The Iraqi Revolution left Jordan totally isolated and threatened by the same Arab nationalist forces that had swept away the much stronger monarchy in Baghdad. King Hussein’s first reaction was to dispatch his army to put down the revolution and restore his family’s rule in Iraq. It was an emotive response rather than a rational calculation. Even if his overstretched, underarmed forces had managed to overpower the stronger Iraqi army, there were no surviving Hashemites in Iraq to restore to the throne (the only surviving member of the family, Prince Zeid, was then serving as Iraq’s ambassador to Great Britain and lived in London with his family). Hussein soon recognized the vulnerability of his own position, and how easy it would be for his enemies in the UAR to overthrow him now that he no longer had Iraq to back him up. As he recalled his own army, which had reached 150 miles inside Iraq, Hussein turned to Britain and the United States on July 16 to request military assistance. As in Lebanon, foreign troops were seen as essential to prevent outside intervention in Jordan. It was a great risk for Hussein to turn to the former imperial power, so discredited by the Suez Crisis. Yet the risks of going it alone were even worse. On July 17, British paratroopers and aircraft began to arrive in Jordan to contain the damage of the Iraqi Revolution.

At the height of the Cold War, when political analysts conceived of whole regions of the world as dominoes at risk of falling, officials in Washington, London, and Moscow alike believed the Iraqi Revolution would set off an Arab nationalist sweep. They were convinced that the Iraqi coup had been masterminded by Nasser and that he was intent on bringing all the Fertile Crescent under his dominion in the United Arab Republic. This in part explains the speed with which the United States and Britain intervened to prop up the pro-Western states in Lebanon and Jordan. All eyes now turned to Egypt—to sound out Nasser’s views on recent events—and to Iraq, to see what Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim intended to do. Would he bring Iraq into union with Syria and Egypt, creating the Arab superstate that would redress the balance of power in the region? Or would the traditional rivalry between Cairo and Baghdad be preserved in the republican era? According to Nasser’s confidant, Mohamed Heikal, the Egyptian president had misgivings about the Iraqi Revolution from the outset. Given the extraordinary volatility of the Arab world in 1958, and the tensions between the Soviets and the Americans, further regional instability could only represent a liability for Egypt. Nasser was meeting with Tito in Yugoslavia when he first learned of the coup in Baghdad, and he flew directly to Moscow to meet with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on July 17. The Soviets were convinced that Nasser had orchestrated the whole affair and were concerned about the U.S. reaction. Khrushchev admonished Nasser, saying, “Frankly we are not ready for a confrontation. We are not ready for World War Three.”⁵² Nasser tried to convince his Soviet ally that he had no part in the events in Baghdad, and he tried to secure Soviet guarantees against U.S. retaliation. The most that Khrushchev was willing to offer was to conduct Soviet-Bulgarian maneuvers on the Turkish border to discourage the United States from deploying Turkish troops in Syria or Iraq. “But I am telling you frankly, don’t depend on anything more than that,” Khrushchev warned the Egyptian president. Nasser reassured Khrushchev that he had no intention of seeking Iraq’s accession to the UAR. The new Iraqi government was itself divided on whether to seek union with Nasser or preserve the independence of Iraq. The new leader of Iraq, Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim, was determined to rule an independent state and had no intention of delivering his country to Nasser’s rule. He worked closely with the Iraqi Communist Party, seeking closer ties to the Soviet Union, and was cool toward the Cairo regime that had clamped down upon the Egyptian Communist Party. Qasim’s second-in-command, Colonel ‘Arif, played to the Arab nationalist gallery in calling for Iraq to join Egypt and Syria in the UAR. Qasim ultimately arrested his coconspirator and had ’Arif imprisoned, condemned to death, and reprieved (in 1963’Arif would head the coup that would overthrow and execute Qasim). For the next five years, Qasim took Iraq down the road of rivalry, rather than unity, with Egypt, and relations between Iraq and the UAR deteriorated in mutual recrimination. Iraq?s failure to join the United Arab Republic was a great disappointment to Arab nationalists across the Middle East, who had seen in the bloody revolution the possibility of uniting the three great centers of Arabism?Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad.

The Arab world had been utterly transformed by the Egyptian Revolution. In the course of the 1950s Egypt had emerged as the most powerful state in the region and Nasser the undisputed leader of the Arab world. Nasser rose to the peak of his power in 1958 with the union of Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic. The union sent shock waves across the Arab world that nearly toppled the fragile governments in neighboring Lebanon and Jordan. Arab nationalists welcomed the prospect of the collapse of the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan and of the pro-Western Christian state in Lebanon in the expectation that both would join the United Arab Republic. The Iraqi Revolution of 1958 that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad seemed the harbinger of a new Arab order, uniting Egypt and the Fertile Crescent and fulfilling the hopes of Arab nationalists in a united, progressive Arab superstate. For one brief, heady moment, it looked as though the Arab world might break the cycle of foreign domination that had marked the Ottoman, imperial, and Cold War eras to enjoy an age of true independence. Iraq’s decision to stay out of the United Arab Republic was a major turning point. Without the excitement and momentum that the accession of Iraq, or indeed of Jordan or Lebanon, might have brought to the UAR, Egypt and Syria were left to the mundane business of making their hybrid state work. They would not succeed. Arab nationalism turned a corner, and Nasser, having reached the pinnacle of success in the course of the 1950s, suffered a string of setbacks and defeats that turned the 1960s into a decade of defeats.

CHAPTER 11

The Decline of Arab Nationalism

In the course of the 1950s, Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers had led Egypt and the Arab world through a string of improbable triumphs. “Nasserism” had become the dominant expression of Arab nationalism. Men and women across the Arab world believed the Egyptian president had a master plan for unifying the Arab people and leading them to a new age of independence and power. They saw their hopes realized in the union of Syria and Egypt. Nasser’s remarkable run of successes came to an end in the 1960s. The union with Syria unraveled in 1961. The Egyptian army got mired in Yemen’s civil war. And Nasser led his nation and its Arab allies into a disastrous war with Israel in 1967. The long-promised liberation of Palestine was yet further set back by Israel’s occupation of the remaining Palestinian territories, as well as the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and Syrian Golan Heights. The hopes of the Arab world in 1960 had been worn down to disillusion and cynicism by the time of Nasser’s death in 1970. The events of the 1960s had a radicalizing impact on the Arab world. With British and French imperialism increasingly a thing of the past, the Arabs found themselves drawn into the politics of the Cold War. By the 1960s the Arab states had divided into pro-Western and pro-Soviet blocs. The influence of the Cold War was most pronounced in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which developed into a proxy war between Soviet and American arms. The Arab experience, it seemed, would continue to be one of divide and rule.