The New Revolution

July is the month of two big revolutionary anniversaries in the Middle East: Egypt's seventh and Iraq's first. As the anniversaries approached, President Nasser's associates reported him increasingly concerned lest Iraq's young revolution, despite its domestic troubles, should be too much of an encouragement to other restless Arabs, particularly in his own neighboring northern province of Syria. Last week, accepting this challenge to his claim to Arab leadership, Nasser proclaimed that the real revolution in Egypt is only now about to begin.

"I feel that we have only scratched the door of revolution," announced Nasser in an interview with his newspaper Al Ahram. "When the tide of aggression receded from our land, this was the first thing that came to my view: the time had come for real revolutionary action." Nasser confessed that when he came to power in 1952, his revolutionary group of army officers had not fully understood what they were working for. But after the Suez invasion, said he, they saw clearly that the job was to create a wholly new "cooperative socialist and democratic society." In the "radical change" about to begin, announced Nasser, the United Arab Republic will double its national income, eliminate strife between classes, provide equal opportunity for all.

In his new campaign for competitive coexistence with Iraq, Nasser was able to take advantage of another set of coexisting competitors. Already accepting Soviet aid to build his Aswan Dam, Nasser last week signed an $8,000,000 agreement with the U.S. to resume the technical-aid program broken off in the Suez crisis of 1956.

He brought this off even while showing a characteristic burst of intransigence over

Suez. U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold flew to Cairo to discuss release of the Danish freighter Inge Toft, seized by his Suez Canal officials last May for carrying Israeli cement and potash destined for Hong Kong and Tokyo. On the morning of Hammarskiold's arrival, Nasser's Al Ahram printed Nasser's declaration that the U.A.R. would hold the Inge Toft's cargo on the ground (rejected by the U.N. Security Council's decision in 1951) that his country was in "a state of war" with Israel. Beneath the autographed pictures of Nehru, Tito, Chou En-lai and of Hammarskjold himself, Nasser and the Secretary General talked for three hours. Then the Secretary General left, tightlipped, for Geneva.

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