Showing posts with label 1900 - 2000. Show all posts

by Ben Atherton Updated Fri 9 Mar 2012

Photo: Father and son: Bashar al-Assad and Hafez al-Assad (Reuters)

Map: Syrian Arab Republic

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has been accused of waging a brutal war against his own people as he fights rebels who want an end to his family's 40-year rule.

In doing so he is following in the footsteps of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who presided over the deaths of thousands of people when he unleashed his forces to crush an Islamist uprising in the early 1980s.

Bashar al-Assad had been showing signs of loosening his grip on the country until protests broke out last year.

"I admit to total incomprehension as to how this man has changed," French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who hosted Mr Assad in Paris in 2008, said recently.

"He was not a democrat, but two years ago he was not massacring women and children in Homs. He was not a murderer but he has become a murderer."

Below are key events in the modern history of Syria and the Assad dynasty:

1916

Diplomats from France and Great Britain draw up an agreement to carve up the Middle East into 'zones of influence' after the expected defeat of Ottoman Turkey in World War I. France will get the northern zone, including what are now Syria and Lebanon, while Britain will oversee the south, including Palestine, Jordan, and the Iraqi oil fields.

1918

The Sykes-Picot agreement, named after the diplomats who drew it up, is put into effect following the end of World War I.

1920

An independent Syria is established by Faisal I of the Hashemite dynasty, who had fought with Lawrence of Arabia against the Turks. His forces are defeated by the French, and French troops occupy Syria later that year.

Photo: Faisal bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi (centre), later Faisal I of Syria, with delegates including Lawrence of Arabia (in headdress third from right) at Versailles during the 1919 Paris peace conference. (Wikipedia)

1925-27

A rebellion launched by Sultan Pasha al-Atrash is put down by French troops amid heavy fighting in cities including Homs, Hama and Damascus - all flashpoints in the current rebellion.

Photo: Damascus in flames after a French air raid, October 18, 1925 (Wikipedia.fr)

1930

Hafez al-Assad is born into a minority Alawite family in western Syria.

1937

Syria and France negotiate a treaty to give Syria independence, but the government in Paris refuses to ratify it and World War II breaks out in 1939 before any progress can be made.

1940

France falls to Nazi Germany and Syria comes under the control of the puppet Vichy regime. The country is occupied by British, Commonwealth, and Free French forces in 1941.

Photo: Australian soldiers at the Vichy French Aleppo airfield, Syria, in June 1941. (Australian War Memorial/Wikipedia.fr)

1944

Syria is recognised as an independent state and French troops pull out in 1946, ushering in years of coups and political turmoil.

1958-61

Syria and Egypt unite under the banner of the United Arab Republic, with the head of state being Egypt's leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, before Syria secedes following a military coup.

1963

The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party engineers another coup which gives its members a majority in a new cabinet.

1964

Now a high-ranking Ba'ath Party official, Hafez al-Assad becomes a general; in 1965 he will become commander-in-chief of the air force; by 1966, he is minister of defence.

1965

As his father rises through the ranks, Bashar al-Assad is born in Damascus.

Photo: The Assad family in the early 1970s. The young Bashar al-Assad stands in front of his father at far left. (Wikipedia)

1967

Pre-emptive Israeli strikes on Egyptian forces develop into the Six-Day War, with Syria and Jordan joining Egypt in attacks on the Jewish state. Israel prevails, and occupies Syria's Golan Heights along with the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Sinai peninsula.

Photo: Israeli tanks advance towards Syrian positions in the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War (Wikipedia)

1970

Hafez al-Assad seizes power in an internal Ba'ath Party coup. Assad loyalists are installed in key posts throughout the government. His regime builds up Syria's military and develops a cult of personality around the leader while ruthlessly suppressing internal dissent. But overall living standards rise and Syria experiences a relatively long period of stability

1982

Hafez al-Assad sends his troops in to crush a rebellion by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Up to 10,000 people die as troops bombard the city of Hama. During this period Syrian forces also take part in the civil war in neighbouring Lebanon.

Photo: A Syrian soldier and a member of the pro-Syria Amal militia next to a portrait of Hafez al-Assad in west Beirut, 1987.

1994

Bashar al-Assad, studying as an optician in London, is recalled to Syria as heir-apparent after his elder brother dies in a car crash.

Photo: Syrian girls chant slogans praising president Hafez al-Assad after he was elected to his fifth seven-year term in 1999 (Reuters: Khaled Al Hariri)

2000

Hafez al-Assad dies at the age of 69. Bashar al-Assad is elected unopposed as president with a claimed 97 per cent of the vote.

Photo: Bashar al-Assad at his father's funeral in Damascus, June 2000 (AFP: Rabih Moghrabi)

2007

Bashar al-Assad gets another seven-year term as president. During this period he makes cautious overtures to the West, with the so-called Damascus Spring leading to the release of hundreds of political prisoners. But Amnesty International says the Assad regime is still torturing and persecuting political opponents.

2011

Protests inspired by the wider Arab Spring movement break out in Syria in late January. Syrian forces violently put down a number of protest rallies. In June, Assad promises moves towards reform - but the repression continues. By the end of the year, Syria has been suspended by the Arab League and Assad's troops are engaged in a war with rebel forces, led by deserters gathered under the loose banner of the Free Syrian Army.

Photo: Syrian demonstrators protest against Bashar al-Assad on Christmas Day, 2011 (Reuters)

Source: ABC/Wikipedia/AFP/Reuters

Timeline: Syria and the Assads - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Keith Gessen The Guardian, Wednesday 12 March 2014

Frances Welch's new biography uncovers the humour and strangeness in Rasputin's fatal embrace of the Romanovs

'Incredible charisma, bad teeth, questionable hygiene' … Grigory Rasputin. Photograph: BBC

Grigory Rasputin was a Siberian peasant turned holy man with incredible charisma, bad teeth, questionable hygiene (he claimed that he once went six months without changing his underwear), and a strong animal odour – like a goat's (according to the French ambassador). He used these various attributes to ingratiate himself with the royal family of Russia and become, for about a year toward the end of the Romanov dynasty, the de facto power behind the throne. While doing all this he seduced thousands of women and still managed to get stone drunk several nights a week. It's an inspiring story, though it ends badly, and no wonder that the expatriated French actor Gérard Depardieu has played Rasputin in not one but two biopics in the last two years.

