Perhaps the most vulnerable Arab leader in 1958 was the young King Hussein of Jordan, who would celebrate his twenty-third birthday in November of that year. Given Jordan’s history of relations with Britain, Hussein had been a particular target of the Nasserist propaganda machine. The Voice of the Arabs broadcast damning criticisms of Hussein and encouraged the Jordanian people to overthrow the monarchy and join the progressive ranks of modern Arab republics. In response to these external pressures, King Hussein did all he could to distance himself from Britain. He stood up to British pressures and stayed out of the Baghdad Pact. In March 1956 he dismissed the British officers still running his army, including the influential commander Glubb Pasha. He even negotiated the termination of the Anglo-Jordanian treaty in March 1957?effectively ending British influence over the Hashemite Kingdom. These measures were followed by conciliatory efforts toward Egypt and Syria and by efforts to demonstrate Jordan?s commitment to Arab nationalism. Hussein’s boldest concession was to open his government to pro-Nasserist forces. In November 1956 Hussein held free and open elections for the first time in Jordan’s history, which gave left-leaning Arab nationalists a clear majority in the Jordanian parliament. Hussein took the risk and invited the leader of the largest party, Sulayman al-Nabulsi, to form a government of loyal opposition. The experiment lasted less than six months. The reform-minded Nabulsi government had a difficult time reconciling the contradictions between loyalty and opposition. Moreover, al-Nabulsi enjoyed greater public support and loyalty from the Nasserist “Free Officer” elements in the Jordanian military than did the king. Hussein came to believe that prolonging the Nabulsi government would shorten his monarchy, and he decided to act. In April 1957 Hussein took a real gamble in demanding al-Nabulsi’s resignation, on the pretext of the government’s sympathies for communism. Shortly after dismissing al-Nabulsi, Hussein took forceful measures to reassert his hold over the country and its armed forces. By mid-April, King Hussein had orchestrated the arrest or exile of the leading Jordanian Free Officers who threatened his rule and secured oaths of loyalty from his troops. The pressures on Jordan intensified following the 1958 union of Syria and Egypt.⁴⁶ Arab nationalists redoubled their calls for the Hashemite government to step aside and for Jordan to join the progressive Arab ranks through union with the United Arab Republic. Hussein’s own vision of Arab nationalism was more dynastic than ideological, and he turned to Iraq, led by his cousin King Faisal II, to shore up Jordan’s vulnerable position. Within two weeks, he concluded a unity scheme with Iraq called the Arab Union, launched in Amman on February 14, 1958. The Arab Union was a federal arrangement that preserved each country’s separate national status but called for joint military command and foreign policy. The capital of the new state was to alternate between Amman and Baghdad every six months. The two Hashemite monarchies were connected by blood ties, a shared history under British tutelage, and even had a border in common. The Arab Union was no match for the United Arab Republic, however. The union of Iraq and Jordan was seen as a rearguard action against the threat of Nasserism. By throwing in his lot with Iraq, host of the Baghdad Pact, whose prime minister Nuri al-Sa’id was reviled as the most anglophile Arab politician of his day, Hussein had exposed his kingdom to even greater pressure from the Nasserists.

