MIDDLE EAST: The Critical Mass

The Middle East, somnolent, hot, primitive, resembles what scientists call a critical mass. Add one extra gram, and all sorts of violent reactions are set off: atoms break loose, rush about, rearrange themselves in new patterns. The extra gram that had set the Middle East fissioning and fusing was the sale of Communist arms to Egypt. Last week this dance of the atoms was going on to the accompaniment of shudders, groans and forebodings from the journalistic moaner’s corner, led by those partners in anguish, the Alsop brothers. But despite their outcries, all was not yet lost in the Middle East or yet won.

Some of the shiftings and skitterings:

Britain, fed up with trying to please or appease Egypt, decided that proven friends are best, and made a big fuss over its new Baghdad pact (METO) partners, particularly its old partner-in-oil Iraq. By proving that it pays, militarily and economically, to be friends, the British hope to recruit as another METO prospect, Jordan, whose national budget and Arab Legion they underwrite at the rate of $24 million a year. The British are determined to show Egypt’s Nasser that flirting with Communists is not the way to get arms or anything else from the West. The British have another reason for bestirring themselves: kicked out of the Suez by the Egyptians, they must now base their Middle East operations on uneasy Cyprus, which is under state of emergency.

Help one Arab power Iraq and two other Arab nations bristle. Saudi Arabia’s ruling Saudi family mortally hates and fears Iraq’s Hashemite rulers and intrigues expensively with the riches provided by U.S. oil royalties to prevent the Hashemite Arabs (Iraq, Jordan) from ever getting together. And Egypt jealously regards Iraq as its chief rival for Arab leadership.

France, which grudgingly left Syria and Lebanon in 1946, has misgivings about British ascendancy in the Middle East, deplores METO, and would like to reassert its old influence in its lost territories.* Therefore, France works to help the other half of the Arab world: three weeks ago it resumed arms shipments to Egypt. Egypt reciprocated by ceasing its own fiery broadcasts to the Moslems of French North Africa (while persisting in stirring up hatred against the British by broadcasts beamed at the Sudan, Kenya and Uganda).

Israelis, who greeted the Soviet arms delivery to Egypt with hints that it might find itself driven to preventive war, and denounced Eden’s talk of border compromises as “dismemberment,” last week admitted privately they might have been too abrupt. They talked of a corridor across the Negev, of giving Jordan free access to the port of Haifa, of compensation for the 900,000 Palestine Arab refugees huddled on its borders. (The U.N. commission which feeds and shelters the refugees believes the problem will never be solved until the Israelis offer to take back a token number of them.)

The U.S., in the person of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, surveyed the shifting scene and saw little need for drastic change in its policies. This was not quite the flabby inactivity critics called it. It would be all too easy to play that old Arab game of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The U.S. has reasons for not ditching the Arabs (geography, pledges, oil), and reasons for not ditching Israel (most Western-minded of Middle East states in its political institutions, its culture, its technical skills). But no regional pact against Communist incursion can have vitality without the support and participation of the U.S. And as long as Arabs and Israelis remain at war, the U.S. could join a pact with neither without raising the cry of betrayal from the other.

Helping Both. Last week the U.S. worked quietly to help both. Israel was given to understand that the U.S. would listen sympathetically to a request for not a lot but some more arms. This might reassure the Israelis that they would not have to negotiate from a position of weakness. Egypt’s Nasser, who reported a Russian offer to finance the Aswan dam but candidly expressed a preference for Western money, was all but assured that the money would be forthcoming through a World Bank loan and joint U.S.-British grants.

But the long-range answer is not merely more and more money as so many critics insist. If the U.S. is going to top each Soviet offer with a better one, the Russians could involve the U.S. in immense expenditure, as Dulles pointed out last week, without costing themselves a penny. The Russians have made great play with talk of loans of $180 million for a steel plant in India, of $275 million for Egypt’s Aswan dam. But in the area from the Middle East to the China Sea, ICA Administrator John B. Hollister reported last week, U.S. economic grants in aid are running at the rate of $1.5 billion a year. If friendship could be bought, the U.S. should have it by now. But friendship costs and is worth more than money.

In the Middle East, the atoms dance on. With so many complex relationships on the loose, the possibility of peril is in the air, but not the need for panic. Some lugubrious journalists act as if every Soviet intransigence is a sign of U.S. inflexibility, every Soviet adventure a proof of Western incapacity. But the Soviet Union too would find, entering this intricate and crucial area, that their every move compels a countermovement, and the end is not yet.

* Though how Syria sometimes responds to its old master can be judged by official Radio Damascus broadcasts to French North Africa. Samples: “Fighting brothers, exterminate those who have murdered your martyrs! Kill! Burn their homes! . . . In Morocco a million foreigners face 10 million Arabs. If each Arab were to kill one Frenchman at the cost of his own life, it would be possible to exterminate without exception all the French . . . Spare not their women and children, for they spare not yours!”