Mother Goose & Propaganda

In Mother Goose's story of bringing home the bacon, the cat, as soon as it got its saucer of milk, began to kill the rat, which began to gnaw the rope, which began to hang the butcher, who began to kill the ox, which began to drink the water, which began to quench the fire, which began to burn the stick, which began to beat the dog, which began to bite the little pig--which then in fright jumped over the stile so that the old woman brought it home from market that night after all.

It was not possible to bring home the bacon in the Middle East last week, but when the Arab cat tasted the milk of Israeli withdrawal, the process at least got started. The Syrians let the Iraq Petroleum Go. start repairing the pipeline pumping stations which Syrian soldiers blew up during the Suez-Sinai invasion last November. In ten days, by laying temporary pipes around the blasted stations, the oil company plans to begin pumping oil at 44% capacity--enough to replace nearly all of the crude oil that Western Europe has had to buy from the U.S. since the Suez landings.

Waved Off. The Egyptians stopped dragging their feet on Suez Canal clearance long enough to say that they had found no explosives in the sunken tug Edgar Bonnet--presumably enabling 71-year-old Lieut. General Raymond A. Wheeler, chief of the U.N. salvage force, to get on at last with clearing the canal's last big obstructions. Engineer Wheeler himself, in a black Homburg, tried to approach the tug by boat but was waved off by the Egyptians, and with his usual care not to give or take offense, agreed that he should have made an appointment first. If, as Wheeler guesses, it takes him another three or four weeks to clear the Bonnet and the sunken frigate Abukir, the canal should be open for all ships by mid-April.

At this step in the Mother Goose progression, the bacon still seems a long way from home. To read the excitable pronouncements in the kept Cairo press, Egypt is unyielding about everything: gives the U.S. and U.N. no credit for getting Israeli troops out of Egypt (something the Egyptians could not do for themselves), and renews its intransigent attitude about Israeli rights in Gaza, the Gulf of Aqaba, and the Suez Canal. The optimistic drew comfort from the fact that Nasser himself had not yet said all these things, and might not be so unreasonable as his noisy propagandists.

This week, at the close of a hectic four-month U.N. session, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold prepared to fly to Cairo to open the next round with the Egyptian dictator. In an interview with an Indian reporter, Nasser confirmed Egypt's veto of an interim proposal put forward through the U.N. last month by the U.S., Britain, France and Norway. By this plan, 50% of canal tolls would be paid to Egypt, the rest to some such neutral agency as the World Bank, to be held in escrow for repaying the original owners of the confiscated canal company. Instead, said Nasser, if users pay all tolls to Egypt, the canal "will run smoothly and without difficulty from our side"--and he might even be willing to let English and French ships through.

Belligerent State. Egypt has not yet decided whether to allow Israeli ships to pass through the canal. In the past Egypt has barred Israeli ships from the canal--and from the Gulf of Aqaba--on grounds of Egypt's continued "state of belligerency" against Israel. Back in 1951 the U.N. Security Council ruled out this claim as incompatible with the 1949 Egyptian-Israeli armistice.

Nasser last week promised a group of student visitors from Gaza "to win back all Palestine." Diplomats in Cairo believe that Nasser may accept indefinite stationing of U.N. Emergency Force troops to keep peace along the border, but will insist on control over Gaza and the Gulf of Aqaba. Last week John Foster Dulles made plain that the U.S. will not be disposed to release the $50 million in blocked Egyptian funds so long as Nasser shows himself intractable.

Nasser now wants the U.N. to do for him what he cannot do for himself: repel invaders, reopen the canal. But he has yet to indicate that he feels any obligation to the rest of the world. At the same time he complains that the U.S. is trying to isolate him. The isolation, which may increase, is his own doing.

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