LITMIR.BIZ

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The confrontation confirmed Nasser’s worst fear; he complained to Zakaria, after what he considered Amer’s “silent coup,” that there were now two states in Egypt, an official one, which he presided over, and a shadowy one led by Amer.²⁸ In a less guarded moment, he bluntly confessed to Sadat that the country was currently “run by a gang … I am responsible as president, but it is Amer that rules.”²⁹ The type of regime emerging in Egypt in the 1960s was therefore one of dual power, an unstable and alarming situation.

      The previously lurking power struggle now came into the open. Nasser’s goal was to infiltrate the military, while Amer’s goal was to extend his influence over the political sphere. The president pushed Amer in March 1964 to hire Muhammad Fawzy as chief of staff, after he had refused to surrender general command to him two years earlier. The field marshal acquiesced in order to appease Nasser, but then restricted Fawzy’s duties to trivial administrative tasks, and created a new position in the chain of command—the so-called Ground Forces Command (GFC)—to carry out the duties of the chief of staff.³⁰ Amer and his entourage, on the other hand, tightened their grip over the military and security, and began to extend their influence over civilian sectors as well, from overseeing land reform to supervising public sector companies and running sporting clubs. In truth, though, the real players in this struggle were neither Nasser nor Amer, but rather their security associates. For example, hiring Fawzy as chief of staff was proposed by his relative Samy Sharaf, the PBI director; at the same time, the OCC head, Shams Badran, had an infinitely stronger control over the military and military-based security organs than Amer himself.³¹

      At this point, Nasser began to regret his disregard for political organization. If he had formed a strong ruling party, he would have kept the military in line via political commissars, as was the case in Russia and China. Instead, he resolved to control the military through secret cells loyal to his regime. Now that their loyalty had shifted to Amer, he had no way of purging them—he simply did not know who the members of these cells were.^* But perhaps it was not too late. If the military had become his rival’s power base, and if the security apparatuses he controlled (the PBI; the Interior Ministry’s investigative organ, the GID; and the police force) were no match for Amer’s ensemble (the OCC; the military and civilian intelligence agencies; and the military police), then maybe he could turn his attention to the political apparatus—maybe he could shore up his social support and transform the rudimentary organs that existed so far into an all-powerful ruling party. If he succeeded in expanding and organizing his social base, then maybe he could reduce the relative weight of the military in the ruling coalition. The idea of the Arab Socialist Union (ASU) was thus born—conceived from the beginning as a political counter to the military.

      COUNTERWEIGHING THE MILITARY

      Nasser deeply mistrusted political parties because they could be easily infiltrated and subverted. He preferred to mobilize support through direct appeal to the masses via speeches and state-controlled media. But by 1962, he realized how he had inadvertently cornered himself; because of his reluctance to build a powerful ruling party, the political arena became entirely dominated by the military and the security apparatus. Nasser was now determined to remedy this deficiency. He began to build on what he had. The chaotic array of political currents that constituted the Liberation Rally gave way by 1958 to a more pyramid-shaped, district-based structure called the National Union (NU). But despite its more solid structure, the NU was a nonideological control instrument open to all citizens and concerned mostly with providing crowds to welcome state dignitaries, shepherding them to root for the president during national celebrations and to vote for whatever the government ordained in referendums. Neither the Liberation Rally nor the NU had any capacity for popular mobilization. They were more like fluid social networks of all those who supported—or more accurately, sought to benefit from—the regime. They included students, workers, peasants, professionals, merchants, as well as rural notables and capitalists, coming together occasionally to express approval of whatever the regime did.

      The passing of the socialist laws of 1961, which Nasser used to broaden his mass base and tighten his grip over the bureaucracy, provided the occasion to reorganize and empower the NU. Through the National Charter of 1962, Nasser announced the creation of the ASU, which was supposed to represent the will of what he called “the alliance of the people’s productive forces” in achieving freedom (from imperialism), socialism (which meant a state-planned economy), and (Arab) unity. It was methodically structured along two axes: one based on profession, with committees for workers, peasants, intellectuals, soldiers, and “patriotic” capitalists, as well as the Socialist Youth Organization for students; and another on residence, with district branches in the cities and basic units in the villages (7,500 chapters in all). In theory, the ASU was supposed to provide candidates for parliament and cabinet, as well as other leadership positions, such as mayors and university deans, and “inspire” legislation and policies on all state levels. In short, it was supposed to represent the seat of political power.

      The GIS deputy director and leading ASU cadre Abd al-Fattah Abu al-Fadl published an exposition of the origins and goals of this new organization in the regime’s mouthpiece Al-Tali’ah (The Vanguard). Abu al-Fadl first explained that the ASU was a mass organization that brought together members of all social groups to allow them to resolve their conflicts and contradictions peacefully and to find common ground under the supervision of a political apparatus composed of “politically trained elements committed to the revolution’s principles.” Abu al-Fadl denied that the ASU was a ruling party, dismissing single-party rule as either fascist (representing the interests of the economically dominant class), or Communist (representing the dictatorship of the workers), and thus inherently prejudiced against other social groups. The ASU, in contrast, was an alliance of the people as a whole and allowed them all to express their interests and negotiate a means for coexistence. He then explained that the regime rejected political pluralism because in multiparty systems party struggles are proxies for class struggles, which the ASU aimed to eliminate; “in the absence of a basic contradiction between the interests of the people’s productive forces, there is no need for each of them to form an independent political organization.”³²

      All this rhetoric notwithstanding, it was clear that Nasser aspired for a Leninist-styled organization modeled on Soviet and East European (especially Yugoslavian) experiences. In a meeting with the members of the ASU’s provincial executive offices, on January 12, 1966, he stressed the “vanguard” role of the party: “We cannot succeed unless we understand the masses. We must take their ideas and opinions, study them, organize them, give them back to them, and then point them in the right direction.” His language then turned militaristic: “you must engage with people, recruit them, invite them … to expand the ASU army.”³³ But regardless of what Nasser desired, the ASU was not equipped to perform this vanguard role. In his enthusiasm to replicate the superb organization of Communist parties, the president seemed to have overlooked one missing ingredient: communism. Nasser was not a Communist, and did not adhere consistently to any strict ideology. He was a pragmatic man, though imbued with lofty ideas about modernity and social justice. Needless to say, without ideology there can be no ideological indoctrination.

      So all the ASU was capable of was to bond key social groups to the regime through material temptations rather than ideological commitment. This was good enough to achieve Nasser’s immediate goal: to revamp the political apparatus and place it on par with the military. Sharaf admitted that much: “We suffered an imbalance; the weight of the military was growing beyond control. Nasser created the ASU as a political counter to the army.”³⁴ And because Amer was aware of this, he fought the new organization fiercely. A good example is the Alexandria summer camp incident of 1964, when the organization’s youth branch (the Socialist Youth Organization) chose the following topic for its cadres to research during their stay: “How should ASU youth resist a possible coup?” When the MID reported the episode to Amer, he was naturally furious.³⁵

      The absence of ideology and the hidden goal of neutralizing the army condemned the ASU from the beginning to the fate of a highly centralized totalitarian body that issued directives from the top downward to keep citizens in line with regime policies and curb any opposition, rather than a mass mobilizing organ. The future ASU secretary-general Abd al-Muhsin Abu al-Nur described how he presided over

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