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.”
THE CEAUŞESCUS OF ROMANIA
Nicolae 1918–1989 Elena 1916–1989
He always claimed to act and speak on behalf of the people, to be a beloved son of the people, but he only tyrannized the people all the time.
Prosecutor at the opening of the trial of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu, December 1989
The preposterous and merciless Ceauşescus personified the long Communist tyranny over eastern Europe—and their violent fate represented the drama of the 1989 revolutions that overthrew it. Ceauşescu promoted his own cult of personality as self-declared “Conductor” (Leader) and “Genius of the Carpathians” and diverted his poverty-stricken country’s resources to vast monuments to his own glory while using his Securitate secret police to murder his enemies. He and his wife Elena ruled as a grotesque partnership. When the communist Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989–90, they were the only two of the ousted leaders to be shot.
Born into a peasant family, Ceauşescu joined the fledgling Romanian communist movement in the early 1930s. At the time Romania was a conservative monarchy, and being a communist was illegal. In 1936 Ceauşescu was jailed for two years, and in 1940 was interned in a concentration camp. Here he met Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the leader of the Romanian Communist Party, and escaped with him in 1944. That same year a broad-based anti-fascist “liberation” government—including Dej—was set up with Soviet assistance. In 1947 Ceauşescu married plowman’s daughter Elena.
Later that year the Communists ousted their erstwhile allies from government, and in 1952 Dej became de facto dictator of Romania. With the elevation of his mentor, Ceauşescu was able to secure his own position, and when Dej died in 1965, Ceauşescu became party leader and head of state. Many Romanians hoped their new leader would inaugurate a period of greater liberalization and reform. In August 1968 such expectations intensified after Ceauşescu’s denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and his defiant line made him a genuinely popular figure within Romania, and earned plaudits from the West. Nevertheless, he was quick to assure the Soviets that his country would remain a loyal member of the Eastern Bloc.