Year 1960 - Part 16: The Five Pillars of American Middle East Policy and a Visit from the Poet al-Qarawi

Tuesday, 8 November: The American Presidential Election

The United States has two great parties, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, and it is not easy to tell the difference between them. Both are "capitalist" parties, believers in a free domestic economy, working to raise the standard of living of the less wealthy segment of their own society, for the individual's own standard of living there is already high, and preferred over any other country in the world. The dollar has become the world's own reserve currency, the medium of every international commercial transaction, and American banks are the channel through which credit is opened between different nations.

In foreign policy, both parties work to entrench American influence, cement the dollar's own strength, and drain the Arabs' own wealth, buying their oil at the cheapest possible prices, refusing to let them establish any advanced petroleum or technological industries of their own, and leaving the oil princes of the Arabian Peninsula just enough of a margin to eat and drink their fill, and indulge their own vices in the cabarets of Europe and America. And that is all, for whatever remains to them from the price of crude oil, they are expected to deposit in American and British banks especially.

Until the day came when the dollar itself sank to its lowest point, so that Arab deposits, staggering in their own raw numbers, had lost more than three-quarters of their own purchasing power.

The example I offer is this: I stayed at the world-class Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City in 1959, and paid 25 dollars a day for the room. Today (1995), I hear that a single night's room now costs more than 500 dollars.

Likewise, the two great American parties are agreed on supporting Israel, supplying it with advanced weaponry, "so that it remains stronger than all the Arab armies combined." Every indication suggests it now possesses the nuclear bomb.

This was openly stated by the two rival candidates in the current election: Nixon for the Republican Party, and Kennedy for the Democratic Party.

Kennedy won, from a well-known wealthy family, by a razor-thin majority over his Republican rival.

This is the first time in American history that a Catholic candidate has ever won. My own sense is that President Abdel Nasser was relieved at Kennedy's own victory, hoping he might find in him some understanding of the Arabs' own troubles and fundamental problems.

But anyone examining American policy closely, especially as it concerns our own Arab region, finds it resting on five fixed pillars:

First: an unshakeable American commitment to guaranteeing Israel's own safety, supplying it with money and weapons, so that it remains stronger than the Arabs combined.

This is why Arab armies achieved no real victory in the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. America intervened, with its own enormous resources, to steer the battles whenever signs emerged of Arab armies gaining the upper hand in certain engagements.

Second: America's unwavering commitment to the flow of Arab oil, through the Gulf, through the Suez Canal, and through the pipelines running across Saudi Arabia and Syria, to Western and American refineries, at the cheapest possible prices.

No one is unaware that British and American oil companies interfere in the policy of the oil-producing states, steering it toward their own interests.

Third: the existence of the Arab oil princes as recognized states of their own, with hereditary systems of rule, serves the Western world's own interest, and so they endure, propped up by American support and the protection of British and American intelligence.

When Abdul Karim Qasim threatened Kuwait in 1960, British forces landed on its own territory to protect it.

And when Saddam Hussein committed the "crime" of annexing it in 1990, American President George Bush rallied the armies of the world against him, Egyptian, Syrian, and Gulf Arab armies among them, and waged a devastating war against him on 17 January 1991.

Any talk of "democracy," it seems, must always stay well clear of the Arabian Peninsula.

Fourth: an American "commitment" to "recycling" the surplus of oil wealth, forcing its own owners to buy Western weapons and goods, whenever the balance of payments of these protected states begins to wobble.

Fifth: forcing the "protected" Arab states into the military alliances the United States and its own allies establish, to serve as an offensive-defensive belt against the Soviet Union. This entry need not be explicit, it is enough that it be expressed through conduct alone.

For this reason, America established enormous military bases in Arab countries, the most famous of them the Dhahran base, and drew certain Arab states, such as Iraq under its own monarchy, Lebanon, and Jordan, into "membership" in the Baghdad Pact.

This reckless American policy met fierce resistance from the Syrian governments of the 1950s, and from Egypt's own government under Abdel Nasser, where military alliances were concerned.

As for the flow and exploitation of Arab oil, its own "owners" and beneficiaries slept soundly on a bed of silk.

For this reason, that Lebanese journalist Yazbak was right, when he wrote a book in the 1940s of this century titled "Oil, the Enslaver of Peoples."

Who knows! Had it never been discovered on our own soil, Israel might never have been established in the heart of the Arab world to protect its own flow, serving as a policeman with which the powers holding these interests could threaten every other Arab country.

On this same day, the government held two lengthy sessions, one in the morning, the other in the evening. The morning session studied essential amendments to the Industrial Bank's own regulations, so that it could better carry out the tasks entrusted to it.

The evening session studied the question of how much cottonseed ought to be exported abroad.

We hold 175,000 tons of this seed. The debate was long and heated over the right quantity, with proposals ranging between exporting 15,000 tons and 30,000 tons.

