“So,” the President of Egypt asked rhetorically, his tone thoughtful and strangely distracted, “it is true that a large British fleet has docked at Damman?”
“Yes. There is talk of an ANZAC Brigade being formed for service in Kuwait,” Sadat explained. “Australians, New Zealanders with modern tanks and artillery to fight beside the infantry formations the British have already flown out to the Kingdom.”
“The British are making a lot of the bombing raids being carried out from Cyprus. What do our people in Iraq report?”
Our people in Iraq referred in the main to members of the Muslim Brotherhood too distant from Cairo to have been purged and harassed by Nasser’s security service and a dwindling handful of Iraqi Army officers sympathetic to Nasser’s dream of a pan-Arab republic, rather than any kind of coherent intelligence network.
The two men sat down, the President behind his desk and Sadat, weary from his travels in the chair before it. Notwithstanding their friendship there was never a scintilla of doubt as to who was the real master.
There was a hiatus while strong bitter coffee was poured by staff acolytes and both men collected their thoughts.
Muhammad Anwar El Sadat had come a long way from his humble Upper Egyptian roots. Born one of thirteen children of a poor family at Mit Abu al-Kum in December 1918 to a Nubian father and a half-Sudanese mother, he had faced insults and racial jibes from the first day he was exposed to the milieu of Lower Egypt and the alleged sophistication of contemporaries and enemies from Cairo, Alexandria and the Delta. Throughout his adult life he had known his opponents and detractors had never regarded him as being ‘Egyptian enough’, and latterly they sniggered behind their hands and accused him of being ‘Nasser’s black poodle’. As a boy his heroes had been Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the leader of the ‘Young Turks’, Mahatma Gandhi, and as a young man he had been fascinated and excited by the early success of the Nazi ‘Blitzkrieg’. It was shortly after graduating from the Royal Military Academy in Cairo in 1938 that Sadat, a conflicted proto-revolutionary had been posted to the Sudan — then a part of Egypt under the ‘protection’ of the British — where he had met Nasser and with other officers founded the Free Officers, committed to expunging the two great evils then afflicting their country; the British presence and the endemic corruption of the ruling royal regime.
During World War II the British had jailed Sadat for making approaches to the Italians and the Germans for help. He was by nature a profoundly political animal; during and after the war, acting on behalf of the Free Officers he was involved with and penetrated the Muslim Brotherhood, the fascist movement Young Egypt, and the pro-palace Iron Guard of Egypt. When in 1952 the Free Officers had overthrown King Farouk it was Sadat who had made the announcement over Egyptian radio. That had been a momentous moment in his life; and shortly ‘Nasser’s black poodle’, the second most powerful man in Egypt and his ‘master’ had to make a decision upon which, literally, the fate of their nation hung.
“The British bombing is being undertaken by a small number of aircraft,” Sadat reported. “We believe they have persuaded the Syrians, and possibly the Lebanese to allow the RAF to overfly their territory enabling the bombers involved to carry the heaviest possible bomb loads. The Soviets probably meant to use Sulaymaniyah as a concentration point and logistics hub, a ‘pause point’ before renewing their invasion. However, the bombing seems to have forced them to proceed in a somewhat ‘piecemeal’ fashion. If our Iraqi friends only stopped fighting among themselves,” he observed resignedly, “the British bombing might actually have given them a chance to at least slow down, if not halt the Russians before they get to Baghdad. But,” he shrugged, “we know that won’t happen.”
“Have the Iraqis started moving forces to reinforce the Baghdad garrison yet?”
Sadat shook his head.
“No, the forces in the south have drawn back around Basra. For all we know they might be about to mount another idiotic incursion into Iran.”
Nasser turned the possibilities in his head.
“You spoke to the Iraqi Ambassador?”
“The man was more concerned with seeking asylum for his family and business associates in Baghdad than he was about seeking our help on the battlefield,” his friend responded, quietly contemptuous. “He seems to be under the impression that the British or the Americans will come to Iraq’s rescue at any minute. He kept on saying ‘surely they will defend their oil’ to me!”
Nasser nodded.
By the grace of Allah he led a ‘historic’ country, not a collection of ethnically, religiously and culturally incompatible ‘provinces’ cobbled together by British and French diplomats over forty years ago at a now ruined French palace outside Paris. Egypt had existed throughout recorded history; it was the great power of the Middle East, situated astride both Africa and Arabia. From its history it derived intrinsic and legitimate nationhood and unity; Iraq had none of that for all the fact that its ancient Mesopotamian settlements had been the cradles of civilization. There was no such thing as ‘Iraq’ other than in the minds of map makers and long dead European politicians. Iraq was merely one of the more egregious of the blunders written into the Treaty of Versailles.
Iraq was not worth fighting for.
But Basra?
Well, that was different, likewise Kuwait which the Russians would surely gobble up sooner or later if they gained a secure foothold in the Persian Gulf. If the Soviets ever established themselves in Southern Iraq and Iran what then of Egyptian claims to be a regional power?
There was also the matter of Egypt’s own oilfields. Commercially viable fields had been discovered in the first decade of the twentieth century in the Gulf of Suez, other, as yet unexploited but potentially much larger reserves of oil lay under the Sinai Peninsula around Abu Rudeis and Ra’s Sudr. New reserves were regularly discovered in both the Western and the Eastern deserts; had the World not gone mad in October 1962 Nasser’s Egypt might have already been well down the road to becoming a major global oil producer by now. The riches that might have brought would have made possible to fund his regime’s raft of radical social reforms; made it unnecessary to go cap in hand to the old superpowers to finance great projects like the High Dam at Aswan.
Those oilfields, ‘under the auspices of a new pan-Arab Republic, and those of Kuwait and Southern Iraq, perhaps, allied with those of Abadan and the adjacent Iranian oilfields might yet underwrite a new and lasting Arab economic, cultural and military renaissance’.
These were the exact words that had come from the mouth of a British Foreign Secretary!
It was hardly surprising that Nasser and Sadat had looked at each other in askance, momentarily too stunned to respond.
‘Of course,’ Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson had continued, as if he was discussing some small and insignificant caveat in a ten thousand word long treatise on building sand castles, ‘one cannot ever be entirely certain how things will play out. War is a notoriously messy business.’