and was stationed in the Sinai Desert on the
Egyptian side of the Egyptian–Israeli border.
In reality, Nasser’s position after Suez was a
weak one. There was no hiding the fact of his
defeat by Israel. No one realised this more clearly
than the astute King Hussein of Jordan. Before
Suez he had been forced by powerful groups in his
country to denounce the West and to embrace
Egypt. After Nasser’s defeat by Israel, Egypt was in
no condition to interfere. In April 1957 Hussein
foiled a coup and declared martial law, assuming
personal power with the support of the army.
With Egypt and Syria already relying on Soviet
support, the US stepped into the vacuum left by
the British after Suez. The so-called Eisenhower
Doctrine, approved by Congress and signed by
the president in March 1957, involved the US
more deeply in the Middle East. The US offered
economic and military aid and empowered the
president to use armed force to assist any nation
in the Middle East requesting such help against
armed aggression ‘from any country controlled by
international communism’. Since the Cold War
was not the root cause of instability and conflict
in the Middle East, the Doctrine did not con-
tribute a great deal to peace.
For Arab leaders to embrace the US openly as
friend and protector in the 1960s and 1970s was
made virtually impossible by American support
for Israel. Only Lebanon, with a Christian non-
Arab president, responded positively to Eisen-
hower. To counter the Soviet alignment with
Egypt and Syria, Eisenhower ordered the US
Sixth Fleet into the eastern Mediterranean and
sent financial aid to Jordan. The US also tried to
destabilise the regime in Syria. This attempt
failed. Worse still, the West’s most reliable ally,
Iraq, changed regimes and left the Baghdad Pact.
In July 1958 a bloody revolution broke out in
Iraq, and the king and his chief pro-Western min-
ister were brutally killed. General Abdel Kassem,
with local communist help, seized power. In
Jordan, King Hussein was greatly alarmed and,
fearing for his throne, asked for British help.
Britain sent troops and Hussein held shakily on
to power. For a time too, in response to a call
for assistance from the Lebanese president, US
marines were landed from the Sixth Fleet. As it
turned out, it was not these applications of the
Eisenhower Doctrine that constrained the Soviets
in the Middle East, but the rivalry of the Arab
nations among themselves. Fundamental to inter-
Arab conflict was the hostility between Iraq and
Egypt. Nasser interpreted communist support for
Iraq’s General Kassem as an unfriendly act towards
Egypt. By the spring of 1959 Kassem denounced
Nasser, and Nasser denounced Kassem.
Ultimately neither the Soviet Union nor the
US could enlist the Middle Eastern nations in the
Cold War. The leaders of these nations were pri-
marily concerned with their internal and regional
conflicts; they made use of Cold War antagonisms
to further their own interests. The naval-base facil-
ities that the Soviet navy acquired over the years in
Egypt, Syria, Libya and the People’s Democratic
Republic of Yemen as well as on the Red Sea
entailed great costs directly and indirectly. Foreign
naval bases, moreover, are dependent on the
changing attitudes and policies of the leaders in
power in these unstable countries. The Soviet
Union’s expensive policy was singularly unsuccess-
ful. In one respect, though, it was a major player
in the Middle East and that was in its role of sup-
plying arms to Israel’s principal enemies, Egypt,
Syria and Iraq. This, in turn, stimulated the US
and other Western nations to try to replace the
Soviet Union as the provider of arms. Inevitably
the Middle East became a danger to world peace.
Israel, despite its historic roots, is a new country
whose development in the post-war world has
been astonishing. The great majority of the people
who built the nation had left a Europe whose soil
had been soaked with Jewish blood. The young
fighters and pioneers who had reached what was
Palestine before 1947 had lost their families in
Hitler’s Holocaust and in Poland, even after the
war had come to an end. The diverse European
Jews speaking no common language were forced
into a nation sharing one purpose above all others:
they would never again be defenceless. They are
bound together by the common memory of the
Holocaust when no nation cared enough to try to
save Jewish men, women and children.
The immigrants to Palestine did not come to
empty lands. The Jews settled in towns which
1
THE STRUGGLE FOR PREDOMINANCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST 455
