Titans of History

NASSER, SADAT, MUBARAK

Egypt and The Arab Spring

1918–70 & 1918–81 & 1928–

I have been a conspirator for so long that I mistrust all around me.

Gamal Abdul Nasser

Gamal Abdul Nasser was the most influential Middle Eastern leader of the mid-twentieth century, the dictator of Egypt, the region’s most powerful country, and perhaps the most popular Arab potentate since Saladin. Yet his career ended in defeat and disappointment and the failure of his secular pan-Arabism opened the door to a new Islamic fundamentalism. Nevertheless for almost twenty years he was for many Arabs El Rais—the Boss.

Born in a village near Cairo, Nasser was the son of a post office worker. He was educated in Alexandria, where he lived with his grandmother and joined the army in 1937. Egypt was then ruled by the Albanian dynasty of kings descended from Mehmet Ali, the Ottoman warlord and pasha who seized control of the county after Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion, becoming first khedives then sultans and finally kings of Egypt. The country was actually run by a hybrid elite of Ottomans and Albanians as well as Egyptians—but even this was under the domination of Britain, which had controlled Egypt since 1882. Reading widely everything from the Koran to Dickens, Nasser was political from an early age, loathing the control of the British over Egyptian life.

Studying at the military academy, he met his political ally Abdul Hakim Amer, a genial, vain, bombastic and flamboyant fellow officer with whom he served in Sudan. Hoping for a Nazi victory to overthrow British rule in Egypt, he and Amer worked to put together a group of like-minded officers. Faced with the UN plan to partition Palestine between Jewish and Arab states, Nasser was tempted to fight on the Arab side and finally got his chance when King Farouk of Egypt, obese, incompetent and debauched, joined the other countries of the Arab League in an attack on the nascent Jewish state of Israel. The Egyptians, including Nasser, advanced fast into the Negev but the young officer witnessed the ineptitude of the king and his officers as well as the lack of equipment and absence of proper preparation.

By August 1948, Nasser was the deputy commander of Egyptian units surrounded by the Israelis in the so-called Falluja Pocket. It was a formative experience: Nasser was humiliated by the disastrous war effort and on his return he formed with his friend Amer and others the Association of Free Officers. Nasser consulted with the Muslim Brotherhood, but concluded early on that their Islamic program clashed with his own Arab nationalism. The Free Officers selected General Muhammad Neguib to be their front man.

When Nasser heard in May 1952 that Farouk was planning to arrest the Free Officers, he launched an almost bloodless coup d’état, allowing the king to depart from Alexandria in his yacht with full honors. The revolutionaries were unsure whether to create a democracy or a military regime. Since Nasser was only a lieutenant colonel, Neguib became president of the new Egyptian Republic, but real power was in the hands of the Revolutionary Command Council, which was effectively controlled by Nasser in his role as deputy chairman.

In 1954, as Nasser pushed land reforms and demanded that the alarmed British should leave the Suez Canal, he clashed with the more moderate Neguib. But he asserted his confidence by taking real power as prime minister. Nasser’s passionate and elegant oratory was already captivating Egyptian audiences. In October, as Nasser addressed a huge crowd in Alexandria, a young Muslim Brother tried to assassinate him but Nasser defiantly and courageously continued his speech:

My countrymen, my blood spills for you and for Egypt. I will live for your sake and die for the sake of your freedom and honor. Let them kill me; it does not concern me so long as I have instilled pride, honor and freedom in you. If Gamal Abdel Nasser should die, each of you shall be Gamal Abdel Nasser … Gamal Abdel Nasser is of you and from you and he is willing to sacrifice his life for the nation.

On his return to Cairo, Neguib was deposed; Nasser became the unrivaled president, a position he retained for the next fifteen turbulent years. He appointed his crony Amer commander-in-chief of the army before launching a massive crackdown on communists and, above all, the Muslim Brotherhood. He arrested 20,000 of their members and had their leader and ideologue Sayyid Qutb executed.

Henceforth Nasser, with his tall good looks and superb oratory, was immensely popular, but it was his embrace of pan-Arabist nationalism that excited not just Egyptians but the entire Arab world, which was emerging from a century of foreign domination. Nonetheless he ruled an effective one-party state with the aid of a growing and brutal secret police, backed by an ever more corrupt and oligarchical military junta who swiftly became rich (though he himself had no interest in material matters).

Nasser committed himself to the nonaligned movement, emerging as its leader alongside Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia and Nehru of India. In 1956 Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, outraging British Prime Minister Anthony Eden who, facing the decline of British imperial power, now saw Nasser as a new Hitler. The British responded by putting together a secret deal with the French and the Israelis to attack and destroy Nasser. The Israelis would invade Sinai; the Anglo-French would then “intervene.” The Israelis succeeded in a dazzling campaign to take Sinai but the British intervention was a disaster and US President Eisenhower condemned it. The Israelis were forced to withdraw and it marked the end of British imperial influence in the Middle East.

