When Iraq Invaded Kuwait in 1990, What Would Nasser Have Done?

By Andrew I. Killgore

Recently an interviewer from the BBC asked a distinguished retired State Department official what might have happened if Gamal Abdel Nasser, the symbol of Arab unity, had been president of Egypt on Aug. 2, 1990, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait.

Would Nasser have rushed troops to defend the states of the Gulf, as did his successor once removed, President Hosni Mubarak?

Perhaps unbeknownst to the BBC interviewer, the question was not really a hypothetical one. A likely answer is provided by turning back the calendar just 30 years.

Turning Back the Calendar

At the beginning of 1961 the Middle East seemed relatively free of tension. But wars have broken out there on an average of every seven years since 1948-49. Since there had not been a major war in the region since 1956, on form it was time to start worrying.

Egyptian President Nasser was at the height of his powers as the hero of Arab nationalism, after surviving the 1956 British French-Israeli attack on Egypt's Suez Canal. In Baghdad, President Abdul Karim Qassem had earned Arab nationalist laurels of his own after a successful coup in 1958 against the British-imposed monarchy, in which the boy-king, Faisal II, and his strongman prime minister, Nuri Al-Said, were killed.

Now tension was mounting over Kuwait, which had long enjoyed British protection but from which British troops were being withdrawn. On June 19, 1961, Britain announced that it recognized the Emirate's independence. Six days later, on June 25, Qassem publicly proclaimed that Kuwait was an integral part of Iraq.

Six days after that, on July 1, Britain announced that it had sent troops to Kuwait to protect it against a possible Iraqi invasion. This amounted to a disappointing setback to British withdrawal from the entire Middle East, an outcome fervently desired by Arab nationalists of many political persuasions.

With uncommon haste, the Arab League met and voted to send Arab troops to replace the British, whose return to protect the newly independent Emirate was an acute embarrassment.

Egypt had approved the League's decision to send Arab forces. The question on everyone's mind, however, was whether President Nasser would actually send Egyptian soldiers to protect Kuwait from possible attack. Kuwait's very creation, in 1899, by a divide-and-rule Britain, was regarded as an affront to Arab unity.

That Kuwait crisis ended peacefully, however, as Nasser dispatched a symbolic two companies of Egyptian soldiers as part of several thousand troops from other Arab countries. When Qassem did not publicly reiterate his claim to Kuwait, the crisis ended.

President Nasser, the embodiment of modern Arab nationalism with its abstract dreams of Arab unity, had acted in this specific dispute between two Arab states essentially as the leader of Egypt. For at least 3,500 years, rulers in the Nile Valley had regularly opposed the accumulation of excessive power by rulers based on the lands bordering Iraq's Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Critics of Hosni Mubarak would like to accuse him not of supporting Egypt's national interests, but of supporting the US and its Gulf allies in the 1990-1991 Gulf crisis only to assure the continuation of US aid. There is little likelihood, however, that Nasser would have reacted differently.

During the years between 1961 and 1990, some of the dreams of pan-Arab nationalists had been realized, and had Cairo and Baghdad practiced any serious bonding, things might have been different. Instead, however, Saddam Hussain had fantasized himself into the conquering Nebuchadnezzar of a new Babylon. And, faced by a traditional threat from a traditional Mesopotamian ruler, the ruler of the Nile Valley acted traditionally.

What was at stake in millennia gone by was control of the known, or civilized, world. What was at stake in 1990 was control of 65 percent of the world's oil reserves. Today, as in the past, the area is too important to be placed at the disposal of a tyrant.

When Saddam Hussain was resisting what other Arab republics perceived as an aggressive Islamic revolutionary Iran, he enjoyed the support of virtually all of the Arab world. When, in turn, he became the aggressor, he lost much of that support. The lesson of 1990, as of 1961, is that if the human and material resources of the Middle East are ever to be harnessed to the service of unified goals, it will only be with the consent of all of its inhabitants.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.