As Robert Massie once wrote, only in Russia could the story of Rasputin have unfolded, but even in Russia it was pretty strange. In her humorous new biography, Frances Welch does not stint on its strangeness, though she does try to explain just how it came to pass.

Rasputin took advantage of the Russian tradition of the wandering peasant holy man, walking from village to village and reputed to have a direct connection with God (even Tolstoy, toward the end of his life, visited one). He also exploited the loneliness and isolation of the last Romanov couple, Nicholas and Alexandra – the tsar a polite, indecisive man and the tsarina a German-born and English-bred granddaughter of Queen Victoria ("The tsarina was as happy ordering chintzes from the latest Maples catalogue as she was cultivating mystics," writes Welch), who never quite adjusted to Russian life or shed her accent (she communicated with Nicholas in English). And, finally, he made use of the vexed condition of the couple's son, Alexis, the heir to the Russian throne, who had inherited (from Queen Victoria) a terrible disease: haemophilia. Nicholas and Alexandra kept vigilant watch over the boy, employed two sharp-eyed sailors to accompany him everywhere and commandeered an army of doctors to try to make him well. None of them could do anything; as Welch points out, they may easily have done more harm than good, prescribing, for example, the new wonder drug aspirin, which we now know is an anti-coagulant, the exact opposite of what a haemophiliac needs. The disease was torture for both the boy and his mother. During bleeding episodes Alexis would suffer excruciating pain, and his mother, an empress but also, she knew, the carrier of the disease, would sit by him, helpless.

The one person who appeared able to help was Rasputin. He was recommended to the family by their confessor, who had been impressed by his mixture of smelliness and religious fervour. Then it turned out that he seemed able to stop Alexis's bleeding. Exactly what Rasputin did has been the subject of medical dispute. During bleeding episodes, Rasputin would talk to the boy, tell him stories, calm him down – this may have lowered the heir's blood pressure, easing the bleeding. Contemporaries claimed that Rasputin could hypnotise people with his eyes, and it's possible he hypnotised Alexis, with the same calming effect. Rasputin was also the purveyor of some undeniably sage advice, as wise then as it is now: "Don't let the doctors bother him too much."

For Alexandra, there was no medical dispute: Rasputin was a Man of God. He became a frequent visitor to the royal household and the tsarina plied him with gifts and favours. Knowing of Rasputin's connection at court, people were always making requests of him, and a word from the empress went a long way in making those requests a reality. Rasputin's St Petersburg apartment became a busy office where he would meet supplicants, taking care of their medical problems with his healing powers and their bureaucratic problems with his influence. Payment could be made in money, pledges of loyalty, or, most controversially, "kisses".

During quieter times perhaps this all would have passed, but Russia was entering a period of intense crisis. In 1905, after a war with Japan ended in defeat and soldiers fired on a large protest in St Petersburg, Nicholas was forced to grant a constitution and convene a parliament, the Duma. But Nicholas granted the constitution against his better judgment, and when the Duma became too bold in its demands, he dispersed it. Another Duma was called, and also dispersed, and then another. Under the leadership of prime minister Pyotr Stolypin the country's economic performance improved rapidly. But Stolypin was assassinated in 1911. Russia soon found itself embroiled in the first world war, and less than four years later the entire royal family, including 13-year-old Alexis, was executed in a basement in Yekaterinburg.

The judgment of most historians is that the autocracy had no chance of surviving a war it could not win. And yet the war was won, eventually. What if Nicholas had held on another year? There's no question that some changes would have been in order. But he and his family may have had a different fate.

That they didn't can at least partly be attributed to Rasputin. His true nature – that of a drunk who made it a principle to start undressing every woman he met, until she made him stop – had become clear to people in St Petersburg relatively quickly, and soon Rasputin's relationship with the royal family became a scandal. The orthodox church, which had supported him, now tried to bring his behaviour to the attention of the tsar. It had no effect. Stolypin considered the question a sufficiently vital matter of state that he, too, presented a report: this also was ignored. And on it went. Rasputin had convinced Alexandra of his holiness, and no amount of evidence could turn her against him. All warnings about Rasputin came to seem like attacks on the family, and further isolated them from the people who wanted to help.

The worse things got, the more Alexandra came to rely on Rasputin's judgment. In the summer of 1915, with the war going poorly for Russia, Nicholas decided to leave the capital and assume command of the Russian army. This was a moderately bad idea militarily, but it was a disastrous idea for the government, which was left in Alexandra's hands. The tsarina was devoted to Russia, but inexperienced, and blinded by her belief in Rasputin. Under their joint direction a series of catastrophic decisions were made, as experienced ministers who disliked Rasputin were dismissed in favour of non-entities and incompetents. For years there had been (crazy) rumours that he and the empress were lovers; now people became convinced that they were also German spies.

Throughout all this, people kept trying to kill Rasputin. Welch lists at least four assassination attempts, including one by the female follower of a rival holy man, Iliodor, who stabbed Rasputin in the stomach. He survived. The final, successful attempt came in December 1916, and was carried out by a monarchist Duma deputy and two young aristocrats – one of them, Felix Yusupov, was the heir to Russia's largest fortune, and the other, Grand Duke Dmitry, was a nephew of the tsar. Yusupov lured Rasputin to his house, where he fed him poisoned cakes and wine, and, when these did not have their intended effect, shot him in the back. Rasputin, however, got up and started running away, at which point he was shot again by the Duma deputy. The conspirators then wrapped him in a curtain, bound his hands and threw him in a hole in the ice in the Neva river; he drowned.

They had hoped to save the autocracy, but if anything things became worse, and in any case it was too late. Just two months later crowds took to the streets of St Petersburg, and Nicholas was forced to give up the throne. In one of its few wise moves the provisional government dug up Rasputin's body and burned it. Not long after, the Bolsheviks seized power.

