Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. Hazem Kandil
who were also involved in the cover-up would rise to power and fame—rather than suffer for their complacency. Prominent examples included, on the political side, Kamal al-Shazly, future minister of parliamentary affairs and deputy secretary-general of the ruling party, who was back then the ASU representative in Munufiya, and on the security side, the future interior minister Abd al-Halim Musa, and the future director of state security Hassan Tal’at.65 And without getting too much ahead, it is worth mentioning that in September 1998 al-Feqi family and their hirelings spearheaded the repression of Kamshish peasants who resisted President Hosni Mubarak’s reversal of the state protection guaranteed to tenant farmers in the 1950s. Al-Feqis still owned land above the limit prescribed by law and were hungry for more, and Shahendah Maqlad, Hussein’s widow, was still there to lift the peasants’ spirits. Little had changed in three decades.*
The complacency of political and security cadres alarmed Nasser, who pointed to the “tragedy of Kamshish” during his May Day speech of 1967, as an indicator that opportunists had hijacked the ASU, and that even after he sequestered the lands of large landlords, “they remained emperors just as they were before, even more so.”66 A few days before, the daily Al-Akhbar came out with a dramatic headline that read: “Nasser Warns of Counter-Revolutionary Forces.”† But it was Amer who was truly disturbed by the intimate relations that were forming behind his back between the president’s ASU and security men (at the PBI and the Interior Ministry) and the rural elite, and saw this as a potential threat to the political influence of the army. Determined to liquidate this last bastion of social reaction, Nasser and Amer, each for his own reasons, agreed to form the Committee for the Liquidation of Feudalism. Infighting over who should be included, however, produced a catchall twenty-two-member committee with all the usual suspects from both security factions: Sabri, Sharaf, Gomaa, and others associated with Nasser, alongside Amer, Badran, Nasr, and their allies.67
In a matter of weeks, the committee received complaints from hundreds of villages against the still dominant power of large landowners. Investigations revealed that more than 45 percent of the peasants were still landless, that 95 percent of the landed peasants held less than 5 feddans, and that only 5 percent of landowners controlled 43 percent of all arable land. Petitions also highlighted how the rising agricultural bourgeoisie was gaining political control over the countryside. Soon the committee issued its final report: “After eight months of continued work … the Agricultural Reform [Agency] sequestered or placed under state guardianship about 200,000 feddans … banished 220 feudalists from the countryside … expelled hundreds of mayors, clerics, and officials who were dominated by feudalists, and dissolved dozens of ASU village committees … This was an ‘agricultural revolution.’ ”68 It was excellent propaganda for Amer and his associates.
In reality, the results had been much more modest. Probably under pressure from ASU-connected security officials, the committee examined only 330 cases out of Egypt’s five thousand villages before hastily concluding that there were no systematic violations, only a handful of pockets of illegality. It did not matter that some of these “irregularities” were as blatant as the six families that each held between 1,275 and 4,500 feddans, although the law allowed for only 300 feddans per family.69 Nor did it matter that, as the report confessed, there was as much as 200,000 feddans concealed from legal authorities. The problem was reduced to the survival of individual feudalists associated with the old regime, rather than an indicator of the emergence of a new landowning class nurtured by the new regime.70 The civilian and military security elite had no need to investigate how this happened—they were the ones who allowed it. Committee members also had no real stake in changing the situation. Nasser’s faction (probably without his consent) was determined not to alter the power structure it had developed in the countryside, and Amer decided—after flirting a bit with the possibility of sabotaging this arrangement—that this was perhaps too distracting, that his efforts should be entirely focused on military rather than social affairs. And it was this latter decision that set the stage for the final and painfully spectacular showdown of 1967.
THE MILITARY NEEDS A WAR
For such a brief encounter, the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 remains one of history’s most consequential confrontations. In Egypt, the defeat was “so unexpected in its totality, stunning in its proportion, and soul-destroying in its impact that it will be remembered as the greatest defeat of the Arabs in the twentieth century.”71 How can we explain the astonishing sequence of events that led up to this defeat? How can we solve the central puzzle of the war, which is how a politically astute leader like Nasser held firm on the path of escalation against Israel, even though he knew how little he controlled his own military. The standard interpretation underlines the incompetence of Egypt’s political and military institutions at the time. Another common interpretation in Egypt points to a mischievous plot hatched between Washington and Tel Aviv to destroy Nasser’s regime. Israeli analysts and diplomats claim that Nasser thought be could actually defeat Israel, or at least snatch a substantial political concession from it through a grand military bluff. Western scholars highlight psychological pressures by other Arab states on Egypt to carry the banner of resistance against Israel and to protect neighboring Syria and Jordan, adding that it was Nasser’s virtuoso politics and impulsiveness that made him rush headlong onto the perilous path of war.* Doubtlessly, there is a kernel of truth in all these claims. But if we move away from trying to explain what brought about the defeat, to considering the more perplexing question of why the military drove the country to the brink of war in June 1967, we can see that none of these interpretations hold. If regime institutions were so incompetent, and Amer knew it (as discussed below), then why rush to war? And if the United States and Israel were out to get Egypt, and both Nasser and Amer were quite aware of this (again as discussed below), then why fall into their trap? And if we blame the escalation on Nasser, then why was he desperately trying to defuse the situation until the last moment? Perhaps the “true” motivation behind this unwarranted escalation will remain forever hidden, but the logic of the intraregime power struggle provides an explanation that best incorporates the available historical evidence. This logic points in only one direction: that the effectiveness of Nasser’s counterbalancing strategy convinced Amer and his associates that if the military did not accomplish something spectacular soon, it would be gradually displaced from the center of power. In other words, the escalation was an attempt to salvage the image and influence of the military.
Let us first underscore how Amer knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that the army was not equipped for war, even as he pretended he was preparing for one. On December 16, 1966, the field marshal received a report by the military’s high command advising against any military confrontation with Israel in the foreseeable future. The report was based on the disastrous effects that the Yemen War had had on the armed forces. The Egyptian army had sent military instructors to support Yemeni left-leaning nationalists in 1962—an opportunity Amer had embraced to boost the military’s public image in what he believed would be a short and effortless campaign against pro-monarchy bandits. According to Chief of Staff Muhammad Fawzy, Amer’s strategy in Yemen was theatrical, a mere show of force. He encouraged firing excessively into Yemeni mountains for no other purpose than to demonstrate lethal strength back home; he gave out field promotions and military decorations to officers who barely saw combat; and his aides fabricated press releases about the army’s heroic exploits.72 Sadat, who was responsible for the political side of the war, also complained how Amer treated the war as “a new theater to strengthen his position and extend his influence.”73 Amer’s plan almost worked, in light of the fact that the United States under John F. Kennedy had initially recognized the republicans in Yemen. Soon, however, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom, which both supported the Yemeni monarchy, persuaded Lyndon B. Johnson to change sides. Saudis could not live with a Communist regime on their southern borders; the British could not stand losing the strategic port of Aden to Communists; and Johnson was much more hawkish than his predecessor in fighting communism.74 Now the army was trapped in an unconventional war against Western-funded guerrillas and European mercenaries. What started out as a simple operation requiring no more than a few hundred officers turned into a quagmire that drew no fewer than 70,000 men by 1965.75
The report submitted by the general command at the end of 1966 assessed the impact of this new reality.