The interests of the oil-pressing factories, which need this seed, called for limiting exports, while the country's own need to import essential goods called for expanding exports instead, to secure "hard" foreign currency.

This was the true source of the anxiety and difficulty.

I felt as though the government were echoing the words of the poet:

"He threw him into the sea, hands bound, and told him:

Beware, beware, that you should ever get wet."

It is regrettable that these long debates in ministerial sessions bring people's own affairs to a standstill, leaving them waiting for days at the ministries' own doors, until the minister finds time to review their own petitions.

I worked to remedy this problem, by delegating the provincial finance directors to decide a broad range of matters otherwise falling within the minister's own authority.

This brought great relief to the ordinary petitioner, who no longer needed to travel to the capital in search of a hotel to sleep in and a restaurant to eat at.

Monday the 14th: A Visit from the Poet al-Qarawi

I was delighted, to the very fullest measure of delight, by a visit from the mighty poet "al-Qarawi."

The Republic had set aside for him a lifetime pension of a thousand Syrian lira.

This was an excellent sum in those days, equivalent to the salary of a university professor who had reached the very highest rank of professorship (first class, first grade).

He had come to collect his own accumulated back pay, under Decision Law No. 35, dated 11 February 1959.

This pension had been proposed for him by the ministerial committee I chaired, at a personal request from Abdel Nasser himself.

On this visit, he gave me a gift of his own splendid collected poems, "The Divan of al-Qarawi, Rashid Salim al-Khouri," signing the dedication as coming "from your sincere friend."

The volume is a large one, running to 925 pages, its introduction written in "Sanbol" on 1 August 1952, corresponding to 11 Dhu al-Qi'dah 1371, and printed at the Safadi commercial press, though without stating the country where it was printed, or even a date.

I sat with "al-Qarawi" for a full hour, exchanging with him the sweetest of conversation.

He overflowed with eloquence, national feeling, gentle manners, and devotion to his own Arab nation. His own burning passion captivated me, taking full hold of my own emotions.

With his own immortal poetic gift, he managed to lift me from the heavy, material atmosphere of "financial reality" into a world where the white butterflies of poetry flutter freely.

I recorded the following about him in my own notes:

"His poetry truly delights me. I would almost venture to say he is the one poet whose words make my own heart and feelings dance."

I asked him about his life in his own village of al-Barbara in Lebanon, after his return from his American exile, and he said:

"I live in al-Barbara in the home of one of the village's own sons, for the house I grew up in has become a stable for animals. I fry my own eggs for my meals, and sweep the floor of my own room myself, to keep it clean for sitting and sleeping. I wish to express to the Republic and its own President my deepest gratitude for this pension, which I hope will help me build a small house of my own in al-Barbara, where I can spend the rest of my own life, and which can serve as a refuge for my own siblings and their children, should they ever return to their homeland."

I asked him: why did you never marry, sir?

He said: I was a schoolteacher, and had to support my own siblings and mother, and my own salary secured no more than bare subsistence for a family. For this reason, I did not wish to burden myself further with a wife whose own conduct I could not be certain of, or children I would never be able to make happy. So I remained, in effect, "a monk," devoting myself instead to raising my own younger siblings.

He spoke to me of his own nationalist poetry, and his own passion for his Arab nation.

And of how often he faced unjust campaigns against him, for these very convictions.

He recalled growing up in a family where his own mother used to frighten her children with talk of "the Bedouin," meaning the Arab, and where the clergy used to mold young minds at school, infecting them with the viruses of bigotry and superstition.

He added that God had blessed him when he found his own way to emigrate and leave this "ghetto" behind, just as God had blessed Ameen Rihani with deliverance from the claws of foolish superstition.

I wish to record his own words here with complete honesty, to help anyone wishing to study him with real sincerity, for he launched a fierce attack on the Kataeb Party, describing its members as ignorant bigots, and likewise attacked the Christians of the Levant, accusing them of foolishness and weak national conviction.

He said: "these are old convictions of mine."

He read me a passage from a poem he had composed in 1925, thirty-five years before this very meeting, on Sultan al-Atrash, which read:

"What an Atrash you are, when we called upon you

for a vengeance I thought all of us could hear.

Young man of the battlefield, do not blame us,

the finest excuse we can offer is a finer deed still.

You practiced it well, in the days when we

practiced submission, chained as we were.

For it you lit pyres of corpses and skulls,

while we lit only censers and candles instead.

If you would lift this injustice, then strike

with the sword of Muhammad, and set Jesus aside.

'Love one another,' we were counseled

by a wolf, and no flock was ever spared by it.

O gentle lamb, who left behind

no other gentle lamb in all creation but us.

You raged for a mere collar, once sold,

yet never raged for your own people, sold in turn.

Why did you not bring down some new gospel

to teach us pride, rather than submission?

