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As a result of the Sinai debacle, Gamal Abdel Nasser has tumbled all the way down the prestige pyramid internationally, but he still remains an imposing pharaonic figure to most Arabs. Western experts wonder how long he can stave off a coup, for the fact is that Nasser's Egypt is a mess. Nasser has sacked his top military men, cashiered hundreds of officers for desertion under fire, and left the army's morale near zero—all dangerous for a man whose chief political support comes from a pampered officer corps. The Russians, disgusted with the performance of Nasser's military forces (one army general was dead drunk in a Cairo hotel on the morning of the Israeli attack), are insisting on a complete reorganization of the military.
Egypt's economic problems are desperate. Its four main sources of foreign exchange are either sick, dead, scuttled or in Israel. Tourism, which ordinarily brings in $78 million a year, has dried up. The cotton crop ($300 million a year) is threatened by the worst plague of cotton leafworms since World War II. The Suez Canal, which brings Egypt $260 million a year, is clogged with sunken ships, the work of Egyptian frogmen who dynamited them or opened their sea cocks. Nearly 80% of Egypt's oil production came from wells in the Sinai, which are now in Israeli hands. Egypt cannot even pay its international bills.
¶SYRIA lost all but six of its 70 combat jets, all but a quarter of its armor —and Russia seems in no particular hurry to send in replacements. Syrian President Noureddin Attassi and his ruling Baathist party were unmasked as paper tigers for championing total war and then offering no more than nuisance shelling until the Israelis turned full wrath on Syrian gun emplacements. But the Israeli invasion of Syria united the Syrians and gave the Baathists a new lease on government house in Damascus. Not even they have been able to destroy the country's ability to feed itself—though they have tried by dividing the land into small, uneconomical lots—and Syria had no oil or real tourism to lose. In place of the road signs that used to supply directions, new signs have appeared: "No peace until Zionism ends."