INTRODUCTION

I believe that it is only against the background of Western strategic planning for this region that the student of this cataclysmic period can understand fully the tumultuous events which followed each other in such rapid progression: the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement of 1954 for the evacuation of the British Military Base in Egypt; the formation of the Baghdad Pact in 1955, and the attendant Egyptian-Iraqi rivalry for the hegemony of the Arab world; the Suez Crisis which, together with the escalating Arab-Israeli conflict, erupted predictably into open war in October 1956; and finally, the crises that rocked the Middle East in July 1958 – the fall of the Hashemite dynasty and the ancien regime in Iraq, and the Anglo-American military interventions in Jordan and the Lebanon respectively. These last events constituted the final act in a drama that had begun in 1955. They were followed inevitably in the Spring of 1959 by Iraq’s departure from the Baghdad Pact, and the renaming of its rump as the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO).