Fifty-three years after his death, the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser remains hotly contested. To his champions, the former Egyptian president, who ruled his country for 16 years until his death, aged 52, from a heart attack in 1970, was a unifying and inspirational leader who genuinely sought dignity for ordinary people while standing up to meddling western powers, most famously during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Against that, his detractors fault him as an autocrat who popularized the rule of the “man on horseback” that became the dominant model in the Middle East, and whose support for Arab nationalism sowed discord and violence across the region.
We Are Your Soldiers falls squarely into the second category. Its author Alex Rowell credits Nasser with not only creating the model of an all-powerful personal dictatorship and corporate militarism in Egypt but also across the Arab world. In his account, the Arab spring of 2010-12 was a revolt against the authoritarian system created by Nasser as much as against like-minded autocrats in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria and beyond.
Nasser “facilitated the spilling of rivers of Iraqi blood, empowered many of the country’s most violent and authoritarian actors, and made a pivotal contribution to the long-term devastation of its society and politics”, writes Rowell, a Lebanon-based journalist and author. .
More than any other individual, Nasser was responsible, Rowell claims, for the various civil wars that tore Lebanon apart, through incitement and interference in that country’s internal affairs. His “crusade” against Jordan nearly dethroned King Hussein, while Saddam Hussein and Muammer Gaddafi owe their rise to power to the Egyptian revolutionary. Even in death, says Rowell, Nasser has remained a force as “his ghost” influences Arab politics up to the present day.
As such, this is a sweeping, very readable, “one-size-fits-all” explanation for the ills of the Arab world then and now. But it is also one that does not fit “all”, as context, nuance and complexity are lost.
Rowell says he wants to focus more on Nasser the individual and his impact within the Arab arena than on the global cold war and the consequent geostrategic implications. This is a serious analytical error. From 1955 onwards, Nasser’s decisions and actions — like those of his regional counterparts — were a reaction to the superpower rivalries that undermined the nascent postcolonial states of the Middle East, turning the region into a proxy battleground.
In the early 1950s, Nasser, then a young colonel with relatively moderate political views, sought to build a close relationship with the US. He and his Free Officer comrades who overthrew the monarchy in a coup d’état in 1952 wanted to harness state power to lift Egyptians out of poverty and industrialize the country. They hoped that America would help modernize Egypt and free it from imperial British control. At the same time, Nasser asked that Egypt remain independent and pursue non-aligned foreign policy and state-led development.
Such requests fell on deaf ears in the Eisenhower White House. Against the backdrop of heightened cold war tensions, Washington demanded that Egypt choose between regional anti-Soviet defense pacts or ostracization.
When Nasser refused to play ball, Washington set up regional alliances — first led by Iraq and then by Saudi Arabia — in order to isolate and contain him. Nasser retaliated by targeting pro-western rulers in the region and trying to build an alternative bloc, which led to a prolonged proxy conflict known as the Arab cold war.
America’s confrontation with Nasser unleashed a chain of crises that radically altered the trajectory of change in the Middle East. The strife between Arab countries certainly had local roots, but the US fanned the flames. The consequences were devastating economically, institutionally and militarily, fatally fracturing Arab politics.
Although Rowell’s story is entertaining, his fixation on Nasser’s personality blinds him to the bigger, defining international forces at play. These saw Egypt dragged into costly regional entanglements and conflicts — most notably the Six-Day War of 1967 — in which it found itself overextended and outplayed.
Far from an all-powerful leader, as Rowell claims, Nasser was constantly on the defensive, trying to secure his regime against real and imagined threats. He could neither keep in check his Arab nationalist allies nor deter his regional rivals. The turmoil and violence in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya and beyond was fueled more by internal, regional and international drivers than by Nasser’s hidden hand.
Any balanced assessment of Nasser’s impact in Egypt and the Arab world must cover his social and economic reforms — in particular his land reforms and accessibility to education and medical care — on which, alas, We Are Your Soldiers has little to say.
Nasser never even pretended to be a democrat. He repeatedly stated that democracy was a luxury that Egyptians could not afford. But like the early generation of postcolonial leaders in the developing world, Nasser, the son of a postal worker, was a developmentalist genuinely concerned about improving the dismal living conditions under which most Egyptians lived.
After he took power he engineered a social revolution that transformed the lives of millions of Egyptians, modernizing the country and leveling the social playing field. But Rowell is spot on to draw attention to how Nasser ruled with an iron fist and police enforcement. He was so popular that of the 35 million people in Egypt at the time of his death, it is estimated that one in seven attended his funeral.
Nasser still animates the imagination of many Egyptians and Arabs — a different story than the one told by Rowell. Perhaps there is no more poignant symbol of this than the images of his portrait held aloft by protesters in 2011 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, as well as in other Arab countries.
Yet, contrary to the hypothesis that Rowell advances, the history of the modern Middle East — or indeed any other region — cannot simply be explained by the impact of “great men”, heroes or villains. Nasser was a creature of his turbulent times and, for all his charismatic presence, was at the mercy of greater forces that he could not control. Ignoring that blinds us to what was — and arguably still is — happening in the world of Middle East politics and international relations.
We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World by Alex Rowell Simon & Schuster £25/WW Norton $30, 416 pages
Fawaz A Gerges is a professor of international relations at London School of Economics and the author or ‘Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash That Shaped the Middle East’
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