A reincarnation of the Baghdad Pact

In 1955, when the Cold War and the nuclear arms race between the former Soviet Union and the US had reached fever pitch, the Arab world was also undergoing deep transformation triggered by the Nasser-led 1952 Egyptian revolution. Egypt's emerging role as a beacon of national liberation in the Arab region and in Africa was coveted by both superpowers though for different reasons. The Soviet Union, reversing the old-era Stalinist approach, wanted to embrace Third World revolutionary movements as a bulwark against the old imperial and colonial powers. The US secretary of state at the time, John Foster Dulles, was obsessed with the idea of blocking Communist expansion towards the Middle East which occupied strategic routes, waterways, and possessed burgeoning oil wealth.

The Baghdad Pact sought to build a military alliance comprising the US, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, setting a wall against the Soviet Union at both the southern tip of NATO (Turkey) and the northern tier of the Western alliance (Pakistan). The strategy did not sit well with Nasser. He was interested in playing both sides of the street, capitalising on the approaches of the two superpowers. His ultimate aim was to build on his concept of Pan Arabism as his power-base for the revival of Arab cohesion under his leadership. Nasser not only refused to join the pact but attacked it repeatedly as an attempt by old imperial powers (Britain later joined the US in the alliance) to sneak back into the Arab world and dominate it. Nasser fired up Arab sentiment against the Baghdad Pact which he considered the antithesis to his Pan Arabism ambitions. Three years later the pact collapsed and was buried under the 1958 leftist- leaning Iraqi military revolution of Abdul-Karim Kassem, which toppled the monarchy and dragged the mutilated bodies of its symbols through the streets of Baghdad.

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