Maladjuster of the Middle East - New Nasser Book - A Review

We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World by Alex Rowell  (W.W. Norton, 2023).

If you think it is time to bone up on Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and his contributions to today's Middle East chaos, I can vouch that Alex Rowell's deeply researched and lucidly written We Are Your Soldiers is a good place to start.

Rowell is an Arabist – I mean that in a nice way. He lives among the Arabs, understands Arabic, and, as a journalist, endeavors to rationalize the Arab and Muslim Middle East in prestigious American and British media outlets. Don't let the fact that Rowell is not a philo-Zionist put you off for this book, for he has a solidly constructed thesis and presents a wealth of color and material that observers who care about Israel may want to squirrel away.

I look past lines like Israel captured the "Palestinian West Bank and Gaza" in 1967. Rowell knows those territories transferred from Turkey to England to Jordan and Egypt before falling to Israel in the Six-Day War. Maybe he means that they would have been Palestinian had the Palestinian Arabs not rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan. But let's not quibble. The book relates only tangentially to Israel.

Rowell brings something new to the table. He proposes that Gamal Abdel Nasser, who died in 1970 at age 52, not only left behind a fractured Egypt but that he is blameworthy for the instability that today troubles Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, and Libya.

Start with Egypt. Except for the brief 2012 to 2013 presidency of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, the country has had only military men at its helm – Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi who (on December 19, 2023) captured 89.6 percent of the vote to secure a third term. Astonishing not.

Rowell spells out in a gripping narrative the damage Nasser did as he habitually interfered with the normal political development of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, Libya, and his own Egypt. The real Nasser, as opposed to the iconic revolutionary caricature, "methodically destroyed the institutions of parliamentary democracy, banned all political parties, muzzled the press, gutted the judiciary, strangled civil liberties, and jailed or outright killed his opponents" and did so not only "at home but abroad."  

It didn't have to be this way. By 1952, it was indeed time for the ineffective King Farouk to go and for British suzerainty to end. Egypt was ready to run its own affairs and control its resources, including the lucrative Suez Canal. Waiting in the wings were the comparatively liberal reformist Wafd Party but also its competition, the Muslim Brotherhood (which eventually spawned al-Qaida, Islamic State, and Hamas). Wafd would have been the better choice. Instead, the motley "Free Officers," of whom Nasser was the most dominant, took power in a bloodless coup on July 23, 1952. The monarch sailed into exile on his yacht.

The figurehead of the putsch was General Muhammad Naguib, but when he imagined that he was more than that, Nasser promoted him to a ceremonial position. Nasser, like other Arab tyrants – Assad the Elder, Saddam, and Muammar Gaddafi – had found his path toward upward mobility through the military, making frenemies and influencing people who would comprise their juntas.

He completed the consolidation of power in 1955 and set out to restructure the country's polity, creating a cult of personality. At first, Nasser cooperated with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, while going after Wafd politicians. The crushing of parties like the Wafd, which promoted a semblance of tolerance and democratic values, is a motif throughout the Muslim Middle East. Hence, outside Israel, there is not a single country in our region with a democratic-oriented ruling party.

In 1954, Nasser was ready to turn against the Brotherhood. Along the way, he banned political parties, purged the army, politically neutered university campuses, controlled broadcasting, and closed newspapers. Transistor radio, which became available in 1954, transmitted his Voice of Cairo throughout the Middle East.

In April 1955, as European states were shedding their colonies, he appeared on the world stage at the Bandung Conference, where the non-aligned/third-world bloc of countries supposedly neither loyal to Soviet communism nor US capitalism was born. Israel was not invited due to Arab pressure. Nasser met Red China's Chou En-Lai, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sukarno of Indonesia alongside representatives from Pakistan and Jordan. The conference was a Muslim opportunity to gang up on "aggressive Zionism" and support "the rights of the Arab peoples in Palestine." It passed a unanimous resolution calling for the internationalization of Jerusalem (odd since, at the time, east Jerusalem was in Jordan's hands), called for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1947 Partition Plan lines, and a return of Arab refugees who had left or been forced out during the 1948 War. There was no mention of recognizing the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland within any boundaries.

Nasser "came back from Bandung a different man" full of himself, writes Rowell. He nationalized the Suez Canal, in which France had a substantial financial stake. This decision and Nasser's encouragement of cross-border attacks from the Gaza Strip (which Egypt occupied) into Israel precipitated the 1956 Sinai Campaign, in which Israel captured Gaza and Sinai while the French and British recovered military control of the Suez Canal. US President Dwight Eisenhower came to Nasser's diplomatic rescue and pressured Israel back unconditionally to the 1949 Armistice Lines. After flirting with him, the CIA mistook Nasser for a Soviet pawn and gave way to Moscow.

Around this point, foreigners, educated Arabs (Rowell mentions the family of Edward Said), and Jewish people found it expedient to leave Egypt. Once cosmopolitan, Cairo was becoming increasingly religious, provincial, and overpopulated because of urbanization. Nasser built concentration camps – Rowell describes these in detail – to punish political opponents; forced labor and torture by the sadistic secret police became a routine tool to maintain his authoritarian control.

