THE CRISIS OF MODERNITY 325need for army officers opened up places for lower class boys in the coun-
try's elite military schools and Nasser rode this opportunity all the way to
the rank of colonel.
The Arab defeat in 1948 deepened his sense of grievance. He blamed the
country's king for it, and so he conspired with some hundred other army of-
ficers {"the Free Officers Club") to overthrow the monarchy and set up a re-
public. One morning in the summer of 1952, the Free Officers struck hard
and fast: a nearly bloodless coup-two casualties and the monarchy was gone.
Getting rid of the king was the easy part, though. The big step was get-
ting the British out of Egypt. For this step, however, Nasser needed serious
firepower. The Cold War being in full swing at this time, almost any emerg-
ing nation-state could get arms from one of the two superpowers, so Nasser
approached the Americans; but they didn't see Egypt as a key to "contain-
ing" Communism and mistrusted what this Arab fellow would do with
weapons, so they turned him down. Nasser then went to the Soviets and
from them got mountains of weaponry-which made the Americans sit up
and take notice. In typical Cold War fashion, they decided Egypt was im-
portant after all. In a bid to win Nasser back, they offered to build him the
world's biggest dam, right across the Nile River at a place called Aswan, a
dam that would multiply Egypt's farmland and produce enough electricity
to vault the country into the ranks of industrialized nations instantly! A
breathtaking vision-the fulfillment of the secular modernist dream!
But when Nasser looked at the fine print, he saw that the aid agreement
included U.S. military bases on Egyptian soil and U.S. oversight of Egypt's
finances: here was the thin end of the imperialist wedge once again enter-
ing his country's heart. Nasser refused the aid, but could not stop dream-
ing of the Aswan Dam. But how could he finance the dam without selling
his country to one of the superpowers?
Then he saw the answer: the Suez Canal, of course. The canal was
pulling in about $90 million a year, and Egypt was getting only $6.3 mil-
lion of it, roughly. Here was the money Egypt needed for its development,
and it was mostly draining away to Europe! In 1956, Nasser suddenly
poured troops into the Canal Zone and took over the canal.
A furor broke out in Europe. British politicians called Nasser another
Hitler, a madman with a grandiose scheme of world conquest. The French
press said Egyptians were too primitive to run the canal; they would disrupt