Lebanon was another pro-Western state that came under intense pressure from the union of Syria and Egypt. The sectarian division of power agreed to in the 1943 National Pact had begun to unravel. Lebanese Muslims (which term grouped Sunnis, Shiites, and Druzes) were particularly aggrieved. They did not approve of the pro-Western policies pursued by the Maronite Christian president Camille Chamoun and wanted to align Lebanon with more overtly Arab nationalist policies. The Lebanese Muslims in 1958 had reason to believe that they outnumbered the Christians. The fact that the government had not authorized a new census since 1932 only confirmed Muslim suspicions that the Christians refused to recognize demographic reality. Lebanese Muslims began to question the political distribution of power that left them with less political voice than their numbers would warrant under a more proportional system. They knew that under true majority rule, Lebanon would pursue policies in line with the dominant Nasserist politics of the day. The Lebanese Muslims saw Nasser as the solution to all their problems, a strong Arab and Muslim leader who would unite the Arab world and end the perceived subordination of Lebanon’s Muslims in the Christian-dominated Lebanese state. President Chamoun, however, believed Nasser posed a direct threat to Lebanon’s independence, and he sought foreign guarantees from outside subversion. After the Suez Crisis, Chamoun knew he could not count on France or Britain for support. Instead, he turned to America. In March 1957 he agreed to the Eisenhower Doctrine. First presented to the U.S. Congress in January 1957, the doctrine was a major milestone in the Cold War in the Middle East. As a new policy initiative designed to contain Soviet influence in the Middle East, it called for American development aid and military assistance to Middle Eastern states to help them defend their national independence. Most significant, the Eisenhower Doctrine authorized “the employment of the armed forces of the United States to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence” of states in the region “against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism.” Given the deepening of Soviet-Egyptian relations since the Czech arms deal and the Suez Crisis, the Eisenhower Doctrine seemed to many a policy designed to contain Egyptian as much as Soviet influence in the Arab world. Egypt rejected the new American policy as the Baghdad Pact all over again—another attempt by the Western powers to impose their anti-Soviet priorities on the Arab region, ignoring Arab concerns over Israel. Thus, when the president of Lebanon formally accepted the Eisenhower Doctrine, he entered on a collision course with both the Nasser government and Nasser’s many supporters in Lebanon. Matters came to a head in the Lebanese parliamentary elections, held in the summer of 1957. In Lebanon, the parliament elects the president of the republic for a single six-year term. The parliament resulting from the 1957 elections would thus elect the next Lebanese president in 1958, so the stakes were high. In the run-up to the elections, Chamoun’s opponents—Muslims, Druze, and Christians alike—formed an electoral bloc called the National Front. The front brought together a formidable group of politicians: the Sunni leader from Tripoli, Rashid Karami; the most powerful Druze politician, Kamal Jumblatt; and even Maronites hostile to Camille Chamoun’s rule, like Bishara al-Khoury’s Constitutional Bloc. The National Front represented a far larger share of the Lebanese public than those supporting the beleaguered President Chamoun. Lebanon became a battlefield between the Americans, trying to promote regimes sympathetic to the West, and the Nasserists, who were trying to unite Arab ranks against foreign intervention. As parliamentary elections neared, the U.S. government feared Egypt and Syria would promote the National Front and undermine the position of the pro-Western Chamoun. So the Americans subverted the elections themselves. The C.I.A. provided massive funds to underwrite the election campaigns of candidates running in Chamoun’s bloc in an operation overseen personally by the American ambassador to Lebanon, who was determined to achieve “a 99.9 percent-pure pro-U.S. parliament.” Wilbur Crane Eveland, the C.I.A. agent who hand-delivered the funds to Chamoun in his distinctive gold Ford de Soto convertible, had grave misgivings about the operation. “So obvious was the use of foreign funds by the [Lebanese] president and prime minister that the two pro-government ministers appointed to observe the polling resigned halfway through the election period.”⁴⁷ Electoral tensions gave rise to large-scale fighting in northern Lebanon, where many civilians were killed and wounded during the voting. Chamoun won in a landslide. The victory was not so much an endorsement of the Eisenhower Doctrine as evidence of the corruption of the Chamoun government. The opposition press took the election results as proof that Chamoun sought to stack the parliament in his favor in order to amend the Lebanese constitution to allow himself an unlawful second term as president. With the opposition shut out of the parliament, some of its leaders turned to violence to prevent Chamoun from gaining a second term of office. Bombings and assassinations wracked the capital city of Beirut and the countryside from February to May 1958. The breakdown in order accelerated after the union of Syria and Egypt, as pro-Nasser demonstrations gave way to violence. On May 8, 1958, Nasib Matni, a pro-Nasser journalist, was assassinated. Opposition forces blamed the government for his death. The National Front held Chamoun’s government responsible for the murder and called for country-wide strikes in protest. The first armed disturbance broke out in Tripoli on May 10. By May 12, armed militias were fighting in Beirut as Lebanon dissolved into civil war. The commander of the Lebanese army, General Fuad Shihab, refused to deploy the army to prop up the discredited Chamoun government. The Americans prepared to intervene in Lebanon as the situation deteriorated and the pro-Western Chamoun government looked in danger of falling to the Nasserists.