The story of Rasputin and his fatal embrace of the last Romanovs is a story of autocracy, of the kind of damage that can be wrought when a nation's fate depends too much on the judgment of a single individual. It's not easy to find contemporary analogues – Putin, for example, has no Rasputin – but I do keep thinking of Larry Summers, a man reviled in many circles, who nonetheless managed to ingratiate himself into the inner circle of President Obama's economic advisers early in his first term, when robust and equitable measures might have been taken to save the American republic – all of which Summers discouraged. But in that case, too, there probably wasn't much anyone could have done.

Rasputin: A short life – review | Books | The Guardian

For most people, the Internet arrived sometime between 1993-1995, but it did not just miraculously come into being. It is a long story of an almost accidental evolution of a government-funded military experiment named “ARPAnet” into today’s ubiquitous, commercial Web. Its evolution can be linked to ancient information-processing devises such as the abacus and travelling through the years to a series of rapid technological changes during the late nineteenth century--such as the typewriter, punch clock, cash register, and four-function calculators--that provided new ways of processing information. In the 1960s, a group of “anarchist hippies” from different organizations began realizing the potential which computer technology had for revolutionizing communication in ways that had not happened since the invention of the printing press over 500 years ago.

The ARPAnet

Worried that the U.S. was falling behind in terms of scientific achievement after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA had as its state mission to keep the U.S. ahead of military rivals by pushing research projects that promised significant advances in defence-related fields. ARPA had several project offices that funded research in different areas depending on the changing priorities of the Department of Defense (Burman 2003). One of these divisions, the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) headed by J.C.R Licklider of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) became a major funder of computer science in the United States and the driving force behind research into areas such as graphics, artificial intelligence, and networking.

One of Licklider’s visions was to create an “intergalactic network” of computers and people. His influential 1960 paper “Man-Computing Symbiosis” was a revolutionary conceptual shift because it cast computers not as number-crunching machines but as an exciting new communication medium. After Licklider left ARPA for MIT, his successor, Robert Taylor, remained committed to Licklider’s “intergalactic network” because it allowed ARPA researchers from around the country to access various computers in different locations (Abbate 1999).

Laying the Foundation of the Internet

Paul Baran of the United States Air Force-backed Research and Development organization (RAND) would help Lickliders’ dream become a reality by creating what would become the foundation for the Internet. In 1962, Baran was commissioned by the Air Force to research a decentralized, survivable way to maintain control over its missiles in the case of a nuclear attack.   Baran’s final proposal was what was called a “packet-switched network.”

Unlike the traditional network system which channelled information through one source to be processed and then routed somewhere else, packet switching essentially split large sections of data into little sections called “packets” that could be sent through different routes which all led to the same place. Upon arrival, information would be reassembled (Segaller 1998). Packet switching allowed dynamic rerouting--in other words, information could to be routed and rerouted quickly to any computer.

Baran talked to Robert Taylor of ARPRA who pushed the project forward by awarding what was called the “ARPAnet” contract to BBN. The team at BBN proposed that this network be composed of what was called Interface Message Processors (IMPs), or routers that were connected with modems that would process data packets. BBN chose Honeywell’s DDP-516 to build the first IMP and, in 1969, the very first rudimentary peer-to-peer network was established when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and succeeded in transmitting the “l” and the “o” in the word “login” to Stanford before the system crashed.  Hence, the first message on the Internet was “lo” An hour later, they were successful in transmitting the full “login.”

Later that year, four major computers at major universities (UCLA, University of Utah, Stanford Research Institute, and UCSB) joined the network, with other universities soon following (Burman 2003). As the network grew, however, ARPAnet managers realized that the original system supported only client-server applications like Telnet and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and couldn’t handle host-to-host connections. These limitations were overcome with the NCP, or Network Control Program, which allowed communications between different hosts running on the same network.

Becoming an ARPAnet user, however, was difficult. The first challenge for any potential user was getting access to the network. For a site to get an ARPAnet connection, someone would have to have a research contract with ARPA or had to pay the cost of setting up their node which, in 1972, might run anywhere between $55,000 and $107,000. When a site was approved, ARPA had to order a new IMP from Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, reconfigure the network to include the new node, and arrange with AT&T for a telephone link between the new node and the rest of the ARPAnet. Once a site was connected to ARPAnet, though, access to its controls was much looser (Abbate 1999). In theory, access within each site was to be limited to individuals doing work for ARPA, though few sites actually enforced that policy.

Many members of ARPAnet suspected that ARPA managers were aware that unsanctioned users were on the network and did not object. Unauthorized users who contributed improvements to the system were even tacitly encouraged. In fact, “science fiction lovers” mailing lists were apparently allowed to operate over ARPAnet provided they generated enough traffic to allow ARPA managers to observe the network’s behaviour under the load. Another unofficial but tolerated activity was Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg, which made an effort to make historically significant documents available over the network. Hart was not an ARPA researcher but had acquired an account at the University of Illinois and began by posting the Declaration of Independence on his site’s computer in December of 1971. Project Gutenberg is still in operation on the Internet to this day (Abbate 1999).

Once on the network, users had access to some of the most advanced computer systems in the U.S., but using it was difficult or unappealing, and new sites were given little direction on how to get started. In addition, navigating what was available on the ARPAnet was difficult because the network search tools that Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) users would later take for granted did not exist. ARPAnet, however, would change forever with the creation of “net notes” (later “email”) created by Ray Tomlinson. Email quickly became the network's most popular and influential service, surpassing all expectations. Email was not included in the original blueprint for the network, and its success represented a radical shift in the ARPAnet’s identity and purpose. The network was originally built to provide access to computers rather than to people, but email and emailing created a deeper level of community among ARPAnet users (Murphy 2002).

In 1972, ARPAnet was successfully demonstrated to the International Conference on Computer Communications in Washington in the presence of AT&T and other international telephone companies. In July, 1974, the ARPAnet was transferred to the Defense Communication Agency as an operational network where it continued to perfect protocols and expand the ARPAnet to function internationally by satellite links. Over the course of the decade, the ARPAnet, which was a single network that connected a few dozen sites, would be transformed into the Internet, which was a system of many interconnected networks, capable of almost indefinite expansion (Burman 2003).

