Storm from the East by Milton Viorst

Author:Milton Viorst
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780307431851
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T21:00:00+00:00

V

UNITY-DISUNITY 1957—1967

Stepping into the void left by the humiliation of Britain and France at Suez, the United States involved itself more energetically than before in the Middle East. The intensity of the Cold War was rising. In the year of Suez, the Soviet Union showed in Hungary its willingness to use armed force to preserve its hegemony within the Communist bloc. Having placed into space Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite, it was feeling expansive. Washington could hardly be indifferent to the progress the USSR was making in winning support in the Arab world.

President Dwight Eisenhower, in an address to Congress in March 1957, overlooked the vestiges of Western imperialism, as well as inherent weakness among the Arabs, to blame “International Communism" for the region’s drift away from the West. “Russia’s interest in the Middle East is solely that of power politics," he said. Moscow’s design was to dominate the region, he warned, as part of its “announced purpose of Communizing the world." In what became a doctrine that took his name, Eisenhower asserted America’s right to use armed force against Russia or “any nation controlled by International Communism" to preserve its interests in the region. 1

Syria was particularly outspoken in denouncing the Eisenhower Doctrine, arguing that its quarrel was not with Communism but with Zionism and imperialism. Recently, fifty-six of its soldiers had been killed in a border skirmish with Israel. Washington did not respond but Moscow offered Syria the consolation of money and arms. Obsessed with the Cold War, the United States attached little importance to Syria’s conflict with Israel or with the West.

In the spring of 1957, Damascus brought a complaint to the United Nations that Turkey, America’s NATO ally, was threatening an invasion. A few weeks later, Syria expelled three American diplomats on charges—for which it produced some evidence—of seeking to overthrow the government. Still, Washington refused to consider the possibility that Syria’s concerns were legitimately nationalist, and that it was tilting toward Communism only by default.

It is worth noting that since the Palestine debacle of 1948, Syria’s system of government had been in disarray. French colonialism had created a democratic structure, which Syria’s elected leaders had used astutely in the 1930s in the struggle for freedom from France. But Syrians, accustomed to thinking of Palestinians as their southern countrymen, felt a strong bond with Palestine, and the government’s bungling performance in the 1948 war discredited not only their democratically elected leaders but democracy itself. After 1948, Syrians grew dubious about whether their democracy would work in normal times.

Syrians from all sectors, out of a hope for a more decisive government, seemed to rejoice when the army conducted a coup d’état against their democracy in 1949. Military rule seemed to provide a comfortable cultural fit but, in fact, the army proved to be no better than the parliamentarians at governing. The first military regime lasted only months before giving way to a second, which restored a parliamentary structure beneath military cover. Then the army struck again in 1951 to establish a full-fledged dictatorship.

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