The Arabs: A History

The road to Suez began in Aswan. Along with the land reform program, the Aswan High Dam remained a central part of the Free Officers’ domestic development agenda, as it was expected to provide both the country’s energy needs for industrialization and a significant expansion of agricultural area through irrigation. The Egyptian government could not, however, fund the dam on its own. It was one of the largest civil engineering projects in the world, and the price was astronomical—an estimated $1 billion, of which $400 million would have to be paid in foreign currency. The Egyptian government negotiated a finance package with the World Bank in late 1955 to provide a loan of $200 million, backed by a commitment from the United States and Great Britain to provide the remaining $200 million. The British and U.S. governments hoped to use the Aswan Dam project as a means to exercise some control over the politics of Nasser’s Egypt. According to Heikal, the United States and Britain never intended to give the full amount Egypt needed, pledging only one-third the sum requested—not enough to guarantee the dam but rather just enough to exercise influence over Egypt during the years it would take to build it. Dulles allegedly told the Saudi king Sa’ud in January 1957 that “he had decided to help [Egypt] with the Dam because the project was a long term one,” according to Heikal. “It would have tied Egypt to America for ten years, and in that time Nasser would either have learned the danger of co-operating with the Soviet Union or he would have fallen from power.”31 The U.S. government also tried to make the loan contingent on a commitment from the Egyptian government not to buy more arms from the Soviet Union. The military expenditure would, it argued insincerely, undermine Egypt’s ability to pay its part of the dam’s construction costs. Nasser had no intention of breaking with the Soviet Union, which was the only power willing to assist his military with no preconditions. Nasser had come to recognize that the rules of the Cold War precluded cooperation with both the Soviets and the Americans. By April 1956 he suspected that the United States would withdraw its support for the Aswan High Dam. Three months later, on July 19, 1956, Eisenhower a

Nasser was scheduled to give a major speech in Alexandria on July 26 marking the fourth a