THE MIDDLE EAST: Reversal of Alliance?

Two months after the departure of U.S. and British forces from Lebanon and Jordan, the Middle East is undergoing a political sea change. A strong, unexpected and menacing Communist current is running through the streets of Baghdad, proving that during the 40 years of British-backed strong-man rule in Iraq the Communists were able to develop and harden the best-organized apparatus in the Middle East. Iraqi Premier Karim Kassem, needing political support for his army dictatorship, has had to call upon the Communists to fight off those who want to merge Iraq into Nasser’s one big Arab nation. At this crucial point, a crack is showing in those Arab nationalist forces which were formerly united by the simple desire to expel the West.

Some Arab leaders have at last begun to see that the Communists, hitherto almost indistinguishable in the common outcry against the West, had never in fact accepted Arab unity under Nasser as a sufficient anti-Western end in itself. All the time, the Reds had been infiltrating and sabotaging the movement, and biding their time to seize power for themselves.

The Mild Gentleman. The Arabs who first made this discovery were the Baath Socialists, who are particularly strong in Iraq and Syria. It was their Syrian leader, Vice President Akram Hourani, who saw the Communists about to come to power in Syria and, to prevent it, rushed Syria into union with Egypt. And it was the Baath Socialists in Iraq, emerging as the chief anti-Communist and pro-Nasser force in the country, who were the chief victims of Kassem’s roundup of conspirators in Baghdad last week. In Cairo, Saeb Salam, who led Nasserite forces in the recent Lebanese rebellion, emerged from a long session with Nasser to say that the Communists were opposing Nasser in Iraq and that the Americans were helping Moscow by also opposing him. Asked Beirut’s newspaper L’Orient: “Are we not truly on the eve of a reversal of alliance? There exists today a meeting of circumstances that push Egypt and America into each other’s arms.”

Precisely at this moment one of Washington’s Middle East experts arrived in the area to collect answers to such fantastically tangled questions. Arab newspapers carried extravagant stories that Assistant Secretary of State William Rountree, 41, a Dulles protégé, was on his way to offer Nasser a big low-interest loan. Baghdad’s newspaper al Zaman charged that Rountree “is coming here to weave conspiracies against us.”

A onetime accountant from Georgia, who earned a law degree in seven years of Washington night school and in his government career has had more to do with budgets than with diplomacy, Assistant Secretary Rountree had never run into such calumnies in his life. “You know the mild gentleman he is,” said State Department Spokesman Lincoln White at a Washington press conference.

The Second Front. Nasser was still doggedly protesting his brotherly loyalty to Iraq’s General Kassem, still praising the Russians for sending him another batch of war planes. At last week’s 40-nation Afro-Asian economic conference in Cairo, Soviet and U.A.R. delegates worked together to get Cairo designated the group’s permanent headquarters, and it was left to the delegates from Indonesia and the Philippines to stand up against Communist pressure. Nasser himself seemed wholly unimpressed by the conciliatory moves the U.S. has recently made towards him—releasing $26 million in blocked funds, reviving the CARE relief program in Egypt, resuming the $13.5 million U.S.-Egyptian rural improvement service, leasing dredges for the Suez Canal. His press remains pathologically hostile to the U.S. But Nasser told Columnist Joseph Alsop last week: “Now is the time to normalize relations between my country and the U.S.”

The Beirut talk of a reversal of alliance in the Middle East was much too facile an explanation. But the U.S. finds itself currently between policies in the Middle East. Arriving in Beirut, Assistant Rountree was greeted by Premier Rashid Karami, who told him that Lebanon, as the first Middle Eastern nation to embrace the Eisenhower Doctrine, now “considers this doctrine null and void.” The U.S. was still as mistrustful of Nasser as he is resentful and suspicious of the U.S. But both are coming to see that there may be a force loose in the Middle East that is more dangerous to their own interests than each is to the other. The two may yet find themselves making common cause together, if at arm’s length.