Nasser’s prestige was at its height: his speeches and radio stations beamed out anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist propaganda promising the Arabs pride and grandeur at last. His pan-Arabist ideas excited the Arab people across the region and inspired nationalist officers in most Arab countries. In Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and even in Saudi Arabia, the regimes were shaken by Nasserist infiltration. In 1958, sympathetic officers in Iraq massacred King Faisal II and his family and created an Iraqi republic on the Nasserist model. In Jordan, King Hussein scarcely clung on to power as Nasserist officers dominated the army. King Saud of Arabia ordered Nasser’s assassination, but the plot was exposed and he was deposed, replaced by his brother Faisal.

Syria and Egypt formed a United Arab Republic under Nasser as president—though it soon fell apart. Nasser flew to Moscow to meet Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, alarming the Americans: he was anti-communist and persecuted Egyptian Marxists, but despite his nonaligned leadership, he leaned clearly toward the Soviets. A coup in North Yemen by Nasserist officers led to Nasser sending Egyptian troops to fight royalist forces backed by the Saudis.

In Egypt, Nasser—omnipotent, isolated and ill—came to understand that his regime had become a corrupt dictatorship with its rich army elite and its secret police. Above all he realized that Field Marshal Amer—powerful, hedonistic, and a drug addict—had failed to create a strong army. In 1967, Syrian clashes with Israel challenged Nasser, the most powerful Arab leader of the greatest Arab country, to live up to his years of bombast. Soviet leaders warned that Israel planned an attack on Syria—but this was utterly false.

Nasser probably hoped to raise the tension and demonstrate Egyptian power without actually fighting Israel. He expelled UN peacekeepers from Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran, promising a victorious war and the massacre of the Jews of Israel. At the same time, he allowed Amer to move Egyptian forces up into Sinai and prepare an attack while his officers assumed control of the Syrian and Jordanian armies. At the last moment, he panicked and ordered Amer to desist but the damage was done: Israelis were in a state of existential terror, convinced a second Holocaust was upon them. The prime minister Levi Eshkol was dithering; the chief of staff General Yitzak Rabin had a breakdown. Finally Eshkol brought Moshe Dayan, former general and now politician, famous for his cool intelligence and his trademark black eye-patch into the government as defense minister. Faced with an apparently imminent Egyptian attack coordinated with Syria and Jordan, Dayan launched a pre-emptive strike, wiping out the Egyptian air force in minutes and defeating Egyptian troops on the ground. Syrian and Jordanian forces attacked Israel, which defeated both in turn—while Egypt under Nasser and Amer still claimed victory. In fact Nasser’s clumsy brinkmanship and bullying domination of the other Arab countries, combined with Amer’s incompetence, had brought about a defeat even greater than that suffered by King Farouk.

Nasser offered to resign but vast crowds in Cairo insisted he remain president. However he was a broken man, dying of a massive heart attack in 1970, succeeded by his vice president, Anwar Sadat. Sadat was another dynamic and original army officer who was determined to overturn the Israeli military advantage and yet simultaneously to avoid Egypt becoming a Soviet satellite country. He threw out Soviet military advisers and coordinated a secret plan with Syria to attack Israel on Yom Kippur 1973: Israel was totally surprised by the attack. Though Israeli forces ultimately repelled the Egyptians and Syrians and managed to cross the Suez Canal to attack Egypt proper, Arab military pride was restored.

In 1977, Sadat flew to Jerusalem and signed a peace treaty with Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel, who returned Sinai in exchange for peace. Yet Sadat presided over a police state that was not delivering economic benefits to his people. There was considerable discontent and riots as well as rising activity by Islamic fundamentalists, appalled by Sadat’s growing alliance with the West. In 1981 Sadat was assassinated at a military parade, succeeded by his vice president, air force general Hosni Mubarak. The latter was cloddish and unsophisticated, but conservative and shrewd enough to rule Egypt for the next thirty years: the direct succession of pharaonic dictators had led from Nasser via Sadat to Mubarak, who received vast financial and military aid from America in return for suppressing Islamic fundamentalism and maintaining the peace with Israel. But Egypt was a one-party state with a brutal secret police, a corrupt military oligarchy, faked elections, a controlled press and brazen injustice.

In 2011, as Mubarak, now an octogenarian, planned the succession of his son, a popular revolution—part of a wave of discontent against dictators across the Arab world—overthrew the president. The revolts toppled the long-serving Libyan and Tunisian leaders and sparked a bloody uprising in Syria against Bashar Assad and his brutal dynasty. But after the initial optimism and effervescence, revolutions usually favor those with the best existing organizations and discipline: thus in Egypt, the military and the Islamists were the most organized. The Nasserite generals, in power since 1952, tried to remain in charge; middle-class Egyptians, who promoted Mubarak’s fall through Facebook and Twitter, dreamed of liberal democracy, but the mass of Egyptians seemed to prefer the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists. The outcome of all these events across the Middle East remains unclear: as the Chinese communist premier Zhou Enlai reflected when asked about the outcome of the French Revolution, “It is too early to tell.”