Word: arab
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Brother screamed at Arab brother last week in a way that suggested that Arab brotherhood is a sometime thing. In Cairo, President Nasser's marchers swung dead rats and dogs from mock gallows to show their hate for Premier Kassem and his Iraqi Communist allies. In Baghdad, Kassem supporters plastered the city with portraits of President Nasser's grinning countenance superimposed on pictures of donkeys, hyenas and dancing girls...
Nasser's Voice of the Arabs raged that Kassem was an apostate whose followers had torn up the Koran outside his office door shouting: "Death to Arab nationalism, death to Islam!" Nasser, who hitherto has hesitated to make a jihad, or holy war, against his Arab enemies, now invoked this highly charged cry against the Kassem regime and its atheist Communist comrades. (Use of such dangerous religious passions for political purposes may be effective against the Reds, but it also upsets Lebanese Christians and other non-Islamic Arabs...
Obviously the Kremlin hoped to keep its influence in both Arab camps. But could the Kremlin restrain its Iraqi partisans without in time destroying their enthusiasm? And was it enough for the Kremlin to remind Nasser sensibly of his economic dependence on Moscow? That unpredictable man had been known before to prefer pride to profit...
Looking on at another outburst of Arab street hate, the U.S. could be grateful for being out of the line of fire for once. It was refreshing to hear Nasser speak for the first time of "a Communist reign of terror," and to have Kassem denounce not the West but Nasser. And to hear the Communists, rather than the Western powers, accused of dividing the Arab nation was a welcome change. Yet those who now instinctively saw in Nasser a welcome new ally overlooked his own heavy and continuing dependence on the Soviet bloc. London's conservative Daily Telegraph...
...Communist help he depended upon to crush the Mosul revolt. (So long as Baghdad keeps independent of Cairo, the British think they can save their valuable oil principality of Kuwait from falling to Nasser.) Washington's reaction was to take no sides in what it called an Arab "family quarrel." Nasser's disenchantment with the Communists may now have gone a little farther than Kassem's, but neither was yet showing any signs of the wish, or the capacity, to break with Moscow...