Nasser: The Last Arab

"There are a lot of books out there about Nasser. Some of the books by local authors like Mohamed Heikal are very important as semi-memoirs. Aburish, it seems to me, gives a very fair and balanced picture of Nasser’s ambitions. He wanted to be the leader of an Arab renaissance. Ironically this is what the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles hoped in 1953, when he first visited the revolutionaries in Egypt. He promised them that he would make Egypt a major regional military power if the Egyptians tried to make peace with Israel and if they joined into a Middle Eastern pact much like NATO. In other words, if they played their assigned role in the Cold War they could become a regional leader. Through such a pact, it was hoped, the countries of the Middle East would focus on cooperation. Nasser balked at such a limited role, and proved to be a great problem for Washington, taking aid from the Russians and nationalising the Suez Canal. Ironically, the policy that both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter tried to pursue towards Iran when they tried to make the Shah into the leader of the Middle East was what Dulles had once tried to do with Egypt. And therefore this book is very good at helping us understand how Nasser’s ambitions were more than that and yet how the United States and others hoped to use those ambitions to mold a pro-Western Egypt. To the end with Mubarak. The progression is obvious. Sadat, in his autobiography, says that in Nasser’s last days he had warned that everything an Egyptian leader tried was going to be very chancy because the United States called 99% of the shots in the Middle East. Sadat kept repeating that and in 1973, when he launched the October War [against Israel], he very self-consciously did this, not in the expectation of military victory, but in terms of getting the United States involved, on the grounds that if the United States did not get more involved a few things would happen. One, the Russians would continue their influence in Egypt, and two, there would be permanent instability and potential for war in the Middle East. That was Sadat’s message to the United States and it worked. If you look at Kissinger’s memoirs he talks about Sadat as a modern Bismarck. I think that is going a bit far but still Kissinger realised exactly what was up. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And the most amazing thing to me, which comes out of all the documents that were made available, was on Kissinger’s first visit in shuttle diplomacy at the end of the October War, Sadat asks him to provide him with CIA protection. This is just like one of the Indian princes inviting the British in the 18th and 19th centuries to protect them in exchange for being protected. It has changed quite a bit. Towards the end of the Mubarak days there was very heavy traffic between the Pentagon and the Egyptian military. When it became clear that Mubarak was not going to survive in any form, the Americans were very anxious to make sure that in the future the contacts in the military were not disturbed. And I think the question will be just how much the United States will be able to influence the Egyptian military and in turn how much the military will be able to keep control of the situation. Admiral Mullen [the US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff] who is about to retire, keeps talking about what a wonderful worthwhile investment our military aid has been over the years. The $50bn we invested in Egypt has paid great dividends. I think we are very concerned about whether we will be able to keep that investment up. From what I am reading, and of course here we are projecting into the future, I am not sure the relationship will ever be quite the same, and I think that the new government that emerges in Egypt, whatever it is, will try to have more determination of its own history. And that is no bad thing. If you say that America stepped in at the end of the colonial era to re-order the world, you might say we are now witnessing the end of the neo-colonial era with the events of the Arab Spring that began in Tunisia and received a great impetus from the events in Tahrir Square."