Nasser's Gamble: How Intervention in Yemen Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power

NASSER'S GAMBLE: HOW INTERVENTION IN YEMEN CAUSED THE SIX-DAY WAR AND THE DECLINE OF EGYPTIAN POWER Jesse Ferris Princeton, NJ: Princeton Universit y Press, 2013 (x + 342 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations, maps) $45.00 (cloth)The 1962-70 Yemeni civil war is often considered only a minor episode in Egyptian and Middle Eastern history, with some accounts referring to it as the Unknown War. To remedy this problem, Jesse Ferris draws on archival material from Britain, Canada, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Russia, and the United States. He brings together these sources in a thoughtful analysis of Egyptian foreign policy from 1962, when the war began, to when Egypt was forced to withdraw before the end of hostilities in Yemen in 1970. greatest contribution of the book is the incorporation of Egyptian military officers' memoirs into the historical narrative of Gamal Abdel Nasser's intervention in the Yemeni civil war. It provides an in-depth portrayal of Egyptian political intrigue prior to and during Egypt's entry into Yemen, with particular attention to the relationship between Nasser and his military chief of staff, 'Abd al-Hakim 'Amr.Ferris argues that Nasser's support for the Yemeni revolution was the harbinger of Egypt's downfall in 1967 and the popular decline of Nasser's Arab nationalist ideology. His account shows how the initial deploymentof Egyptian troops in Yemen was not premeditated, nor was the continued investment of Egyptian military and economic resources in the war effort. Nasser's unintentional war drained Egypt's economy and drove its foreign policy into opposition to that of the United States and into conformity with Soviet politicians. Egypt's intervention in Yemen, Ferris concludes, compounded the economic, diplomatic, and domestic political crises that characterized the 1960s in Egypt and that influenced Nasser's decision- making in the weeks prior to the June 1967 war with Israel.While the majority of the book focuses on Nasser's Yemeni interven- tion, the final chapter pursues a tangential analysis of the causes of the 1967 war. Many of the conclusions drawn linking Yemen and the 1967 war are speculative and do not provide concrete evidence for an interpretation that runs against the general scholarly consensus that Egypt's involvement in the Yemeni civil war was a relatively minor factor affecting the war's outcome (see, for example, Eugene Rogan and Tewfik Aclimandos, The Yemen War and Egypt's War Preparedness in June 1967, in 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences, ed. William Roger Louis and Avi Shlaim [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012]). Ferris takes his narrative largely from his dissertation, which ends in Yemen at the close of 1966. decision to add a final chapter focusing on the Six Day War and to change the title from its original, Egypt, the Cold War, and the Civil War in Yemen, 1962-1966, is unfortunate, as it detracts from his extensive research done on the Yemeni civil war, without adding significantly to the literature on 1967.In order to explain Egypt's logic at each historical juncture in the Yemeni civil war, Ferris examines internal Egyptian politics through the perspectives of international actors participating in the conflict. In an attempt to regain an ideological advantage in the Arab world, Nasser declared his intentions to undermine the reactionary Saudi Arabian monarchy. King Sa'ud and King Faisal, in turn, continued their support of the Yemeni counterrevolutionary opposition and were disinclined to approve peace accords while Egyptian soldiers were present on the Arabian Peninsula. This Saudi-Egyptian rivalry impeded multiple attempts to hold an Arab- mediated peace conference during 1965 and 1966.The Soviet Union was initially enthusiastic about Egypt's interven- tion and supported it with arms, financing, pilots, and training. After Leonid Brezhnev ousted Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, however, the Soviets demanded a repayment of military and economic loans, thereby exacerbating Egypt's domestic economic crisis and undermining Egyptian independ- ence. …

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