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A World of Trouble
The White House and the Middle East â" from the Cold War to the War on Terror
By Patrick Tyler Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2009 Patrick Tyler
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3085-7
CHAPTER 1
THE ARAB AWAKENING
Eisenhower, Nasser, and Suez
John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of state, had a bloodless and terrifying manner when conveying American disquietude. He was a righteous man — his critics said self-righteous — and his formidable intellect, honed by practicing diplomacy and international law for nearly half a century, radiated a Calvinist certitude that could be unsettling, if not pompous. On the last weekend in October 1956, it was this very tone that was emanating from the secretary's chair as he looked out from the edifice of his discontent and demanded from Abba Eban some kind of explanation for what was happening in the Middle East.
Why, the secretary of state wanted to know, was the Eisenhower administration receiving intelligence reports by the hour indicating that a full military mobilization was under way in Israel?
Eban, Israel's ambassador to the United States, was prone to sit as erect as a British schoolboy. A charming studiousness animated every muscle in his face and was meant to show Dulles how seriously he took the secretary's concern. There was also, perhaps, a slight furrow of puzzlement to signal that Dulles was not likely to get a real answer because Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was not prepared to surrender details at this most sensitive moment of conspiracy.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, and raised in England as Aubrey Meir, Eban changed his name as Ben-Gurion and others had changed theirs to accentuate their Jewishness. Educated at Cambridge University, Eban represented the British intellectual school of Diaspora Jews, whose number included many scientists and academics whose contribution to the nation-building process would prove crucial.
Eban had served with British forces during the war as a liaison to the Jewish Agency before rushing to Palestine in 1948 and then to the just-established United Nations, where he assisted in marshaling the votes needed for the creation of the Jewish state. For the first eight years of Israel's existence, he had been serving as its ambassador in America, working to expand its recognition internationally and voraciously defending its prerogatives as a sovereign and independent nation.
These were years during which Israel was a tenuous outpost of a million or so Jews in a sea of fifty million Arabs. People, not least the Arab leaders, were betting that the Zionist enterprise would not survive. Its budget consisted of loans and donations. The achievements of each year were measured by hectares cleared, meters of irrigation pipe laid — in other words, the full metrics of anchoring a state on the Mediterranean shore. While some toiled, others rescued displaced persons, survivors of Hitler's extermination campaign, and still others opened camps for Jews arriving from Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, and Yemen. The Zionist dream was now a frenetic, day-to-day task of breaking rocks on barren landscapes to build up an agricultural base, seize and channel water resources, lay out a plan for industry, and construct housing for the flood of immigrants.
Sitting there in Dulles's intimidating presence, his dark hair combed neatly back above black-framed glasses in the style of the times, Eban was ever the London sophisticate, though given what he knew, he had every reason to be nervous. He had quick eyes and an impressive expanse of jowl. Put Eban at a podium, stand him in the pit of diplomacy, and he could call down the heavens with a ringing oration. His voice had become one of Israel's most powerful weapons.
In the midst of the War of Independence, when Israel had existed barely a fortnight and was under Arab attack, Eban had taken the rostrum at the United Nations to warn the Arab leaders of their folly: "Israel is the product of the most sustained historic tenacity which the ages recall," he told the delegates. "The Jewish people [have] not striven towards this goal for twenty centuries in order that, having once achieved it, it will now surrender it in response to an illegitimate and unsuccessful aggression. Whatever else changes, this will not. The State of Israel is an immutable part of the international landscape. To plan the future without it is to build delusions on sand." Words flew out of Eban as if he were tearing them from Scripture.
Dulles's aides had tracked Eban down at Congressional Country Club in the Washington suburbs where he had been enjoying a round of golf with Congressmen Sidney Yates of Illinois and the journalist Martin Agronsky. Israel's mobilization looked opportunistic to most analysts in the State Department. The Jewish state faced no immediate provocation, yet it had summoned its population to arms. Men and women dismounted their tractors and reported for military duty — but what duty?
Now, pinned to his chair like an insect before the secretary, Eban was desperately short of a strategy. Dulles had handed him a copy of President Eisenhower's letter to Ben-Gurion of the previous day warning against any precipitous military action by Israeli forces. Eban had to think fast. He studied the letter for a few moments, then pointed out that the secretary had placed him in a position that made it difficult to respond. If he had been given a copy of the president's letter on Friday, he might have had the opportunity to cable home, before the Sabbath, for some instructions or elucidation about the mobilization that was of such great concern.
Next, he parried the limited facts that were in Dulles's possession.