Designing the Internet

NCP, the first standard networking protocol of ARPA (now called DARPA: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), was rapidly becoming unable to accommodate growing network traffic. Vinton (“Vint”) Cerf and Robert Kahn created the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in the mid-1970s, which added flexibility and sophistication to the network. In fact, the move from NCP to TCP/IP is considered by many people as the beginning of the Internet (the first use of the word “Internet” was in a 1974 paper by Cerf and Kahn on Transmission Control Protocol). TCP did more than just set up a connection between two hosts--it also controlled the rate of data flow between the hosts, compensated for errors by retransmitting lost or damaged packets, and verified the safe arrival of packets using acknowledgments (Segaller 1998).

Cerf and Kahn planned for TCP to replace NCP as the ARPANET’s host protocol and be the standard host protocol in every subsequent network built by ARPA. They also proposed splitting the TCP protocol into two separate parts: a host-to-host protocol and an internetwork protocol (IP), which would become known as TCP/IP. IP would pass individual packets between machines and TCP would be responsible for ordering these packets into reliable connections between pairs of hosts.

In March 1981, Major Joseph Haughney announced that all ARPAnet hosts would be required to implement TCP/IP in place of NCP by January of 1983. The replacement became a major ordeal and Dan Lynch, a computer systems manager, made up buttons that read “I Survived the TCP Transition.” After converting ARPAnet to TCP/IP, DARPA created a separate MILnet site equipped with encryption devices and other security measures to support their military functions while ARPAnet would continue to host civilian academic researchers. ARPAnet’s military roots would continue to be downplayed and, in 1987, the supervision of the Internet was transferred from the Department of Defense to the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Abbate 1999).

Launching the Internet

As the Internet grew, its backbone network, ARPAnet, was unable to keep up. ARPAnet managers and the NSF agreed to connect the ARPAnet sites to the NSF’s regional networks and have the NSFnet take over as the backbone of the Internet. NSFnet had higher-speed lines and faster switches, and it could handle more traffic. Since the NSF and DARPA were already operating their network services jointly, the merger would be relatively painless. During 1988 and 1989, various DARPA sites transferred their host connections from ARPAnet to NSFnet. On 28 February 1990, ARPAnet was formally decommissioned, the remaining hardware dismantled, and military operation of the Internet came to a close. Soon after the completion of NSFnet’s new and faster T1 lines, Internet traffic increased rapidly, and its T1 lines are usually considered the tool which opened the Internet to the world (Burman 2003).

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) developed the next phase of the development of the Internet, the vocabulary of the World Wide Web, while the debut of the first browser, Mosaic (whose developers founded Netscape), provided easy access to information dispersed through servers all over the world by means of the Web’s hyperlinks. By 1995, the Internet had grown into a new communications paradigm. It had started as a network offering file sharing, remote login, and resource sharing for a small group of scientists and had evolved into a global network accessible by anyone who had an ordinary telephone and a personal computer (Murphy 2002).

In 1995, the NSF privatized the Internet and contracted with several companies to carry most of its traffic. Today these companies, or Internet Service Providers (ISPs), include Verizon, AT&T, Qwest, and IBM. There are also smaller ISPs such as cable and DSL companies. Within these backbones are IXPs, or Internet Exchange Points, that allow networks to exchange data. For example, while Verizon and Sprint provide a part of the Internet’s backbone, they aren’t connected--they need an IXP to connect.

Currently, there are several organizations that oversee the Internet’s protocols and infrastructure to ensure that information from one computer to the next can be can be understood. These organizations include The Internet Society, The Internet Engineering Task Force, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Burman 2003). But while the framework of the Internet is carefully designed and cared for, the content continues to be extremely democratic and free.

Future of the Internet

The Internet’s democratic nature has made it seen as needing careful regulation in countries such as China and India. However, as one scholar argues, the seemingly boundless freedom of the Internet is not guaranteed. Some scholars argue that the generative power of the Internet could be on a path to lockdown by Internet-entered products such as iPods, iPhones, Tivos which can’t be easily modified by anyone except vendors. Instead of using personal computers which can run any program from any source without approval from a third party, we are entering a world where centralized approval becomes necessary. These scholars continue to assert that the Internet needs to remain “Wikipedia-ean” in which there are no clear boundaries between users and creators. If the Internet is to continue as an innovative means of collaboration, it will need to preserve its legacy of adaptability and its democratic nature (Declan 2007).

Whatever its future holds, the Internet sits at the centre of virtually all media crossroads.

-- Posted January 12, 2009

References

Abbate, Janet. 1999. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Burman, Edward. 2003. Shift!: The Unfolding Internet Hype, Hope, and History. West Sussex, England: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.

McCullagh, Declan. November 28, 2007. “News.com Talk: The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” News.com.

Murphy, Brian Martin. 2002. “A Critical History of the Internet.” Critical Perspectives on the Internet. Ed. Greg Elmer. New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Segaller, Stephen. 1998. Nerds: A Brief History of the Internet. New York, NY: TV Books.

“Get Linked or Get Lost”: A History of the Internet

Robin McKie, science editor The Observer, Sunday 3 November 2013

It's 100 years since Fritz Haber found a way to synthesise ammonia – helping to feed billions but also to kill millions, and contributing to the pollution of the planet

Fritz Haber in 1919. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

Several hundred scientists from across the globe will gather in Ludwigshafen, Germany, next week to discuss a simple topic: "A hundred years of the synthesis of ammonia." As titles go, it is scarcely a grabber. Yet the subject could hardly be of greater importance, for the gathering on 11 November will focus on the centenary of an industrial process that has transformed our planet and threatens to bring even greater, more dramatic changes over the next 100 years.

