, was the British-subsidized Emir—later King —Abdullah of Jordan...

...Peace and trade with Israel, without which Jordan can have no hope of a settled future, are not even in sight...

...After plotting and inciting unrest for nearly a decade in every Arabicspeaking state from Tunisia to Saudi Arabia and from Syria to Sudan, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser is today a lonely, mistrusted man...

...Kuwaiti spokesmen hurriedly denied that their shiekdom had requested British aid...

...But "at the moment" is always an essential qualification when discussing Jordanian affairs...

...They are eager for the closer economic and cultural ties with Syria and Lebanon (where there are important Shiite communities) which only a civilian government can negotiate...

...Land for the landless," one of the first political demands formulated in backward agricultural societies, was particularly insistent in Egypt...

...It was revealed in Baghdad that Iraqi security forces had lost several hundred casualties in a clash with Kurdish rebels...

...It would be characteristic of Nasser to seek a conspiratorial or terroristic success in Jordan to compensate for his humiliation in Syria...

...Last month, demonstrators in Damascus and Aleppo protested against the proposed restoration of banks and businesses to private owners...

...Thus in the Middle East—no less than in Southeast Asia, France, North and Central Africa, and possibly Germany—1962 looks to be one of the stormiest years since the end of Hitler's War...

...Macmillan will call a ministerial meeting today if it should prove necessary...

...Arab politicians and editorialists throughout the Levant began searching for a British plot...

...The Foreign Office had informed them that General Kassem was unlikely either to risk a clash with the token Jordanian and Saudi forces stationed in Kuwait, or to shift the bulk of his Army southward at a time of Kurdish unrest in northern Iraq...

...Officers and educated civilians alike are beginning to weary of General Kassem's erratic dictatorship...

...the class war would be fought and won...

...That was bad enough, but worse was to follow...

...It appears to have convinced him that henceforth his influence would depend, and his regime would be judged, on deeds rather than words and attitudes...

...General Kassem was able to point to an "obvious connection" between the Kurdish uprising and British antics in the Persian Gulf...

...While the officers who freed Syria from Nasser have fulfilled their promise to withdraw from politics, they are nevertheless watching alertly from the wings...

...No government calling itself reformist could have ignored it, and Nasser duly settled landless fellahin on tracts whittled off the pashas' estates—his most important positive achievement to date...

...The peasants are angry at Kassem for breaking his promise to implement rapid agrarian reform...

...Egypt's appalling internal problems forced Nasser, as they had forced his predecessors, into diversionary foreign adventures and antiJewish and xenophobic campaigns, even though his personal ambitions and the strength of his personality undoubtedly gave Egyptian foreign policy an aggressiveness and consistency it had previously lacked...

...Syria's frontiers, like those of its neighbors, were fixed after 1918 by the British and French for purposes of their own, in callous disregard of economic, linguistic and religious considerations...

...Some British officials concerned with Persian Gulf affairs believe that it is General Kassem's awareness of his growing unpopularity that has spurred him to press Iraq's tenuous claim to Kuwait...

...Outside the UAR, the mobs that once idolized him are today sceptical of his pretensions...

...Inevitably, the British Defense Ministry's initiative set Arab adrenalin flowing too...

...After taking over Lebanon, they intended to appeal to the Syrians to abolish the LebanoSyrian frontier and join in forming a unitary state...

...What British officials most fear is a deal between Kassem and Nasser, whereby Kassem would buy UAR support for the seizure of Kuwait by offering a percentage of Kuwait's oil output and royalties...

...On this occasion, its leaders appear to have been stimulated by Syria's recent recovery of its independence from the United Arab Republic (UAR...

...Most of the politicians who have emerged from the cold storage of the Nasser dictatorship are the familiar figures whose corruption and unbridled irresponsibility encouraged Army officers to seize power four times in the Republic's first decade...

...underemployment (an average of six months' work per rural worker per year) is general in the villages...

...The existence of Israel has secured Jordan against direct UAR attack...

...Syria's example has had an unsettling effect in Iraq, whose military ruler has failed to honor his pledge to introduce constitutional civil government...

...but they have little appetite for a campaign that—besides exposing them to British bombing in the 100 miles of open desert that separate Kuwait from Basra—might earn Iraq the opprobrium of other Arabic-speaking states...

...Indeed, many of his officers married into or established lucrative partnerships with the old landowning families...

...In the same statement he complained that corruption, incompetence and "reactionary forces" had cheated Egypt of the fruits of the 1952 "revolution...

...But from now on, he pledged, Egypt would be firmly propelled along the road to "Socialism...

...Both have been foiled— by the inefficiency of their agents, by the young King's personal courage, and by the support given him by Britain and the United States...

...In fact, Harold Watkinson did not even bother to go to his office that day, and Prime Minister Macmillan and Foreign Secretary Home remained on vacation in Sussex and Scotland, respectively...

...Yet if Nasser pushes through the drastic reorganization of Egyptian society which he now appears to have in mind, he will shock and alienate many of his own officers...

...partly because he needed to justify his propaganda and broaden the base of his regime as middleclass support waned—Nasser suddenly began taking Socialism seriously, although he gave that ill-used ideal a crudely totalitarian interpretation...

...For the moment, Syria is calm under its conservative President, Nazim el-Kudsi, and a Government dominated by Right-wing businessmen and landowners (though the Prime Minister, Maarouf ed-Dawalibi, and Khaled el-Azm, another influential personality under the new regime, have in the past flirted with the extreme Left...

...Syria's liberation from Nasser's control, and Kassem's Kurdish and Kuwaiti involvements, have further consolidated Hussein's position to the point of emboldening him to broadcast, just before Christmas, a personal attack on the Egyptian dictator...

...Nasser's "revolution," for all its Socialistic veneer, from the outset was essentially a petit-bourgeoise affair which substituted pashas-inuniform for the millionaire landowners who had dominated Egyptian society during the reigns of Fuad and Farouk...