To Bring Forth a New Union

To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, wrote Sir Isaac Newton in his third law of motion. He might also have been describing a political law for the Middle East. Last week, only days after Gamal Abdel Nasser had announced the union of Egypt and Syria in a new United Arab Republic, the Kings of Jordan and Iraq reacted by proclaiming a union of their two nations in a rival Arab Federation.

Chief engineer was Jordan's doughty young (22) King Hussein. As he well knew, the Palestinian Arabs and refugees who comprise two-thirds of his 1,500,000 subjects were most susceptible of all the Middle East's Arabs to Nasser's new appeal to the ancient dream of Arab unity. Urgently, Hussein called on Saudi Arabia's King Saud and his cousin King Feisal of Iraq, to confer on a new union. Saud held aloof, but Feisal came.

Early last week Feisal arrived in Amman with a planeload of aides. The negotiators deadlocked in shouting dissension over Iraq's membership in the Baghdad Pact. Hussein's men said their Palestinians would riot rather than be party to a pact that Nasser's propaganda labels a symbol of Western imperialism, and that Saud would never join them unless Iraq pulled out of the pact.

The solution that satisfied everybody was to borrow the United Arab Republic's formula that international agreements signed by either Egypt or Syria would remain binding on whichever country had signed them. Under this formula, Iraq could stick by its Baghdad Pact commitment until August 1959, when the treaty provides that all members may reconsider their membership.

"Happiest Moment." With this obstacle to unity neatly bypassed, Iraq's pouchy-eyed Crown Prince Abdul Illah flew to Amman to make the clinching decisions for his nephew, King Feisal. But another deadlock still loomed. Hussein's negotiators battled doggedly to get their master equal turns with Feisal as head of state. At 4 a.m. King Hussein, who needed federation far more than his oil-rich cousin, rose and announced that he would defer to Feisal as head of state. Hussein went into a stenographer's office to supervise typing of the final draft. At 7:45 a.m. 22 negotiators crowded round a table in the main hall of King Hussein's palace and signed a twelve-point federation agreement bound in the red, green, black and white colors of Jordan and Iraq. "This is one of the happiest moments of my life," cried Feisal, and embraced his cousin.

The royal federation is to be much looser than Nasser's republic. The two monarchs are to keep their individual thrones and sovereign titles. The federation, to be organized within 90 days, is to have one flag, one army, one foreign policy, one foreign service. Both nations will keep their own legislatures. A combined federal legislature will be set up to deal with federal policies, in which Jordan and Iraq will have equal representation. It will sit half the time in Baghdad, half the time in Amman. Though Feisal is designated head of state, "the question of the head of state will be reviewed" if any other state joins the federation. This is a big hint that it is not too late for King Saud to line up with his fellow sovereigns. At week's end Amman reported that the oil-rich Persian Gulf sheiks of Kuwait and Bahrein were "considering" joining too.

"More Natural Union." There was none of the wild display of popular joy in Jordan last week that followed the unity proclamation in Cairo and Damascus. Yet, said an Iraqi leader: "This is the more natural union." Iraq and Jordan go together geographically, historically, and even--because Iraq has the oil wealth and the living space to absorb Jordan's refugees--economically.

The federation will have only 7,000,000 citizens, v. the United Arab Republic's 28 million, but it will be far richer. The practical difficulties of merging the competing economies of essentially healthy Syria and impoverished Egypt are great. Alarmed by the precipitous flight of capital from Syria since the merger was announced, Nasser himself talked last week of an "interim" period that "might be one year or ten years."

The first to hail the new federation was the very man whose appeal it was formed to oppose. Egypt's Nasser fired off a congratulatory message to Feisal expressing the hope that the union of Iraq and Jordan would hasten the day of "great unity" --at the same time that his propagandists were denouncing the whole thing as "a new farce" engineered by "the same traditional feudal opportunists who have nothing in common with Arab nationalism and Arab aspiration."

New Rivalry. Inevitably, the two new unions had set up a rivalry in the Middle East that the world could not avoid. Both would need aid to survive. The two members of the United Arab Republic have been Soviet clients. Jordan and Iraq are oriented to the West. Both were bidding for support of the Arab world, for themselves, and, inescapably, for their patrons.

To advance that bid, Iraq may still consider withdrawal from the Baghdad Pact. As the northern tier of states united to resist Soviet pressure, the pact has always been viable; it would lose little military cohesion if Iraq withdrew. In its second purpose--organizing the Arab Middle East--the pact has been a failure: far from lining up the Arabs, it has isolated Iraq, the sole Arab member, under a cloud of nationalist distrust.

Freed of the charge of association with what Nasser calls an "imperialist" pact, the new federation could become a rallying point for all Arabs. Wrote Beirut's L'Orient: "The question to examine is whether Iraq can better cooperate with the West inside the pact or by liberating herself from ties which handicap her action in the field of Arabs."

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