Three Ways

Around the U.S., barbers, bus drivers and editorial writers were saying last week that Egypt's Nasser was getting too big for his boots. In a suitably classical reference, the New York Times demanded: "Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed that he is grown so great?" In characteristically unclassical American, the tabloid New York Daily News asked: "What has this little Hitler ever done to make himself noteworthy other than, in a kiddie-sized pet, dump rusty boats and assorted kitchen stoves into the Suez Canal?" The fact was that no happy solution could be seen emerging in the Middle East. In the anger of frustration, voices in Europe and America demanded that the

U.N. and the U.S., having been tough with Israel, now get tough with Nasser.

The Hard Way. "No need to be squeamish," urged London's conservative Time & Tide. "He is a gangster dictator and must in the end be dealt with as such." Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, heading for the Gaza frontier, threatened a renewal of war. In a Chicago speech, Missouri's Democratic Senator Stuart Symington declared: "There will be no real peace in the Middle East until Nasser is out of power."

Just four months after Nasser had been saved (by the U.S. and U.N.) from military defeat, and had restored to him what his armies could not hold, Nasser announced last week that as soon as the U.N. clears the Suez Canal for him, he will insist on holding control over the transport systems, the factory-output levels and the room temperatures of Western Europe.

His new plan, conspicuously omitting any reference to the principles "insulating the canal from politics" agreed on at the U.N. last October: Egypt runs the canal, sells all the tickets, keeps all the money.

To such an attitude, the first response of many Americans was apt to be apoplectic. But the summary objection to getting tougher with Nasser is that it only builds him up. So long as his position in Egypt and his influence on the Arab world depend on his keeping international and interracial conflict inflamed, Western badgering and blustering is apt only to enhance the fanatic image of Nasser as champion of the Arab masses.

The Legal Way. The U.N.'s Dag Hammarskjold has chosen a second, softer, lawyer's way of dealing with Nasser, and this is what made all the confusing headlines last week. Hammarskjold works to a plan which requires him to ignore alike the Egyptian calumnies, insults and niggling harassments against his UNEF and the "appeaser" cries of the frustrated Israelis. Taking off for Cairo, he announced, as optimistically as Hammarskjold ever gets: "We may be able to establish a situation in Gaza that will give all parties concerned satisfaction, including Israel."

At Nasser's modest residence in an army compound on the edge of Cairo, Hammarskjold began outlining his plan to sew up, in his cautious stitch-at-a-time style, a set of small concurrences that might finally fit together into a pattern of agreement wide enough to cover Gaza, the Gulf of Aqaba and the Suez Canal dispute itself. It meant taking the Egyptians and Israelis back to first principles--to the armistice agreement which the U.N.'s Ralph Bunche bucked through (and won a No bel Peace Prize for) on the island of Rhodes in 1949. Hammarskjold took the line that if both sides would comply fully with the agreement, neither could longer claim that a state of war exists. For authority he cited the Security Council's 1951 ruling that "since the armistice regime . . . is of a permanent character . . . neither party can reasonably assert that it is actively a belligerent."

For example, argues Hammarskjold, Israel would have to withdraw from a little triangle in the Negev desert known as the El Auja demilitarized zone if it wants to establish its legal right to send ships through the Suez Canal or the Gulf of Aqaba without risk of sinking or seizure. The El Auja zone is a 19-mile sliver of Negev frontier sand barred to armed forces of both sides by the 1949 armistice because of its strategic location as a meeting place of desert trails. The Israelis first set up a farm settlement in 1953 and two years later installed troops in the zone, though Article VIII of the armistice agreement brands any such act a "flagrant violation." Israel's invasion of Sinai was another violation of the whole armistice agreement; and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion has called the armistice a dead letter.

Yet by withdrawing from Gaza and the Gulf of Aqaba the Israelis have taken the main step toward restoring it, and Hammarskjold argues that if the Israelis comply at El Auja, too (with the UNEF moving into the zone in their place), Egypt could no longer claim any legal-- or belligerent--right to stop Israeli shipping either in the gulf or the Suez Canal. If so, the right of all nations to send ships freely through the Suez Canal--one stumbling block in last year's negotiations between Nasser and the maritime powers-would be automatically guaranteed. This was the Hammarskjold dream.

