In the years 1952-55, Egypt received considerable sums of American aid money for economic development. American diplomats in Cairo had been trying to convince Nasser to sign a military assistance agreement with the US, which would have allowed Egypt to obtain American arms at low cost. But despite all that effort, it seemed that Egypt was drifting away from the West and into the communist orbit after the announcement of the Czech arms deal. Though the US had previously supplied Egypt with arms, the Americans, under extreme pressure from world Zionist quarters, especially those stationed within the US exerting so much influence on its general economic machine, found it difficult to consistently do so. Moreover, the Americans were particularly skeptical of recent friendly Egyptian relations with the Communist Bloc and thus the Administration insisted on cash payment. Consequently, Nasser was left with no more option than to go to the communists for military aid. Post-World War II Egyptian governments had, in fact, preferred arms deals with the West. Despite this preference, the exigencies of the Cold War proved to be insurmountable obstacles to that goal. The British and American position was that Egypt could obtain arms only if it would join an anti-Soviet defence pact modeled along the lines of he North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO). Thus, the Anglo-American efforts to organise a regional defence pact created a ‘Gordian knot' which locked before Egypt the gates to an arms deal with the West. After the visit of US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to the region in 1953, the Americans and British were in agreement that the chances of convincing Egypt to join the proposed pact were slim and that there was a need to shift efforts towards creating a ‘Northern Tier' of states which would include Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan. In 1955, this would become the ‘Baghdad Pact'. Without candidly saying it, Nasser would have preferred Western arms due to political repercussions from the Arab world if the Soviet aid offer was accepted as communism was generally viewed as an alien concept conflicting in many areas with the teachings of Islam. The causes of friction between the US and Egypt were Nasser's exaggerated demands and regional ambitions, which led the arms deal negotiations between Egypt and the United States to a dead end. Meanwhile, the Israeli elections, in July 1955, and the victory of Ben Gurion's ‘hawkish' group signalled a diversion of the policy towards a more aggressive one. The Israeli attack on Gaza at the end of February 1955 after the signing of the Baghdad Pact, which caused the death of 37 Egyptians, revealed the incapacity of the Egyptian army to respond to the Israeli provocations. The tension was further heated by the rejection by the Arab League of the Johnson Plan in 1955 to administrate Jordan's waters, in order to cover Israel's necessities for hydraulic resources, and by the extent of the list products considered as war material destined to Israel passing through Suez Canal . [email protected]
