ABSTRACT
Before the offensive against the Lebanon which Abdel Nasser started in Syria from February 1961, there was considerable anxiety in Beirut, particularly in Christian circles. Nasser himself suggested a settlement and so made possible a meeting of Foreign Ministers of the Arab League in Baghdad, the capital of his chief enemy, Kassem, at which for the first time in years representatives of all Arab states, including Jordan and Tunisia, took part. To promote his pan-African plans Nasser had been beating the pan-Islamic drum, because, apart from the geographical accident that some Arabs live in the same continent as some Negroes, religion is the only link between these otherwise totally different peoples. The pan-Arab revolutionaries did not succeed in bringing economic life in Beirut to a complete standstill during the rising in the summer of 1958, but it was stopped entirely by the subsequent counter-revolution of the Kataeb, which showed no less fighting strength, and greater cohesion, than its opponents.
