1'HE TABLET Toly 19th. 1958. VOL. 212. No. 6165

T;IETABL-T A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER* & REVIEW

Fublished as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JULY 19th, 1958

N1NEPENCE

Hope of Survival I A Condition of Just War Religion in the Lebanon : Maronites and Moslems. By Alan Neame Turkey and the Americans : Opinion in Ankara. By Derek Patmore Secondary Modern : The Example of St. Jam es’s, Burnt Oak Examinations Examined : Better Results from the Girls. By Philip Bell. M.P. Logical Paralysis: On Philosophical Decadence. By Dorn llltyd Trethowan

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

AMERICANS

|rjpO what purpose are the Americans in Beirut ? Their landing on Tuesday was made, they explained, in answer to the appeal of President Chamoun. But President Chamoun did not wait until after the coup d’etat in Baghdad on Monday to make his appeal; all he did then was to reiterate with renewed hope an appeal that had previously fallen on deaf ears. More than a week before the Beirut landing the Americans had seemed to indicate that they accepted Mr. Hammarskjold’s view that the fighting in the Lebanon was mainly internal in character, the attempt to overthrow an unpopular President, rather than the result of any “ massive intervention ” from the United Arab Republic. It is now explained that the intervention was suddenly and massively increased during last week. But, however that may have been, it was not simply to support President Chamoun that the Americans landed.

A leading reason was the desire to reassure the Turks in particular, who have Nato’s third largest army, with bases and airfields which are of the greatest value to the Americans, and who had begun to feel misgivings about the whole basis of their foreign policy, as is 3escribed in an article elsewhere in these pages.

It was likewise the intention to sustain the King and the Government of Jordan, who were and are plainly in the gravest peril. Reports of the frustration of a coup in Amman were in the newspapers before there was any hint of a coup in Baghdad, and it seems certain that the intention was to overthrow both the Hashemite monarchies simultaneously, and that the plan miscarried, with only one set of assassins successful.

But the Americans are not in general inclined to go to the help of threatened monarchs. Nor are they inclined to seek forcibly to stem the tides of young nationalisms. Nor would the harshest critic of Mr. Dulles say that he has in the past shown himself aggressively inclined against President Nasser.

IN BEIRUT

In the Middle East the Americans are subjected to very much stronger pressures to support the ten-year-old State of Israel than they are to perpetuate the States that were made out of the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire thirty years earlier. But they have not landed at Beirut to encourage the Israelis. They hâve landed because they judge their presence to be necessary to reinforce the Middle East against the contingency of aggression from the Soviet Union. It remains to be seen whether the action they have taken will close the doors of the Middle East to the Russians, or whether it may prove to be a tragic mistake, producing a very different result.

When the Anglo-French intervention in Egypt was made in 1956, Sir Anthony Eden compared President Nasser to Hitler, and spoke of the importance of stopping his aggressive activities at the outset. If action was not taken against Nasser when he illegally seized the Suez Canal, then a whole series of further aggressions might be expected later, like the series of Nazi aggressions which followed the re-entry into the Rhineland, and would be much more difficult to meet ; that was the thesis. But President Eisenhower, by contrast, explaining the landing at Beirut to the American nation in his broadcast on Tuesday evening, found his lessons from the past not in the years before 1939 but in the years after 1945. The Middle East, he said, was witnessing the same pattern of conquest which the Russians had made familiar in the five years after the war, taking over nations one by one by indirect aggression. He likened the threat to the Lebanon now to the threat to Greece that was met with the Truman Doctrine in 1947. But this thesis, that the whole course of the movement among the Arabs which President Nasser appears to direct is really inspired and directed by the Soviet Union, is not one that it is easy to accept.

When the murderous coup d’état took place on Monday, President Nasser, whose name was being chanted