The ammonia process – which uses nitrogen from the atmosphere as its key ingredient – was invented by German chemist Fritz Haber to solve a problem that faced farmers across the globe. By the early 20th century they were running out of natural fertilisers for their crops. The Haber plant at Ludwigshafen, run by the chemical giant BASF, transformed that grim picture exactly 100 years ago – by churning out ammonia in industrial quantities for the first time, triggering a green revolution. Several billion people are alive today only because Haber found a way to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia fertiliser. "Bread from air," ran the slogan that advertised his work at the time.

But there is another, far darker side to the history of the Haber process. By providing Germany with an industrial source of ammonia, the country was able to extend its fight in the first world war by more than a year, it is estimated. Britain's sea blockade would have ensured Germany quickly ran out of natural fertilisers for its crops. In addition, Germany would also have run out of nitrogen compounds, such as saltpetre, for its explosives. The Haber process met both demands. Trains, bursting with Haber-based explosives and scrawled with "Death to the French", were soon chugging to the front, lengthening the war and Europe's suffering.

"If you look at the impact of the Haber process on the planet, you can see that it has been greater than any other discovery or industrial process over the past 100 years," said Professor Mark Sutton, of Edinburgh University. "On the positive side, there are the billions of people who are alive today thanks to it. Without it, there would have been no food for them. On the other hand, there are all the environmental impacts that a soaring world population, sustained by Haber fertilisers, have had. In addition, there is the pollution triggered by the release of ammonia fertilisers into water supplies across the globe and into the atmosphere.

"And, for good measure, there have been all the deaths caused by explosives created from Haber-manufactured ingredients. These have reached more than 100m since Haber invented the process, according to one estimate. So we can see Haber's work has been a mixed blessing."

Bald and absurdly Teutonic in demeanour, Haber was an ardent German nationalist. He was happy his invention was used to make explosives and was a fervent advocate of gas weapons. As a result, on 22 April 1915 at Ypres, 400 tons of chlorine gas were released under his direction and sent sweeping in clouds over Allied troops. It was the world's first major chemical weapons attack. Around 6,000 men died. Haber later claimed asphyxiation was no worse than blowing a soldier's leg off and letting him bleed to death, but many others disagreed, including his wife, Clara, herself a chemist. A week after the Ypres attack, she took Haber's service revolver and shot herself, dying in the arms of Hermann, their only son.

In 1918 Haber was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry, a decision greeted with widespread indignation. Many British, French and US diplomats and scientists refused to attend his award ceremony in Stockholm. After the rise of Hitler, Haber – who had become a rich industrialist – was expelled from Germany because he came from a Jewish family, and died in Switzerland in 1934.

The ironies that afflicted Haber's life continued in death. One of the most effective insecticides he had helped to develop was Zyklon B, which was subsequently used by the Nazis to murder more than a million people, including members of Haber's extended family, including children of his sisters and cousins.

Since then, the use of Haber's process – or more properly the Haber-Bosch process in acknowledgement of Carl Bosch's work in turning Haber's ideas into a practical industrial process – has expanded dramatically. Today more than 100m tonnes of nitrogen are taken from the atmosphere every year and converted into ammonia compounds, in Haber-Bosch plants. These are then spread over the surface of the Earth, turning arid land into fields of plenty. As a result, our planet has been able to feed and sustain an unprecedented number of people. In 1900 there were 1.6 billion people on Earth. There are now more than 7 billion. Most of the extra mouths have been fed on food sustained by the Haber-Bosch process.

It has been calculated that half the nitrogen atoms in our bodies come from a Haber factory, via its fertilisers and the food nourished by them. As the Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil has put it in his book Enriching the Earth, the Haber-Bosch process "has been of greater fundamental importance to the modern world than the airplane, nuclear energy, spaceflight or television".

This has come at a price, however. There is the sheer strain placed on the natural environment by the number of human beings now sustained by artificial fertilisers. In addition, there are problems caused by our ever increasing appetite for ammonium chemicals. Our bodies may accumulate nitrogen atoms from fertiliser plants, but far more of these atoms fail to make it into the food chain and are instead released into the environment. The result, in many areas, has been calamitous. Nitrogen fertilisers get washed into streams, rivers, lakes and coastal areas where they feed algae that spread in thick carpets over the waters, suffocating life below.

Then there is the atmospheric release of all the excess ammonia, says Sutton. "Ammonia is released into the air from fertilisers on farms and can then be deposited on natural habitats with very unwelcome consequences," he said. "Consider the sundew … It can grow in very harsh environments in this country because its sticky leaves allow it to catch insects, which provide it with nitrogen and other important compounds. But when ammonia from artificial fertilisers is dumped nearby other less hardy plants grow and crowd out the sundew."

Sutton believes that while the dangers of fossil fuels and greenhouse gases are well known today, those of the nitrogen cycle, which affects drinking water, contributes to air pollution and affects the health of large parts of the population, have gone unrecognised. "We need nitrogen compounds to sustain our food supply but we need to be much more careful how we use them. That is the real lesson of the Haber process centenary."

HABER'S BREAKTHROUGH

The atmosphere that we breathe is 78% nitrogen. However, it is in a relatively unreactive form and until the beginning of the 20th century, the only way to obtain nitrogen-rich chemicals – which make excellent fertilisers – was to use manure, in particular bird dung, or guano. At that time, guano was being imported, mainly from South America, in vast quantities to sustain European agriculture. However, Haber found a way to make ammonia, a nitrogen-based chemical, using hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen. A mixture of the gases was heated in special high-pressure vessels, which produced small but significant quantities of ammonia. This process of turning inert atmospheric nitrogen into a chemically reactive form is known as nitrogen fixation.

The German chemical company BASF purchased Haber's process and asked Carl Bosch to scale it up to industrial level. Bosch was awarded a Nobel prize in 1931 for this work.

During the first world war, some of the synthetic ammonia from Haber plants was turned into nitric acid, which is a critical ingredient for explosives.

