Getting into the Act

In the Middle East, as in Southeast Asia, the U.S. hopes somehow to back its friends without at the same time driving the enemies of these friends into Khrushchev's hug. It is ticklish going. So far the U.S., which more or less thought up the Baghdad Pact, has refrained from joining it for fear of antagonizing Egypt's Nasser, who considers the pact a trick to split the Arab world away from him. Last week, without quite signing the pact, the U.S. found a diplomatic way of showing its solidarity with those Moslem lands which are ready to join hands with the West.

To accomplish its delicate mission Washington sent its ablest Middle East specialist, Career Ambassador Loy Henderson, at the head of a topflight delegation of 23 observers to a Baghdad Pact council meeting in Teheran. The pact's five members--Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Britain--were ready with a program that accented economic rather than military measures. Henderson, backed by President Eisenhower's request for $100 million from Congress for special Middle East aid, pitched right in. Sample projects agreed on: a joint five-nation study for development of the Tigris-Euphrates basin's water resources, a joint board to help coordinate development projects in all pact countries. Enrolling the U.S. as a full member of the pact's economic committee, Henderson sought to show that no new colonialism was intended: "We desire to work with groups of nations which have banded together for their common security and welfare, and so to strengthen them that they will demonstrate to other nations in the area that such cooperation is the true road to the achievement of national aspirations." Before the sessions ended, the U.S. also joined the pact's countersubversion committee.

Obviously, the U.S. also hoped that the meaning of its move and its motives were not lost on Egypt's Nasser, who was off in southern Arabia last week lining up little Yemen in his neutralist military alliance.

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