MIDDLE EAST: From the Atlantic to the Gulf?

Meeting for the first time outside the Middle East, the ten-nation Arab League last week sought desperately to give the color of truth to diplomats’ and demagogues’ claims of 75 million Arabs standing as one, “from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf.” Instead, the session at Morocco’s Atlantic port of Casablanca served only to show how deeply divided the Arab world is.

To the usual fierce resolutions denouncing Israel, the eight ministers present added impassioned protestations of support for the Algerian rebels. But the two Arab nations that had done the most for the Algerian nationalists—Tunisia, by giving the F.L.N. rebels a base on its soil, and Iraq, by sending them some $10 million in cash—boycotted the whole conference. Tunisia stayed away because President Bourguiba insists that the League is still dominated by Egypt’s Nasser, and Iraq refused to attend for the same reason. And even as the men in Casablanca talked unity, Radio Baghdad broadcast new testimony that Nasser had backed the army officers who plotted last March’s Mosul rising (see below) against Iraq’s Premier Kassem—to which Cairo replied by charging that Iraqi pilots shepherd Israeli ships through the Shatt-al-Arab.