Israel might be overreacting with this mobilization, he said, but it had very good reason to fear that the Arab nations were "concerting together" in preparation for an attack on Israel. Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian leader, had whipped up the Arab world to a crescendo. A joint command had been established among Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian forces. Preparations for attacks by Arab fedayeen — self-sacrificing martyrs with guns — against Israel had been detected by Israeli intelligence; also detected were Iraqi troops near the Jordanian border. Israel had to be prepared, Eban said, and so it should be no surprise to the secretary that some reserve battalions had been called up.
Instead of allaying Dulles's suspicions, Eban only incited them.
"Some reserve units had been called up," Dulles repeated Eban's words. No, no, no. That was not what Dulles was talking about. According to his information, Israel's armed forces were totally mobilized. Totally. Hundreds of thousands of able-bodied men and women had dropped their civilian routines and reported to military units, bringing the economy to a virtual standstill. Of course, Israel had a right to call up its reserves, Dulles said, but he wondered why Eban would minimize the extent of this vast mobilization. According to the information he possessed, Israel had called up all of its reserves.
What could be the purpose? Was it the situation in Jordan?
Dulles knew that Jordan's monarch, the twenty-year-old King Hussein, was shaky on the throne. His grandfather, King Abdullah, was one of the Hashemite princes whose line had long ruled in Mecca as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Both Iraq and Jordan were unique British protectorates owing to the fact that they were created to reward the progeny of Sherif Hussein, the Hashemite patriarch in western Arabia who had thrown in with the British to defeat the German-Ottoman axis in World War I.
Abdullah and his older brother, Faisal, had fought with Colonel T. E. Lawrence — Lawrence of Arabia — against the Ottoman Turks because they believed imperial Britain would allow the Arabs to reclaim the glory that had existed under the caliphate, the early Islamic empire, by reestablishing its realm on the Arabian Peninsula, in Mesopotamia, and across the Levantine crescent to include Damascus, Beirut, and Jerusalem.But the British had broken most of their promises, allowing the French to kick Faisal out of Damascus and standing pat as Sherif Hussein himself was driven out of Mecca by Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the upstart desert warrior from central Arabia who was unifying a state that would take his name, Saudi Arabia. As a consolation, Winston Churchill had put Faisal on the throne in Iraq; Abdullah was imposed on the Arab population of a new state that the British colonial office had dubbed Transjordan (later, simply Jordan), a wedge of desert that would come to include East Jerusalem and the Old City, where the holy mosques al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock stood on ancient Jewish foundations. This artificial desert kingdom was facing the threat of overthrow by pro-Nasser students and Palestinians, who made up the bulk of Jordan's population.
King Hussein's cousin in Iraq, King Faisal II, had marched Iraqi troops westward to bolster the loyal elements of Jordan's armed forces. Ben-Gurionsuspected that Iraq was positioning itself to take over the eastern half of Jordan if Jordan's monarchy collapsed.
The United States and Britain had taken pains to consult with Ben-Gurion over the Iraqi troop movements — meant to stabilize Jordan — but the Israeli mobilization seemed to give the lie to Ben-Gurion's reply that Israel was not threatened by the Iraqi force.
Did Israel fear an attack from Jordan? Dulles asked.
Yes, Eban replied, it did — he was now on the verge of blatantly deceiving the secretary of state. Given Israel's fears, Eban continued, he understood that its mobilization might raise the question of whether Israel's intentions were defensive or offensive. But all of his information, Eban said, indicated that Israel's mobilization was for defensive purposes.
This was a lie, of course. Eban knew more about the mobilization than he was allowed to say. He had just returned from Israel. Ben-Gurion had called home his ambassadors as a way to signal that he was preparing to take action against Jordan. It was a grand deception, for it had been plain for some time that if Jordan fell apart, Israel would be tempted to seize all of the territory west of the Jordan River that had been part of the historic land of Israel.
That would leave nothing for any future Palestinian Arab state as envisioned by the UN's partition resolution of 1947, and the presumption was that Israel would push the Arabs across the Jordan River where they could take over the remnants of King Hussein's realm.
Since coming out of retirement the previous year, Ben-Gurion had been pursuing an activist military strategy against the Arabs, staging large-scale raids on Jordan and Egypt in retaliation for attacks against Jewish settlements. A raid at Qalqilya on the night of October 10 had turned into a ferocious battle in the densely populated Arab town, and when dawn broke nearly one hundred Palestinians lay dead with as many wounded. The Israeli paratrooper force, under the command of Ariel Sharon, a brash young practitioner of the punitive strike, limped home with eighteen dead and sixty wounded.
Eban had come to understand — he wasn't fully informed — that the border tension with Jordan was more calculated charade than real invasion. When he arrived home that October, Ben-Gurion pulled him aside and whispered conspiratorially that he was about to fly secretly to France to confer with Prime Minister Guy Mollet on a plan that would have "sensational results." The real target was Egypt, not Jordan. The conspiracy — with Eisenhower and Dulles kept in the dark — was to seize the Suez Canal, overthrow the Egyptian regime, and expand Israel's frontiers into the Sinai Peninsula and thereby bolt Jewish foundations even more firmly on the Mediterranean shore where the Hebrew nation had been born.