 

From fertiliser to Zyklon B: 100 years of the scientific discovery that brought life and death | Science | The Observer

Jamie Doward The Observer, Sunday 3 November 2013

Former classified documents show how close the Soviet Union came to launching an attack in 1983

Prime minister Margaret Thatcher was alarmed by intelligence reports about the Soviet Union's reaction. Photograph: Jockel Fink/AP

Chilling new evidence that Britain and America came close to provoking the Soviet Union into launching a nuclear attack has emerged in former classified documents written at the height of the cold war.

Cabinet memos and briefing papers released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that a major war games exercise, Operation Able Art, conducted in November 1983 by the US and its Nato allies was so realistic it made the Russians believe that a nuclear strike on its territory was a real possibility.

When intelligence filtered back to the Tory government on the Russians' reaction to the exercise, the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, ordered her officials to lobby the Americans to make sure that such a mistake could never happen again. Anti-nuclear proliferation campaigners have credited the move with changing how the UK and the US thought about their relationship with the Soviet Union and beginning a thaw in relations between east and west.

The papers were obtained by Peter Burt, director of the Nuclear Information Service (NIS), an organisation that campaigns against nuclear proliferation, who said that the documents showed just how risky the cold war became for both sides.

"These papers document a pivotal moment in modern history – the point at which an alarmed Thatcher government realised that the cold war had to be brought to an end and began the process of persuading its American allies likewise," he said.

"The Cold War is sometimes described as a stable 'balance of power' between east and west, but the Able Archer story shows that it was in fact a shockingly dangerous period when the world came to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe on more than one occasion."

Able Archer, which involved 40,000 US and Nato troops moving across western Europe, co-ordinated by encrypted communications systems, imagined a scenario in which Blue Forces (Nato) defended its allies after Orange Forces (Warsaw Pact countries) sent troops into Yugoslavia following political unrest. The Orange Forces had quickly followed this up with invasions of Finland, Norway and eventually Greece. As the conflict had intensified, a conventional war had escalated into one involving chemical and nuclear weapons.

Numerous UK air bases, including Greenham Common, Brize Norton and Mildenhall, were used in the exercise, much of which is still shrouded in secrecy. However, last month Paul Dibb, a former director of the Australian Joint Intelligence Organisation, suggested that the 1983 exercise posed a more substantial threat than the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. "Able Archer could have triggered the ultimate unintended catastrophe, and with prompt nuclear strike capacities on both the US and Soviet sides, orders of magnitude greater than in 1962," he said .

The exercise took place amid heightened international tension. In September 1983 the Russians shot down a Korean Airlines Boeing 747, killing all 269 people on board, after the plane had mistakenly strayed into their airspace. There is evidence to suggest that the Russians thought the Boeing was an American spy plane.

Earlier in the same year the US president, Ronald Reagan, made a high-profile speech describing the Soviet Union as "the evil empire" and announced plans to build the "Star Wars" strategic defence initiative. With distrust between the US and USSR at unparalleled levels, both sides were operating on a hair trigger.

As Able Archer commenced, the Kremlin gave instructions for a dozen aircraft in East Germany and Poland to be fitted with nuclear weapons. In addition, around 70 SS-20 missiles were placed on heightened alert, while Soviet submarines carrying nuclear ballistic missiles were sent under the Arctic ice so that they could avoid detection.

Nato and its allies initially thought the Soviet response was the USSR's own form of war-gaming. However, the classified documents obtained by the NIS reveal just how close the Russians came to treating the exercise as the prelude for a nuclear strike against them.

A classified British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) report written shortly afterwards recorded the observation from one official that "we cannot discount the possibility that at least some Soviet officials/officers may have misinterpreted Able Archer 83 and possibly other nuclear CPXs [command post exercises] as posing a real threat." The cabinet secretary at the time, Sir Robert Armstrong, briefed Thatcher that the Soviets' response did not appear to be an exercise because it "took place over a major Soviet holiday, it had the form of actual military activity and alerts, not just war-gaming, and it was limited geographically to the area, central Europe, covered by the Nato exercise which the Soviet Union was monitoring".

Armstrong told Thatcher that Moscow's response "shows the concern of the Soviet Union over a possible Nato surprise attack mounted under cover of exercises". Much of the intelligence for the briefings to Thatcher, suggesting some in the Kremlin believed that the Able Archer exercise posed a "real threat", came from the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky.

Formerly classified files reveal Thatcher was so alarmed by the briefings that she ordered her officials to "consider what could be done to remove the danger that, by miscalculating western intentions, the Soviet Union would over-react". She ordered her officials to "urgently consider how to approach the Americans on the question of possible Soviet misapprehensions about a surprise Nato attack".

Formerly secret documents reveal that, in response, the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence drafted a joint paper for discussion with the US that proposed "Nato should inform the Soviet Union on a routine basis of proposed Nato exercise activity involving nuclear play".

Information from the JIC report and Gordievsky was shared with Reagan, who met the spy and was apparently so swayed by the arguments that he pushed for a new spirit of detente between the US and USSR.

However, Burt stressed that the end of the cold war did not mean that the risks had gone away. "Even though the cold war ended more than 20 years ago, thousands of warheads are still actively deployed by the nuclear-armed states," Burt said. "We continue to face unacceptably high risks and will continue to do so until we have taken steps to abolish these exceptionally dangerous weapons."

How a war game brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster | UK news | The Observer

Hassan Ibrahim Last Modified: 29 Feb 2008

A young military officer puts his visions for Arab social justice to the test.

Gamal Abdel Nasser receives a hero's welcome in Port Said in the Suez.

Gamal Abdel Nasser was not just a president of a country, but also the most charismatic leader and visionary the Middle East had seen for many centuries.

His strength of character was evident in his rhetoric, which mobilised Arabs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf, but it also surfaced in the bold socio-economic programmes he introduced to Egypt and the region.

Many people in the Middle East believed Nasser when he boisterously declared victory and did not abandon him even when he admitted defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

His funeral was the largest spectacle of mass grief ever witnessed in the region.

But why would the masses believe and support a leader who had not only been vanquished by the Israelis but also lost most of the Sinai, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights?

The simplest answer is that Nasser was the torch bearer who energised Egyptian and Arab politics, becoming a leading figure in the region.

