EFFORTPOST The 1958 Middle East Crisis: Syria

I recently polled my people and this is what they wanted me to write about. Fortunately I can use declassified CIA documents for most of my research.

There were multiple huge crises in the Middle East in 1958 that seemed like they were going to lead the world into war. There was even a major deployment of US troops there. But you never hear about them. Why? Because there wasn't a war. I'm going to tell you some stories about what scared the heck out of everyone in the USA and the Middle East but they managed to get it under control. Think of it as the anti-Chernobyl.

Buddy Holly - Peggy Sue. Yeah, those were the days.

Syria

The first big crisis of the year, the one that got everything rolling, was Syria's admission to the United Arab Republic. Or to say it another way, Syria being annexed by Egypt. Every state in the region and the superpowers had been expecting something like this to happen eventually since World War II. Now it seemed that the balance of power had been overturned and all of the pent-up conflicts in the Middle East were about to blow up.

I'm guessing it wasn't really a 99.99% vote in favor of it because Nasser had grave misgivings about this and could barely be persuaded to.

Syria was the most failed "failed state" that you could imagine. It owes its existence to the French demand at the end of World War I that after all their sacrifices they deserved their own chunk of the Ottoman Empire. In 1946 it gained its independence but it didn't have much of a national identity other than being the land that France used to own. It was widely expected that it would soon be absorbed into a larger Arab state with Iraq and Jordan. But for extremely complicated reasons this didn't happen and little Syria survived.

Notice how everything he mentions being in "Syria" is in what we call "Lebanon" now.

Soon it wished it hadn't survived. After independence Syria had about one successful coup every two years and countless failed ones. By 1958 most of the factions had been purged from political life and it was Ba'athists who held a tenuous grip on power. They couldn't even trust their fellow Ba'athists, and worse, the Communists were becoming dangerously powerful. And nobody likes a commie. In order to make sure they didn't seize control, in January 1958 Syria's leaders came up with a creative strategy: Become part of Egypt.

One of the main factions that briefly held power there in the early 1950s was the batshit crazy SSNP. I heard the British were supporting them back then.

Egypt

This was pretty crazy but not as crazy as it sounds. There was a strong desire across the region to unite into one Arab nation. What is the heart of the Arab nation? Egypt. And its leader Nasser was the only one who could do this. Two years earlier in the Suez Crisis, Eisenhower ordered Britain and France back into their cucksheds and forbid them to invade other countries anymore. But Arabs saw this as a great victory where Nasser stood up to the colonial powers and defeated them, which at least had a kernel of truth to it. Many people across all the Arab world considered him to be their leader and were annoyed that their country hadn't joined him yet.

Some of the most extreme cope I've ever seen. British troops withdrawing in humiliation from Egypt under American orders, never to return.

The only problem is, how do you get Nasser onboard? He wants to to unify the Arabs, but he doesn't want to start out by being responsible for this basket case country that doesn't have its shit together. Eventually he agrees on a few conditions: The Syrian people have to vote for him. All political parties will be dissolved. The army will get out of politics.

The conservative monarchies are not about to take this lying down. The Saudis try to arrange a coup before unification can happen, but it is terribly inept. The King of Iraq, who kinda hoped he was gonna be the one to annex Syria and lead the Arab world, proposes merging with Jordan. It's another pro-British monarchy ruled by his brother so it makes sense in these dangerous times. The problem is, the Saudis are afraid of Nasser but they're also afraid of Iraq and Jordan getting too powerful, so they have trouble coordinating a response.

This is what the government of Iraq was like in the 1950s. I wonder what will happen to them...

The UAR

On February 22 Egypt and Syria join together as the United Arab Republic.

• The kings of Iraq and Jordan are worried that this will lead the many Nasserists among their own people to overthrow them.

• King of Saudi Arabia is too busy dealing with getting overthrown by his brother to do much.

• President Chamoun of Lebanon is extremely alarmed. The domestic situation is already really screwed up and the last thing he needs is Nasserists on 80% of the country's border.

• Israel doesn't really care since both Egypt and Syria are already hostile to them. Their only problem is if Iraq and Jordan merge because Iraq would be the senior partner and they are not fans of the whole Zionism thing.

• The British are desperate to keep alive the Arab monarchies they set up after WWI. Their whole imperial plan was to build these up and now they only have Iraq and Jordan left.

• The USA is ambivalent. Nasser is hard to deal with, but at least he kept the commies out of the region.

• The Soviets are probably as mad as Boris Badenov when one of his plots fails.

Epilogue

Nasser soon sends Egyptians to take over key government positions away from Syria. The Ba'athists are understandably butthurt as they're the ones who invited the Egyptians to come and now they're getting pushed out of power and having their newspapers shut down. The Egyptians probably figure that if these people are so incapable of running their own lives that they ask us to take over their country, they can't be trusted in leadership roles. There's also less obvious divisions, like business people being butthurt about how the Egyptians don't understand that their economy is different. These tensions were already obviously before the year was out. In 1961, a coup topples the Egyptians. Like so many others who tried to control Syria in this era, they lasted about two years.

Damascus, 1950s. According to some redditor.