World Events in a Month

The month of August's harvest of international events surpassed in importance the political yield of any month of the current year. If the Suez question, after the tripartite aggression against Egypt, had settled down somewhat—Egypt recovering its political and commercial activity with the West, and particularly with Britain and France, which negotiated with the Egyptian government over the restoration of relations with it—then the news of the conspiracy whose outlines and circumstances the Syrian government announced in official statements, accusing the American government of being the mastermind of that conspiracy, has turned conditions upside down just when they had nearly settled. Damascus, whether serious or not in accusing the United States of America of engineering a military conspiracy to overthrow the regime now standing in Syria, has cut the throat of its relations, of every kind, with the Eisenhower government in the first degree, and with the governments of the West in the second. Yet the diplomatic observer cannot pass quickly over the news from Damascus, concerning what it called an American conspiracy against the prevailing conditions there, before casting a glance, however hasty, at the Cairo trials of thirteen political defendants, civilian and military, charged with engineering a conspiracy to overthrow the present regime—Cairo said that this too was engineered by the American government through its ambassador in Cairo. Is there some connection between the two conspiracies, or did they come as the offspring of coincidences, which so often carry in their folds things from the unseen world that man is powerless to analyze or explain? Perhaps the few days ahead will bring to light things still unknown, which are at bottom the cause and reason of every question raised on this subject.

To shed some light on these circumstances, whether in Cairo or in Damascus, it is worth setting down here what the diplomatic commentator said to the Daily Telegraph's correspondent: "As for Moscow's enticements to Syria, they amount to nothing more than money for development projects; the whole matter is that Khrushchev was more generous than the tight-fisted World Bank and than the Western governments, unbending in their bargaining." This means that the United States and its Western allies have not yet grasped the methods Moscow resorts to in order to tempt nations into friendship and dealings with it.

On the other hand we see Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia uneasy in the face of this present situation in the Middle East. King Saud summoned his ambassador in Damascus and learned from him the truth of the position in Syria, while King Hussein flew to Ankara, where he met with King Faisal and conferred with him on the situation of the Arab countries in the light of what is happening around Iraq and Jordan. It has lately been rumored that a conference will be held in one of the Arab capitals, bringing together Their Majesties Saud, Faisal, and Hussein, and President Chamoun, to study the present situation.

In any case, the one certain thing in the Middle East is a nervous suspicion of everything that looks like an assault on Arab independence.

As for success in the Middle East, it will be the ally of those who work to satisfy genuine Arab desires and aspirations, and not against them...

In the international arena, the question of the Oman revolt was among the most prominent problems laid before the United Nations Security Council, which expressed no opinion on it, owing to the Western states' banding together against the Arab Asian-African bloc, which had requested an emergency meeting of the Security Council to examine Britain's interference in the affairs of the Sultanate and the Imamate, and to call on the British government to withdraw its troops from Muscat and Oman; yet the states that took up Oman's cause may well be resolved to raise the subject a second time.

And in London, where the talks on disarmament and the reduction of armies are being held, the delegate of the Soviet Union delivered a fiery speech at the session of August 28, in which he accused the Western powers of obstructing the efforts made toward disarmament, announcing Moscow's rejection of the Western proposals root and branch.

Thus observers in London concluded that every hope of agreement among the five powers on disarmament had ended in failure—a failure for which Moscow paved the way by announcing that it had carried out an intercontinental rocket test which succeeded brilliantly.