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On Nasser and His Legacy

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

• critics are not without an abundance of setbacks to dwell upon: the Yemeni fiasco, which was dubbed Nasser's Vietnam; his many regional quarrels, which consumed his re- sources and attention; his failure to bring about a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict; the performance of his armies in 1956 and 1967; the failure of his agrarian reform; and his inability to create a durable and viable base of power and legitimacy outside the sheer impact of his charisma.

• He flirted with socialism, but in such a context it never really had much of a chance.

• Berger's further assertion that the conditions in Nasser's Egypt may have enhanced rather than weakened the position of religio

• e American journalist Edward Sheehan in the introduction to this book that Heikal played a decisive role in the events that led to the ex- pulsion of Russian troops from Egypt in July 1972

• ent. Nasser was called upon to lend Syria stability and the Ba'ath party sup- ported the union partly out of ideological commitment to Arab unity and partly out of convenience, for it saw the union as an oppor- tunity to strengthen its position against the Communists and the Syrian Nationalist Part

• As Ba'athist leaders regarded themselves as being far more ideologically and politically sophisticated than Nasser, they saw in the union the possibility of 'educating' Nasser, capitalizing upon his charisma and mass appeal, and converting him to the true principles and nature of Ba'athist-style Arab social

• . Time and again, Nasser's letters to Kennedy, Johnson, and even Khrushchev, reproduced by Heikal, seemed to ask for understanding rather than for any specific or tangible concessions. The replies do not reveal much understanding

• Though a rebel and a bit of a gambler, Nas- ser was never a romantic revolutionary and was generally adverse to revolutionary polem- ics and romantic blueprints

• When Castro came to power, for example, Nasser thought of him and his men as a 'bunch of Errol Flynns, theatrical brigands but not true revolutionaries' (p. 343

• d. Since he ruled out Mao's suggestion of a people's war against the Israelis, and since he knew that the odds of victory in a convention- al war were overwhelmingly again

• Nasser would not have been able to rally conservatives such as King Feisal and Kuwait's rulers to his side for a military-diplo- matic onslaught against Israel

• In Egypt Sadatism has been a definite shift to the right and Sadat, as John Waterbury telis us in an illuminating account, has 'abandoned the middle position in ideological affairs and has come to rely increasingly on a mixture of elements from the liberal bourgeois and the Islamic right

• In testimony to the shallow- ness of the Nasserist experiment and to the re- silience of traditional elements in Egyptian so- ciety, there is a strong trend toward Islamic revivalism and political conservatism