Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The source of these authoritarian moves was Nasser, even in the period when Naguib was both president of the republic (June 1953 to November 1954) and prime minister (September 1952 to February 1954). Nasser, who replaced Naguib as prime minister in February 1954, replaced him as president as well in November of that year. The general issue on which they broke was Nasser’s autocracy, but the specific issue was his outlawing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nasser won out in the struggle because he was concerned only with the reality of power and was prepared to cooperate with any group, to adopt any program, or to sacrifice any friend if doing so would strengthen his control of Egypt. Originally his personal sympathies were with the peasant masses and with the West, and there is no evidence that he was possessed of the pleasure-loving indolent characteristics which weaken so many ambitious Arabs. He continued to regard himself as a man of the people, but his insatiable thirst was for personal power.

The Agrarian Law of September 1952 determined much of the subsequent political and economic policy of the regime. It sought to alleviate the plight of the peasant and to force the landlord group, the center of Egyptian wealth, to shift their holdings from land to investment in industry and commerce. This was expected to create jobs for the numerous unemployed of the cities and to increase the Egyptian sector in trade, which was still largely in foreign hands. The original law set a maximum of landownership of 315 acres for each family, with 210 for the head of the family and a quarter as much for each of the first two children. Land beyond this amount had to be sold to the peasants who were actually working it, at a price seventy times the annual land tax, in plots of 2 to 5 acres. If not sold thus in six weeks, the surplus was taken by the state in return for thirty-year 3 percent bonds and was then sold to the peasants on long-term payments by the state. Since the peasants’ cultivation, whether as laborer, renter, or sharecropper, had previously been strictly regulated by the owner, this regulatory function was, under the new law, taken over by cooperative societies which were made compulsory in each district. These societies also act as purchasing, marketing, and training cooperatives. The law also enacted a reduction in rents for peasants who rented land. Several years later the maximum limit for landownership was reduced to 52.5 acres per person.

The agrarian reform undoubtedly helped the peasants who obtained ownership of plots or those whose rents were reduced, but it did nothing about the landless laborers or the growing mass of persons with no economic role who were multiplying so rapidly from the population explosion. The older landlord class, even on a fifty-acre maximum, was adequately provided for, but the method of compensation for their confiscated lands did not give them the free capital which it had been hoped would expand industry and trade. Moreover, few had sufficient confidence in the economic future of Egypt or the regime itself to put much of their current incomes into such activities, especially as the Nasser government took over many of the largest and most prosperous industrial enterprises. As a result, the government itself had increasingly to create new enterprises from government funds, and the system, although committed to a “mixed economy,” increasingly had to move toward Socialism.

It was clear from the beginning that the only remedy for the population explosion was additional land, and it was equally clear that this could be achieved only if the waters of the Nile were spread widely and more effectively over the uncultivated periphery of the Nile Valley. For this purpose the Nasser government proposed a High Dam three miles south of Aswan between the First Cataract of the Nile and the Sudan frontier. The project was technically feasible but enormously expensive, and involved complex political problems.

The proposed dam, three miles long and 120 yards high, would back up a reservoir of about 130 billion cubic meters of water, much of it in Sudan territory, and displacing 60,000 inhabitants as well as submerging many archaeological treasures. The project, originally estimated to cost over a billion dollars, would increase Egypt’s farm lands by about 30 percent, or two million acres, and, by equalizing the flow of the Nile throughout the year, would steady the country’s whole system of agricultural production. If the flow of water from the reservoir were harnessed to generate electricity, it could yield 10,000 million kilowatt-hours, but this would drive the total cost up to about $4 billion over fifteen years. Such a project could not possibly be financed by Egypt itself, and could not be built without previous agreement with the Sudan. Such an agreement must modify an earlier compromise of 1929 which gave Egypt 48,000 million cubic meters of water and the Sudan only 4,000 million cubic meters out of the total Nile flow of 84,000 million cubic meters, leaving 32,000 million cubic meters which previously flowed to the sea to be divided from the new High Dam reservoir.

From the beginning it should have been clear to Nasser that his regime would be a success only if he found a solution to Egypt’s economic plight and that the most substantial contribution to such a solution would come from the High Dam. Such a dam could be built only with the financial assistance of the West, since the Soviet bloc lacked the free resources or the psychological outlook to do the job, and a dam of that size, seventeen times the mass of the pyramid of Cheops, could not be built by Egypt’s own resources soon enough to alleviate Egypt’s economy. If Nasser had concentrated on this problem and determined to retain relations with the United States sufficiently amicable to obtain the necessary American aid, some progressive solution of the problems of Egypt and the Near East might have been possible.

However, Nasser allowed himself to be distracted by all kinds of emotional upheavals of an unconstructive kind. He maintained a constant state of hatred and tension toward Israel; he insisted on heavy armaments Egypt neither needed nor could afford and which Egyptians lacked the skill and the morale to use; he kept Egyptians and the whole Arab world in an uproar by his incendiary speeches and actions and his continual political intrigues and interventions in a fantastic and needless effort to make himself the leader of Arab political movements all the way from Morocco and Lake Chad to the Persian Gulf and Alexandretta; and he insisted on demonstrating his independence of the West by constant attacks and insults directed at the United States.

The United States, in the Dulles era, contributed to this confusion by its mistaken idea that the Soviet Union was actively engaging in efforts to take over the Near East and by Dulles’s efforts to force all the countries of the area into a single defensive pact, like the Baghdad Pact. Dulles’s contribution to the confusions of the Near East, as elsewhere, was that he refused to see that the problems of primary concern to the local peoples were local problems and that these were merely worsened by his insistence that the only problem in any area was the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union.

When the United States rejected Nasser’s tentative requests for heavy weapons, Nasser went to the Soviet bloc with his demands and obtained a large part of his requests (far beyond his real needs) but on a barter arrangement which tied up the Egyptian cotton crop for years in the future and removed this major prop of Egypt’s economy out of the economic picture. Without cotton to sell for foreign exchange, Nasser could not hope to ameliorate Egypt’s immediate economic problems. At the same time, while filling the air with denunciations of the United States and threats to Israel, Nasser opened his discussions for the financial assistance necessary to construct the High Dam. When the International Bank, as well as the American government, agreed to contribute to the project in principle but insisted on certain necessary precautions, such as the right to scrutinize the accounts, Nasser tried to blackmail them by playing off the United States against Soviet Russia by circulating stories of Soviet offers to build the project.