The Glory of Defeat

For the most part, Egypt's supposedly volatile people accepted the triple assaults of their nation's invaders with re markable discipline and calm. To this rule there was one notable exception: Gamal Abdel Nasser. From the moment of the first attack, the aggressive, self-confident man who had staked Egypt's life on the premise that Britain and France would never use force was visibly shocked and distraught.

Last week, his military ordeal apparently ended, the new, post-invasion Nasser began to emerge. Haranguing a crowd of 20,000 at Cairo's ancient El Azhar Mosque, he sounded at times quite his old cocky self. Egypt, he said, finished the conflict "feeling stronger than we did when we started . . . Two great powers are with us: Russia, which threatened Britain and France, and America, which opposed their aggression."

"My Brethren." On the Suez issue he was still defiant. "So long as there is a foreign force, one single foreign soldier in Egypt," said he, "we shall not begin repairing the canal and we shall not begin running the canal. Eden will never force us to surrender. Egypt was made to fight, my brethren, we were made to fight. After ten days of fighting, we are all of us one monolithic people, one aim and one man!"

Unlike the old Nasser, the new Nasser devoted a good deal of his time to defensive-sounding explanations. The singularly unimpressive performance of the Egyptian air force was explained away as a clever trick. "Our pilots," said he, "were ordered to stay grounded despite their protests . . . We put dummy planes on the airfields, and in this way we were able to save our air force." He went on to make the amazing assertions that no Egyptian tanks or armored cars were lost in battle against the Israelis, that the Egyptian air force had shot down 18 Israeli planes and had been "in control of the battlefield" until the "great deception, treachery, perfidy" of Anthony Eden. The fact that none of the other Arab states gave Egypt active military assistance was also, said Nasser, part of Egyptian strategy. "King Saud called me by telephone," said the Egyptian President, "and told me that the Saudi Arabian army and money were at Egypt's service." So, he declared, did Jordan's young King Hussein and Syria's President El Kuwatly. "My answer was that we were worried about Jordan, and that the Egyptian army was able to repulse Israeli aggression."

Egyptians might well believe these stories. There were, in fact, no immediate signs that the war had done anything to shake the Egyptian public's confidence in Nasser. (In Port Said, when a newsman asked a captured Egyptian civilian, "What do you think of Nasser now?", the prisoner squared his shoulders and blurted back: "What do you think of Eden now?")

Frail Reed. But to anyone outside Egypt it was evident that Nasser's Trendex rating had dropped severely. Not only had his military machine been badly damaged, but it had been made abundantly clear to other Arab nations that to rely on Egypt to crush the hated Israelis would be to rely on a frail reed indeed. If they had achieved nothing else, the British, French and Israelis had dealt a severe blow, perhaps a fatal one. to Gamal Abdel Nasser's dream of dominating the Arab world.

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