The U.N., which is on Egyptian territory on Egyptian sufferance, had at one time been worried that Nasser might precipitately order it off and press his legal right to send a brigade of troops into Gaza and to reoccupy his gun position commanding the Gulf of Aqaba. (Hammarskjold's major tactical error so far was to restore Egypt's privileges under the 1949 armistice, such as a return to Gaza, without ever exacting from Nasser any promise that he would obey all the other conditions of the armistice.) But perhaps Nasser does not have to be told that if Hammarskjold pulled out his UNEF, nothing would stand between him and the glowering Israeli army. Nasser might consent to a solution in which his rights in Gaza were recognized, along with an understanding that he would not assert them. On the Gulf of Aqaba, the Cairo press hinted, he might be willing to leave the question to the World Court. (If he did not, if he ordered U.N. troops out and then fired on an Israeli ship, Ben-Gurion could resume hostilities with a much stronger presumption of right on his side--and the better army.)

This was the course Hammarskjold had set for himself. It was slow, it was unlikely to work (those who know Nasser best doubt that he is temperamentally capable of giving up his "rights of belligerency," i.e., accept Israel's existence), and it required Hammarskjold and his U.N. agents to practice a kind of forbearance to pinpricks and jostling that is asking a lot even of an international civil servant. Hammarskjold may get some of what he wants, but will never be able to proclaim a victory over Nasser. It is not even his ambition.

The Slow Way. Before leaving for Bermuda last week, Secretary John Foster Dulles assured reporters: "The general trend [in the Middle East] is satisfactory and in the interests of peace and justice." The State Department was busy offering tranquilizers to itself, and to the nation. Its general attitude was that at the moment everything is up to Dag. Actually, Hammarskjold is a Swede, and far from an agent of U.S. policy in the Middle East. He is a highly sophisticated international bureaucrat who knows better than anybody else that he has 81 different employers, many if not most of whom are as much on Nasser's side as against him. Hammarskjold's mandate is a narrow one.

Indistinguishable as U.S. and U.N. attitudes may outwardly appear, Washington has reached the private judgment that, for U.S. policy. Nasser has passed the point of no return. But he must be dealt with in a way that does not make a hero or a martyr of him. and that does not let the U.S. be put in the false position of choosing flatly between Israeli and Arab. For the good of the entire area, the U.S. has a need to work with and encourage moderate Arabs (who themselves publicly support Nasser while privately fearing and deploring him). While talking softly, the U.S. has blocked Nasser's funds ($50 million), denied him aid, cut off his profitable tourist traffic.

Last week, in a calculated rebuke to Nasser, the U.S. joined the military committee of the anti-Communist Baghdad Pact, an organization against which Nasser has raged almost as unceasingly as have his Russian friends. By a design, Ike's special ambassador, ex-Congressman James P. Richards, is touring friendly Middle East lands first, explaining U.S. aid-without-strings, thereby increasing the isolation of Nasser and adding to the pressures against extremist regimes in Jordan and Syria.

Looking frankly past Nasser to the sort of Middle Eastern stability that might be won ten years hence, the U.S. is encouraging schemes to free Western Europe from its overwhelming dependence on the Suez Canal. Last week leaders of the oil industry met in London to draw plans for a $500 million pipeline from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean through Iraq and Turkey, and to examine other ways of getting around Nasser. The world's shipyards are working at capacity building supertankers to carry Persian Gulf oil around Africa at no greater cost per barrel than smaller tankers going through Nasser's nationalized ditch.

This kind of policy makes no promises of scoring a satisfyingly early victory over Nasser: it does not even set itself to bring him down, but only to reduce his capacity to do mischief. An intransigent Nasser, presiding over a nation too pauperized to be hurt much from economic pressures, is admittedly hard to get at. But U.S. policy is based on the conviction that a dictator who has shown himself more clever than wise is also not a man able to stand the slow throbbing of time.

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