O Lebanon, your own sons have died a death,

when I had thought them merely fast asleep."

He did not forget to tell me that he had studied the philosophy of Islam in Carlyle's own book, and had come to love the Arabs, devoting his own pen and poetic gift to defending their cause.

He very nearly told me outright that he had converted to Islam, but settled instead for a hint more eloquent than any outright declaration could have been.

This, in any case, is a matter between him and God alone. I record it here only because it is a fundamental question in the poet's own intellectual life, and as a tribute of loyalty I offer now that its own subject rests in God's own presence.

He told me of an attempt to kidnap him from the ship, when it docked in Beirut, by Kataeb members, and how he called out to Abdel Nasser for help, so that those who loved the Republic and its President came to his rescue and saved him from being kidnapped and abused.

On this return of his, he composed a long, beautiful poem, of which he gave me a copy, opening with the line:

"So that you do not take it for mere idle dreams,

magnify your Lord, and prostrate yourself in Damascus."

It is regrettable that I lent it to a literary acquaintance to have it copied, and he never returned it. It may appear in the new edition of his own collected poems, which I have not seen, in which he styled himself "the Trumpet of Arabism."

Saturday the 26th: The Year of Africa

My brother Dr. As'ad, our ambassador in Portugal, arrived from a long tour of his own through Black Africa.

He had secured a special permit, one no one before him had ever obtained, to visit the Portuguese African colonies.

He visited Guinea, the Congo (the Belgian colony), Angola, and Mozambique, passing through Salisbury and Khartoum.

He spoke of what he had seen: towering buildings, broad streets lined with soaring trees, and magnificent forests, "grazed" by wild yet "tamed" animals.

He sensed that Africans were yearning for genuine independence, and that the twenty states that gained independence this very year had given political historians occasion to call it the Year of Africa.

In his own view, if it was the white man who enjoyed these enormous advantages, then he would inevitably have to leave, sooner or later, for Black nationalism was spreading like wildfire.

He met with some Muslim leaders in these countries, and found them still holding to their own Islam, though a great many superstitions had crept into their own beliefs.

There is a real need for "missionary" delegations to restore to Islam its own pure face. His own "prophecy" in this proved true, in what he said, and in what he and we alike hoped for.

In Khartoum, he met his friend Dr. Abdel Aziz Ishaq, a university professor who had become a counselor at the Egyptian embassy in the Sudanese capital. He told him of one of his own trips through this country's own forests, where he visited a tribal chief who spoke the very language Dr. Ishaq mastered. He asked him about the practice of eating human flesh in these regions, and the chief said this matter had come to an end, adding: "I myself have not eaten this meat for a long time now." He asked him: "meaning how long, exactly?" The chief answered: "Two months."

The truth is that Africa remains a closed world.

I still recall that France once forbade us from setting foot on the port of Algiers, when our ship "Marrakech" docked there on our own way home in 1945.

Thursday, 1 December: The Sequestration Decisions

A series of decision-laws were issued by the President of the Republic, imposing sequestration on a group of foreign institutions and companies in the Southern Region.

One cannot help but be struck by this frightening penetration of foreign capital into the Egyptian economy, and no fair-minded person could do anything but welcome these sequestration decisions, a necessary cleansing of Egypt's own economy, which had been the object of the ugliest exploitation at the hands of British, French, Italian, and Greek companies.

A pressing question comes to mind: how did the previous monarchical regime and its own pashas ever allow these foreign exploiters such a stranglehold over the very bread of Egypt's poor?

Below are some examples of these laws:

Decision-Law No. 285, dated 1 December 1960, providing for "the liquidation of the Egyptian Electric Railways Company," owned by Boghos Nubar (an Egyptian name, but a foreign owner).

Order No. 86 of 1960, imposing sequestration on the Egyptian Mining Company (Sinca), issued by President Abdel Nasser (a foreign company).

Decision-Law No. 286 of 1960, placing the Cairo Tramway utility under administrative sequestration (a foreign company).

Decision-Law No. 287 of 1960, placing the Egyptian Electricity Company under administrative sequestration (a foreign company).

Decision-Law No. 288 of 1960, "on the transfer of ownership of the Belgian and International Bank in Egypt" to the state, converting its shares into registered state bonds for a period of 12 years, at an interest rate of 5 percent.

Order No. 87, imposing sequestration on the Contracting Joint-Stock Company (L. Rolin and Partners).

Order No. 88, imposing sequestration on the Shepheard's Hotel and Egyptian Hotels Company (a foreign company).

Order No. 99, dated 26 February 1961, imposing sequestration on the assets of Belgian nationals. (Issued alongside other sequestration decisions on foreign assets at later dates.)

From the heart, a salute to Abdel Nasser, who took it upon himself to liberate his own country, both politically and economically.

We in Syria had already gone before him, reclaiming, back in the 1950s, the central bank and every foreign company holding a concession of its own.