The Great Powers and the Arab World • 319renouncing its military ties with the West. When the junta's fiery young
nationalist who was second in command, Abd al-Salam Arif, flew to Dam¬
ascus to meet Nasir, it seemed only a matter of time before Iraq would join
the UAR. But the supreme revolutionary leader, Colonel Abd al-Karim
Qasim, realized that Iraq's oil revenues would go a lot farther at home if
they were not shared with 30 million Egyptians and 6 million Syrians. Arif
was eased from power. Qasim started playing a risky game, balancing be¬
tween Arab nationalists and communists. Iraq's new government bettered
the lives of the masses, but many problems, notably the Kurdish rebellion
in the oil-rich north, proved no easier for Qasim to resolve than they had
been for the Hashimites.
The Ideas of Nasirism
What did Nasir believe in? For many people in the Arab world, and some in
other Asian and African lands, he stood for their wish to defy Western im¬
perialism. Not only Egypt but most Arab countries—indeed, most "Third
World" nations—felt humiliated by the way the West had treated them in
the past. These feelings, and the conviction that the Arabs could build
themselves a better future, led to an ideology called "Nasirism." Its main
ideas were pan-Arabism, positive neutralism, and Arab socialism.
Pan-Arabism is Arab nationalism with a stress on political unification.
Nasir and his supporters saw how foreign imperialism and dynastic rival¬
ries had split up the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Middle East into a
dozen or more countries. Thus divided, the Arabs had lost Palestine in
1948 and were still subject to the machinations of outsiders. For instance,
even in the 1950s, the benefits of Arab oil were going to a few hereditary
monarchs and foreign companies when they should have been shared by
all the Arabs. Political unification would increase the wealth and power of
the Arab world as a whole. Nasir's opponents equated his pan-Arabism
with Egyptian imperialism. They accused him of trying to seize control of
the rest of the Arab world to enrich Egypt in general and his own regime
in particular.
Positive neutralism, as we have mentioned, was Nasir's policy of not
aligning Egypt with either the communist bloc or the anticommunist mili¬
tary alliances that the US promoted. Rather, it invited other countries to
join Egypt in a loose association of nonaligned states. Thus Egypt, together
with such countries as India and Yugoslavia, could thwart US and Soviet ef¬
forts to line up the other countries of the world on opposing sides. Neutral¬
ism could reduce world tensions and maybe even resolve the cold war.