Pebbles from the Avalanche

On the surface the Middle East was relatively quiet: not a single government collapsed, only two bombs were exploded (in Lebanon), only one political plot frustrated (in Jordan). Nevertheless, events happened in the Middle East like the first pebbles of an avalanche, and almost all of them fell in a direction favorable to Egypt's Nasser.

Lebanon. The election of General Fuad Chehab to the presidency relaxed tension but did not end it. Lebanese rebels insist on remaining under arms until President Camille Chamoun steps down and U.S. troops depart; Chamoun, not to be outdone, insists on serving out his term to the final minute on Sept. 23. President-elect Chehab ducked all responsibility: the opposition wildly protested the return of Dr. Charles Malik as Lebanon's U.N. representative, and Dr. Malik wanted Chehab's endorsement before leaving for Manhattan. Chehab, as usual, was cagily silent. As a brutal reminder that the rebel-enforced general strike, so harmful to trade, was supposed to continue, a bomb exploded in a Beirut coffeehouse, killing two innocent bystanders and wounding another. While U.S. marines got their first liberty, 2,000 at a time, in Beirut, a pro-Chamoun leader and two of his aides were found near the Syrian border with their throats slit from ear to ear.

Lebanon's Prime Minister Sami Solh, who narrowly escaped assassination two weeks ago on the road from Beit Meri and was irate at the rebels' continued holdout, tendered his resignation, but President Chamoun refused it. Puffing worriedly on a hubble-bubble water pipe, Solh told newsmen that he could have been butchered as was Iraq's Nuri asSaid "if the American forces had been 24 hours late." He went on: "The rebels, who had massed fresh forces and ammunition from Syria, were to launch a big attack shortly after the Iraqi coup. Had the U.S. not acted in time, the massacres would have dwarfed those of 1860* and would have been comparable only to the Armenian massacres in Turkey during World War I."

Jordan. Reassured by the arrival of 800 British reinforcements, King Hussein, under heavy guard, began to move about more freely, helicoptered to the Jordanian sector of Jerusalem where he told a Jordanian army audience "we shall never allow troublemakers, Communist lackeys and atheists to succeed in undermining this nation." But the arrests of pro-Nasser suspects continued with monotonous regularity: 27 Jordanians were standing trial for smuggling in guns and munitions from Syria, and several of them seemed certain to be publicly hanged; 20 others were swept up by the police as members of a gang of terrorists and bomb throwers. The clandestine radios screamed for Hussein's death; the Damascus newspaper Al Nasr al Jadid, jeered: "Jordan has turned into a huge prison!"

Four U.S. engineers arrived to try to improve Jordan's incredible desert railroads (of 21 locomotives, only five are operable) and to devise a method of speeding up the unloading of cargo at the shallow-draft port of Aqaba. For the British, who are holding the lid tight on this boiling cauldron, the situation is becoming critical. Each possible move seems to create more problems than it solves.

If the British pull out, King Hussein will fall. If they take Hussein with them, the country is apt to fall to Nasser. The Israelis, unwilling to be surrounded by Nasser, may well march to the west bank of the Jordan River, to give themselves a more defensible border as well as 2,165 more square miles of territory. With obvious envy, a British diplomat noted that the U.S. evacuation from Lebanon will be relatively easy, "since it merely involves walking down to the beach." But in Jordan there is no easy way out. Said the diplomat: "We don't regret going into Jordan. But we regret having had to do it." At week's end the U.S. embassy in Amman added to the confusion by "suggesting" that Americans in Jordan leave the country unless there were "compelling" reasons for them to remain. Grumbled a British officer: "It certainly seems ill-timed, I must say."

Iraq. The new revolutionary regime seems solidly in the saddle but not yet shaken down. Last week the mask of sweet reasonableness toward the West appeared to slip a bit. Baghdad censors permitted the newspaper Al-Yakdha to boast: "We have no reason not to consider ourselves part of the United Arab Republic." The Baghdad radio announced that 111 prisoners (39 of them army officers) would shortly be tried by military courts for past crimes against the state. At the U.N., the new Iraqi delegate, Hashim Jawad, took his line from Egypt's shrewd Delegate Omar Loutfi by calling U.S. troops in Lebanon a "threat to international peace'' and a violation of the U.N. charter. Iraq's new Premier, Brigadier General Abdul Karim Kassem, had not talked that way to President Eisenhower's special envoy Robert Murphy the week before.

Imperturbable, five-star Ambassador Murphy, continuing his shuttling, soothing course around the Middle East, arrived in Cairo to find not a single representative of the Egyptian government at the airport to meet him. Nasser pointedly snubbed him for 24 hours, telling a visiting Japanese politician: "Frankly speaking, I wonder whether I should see Murphy at all, because I feel Murphy cannot understand the Arab mentality."

Having got as much mileage as possible from the snub, Nasser then met Murphy with the greatest cordiality. Murphy later told Egyptian newsmen: "We had a very thorough, very friendly and very satisfactory conversation ranging over a large number of subjects," and added of Nasser: "I have a very high estimate of his ability and knowledge." Asked an Egyptian reporter: "Are you going to change your policy as a result of talking to Nasser?" Murphy snapped: "Are you going to change yours?"

Saudi Arabia. One man Murphy did not see was Nasser's commander in chief, General Abdel Hakim Amer. General Amer was absent on a flying visit to Saudi Arabia where he dined with King Saud, who six months ago was being blasted by Radio Cairo for having "plotted" the assassination of Nasser. Now the Cairo spokesmen cooed that Amer's visit was aimed at "purifying the Arab horizon."

All of this brotherly, pan-Arab back-slapping made it clear that Nasser was suggesting to the other Mideast states that they join in one big family dominated, naturally, by Nasser and Egypt. If Iraqis in the new Cabinet longed to keep oil royalties inside their own borders, they had to be mindful of the Baghdad street mobs that cheer Nasser's photograph, and absorb the lies and fury of Radio Cairo.

Besides, Nasser offers another form of membership in his club, not so binding as Syria's merger with Egypt in the United Arab Republic, which has not worked well, as even Nasser admits. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and eventually Jordan might be persuaded to join a looser association called the United Arab States, which now links the U.A.R. with the feudal Imam of Yemen, a ruler whose primitivism makes the sheiks of Saudi Arabia appear enlightened democrats by comparison.* By joining the U.A.S., other Arab rulers might hope to keep some internal autonomy and some hold on their fabulous oil revenues. Such a membership, seemingly voluntary, might prove immune to U.N. charges of violating the independence of those brotherly sovereign states.

*When Druse tribesmen slew thousands of Lebanese Christians, leading to European intervention and the establishment of Lebanon as an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire.

*A temporary and involuntary inmate of the Imam's palace, British-born Rita Nasir, last week described how the Imam punishes a recalcitrant wife or concubine caught in such offenses as smoking. She must kneel in front of the throne while the Imam's dentist yanks out several of her teeth for each offense.

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