Page 243 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

240 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

states stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, and thereby to dominate the
routes from Europe to India and the Far East. Nasser’s successful seizure of the
Suez Canal in 1956 put him in possession of what was known a century earlier
as the ‘overland’ route via Egypt and the Red Sea. Two years later the union of
Egypt with Syria in the United Arab Republic, and the revolution in Iraq
which swept away the Hashimite monarchy and placed a military regime in
power in Baghdad, promised to place him in control of the old ‘direct’ route
from the Mediterranean to the head of the Gulf. At that golden moment, in the

autumn of 1958, it seemed that Nasser was on the threshold of attaining
Mehemet Ali’s dream; with the added prize of the Gulf’s oil shimmering on the
horizon and opening up the breathtaking prospect of both enriching Egypt and
holding the West in pawn. Arabia played very much the same part in Nasser’s
calculations as it did in those of the old viceroy of Egypt, a part that grew in
importance after the collapse of the Syro-Egyptian union in 1961 and the
estrangement of the military regime in Baghdad from that in Cairo.
King Saud had tried hard in 1958 to destroy the newly formed union of
Egypt and Syria by means of bribery and even by attempted assassination. His
activities in this direction, combined with his mismanagement at home,
brought on a crisis in the government of Saudi Arabia and in the ruling family
itself in the spring of 1958, which resulted in Saud’s being forced to hand over
his powers to his brother, Faisal, in the capacity of prime minister. Despite
Saud’s hostility to Nasser, the Egyptian leader’s strident propagation of Arab
nationalist and anti-Western sentiments struck a responsive chord in some
Saudi Arabian circles, including the royal family itself, which Nasser did not
neglect to exploit by putting agents to work to promote unrest where they
could. A group of younger amirs in the Saudi family, led by three of the late Ibn
Saud’s sons, Talal, Fawwaz and Badr, began agitating for the ‘democratiza­
tion’ of the Saudi political system, the introduction of a national assembly and
the conversion of the Wahhabi imamate into a constitutional monarchy. When
they failed to make any headway against Faisal and the senior members of the
family supporting him, they decamped in the summer of 1962, first to the

Lebanon and then to Egypt.
When Nasser embarked upon his expedition to the Yemen in the autumn of
that year - a project he had had in mind at least since 1958 - he hoped to make
use of Talal ibn Abdul Aziz and his brothers to aggravate the disquiet which his
intervention in the Yemen was bound to cause in Saudi Arabia. It was all very
reminiscent of Mehemet Ali’s tactics 130 years earlier. The viceroy of Egypt
had undertaken the subjugation of the Yemeni lowlands in the early 1830s
before ordering his military commander in the Hijaz to advance into central
Arabia and depose the Saudi ruler of the day, Faisal ibn Turki, who was to be
replaced by his cousin, the pro-Egyptian Khalid ibn Saud. The objective of
Mehemet Ali’s army in the Yemen was Aden, possession of which would allow
him to command the passage of the Red Sea and the ‘overland’ route to the