Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen - Hazem Kandil

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was startled. When Nasser got to GHQ on October 31, he was advised to surrender himself to the British to spare the country from total destruction. Amer, who was apparently suffering from a nervous breakdown, cried: “The air strikes will send the country back a thousand years. I cannot expose my countrymen to such a massacre.”11 Ahmed Hamroush, who was present at the meeting, describes how Nasser harshly responded to Amer’s pleas for submission: “Nobody is going to surrender; everybody is going to fight … Your behavior is unmanly; the first shots have hardly been fired. Not only must I take direct command of the army, but I also don’t want you issuing any orders … If you can’t do better than mope like an old hag then you will be court-martialed.”12 Unshaken by the defeatism of his chief military commander, Nasser offered to lead the battle personally, a suggestion to which Amer quickly conceded. The president gathered that if the army was dispatched to face the Israelis in Sinai it would be caught between a rock and a hard place as soon as the Franco-British forces landed in the Canal Zone, and the road to the capital would be virtually undefended. He thus ordered all forces to pull out of Sinai in forty-eight hours (by November 2) and dig in around the banks of the canal. Despite the pressure, Nasser planned the withdrawal meticulously; his successful delaying tactics saved two-thirds of the men and equipment. He also prevented the pilots from joining the battle because he felt they were not yet equipped to take on Western aces. After effectively benching Amer, the president authorized the sinking of fifty cement tanks at the canal’s northern entrance to block an invasion from the Mediterranean, even though he knew this would obstruct navigation in the entire canal. On November 2, Nasser gave a resounding speech at al-Azhar mosque, rallying Egyptians for an all-out popular resistance. He put Zakaria in charge of coordinating popular resistance throughout the country, and dispatched three former RCC colleagues to organize resistance in the canal cities, especially around Port Said, before visiting the battlefront himself days later.13

      In a few days, the attack came to a halt. British and French troops evacuated on December 22 with no gains to speak of, followed by the Israelis in March 1957. Why did the tripartite campaign falter so soon? Nasser’s swift measures certainly had some effect. In addition, the British part of the military operation faced several logistical complications. British troops had evacuated the canal in June 1956 and were already too far away; the closest detachment was in Malta, six days’ sail from Egyptian shores. Assembling the troops once more proved to be one of the most “laborious, elaborate, and time-consuming” mobilization processes in military history.14 Part of the reason for that was that Britain, as Harold McMillan confessed in his memoirs, wanted to prepare for all eventualities. This is a better way of saying that his government “lacked the imagination and initiative to move on from the Second World War … launching a Normandy-style armada by the sure knowledge that in the time it took to cross the Mediterranean world opinion, already sympathetic to Egypt, would have moved much farther in that direction.”15 Ultimately, however, it was the actions of two countries that really mattered: the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States was not willing to accept a reverse to the retrenching of European imperialism after it had finally began to replace British and French hegemony in the Middle East, and the Soviet Union considered an assault on a country with which Moscow had just established military cooperation an unforgivable insult. It was their fierce rejection of the attack—one of the very few things they agreed on during the Cold War—that brought it to nothing.

      Although the Egyptian military was officially defeated (it was forced to withdraw from Sinai, and could not prevent allied air attacks or occupation), the Suez War was hailed as a “political triumph.” Of course, Nasser’s calculations had turned out to be flawed: he ruled out an Israeli intervention; he thought Franco-British competition in the Middle East would preclude their cooperation; he believed France was totally consumed in Algeria and could not afford to open another front; and he estimated that the time and cost needed to assemble a substantial British force was too prohibitive.16 Still, the president displayed great political agility in mobilizing popular resistance and securing diplomatic support out of all proportion to his country’s strength. His arousing speeches and confident attitude inspired Egyptians to resist fiercely, and the stories of their heroic defiance are still part of the folklore of the citizens of the canal cities. Also, the way he presented Egypt’s case to world opinion, and his willingness to compensate Britain and France for their lost shares in the Suez Canal, turned the table on the aggressors. He also proved to be a successful tactician, delaying the aggressors’ success and managing to bring home two-thirds of the army intact.

      But at the same time that Nasser’s political leadership was being celebrated in Egypt and throughout the developing world, Amer’s mediocre military abilities were exposed. Analyzing the military balance sheet, Egypt’s future war minister Abd al-Ghany al-Gamasy explains:

      The political victory might have overshadowed our dismal military performance, but there was no escaping the fact that we failed to secure the country from the east or the north; that the belligerents only yielded to international pressure; and that Israel managed to secure at least one considerable gain in exchange for its withdrawal: an international peacekeeping force stationed in Sharm al-Sheikh to guarantee freedom of Israeli navigation through the Straits of Tiran into the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea. Amer was supposed to reshuffle the general staff and service heads, upgrade the air force and air defenses, and establish a strong presence in Sinai to deter future Israeli aggression; none of this was done.17

      Keen on preserving the patronage network they had established, Amer’s security associates convinced him that the war was the president’s fault; after all, it was his reckless decision to nationalize the canal that brought it on. They also warned him that purging his loyal subordinates under pressure from Nasser would irrevocably tarnish his reputation. Personally, Amer became apprehensive of the military prowess his friend displayed during the war. His method to win back the respect of his men was to shower them with favors, to spoil them even further than he had already done. So while Nasser demanded far-reaching changes in military leadership and organization, an embittered Amer remained unyielding, refusing during a stormy meeting on November 15 to even transfer the scandalously incompetent air force commander, Major General Sedqi Mahmoud, because he was “his man.” Not only that, but Amer also lashed out at Nasser, accusing him of provoking an unnecessary war and then blaming the military for the result.18 Amer’s audacity shocked the president, who began to suspect that the military might be slipping out of his control, that his trusted lieutenant might have built his own power base in the corps. For the first time, a wedge was driven between the two longtime comrades. It could not have come at a worse time. Eisenhower expected a grateful Egypt to embrace his January 1957 offer of U.S. support for countries threatened by communism; instead, Nasser attacked the so-called Eisenhower Doctrine vehemently as an imperialist ruse that justified U.S. military intervention in the Middle East instead of arming newly independent states to defend their own borders. On March 22, 1957, the U.S. president met with the CIA chief, Allen Dulles, and the veteran Middle East operative Kermit Roosevelt to consider means of ousting Nasser19—plans that would finally take shape a decade later, shaking the Egyptian regime to the core.

      THE DARK YEARS

      The Suez War debacle and the confrontation that followed it made the president determined to remove his friend from military command. This was easier said than done. Building on his amicable and lavish personality, Amer’s security aides had placed him at the center of an elaborate patronage network within the officer corps. They talked him into promoting himself to the rank of field marshal in 1957 (a rank unknown in the Arabic lexicon), and helped him transform the army into a tribe, with him as tribal chief: allocating gifts and honors, granting personal favors, solving family disputes, inviting his men to all-night parties at his house, and making sure that the “field marshal’s men” remained untouchable. During his tenure, promotions accelerated to the point where one could become a brigadier general at the age of forty (compared with colonel in the early 1950s). All officers benefited from his doubling of salaries; his raising of the retirement age; his allocation of summerhouses, automobiles, travel grants, and interest-free loans; his order to have officers’ children accepted at universities regardless of their academic scores; and various other privileges.20 For the army, the field marshal had become something of a Santa Claus. Colonel Muhammad Selim recounted

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