Eisenhower was campaigning for reelection against Adlai Stevenson. The war hero president was riding a wave of popularity — he had ended the Korean War — and not even an incipient uprising in Hungary against Soviet tyranny was going to induce him to betray his political instinct that, above all, America needed a period of peace and prosperity. He was dedicated to building up institutions (the United Nations) and alliances (NATO) that would avert war in the future.
"The sum of our international effort," he said in his State of the Union address that year, "should be this: the waging of peace, with as much resourcefulness, with as great a sense of dedication and urgency, as we have ever mustered in defense of our country in time of war. In this effort, our weapon is not force. Our weapons are the principles and ideas embodied in our historic traditions, applied with the same vigor that in the past made America a living promise of freedom for all mankind."
Eisenhower looked at the Middle East with the eyes of a military strategist and saw a fulcrum that joined continents, a nexus where lines of communication crossed and, crucially for the future, a basin that held the world's most bountiful oil supply.
"There is no more strategically important area in the world," he had said, and whoever controlled it in a world war would have an enormous advantage. After Korea, Eisenhower had no illusions about the Soviet Union or Mao Zedong's China. America had entered a long struggle against international communism. Eisenhower and Dulles believed that the Kremlin leadership was itself seeking to minimize the risk of war, but a global competition for influence and power would be intense. In the Middle East, the American leaders saw the potential for collaboration with the British in erecting a new alliance to block Soviet attempts to encroach on the oil-producing region or to secure warm-water ports for the Soviet fleet. In this competition, Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, the rising star of Arab politics, figured prominently. The British distrusted him. So did Israel, whose national emergence represented a completely new kind of challenge for the United States: here was a state whose very existence was deeply resented by its neighbors.
Truman, who was both emotionally and politically attuned to the Jewish community in the United States — his friend and business partner Eddie Jacobson had been a passionate Zionist — infuriated the British and his own State Department in 1945 by supporting Jewish immigration to Palestine.
Unlike Truman, Eisenhower was not beholden to Jewish votes or the Jewish community's nascent political fund-raising machine. Eisenhower struck some people as uncomfortable around Jews, though not anti-Semitic. Eban had met him in Paris in 1952, when Eban accompanied Moshe Sharett, the foreign minister, on a trip to Europe. They had been surprised when the general, the amiable war hero running for president, explained unabashedly how he had come to consciousness about the Jewish experience in history. He told them that as a boy in Abilene, Kansas, he had believed that Jews — he called them the "Israelites" — were creatures of mythology and legend, like angels or cherubs. He confessed to being surprised and disconcerted to discover upon reaching a certain age that they existed outside the Bible.
Eisenhower's easy confession may have seemed strange and inscrutable to a Cambridge man, but Ike's awkward Midwestern naïveté masked the calculating politician who had contested and maneuvered among the great egos of the world war. And he had come out on top.
It had again surprised the Israelis — indeed, it alarmed them — that from the outset of the administration, Eisenhower and Dulles worked diligently and creatively to find solutions in the Middle East. The alarm went up because most of these schemes required Israel to give up land or share water resources with the Arabs. Eisenhower's motivation was straightforward and certainly not hostile to Israel. He was out to protect and expand American interests in the region.
In their first year in office, Eisenhower and Dulles concerted with the British to overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh, the nationalist prime minister of Iran, who had taken the first steps to nationalize British Petroleum's assets in Iran, Britain's largest single investment abroad. Eisenhower and Churchill agreed that Mossadegh was a demagogue who would drive Iran into the Communist camp, upending the pro-Western monarchy of the young shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
The CIA's Operation Ajax to bring down Mossadegh was touch-and-go. Mossadegh stood his ground when the shah issued a decree dismissing him. The fate of Iran teetered when the shah lost his nerve in midplot and fled the country. The CIA was looking at failure until Iranian mobs — with some inducements from American and British intelligence agents — rallied the populace for the shah. The army did the rest. The shah returned to Tehran, and Iran (along with British oil assets) was saved for the West.
Then came Nasser as the new Arab leader. In the postwar order, Eisenhower understood that ideological loyalty — communism versus democratic capitalism — was the new geopolitical currency in the competition with Moscow for hearts and minds in the so-called third world. Nasser's appeal was an organizing force and in Washington there was great excitement when he turned against Egypt's Communists. Washington wanted him to lead the opposition against international communism in the Middle East.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A World of Trouble by Patrick Tyler. Copyright © 2009 Patrick Tyler. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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