* Pakistan smarted from the disaster, its president ceding power to its dynamic foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a socialist heir to 250,000 feudal acres in the family power base Sindh, educated at Oxford and Berkeley. Two weeks after taking office he summoned Pakistani scientists: ‘We’re going to have the Bomb. How long will it take?’ But Indira Gandhi was pursuing the Bomb too. Aided by the Soviets, in 1974 she tested an Indian device that, feared Bhutto, would establish Indian ‘hegemony in the subcontinent’. He accelerated the Pakistani project, promoting a young scientist, A. Q. Khan, who started to buy plans and equipment for an Islamic Bomb. ‘Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilizations have this capability,’ said Bhutto. ‘Islamic civilization is without it.’ He tried to combine Pakistan’s different sides. ‘Islam is our faith, democracy our policy,’ he declared, ‘socialism our economy.’ But he was overshadowed by a military which regarded itself as the guardian of the precarious state. In the east, the founding leader of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, nicknamed Bangabandhu (Friend of Bengal), ruled the new state until his assassination in 1975; he founded a dynasty – his daughter Sheikh Hasini ruled autocratically into the 2020s.
Houses of Solomon and Bush, Bourbon, Pahlavi and Castro
WILD BEASTS AND LIONS: THE ASSADS OF DAMASCUS
On 6 October 1973, Yom Kippur – holiest day in the Jewish calendar – Egyptian and Syrian troops attacked Israel across the Suez and Golan, taking the Israelis by surprise, despite warnings from their agent in the Egyptian president’s office.* Two new leaders, in Egypt and Syria, had changed the Arab response to Israeclass="underline" one would prove a peacemaker of courage and pay for it with his life; the other founded a gangster dynasty that would cost his country the lives of many.
The change of the guard had started with the biggest funeral in world history. On 28 September 1970, Nasser, only fifty-two, died of a heart attack with his vice-president and fellow Free Officer Anwar Sadat at his bedside. As over ten million Egyptians mourned him, King Hussein sobbed for the man who had almost killed him, but he was himself fighting for survival against the PLO under Arafat, who tried to kill him and convert Jordan into its base. Hussein was aided by Israel, Arafat by Syria, until a ceasefire was brokered by Nasser.
There had only been one Nasser, but there were several pretenders to his throne. The new contenders paraded their credentials at the funeral. The first mourner, sobbing ostentatiously, was the twenty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Muammar Qaddafi, a good-looking Libyan Bedouin who had been trained in Britain, where he played football in Hyde Park and promenaded down Piccadilly in Arab robes. He had worshipped Nasser and founded his own Free Officers, who in 1969 deposed King Idris. Promoting himself to colonel and president, Qaddafi rushed to Cairo. ‘A nice boy,’ Nasser had thought, ‘but terribly naive.’ He was much worse than naive.*
A more formidable contender was also at the funeraclass="underline" a tall, slim Syrian defence minister, General Hafez al-Assad, fair-haired with a bulging forehead. Just after the funeral, Assad withdrew Syrian forces from Jordan, helping to save Hussein; and then on 12 November 1970 he seized power in Damascus.
Assad was one of eleven children from a tough clan of Alawites, the sect that lived around Latakia on the coast, traditionally opposed to the Sunnis in Damascus. His grandfather had been nicknamed al-Wahhish – Wild Beast – and his father, Ali, champion of independent Alawite Latakia, took the name al-Assad – Lion – and Hafez became the Sphinx of Damascus.
He had hoped to become a doctor but instead qualified as a pilot, trained in Egypt and the USSR, before joining the nationalist Baathists, who in March 1963 seized power. He delivered the air force. Navigating fissiparous Baathist feuding, in 1964 he was promoted to air force chief while his brother Rifaat created a praetorian Baathist unit. In 1966, an Alawite faction under the leftist Salah Jadid seized power, appointing Assad defence minister. But the Assad brothers rejected internal revolution to confront Israel.
Assad promoted Alawites and Assads to run Syria. His brother Rifaat commanded his guards, the Defence Companies. Himself long married to Anisa Makhlouf, who was mother of five children, Hafez promoted her brother to run his security, the Mukhabarat; her nephew became the family’s financier. Rifaat was married to Salma Makhlouf, a cousin of Anisa.
Hafez and Anisa’s favourite son, Bassel, was eight when his father became president. ‘We saw father at home but he was so busy that three days could go by without us exchanging a word with him,’ Bassel later told his father’s biographer. ‘We never had breakfast or dinner together, and I don’t remember ever having lunch together as a family.’ Yet film footage records family holidays: ‘As a family, we used to spend a day or two in Latakia in the summer, but then too he used to work in the office and we didn’t get to see much of him.’ For the moment, Hafez’s brother, Rifaat, was his heir.
As soon as he was president, Assad flew to Moscow to ask Brezhnev to rearm Syria – in return for the Tartous naval base. Brezhnev agreed. The Assads would be Moscow’s Arab ally into the 2020s.
The last candidate to be Nasser’s heir was the most overlooked: his Egyptian successor Sadat. But the poor farmer’s son quickly won popularity by toning down the vicious secret police and expelling Soviet advisers, and he had a plan to humble Israel that coincided with Assad’s ambitions. Assad quickly learned that Sadat too was planning a war: they met secretly and planned a surprise attack, though they concealed their ultimate aims: the refreshing and courageous Sadat was positioning himself to negotiate peace; the irredeemably radical Assad was aiming to eliminate the Zionist entity. Sadat consulted the Saudi king Faisal, the second of Abdulaziz’s sons to reign, who was overseeing the kingdom’s astonishing oil wealth and supervising improvements at the Holy Sites by his friend the builder Muhammad bin Laden. Faisal sent detachments to fight with the Egyptians, but he also believed the Arabs had never used the oil weapon. Now was the time.
As the Arabs trained for war, the Israelis cultivated close relations with a local friend, the shah, who admired the state, supplying its oil, buying its weapons and welcoming its leaders to Teheran. The shah was at his apogee.
On 12 October 1971, the shah held the party of the century to celebrate 2,500 years of Iran’s Great Civilization.
IMPERIAL PEACOCKS: THE SATANIC FEAST AND THE ANGEL
The shah linked his own achievements to an unbroken line stretching back to pre-Islamic Persia. Oil revenues funded his status as the hegemon of the Gulf, aided by his close relationship with Nixon, while he outplayed Iraq by backing Kurdish rebels.
‘Cyrus! Great King, King of Kings, you immortal hero of history,’ intoned the shah portentously at the opening ceremony before the tomb of Cyrus. ‘Today as in your day, Persia bears the message of liberty and love of mankind in a troubled world.’ But he also warned his enemies: ‘We are vigilant and will remain so.’