WE ARE YOUR SOLDIERS

Comprehensive study of how much of the modern Arab world still reverberates with actions committed by Egypt’s former dictator.

“Seven decades since his coup, and more than half a century since his death, the Arab peoples have scarcely begun to shake off the legacy of ‘Father’ Gamal Abdel Nasser,” writes Lebanon-based journalist Rowell. The now largely suppressed Arab Spring movement, for example, was in many ways a continuation of anti-Nasser resistance, while the Syrian civil war and political chaos in Iraq bear Nasser’s marks in the wake of his failed effort to create an “Arab socialism” that would unite authoritarian rulers in the region. Nasser was a military adventurist who sent Egyptian troops as far afield as the Congo and unleashed chemical warfare on battlefields in Yemen. Ironically, Nasser’s actions helped his enemies rise, including Saudi-inspired Islamists, for Nasser was unsuccessful in playing off the factions of his day such as the Muslim Brotherhood. As Rowell notes, in matters of religion and its Muslim fundamentalist practitioners, “Nasser’s own stance was far more protean and mercurial than the one-dimensional ‘secular’ label permits.” The author shows that Egypt was much the weaker after Nasser’s rule, in part by his alienating the U.S. while courting a failing Soviet Union; in part because of the brain drain that accompanied his regime; and in part because of the disastrous 1967 war, which destroyed Egypt’s air force and led Israel to occupy Gaza and the West Bank. Nasser came to rue his errors, though, and “he made unequivocally clear to his fellow Arab heads of state that neither he nor they were in any position to wage war on Israel in the near future,” a confession “amounting to an indictment of much of pre-1967 Nasserism as a whole.”

A welcome history that helps explain the formation of the Middle East over the last half-century.