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Flood Tide. For a long time the West was divided and confused in its response to Nasser. It recognized justice in Arab resentment against past foreign domination; it felt sheepish about some of its Arab allies (though few are as feudal as Nasser's partner, the Imam of Yemen, and Nasser himself has yet to allow democracy). The West has incurred Arab hate by its Israeli policy. It also acknowledged Nasser's genuine popularity, and hesitated to risk a showdown. With Iraq's abrupt fall, there was no longer a peaceful balance of tensions in the Middle East: Nasser was moving toward absolute domination. Had there been any real manifestation of substantial internal resistance to the coup in Iraq, the U.S. and Britain were in position, if not necessarily in the mood, to roll right on to Baghdad. The West had now lost its strongest bastion in the Middle East, and even more humiliating, by but three assassinations. For the first time in history, the U.S. was ashore in the Middle East, and this very fact had wide implications. The U.S. was committed to preserve the independence of Lebanon against Nasser, and against an all but irresistible tide.
The U.S. position was an uneasy one. Its armed presence in Lebanon might even hasten what it sought to prevent. In all the Arab world east of Suez, not one ruler pledged to the West remained in power last week except by the presence of Western troops. Whatever existing boundaries might be, there was no blinking the fact: the most elemental force in the Middle East is the unifying passion of Al Umma al Arabia, and Nasser symbolizes it.
In the long slow movement of events there is no real reason why Arab unity has to be against the West. The Arab world needs the techniques of the West to overcome its poverty, disease and ignorance. It needs the West's markets for its oil. But the misfortune of contemporary history is that any leader who tries to establish Arab unity in his own lifetime seems driven to make anti-Western emotion his main tool, and the more frenetic his outcry the more successful he is likely to be. Such is the destiny of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Arab in Western clothes.
After the last week's Middle East convulsion, the question was not whether Nasser is lost to the West (he was never the West's to lose), but whether he has forfeited the independence of the Arab unity movement—for Arab nationhood has no more desire to be Russia's slave than dependent on the West.
Nasser the gambler has ever been ready to summon Russian help, which he thinks he is skillfully using without being used. It is a dangerous game he plays, and all the odds are against his winning in the end. Last week as the Russians practically smothered him with their kind of help—U.N. vetoes, hints of "volunteers," anti-Western Moscow demonstrations, threats of war—Nasser visibly fought shy of the Russian embrace. Here was a man who spread, and could continue to spread, lies and hatred of the West, but the paradox of an infinitely complicated situation was that the U.S., though resisting him, had in the last resort to stand ready to save Nasser from the consequences of his own adventurism—from Communism itself.