Word: nasser
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Though he became a professed socialist in the last years of his life, Nasser stood for no doctrinaire political ideology. His movement, he admitted, was "a revolution without a plan." More precisely, it was a revolution to rid the Arab world of foreign domination?a job that was bound to involve tragic excesses. Former U.S. Ambassador to Cairo Raymond Hare has characterized it as "a revulsion rather than a revolution." Convinced that Israel's statehood represented part of the domination that he detested, Nasser felt compelled to waste Egyptian resources in military conflicts with the new nation. At home...
...Aswan High Dam, designed to generate cheap electricity and create some 1,500,000 acres of newly fertile land. To finance it, Nasser turned to both the U.S. and Russia. Rebuffed by the U.S. on a request to purchase weapons in 1955, Nasser stunned?and delighted?the Arab world by announcing that he had made an Iron Curtain arms deal through Czechoslovakia. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles thereupon scratched Aswan as an American aid project, and Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal. "Americans," he cried, "may you choke on your fury...
Britain and France, fearful of being strangled by a cutoff of Suez traffic, joined the Israelis in 1956 in a surprise attack on Egypt. Though Nasser's forces were badly beaten, he was saved when the U.S. and the Soviet Union combined to compel all three nations to withdraw their forces...
...Nasser gained immense prestige throughout the Arab world, and he quickly exploited it. In one Arab state after another, he engineered pro-Nasser takeovers. Nasser proudly called the coups "pageants of sunrise," but the results often did not last much past sundown. His agents in Iraq helped to assassinate King Feisal II, tried at times to topple Hussein in Jordan, and assisted successful revolutions in Libya and the Sudan. They filtered through so many Middle East capitals weaving plots that there were increasing protests. During a 1966 visit, former Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson told him: "Mr. President, the U.S. Government...
...Nasser's greatest failure as a sponsor of revolution was in Yemen, where Egyptian troops fought for five years in an ill-advised campaign to depose the Imam Badr and replace him with a republican government. "I was convinced that I was participating in a genuine war of liberation," Nasser said after the campaign had ended. "By the time I found out it was a tribal war, it was too late to get out with honor. I found myself stuck." Small wonder that some observers dubbed Yemen "Nasser's Viet...