Social justice

Many Arabs did not abandon Nasser even when he admitted defeat in the 1967 war

It was his firm belief in social justice that pushed him to try to implement socialist policies shortly after the 1952 revolution. However, these policies were not entirely suited to a society that was predominantly hierarchial, semi-feudalist, and agrarian.

As a result, a stratum of intellectuals and technocrats forced Nasser to adopt a more centralised decision-making process which in turn bred autocracy within the new government.

But contrary to the myth perpetuated by his enemies, Nasser was not the fire-brand revolutionary who "brandished his sword and called for the annihilation of Israel"; rather, he was grounded in a realistic approach to regional geo-politics.

He had the unique ability to balance building Egypt's infrastructure and economy with working for the liberation of Palestine - or at the very least, reaching the best possible peace settlement which ensures the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.

Nasser was not a warmonger, having experienced firsthand the damage war can inflict on a civilian population. His experience during the 1948 war and the gruelling siege of the Fallujah pocket in Palestine instilled in him an abhorrence for military solutions.

He instead attempted to solve the problems that plagued post-monarchial Egypt through economic and social reforms.

Land reform

Before the 1952 revolution, the Egyptian economy had been dominated by the private sector - a modern application of the feudalist system in which one per cent of the population owned some 85 per cent of the land.

Nasser recognised that existing land ownership schemes were grossly unfair and were the root causes of economic and social disenfranchisement among the landed peasants.

He understood that if Egypt's revolutionary transformation was to have any chance of succeeding and inspiring regional change, the government would have to reverse the monarchial system of land ownership in which the farmers had been treated like serfs.

At a rally during one of his visits to a factory in Cairo, Nasser lamented the plight of the country's peasants and expressed his disappointment that there were some who objected to his land reform projects.

"Why can't they believe that the poor people of Egypt have the right to a decent life on this earth before they die?" he asked.

A standing ovation helped Nasser formulate the "nationalisation and confiscation of properties and businesses" economic plan he would later put into action.

State priorities

Nasser was very measured in his reforms. He did not confiscate all private properties in the manner of his contemporary Josef Stalin, the Soviet premier.

In maintaining the rights of the Egyptian peasantry, he established a ceiling of 200 feddans (roughly 200 acres) for private land ownership, thus ensuring that the class system was not shaken to the roots.

By introducing agrarian reforms, redistributing land and developing the economy along socialist lines in the late 1950s, Nasser revolutionised Egyptian society transforming the very mechanisms at its heart.

Following the 1952 and 1961 land reform initiatives, most of the country's industrial, financial and commercial undertakings were nationalised by the government, including management of the agricultural sector.

Both industrial and agricultural output, along with foreign investment grew considerably after the revolution. The construction of a giant steel mill in Helwan, along with building the Aswan Dam, were perceived as an enormous added value to the Egyptian economy.

One of his most memorable economic and strategic decisions was to re-nationalise the Suez canal, which had been under British-French control for decades - a move that would incur the wrath of many powers in the region.

Nasser's drastic reforms catapaulted Egyptian industry forward and into the modern age. Productivity surged becoming the highest - and the standard - in the Arab World.

Foreign intervention

As the Egyptian masses embraced Nasser and his reforms, many in the Arab world watched with envy – and in some cases, with poisonous jealousy.

Some Arab leaders did not appreciate the revolutionary changes Nasser was introducing to Egypt. When he decided to build the High Dam in Aswan, there was little regional or international financial support.

John Foster Dulles, the US secretary of defense during the Eisenhower administration, vowed that Nasser would never achieve his goals. He urged Arab governments not to deal with Nasser and to actively seek his demise.

Some historians attribute the bloody Yemen conflict - which depleted the power of the Egyptian army - to US prodding of Saudi Arabia to defeat and weaken Nasser.

Grounded

 

Nasser's ideals for a united Arab world still resonate in the region today

Despite his fervour, Nasser never allowed his dreams to cloud his sense of reality.

In 1958, Syrian military and civilian leaders sought to unite their country with Egypt. Though Nasser was surprised by the sudden request and uncertain whether the time was ripe, he agreed.

The merger into the United Arab Republic (UAR) was viewed by many as the first step toward the founding of a Pan-Arab state, but it quickly succumbed to internal rivalries.

However, when a coup in Damascus ended the unity between Egypt and Syria, Nasser refused to use force to crush the separatist dissent.

That was the same wisdom and foresight he used to prevent Iraq's first attempt at occupying Kuwait in 1959. The Egyptian army did not have to fire a single bullet. 

Compare that to the mess of 1991.

It was Nasser's belief that the battle for liberation must be waged everywhere in the region and he consequently supported such movements in Algeria, Yemen and even the Congo.

Revolutionaries like Ahmed Bin Bella, Loran Kabila and even the father of all revolutionaries, Che Guevara, visited Nasser and considered him an inspiration.

Despite the debacle of the UAR and the humiliating defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, Nasser did not lose sight of his Arabist mission.

He purged the army of the destructive elements that led to the crushing defeat and planned diligently to foment Arab unity and military strength to retake lands lost in 1967.

On September 28, 1970, Nasser passed away after trying to mediate between disputing Arab leaders but his legacy and ideals of a united Arab nation live on.

Source: Al Jazeera

Opinion: Nasser, the torch bearer - Arab Unity - Al Jazeera English

Last Modified: 20 Jun 2008

In 1952, an Egyptian army officer stepped forward to lead the drive for Arab unity.

Between 1952 and 1970 there was one man at the heart of the drive for Arab unity

The years between 1952 and 1970 saw the drive for Arab unity at its strongest. It was an age of solidarity and the pursuit of unity through mass political movements. And it was an era dominated by a leader the likes of whom the Arabs had not seen in a long time.

Cairo, the capital of Egypt, is the Arab World's largest city. Home to over 18 million people, it is often called the heart of the Arab World.

It is also considered by many to be the cradle of modern Arab nationalism for it was in Cairo that the idea of a unified Arab nation found its greatest expression.

Bloodless coup

At the end of World War Two, colonialism still dominated large parts of the Arab World. Egypt was a monarchy under British rule and the base of Britain's presence in the Middle East.