The stage was now set to export Nasserism. But what was Nasserism? It was essentially secular pan-Arab nationalism. Throw in a dash of nationalization of major industries and a pinch of bloated government. Power and wealth accrued to the officer corps. Its foreign policy prescription was to keep Western influence at bay while tilting toward the Soviets.

Nasserism was also an imperialism. Nasser's bloody fingerprints were all over the coup that overthrew Iraq's Hashemite King Faysal II on July 14, 1958. Iraq's "Free Officers" (a recurrent euphemism for "revolutionary" nationalists coming out of the military) tormented and murdered moderate reformist politicians. Antisemitism went up a notch. With the sensible monarch and his wise prime minister out of the way, Iraq was spoiled for intramural warfare among its contending ethnic, tribal, and religious groups. The Free Officers turned on one another. Each successive strongman sought Nasser's approval. A Nasser protegee named Saddam Hussein emerged. As Rowell tells it, "If Nasser did not literally install Saddam on the throne, he nonetheless did a great deal to create the conditions that enabled him to get there – not the least during the three years he hosted, paid, and protected him as his guest in Cairo." The fiend clutched ruthlessly onto power from 1979 to 2003 until he was finally hung in 2006.

After a Nasser-instigated revolution in Syria, he pushed for a merger of the two countries into the “United Arab Republic.” Next, he appointed a high commissioner to administer affairs in Damascus and benefited from the services of a sadistic secret police chief. The Ba'ath Party of Syria wanted only to be Nasser's political tool, seeking closer union with Egypt. For Nasser, total devotion was not enough. Once he took over, Nasser sought to dismantle surviving trace elements of Syrian independence.

"The speed with which Nasser proceeded to squander" the "adulation" he enjoyed in Syria "was remarkable, writes Rowell. There was a "mismatch between Nasser's intentions and Syrians' expectations." A period of vicious instability followed that forced the Egyptian overlords out. Nonetheless, a pro-Nasser faction emerged that included a certain captain Hafez al-Assad. He, too, had been on  Nasser's payroll, was influenced by his style of rule, and lived in Cairo, perhaps rubbing elbows with Saddam Hussein. In September 1970, Assad wrested control of the country.

The psychopath does not fall far from the sociopath. Hafez's son Bashar replaced his father in July 2000. At least 350,000 Arabs have been killed in the fighting to keep the Assad clan of Alawites in power. Bashar, having butchered his way back into Arab good graces, is today a rehabilitated member of the Arab League hectoring Israel and praising the "Gaza Resistance."

In Lebanon, Nasser played a central role in stoking the 1958 intramural fighting, which heralded the unraveling of Lebanon's delicate sectarian political system. Then in 1964, he created, funded, and trained the Palestine Liberation Organization. He endorsed the ascendency of Cairo-born Yassir Arafat in 1967, as he edged out the PLO's founding chairman, Ahmad Shuqayri of Lebanon. The Palestinians had arrived in Lebanon after the 1948 War. By 1968, their "refugee camps" (opposition to permanent resettlement is a core ethos of Palestinian victimization) became autonomous, and PLO militias developed into a potent armed force. Nasser pressured the disintegrating Lebanese polity into accepting the “Cairo Agreement” (1969), which created a state within a state and gave the PLO the right to attack Israel from Lebanon. The country never regained sovereignty over its borders.

Nasser also did his darndest to overthrow Jordan's King Hussein (father of the current monarch Abdullah II). The young Hussein tried to placate Nasser, seek his guidance, and follow his lead. With Nasser's deceitful approval, Jordan flirted with becoming a member of the pro-Western Baghdad Pact. To his credit, the King experimented with democratic institutions, but Nasser's agents exploited every opening to undermine his regime. Nasser employed the Syrian secret police to destabilize Jordan. He tried repeatedly and continually failed to kill Hussein by poisoning his food and even his nasal spray and (using the Syrian airforce) shooting down his plane. Cairo either ordered or acquiesced to the assassination of Jordanian politicians close to the King. Fear that a genuine parliamentary government would be exploited to create insecurity helps explain how Jordan devolved into what it is today: a police state.

A wary Hussein and Nasser buried the hatchet by 1964 when Cairo created the PLO. Its establishment was awkward as Jordan had annexed the West Bank and held east Jerusalem. The only part of Palestine the PLO could liberate was Israel. In 1967, Nasser bamboozled Hussein to join him in going to war with Israel, which led to Jordan's loss of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Had Jordan stayed out of the war, as Israeli leaders pleaded for him to do, there would be no Jewish presence today in Judea and Samaria, no "settlements," and – who knows – Jordan, with its overwhelmingly Palestinian population, might today be a confederated Hashemite-Palestinian state.

It is de rigueur among anti- and post-Zionists to imagine that Nasser wanted to make peace with a recalcitrant Israel going back to the days of Moshe Sharett. I don’t doubt that Israel missed opportunities, but not obviously so. After losing the 1967 War, Rowell writes that Nasser was prepared to accept peace offers that would essentially undo his military losses. These included UN SC Resolution 242, crafted to be open to interpretation, and the 1969 Rogers Plan put forth by William Rogers, Richard Nixon's Secretary of State. He claims that, unlike Arafat, Nasser accepted a two-state solution to the conflict. I am not sure how he squares these assertions with Khartoum's "Three No's" – No peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No negotiations with Israel - announced at the Arab League Summit on September 1, 1967.

As for the Roger's Plan, Egypt demanded a total Israeli withdrawal from all the territory captured in the 1967 war and restoration of the "legitimate rights" of Palestinian refugees – presumably meaning repatriation within Green Line Israel. The Rogers Plan implied the Palestinian right of return. For Israel, this was a non-starter. Golda Meir wanted to negotiate permanent borders and peace treaties directly with Egypt and Jordan. The plan did not call on the Palestinian Arabs to end terrorism or accept the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland. It struck Israeli leaders as an attempt to appease the Arabs at Israel's expense.

In June 1970, the PLO tried to overthrow Hussein in what became known as Black September. One of its constituent groups hijacked five airplanes, four of which were ultimately flown to Dawson's Field in Jordan and blown up – TWA Flight 741; Swissair Flight 100; Pan Am Flight 93; and BOAC Flight 775.

Meantime, the hijacking of El Al Flight 219 was foiled, although the Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled, became the poster girl of the "destroy Israel by-any-means-necessary" crowd. Palestinian terrorists had also taken Western hostages, staying at two Amman hotels. And Palestinian gunmen had repeatedly shot at the King's motorcade. All this messaged Hussein's powerlessness to control his country.

To survive, the King unleashed his tanks and artillery on the PLO, which was embedded in the Palestinian refugee camps. Thousands were killed. Arafat, in his slippery way, sued for peace, and Nasser hosted a sulha reconciliation meeting in Cairo on September 26, 1970. The Egyptian leader suffered a heart attack and died on September 28, 1970, but not before he had rescued Arafat to fight another day.

Leaving Jordan, the PLO leader set up shop in Beirut, deploying his men in south Lebanon, which became Fatahland, to launch terror attacks into northern Israel. That ended in 1982 when the IDF ousted the PLO from Lebanon, and Arafat's entourage moved on to Tunisia until the 1993 Oslo Accords brought him to Ramallah.

No country suffered more than Yemen from Nasser’s interference. The Egyptian leader's involvement in Yemen was unprovoked and pure aggression, according to Rowell. In September 1962, Yemen's "Free Officers," inspired by Nasser, overthrew  Muhamad al-Badr, the Shi'ite imam running the country. His base was in northern Yemen among the Zaydi-Shi’ite tribes – the same population from which the Houthi clan would emerge in the 1990s. The fanatical Wahhabi Sunni Saudis and the evanescent British Empire joined forces with the Shi'ite imam against Nasser.

Today, as the war Hamas wrought rages in Gaza, Yemen is much in the news. Instead of Egypt, imperial Persia, which is Shi'ite, is on the scene. Yemen is dominated by the Houthi clan, who are Shi'ite Arabs. They are in strategic control of the strait of Bab al-Mandab, which leads to and from the Suez Canal (and Eilat). It is a choke point between the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean. By putting a squeeze on boats sailing between Asia and Europe, they hope the international community will pressure Israel to abandon its must-win war to defang Hamas.

In his day, the Egyptian leader used his airforce and sent tens of thousands of foot soldiers to Yemen. It was the only country where Egypt used poison gas and biological weapons (even after Nasser lost the 1967 war to Israel). He pulled out in defeat only in November 1967. Even his supporters referred to Yemen as Egypt's Vietnam.

Nasser left a further lethal legacy before he died – one Muammar Gadaffi. A Nasser-wannabe, he took power of Libya in September 1969. "Tell President Nasser we made this revolution for him," the young lieutenant cabled to Cairo. In his early days, Gadaffi was charismatic and feigned sanity, not the Caligula figure that comes down to us in history. To guide his acolyte, Nasser sent a viceroy to direct the development of Libya (as if the master had not run Egypt into an economic and political ditch). According to Rowell, from behind Libyan proxies, Nasser directed the country's foreign policies and negotiations with the outside world. Saddam Hussein tried to elbow Nasser out, but Gadaffi was true to his love. Nasser told Gadaffi that Allah had chosen him to rule Libya and implied that he would succeed him as leader of pan-Arabism and Nasserism.

Nasser's interest was understandable – Libya had a small population and immense oil wealth. Like his mentor, Gadaffi spread terror and destruction at home and beyond. He was behind multiple plane hijackings and assassinations, including  Pan Am Flight 103, blown up over Lockerbie, and the La Belle disco bombing in Germany. Rebels belatedly killed Muammar Gaddafi while one of them sodomized him with a bayonet in 2011; a fitting end.

Alas, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen are hopelessly failed states. Jordan and Egypt are, at best fragile states.

Rowell's book should put the final nails in the coffin of those who pretend Nasser was some avuncular revolutionary uncle.