Egyptian discontent at still being a colony was rising and Egyptians felt angry and humiliated after their poorly-armed military lost the 1948 war against Israel.
On July 23, 1952, a group of Egyptian army officers, calling themselves the Free Officers Movement, took power in a bloodless coup.

At the forefront of the uprising was a charismatic young army officer called Gamal Abdel Nasser. 
This was the first military coup to happen in the Arab World and it set a precedent for many to follow.

After assuming power, Nasser and the Free Officers formed the Revolutionary Command Council, which constituted the real power in Egypt. General Muhammad Naguib became Egypt's first president.

However, it soon became clear that the revolution was driven by the charisma of Nasser, and his strong ideological notions. Conflict with Naguib over strategies soon resulted in his removal, and in October, 1954 Nasser was appointed president of Egypt. He was the first native Egyptian to rule Egypt in over 2500 years.
Dia' El Din Mohammad Daoud, the secretary-general of the Nasserite movement, says: "Nasser was an ordinary man of the people, not a man of the upper classes, he came from the working classes, the father was a simple employee, his allegiance was always to the people, that's where he came from, that was his image."

Vision

Nasser set about changing Egypt. He had his own vision for both a new nation and the Arab World. Politically, he transformed Egypt into a republic, introducing centralised parliamentary rule, but he is better known for his domestic social programmes.

Nasser and Naguib became bitter enemies after the coup

Nasser's aim was to improve the conditions of the peasant majority - establishing land reforms, free educational programmes for boys and girls and developing the country's medical infrastructure.

Egypt was captivated, and the Arab World watched closely as Nasser expanded on his brand of socialism. He believed that if the people had real equality they would feel more united and act as one entity.
Saadedine Ibrahim, an Egyptian political activist, says: "One of the very early phrases that Nasser coined was addressing the common man: 'Raise your head fellow brother, the end of colonialism has come.' And that is the kind of language, message that echoed very deeply with the average man, because it was a simple language and people who were downtrodden, people who were beaten, mistreated, felt worthless, began to gain that kind of confidence, spirit that they didn't have before."
Never before had an Arab leader achieved such popularity outside his own capital.

Rarely had the population of an underdeveloped Arab World felt that they could participate in the future of their own nations.

Winning Arab hearts

Daoud says: "For the first time an Egyptian leader from the people and not from the upper classes, was able to win the hearts of the Arab people, there was now contact with various Arab forces and dialogue, there was a common language, one with which all Arabs could identify, this paved the way for a common Arab strategy."
Nasser's modern take on nationalism inspired Arabs, in a way which the Nahda, the Arab renaissance of the 19th century, had not. 

Nasserism had taken Arabism a step further. He believed Arabs would be stronger if united, that they shared a common struggle against colonial powers and that the liberation of Palestine should be an Arab duty.
Nasser's vision extended far beyond Egypt. He believed that the lessons of the revolution should be applied in other Arab countries.

His charisma and influence were so great that he inspired Arabs elsewhere to dream of a unified Arab nation. His defiant attitude towards Egypt's former colonial masters made him even more popular. Nasserism swept the region.

Suez Canal crisis

One of Nasser's main concerns was foreign occupation of Arab lands and it was events surrounding this issue which lead to a dramatic turn towards Arab unity.

As early as 1954, he supported Algeria's struggle for independence from the French, by providing arms and military training to Algeria's independence movement. But liberating his own nation from occupation proved to be one of the milestones of his career.
The British, who had originally agreed to remove their troops from the Suez Canal by 1954, still occupied it.

At the same time Egypt desperately needed electricity and the Americans had promised Nasser over $200m to build a hydroelectric power station in Aswan - known as the High Dam. But the US was a strong ally of Israel who - by 1954 - occupied large parts of Palestine.

Nasser's opposition to Israel and what he saw as US and European colonialism as well as his growing relationship with the communist block angered Western powers. The US refused to finance the dam.
In response Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal on July 26, 1956 and turned to the Soviets for financial aid.

The British and French no longer controlled this vital seaway. The old colonial powers were humiliated.
Ibrahim says: "It was fantastic, we went down to the streets, it was late at night, it was summer... streets were full of demonstrations, joy, people cheering... it was like a festival, it was like a feast, a moment of victory again."
What followed was military conflict between Egypt and a coalition of French, British and Israeli forces.

The operation to take the canal was a military success but a political disaster for the coalition - the US fearing Soviet intervention imposed an end to the crisis but allowed Israel to occupy the Sinai.

Arab hero

Despite the military defeat, Nasser had forced the West into submission. The Arab World had a new hero.

The Arab World now felt it could rally behind a strong leader. The effects of his revolution in Egypt soon spread to other Arab nations.
In 1958, the Iraqi Free Officers' Movement, modelled around Nasser's revolution, toppled the monarchy.

In Lebanon, events in 1958 led to a minor civil war between the existing regime and more revolutionary currents, influenced by Nasser's ideas. The US was asked to intervene. US forces landed on Beirut's shores in support of the local government but in the end it was Nasser who brokered a political agreement among the warring factions.

But the most notable spread of Nasserism in 1958 came in Syria.

A power struggle erupted within the military between Baathist and Nasserist currents. Fearing their country might be divided and that this could derail the drive towards Arab unity, a group of Syrian army officers asked Nasser to join Egypt with Syria.

Nasser was reluctant as the two countries had different political systems and experiences; he preferred a federation of two states. But with increasing pressure to find a rapid solution to Syria's situation, Nasser finally agreed, stressing that the two nations would be ruled on his terms.
The United Arab Republic (UAR) was born.

Problems persist

Nasser was a charismatic leader who came from humble beginnings

At the peak of his rule in the late 1950s, Nasser was the most important leader in the Arab World. He had succeeded in uniting at least one Arab nation with another, and ruled over both.

He had outmanoeuvred the old colonial powers and hastened their decline, restoring to the Arabs long lost feelings of pride, self confidence and above all, he managed to set the stage for the creation of an aspirational dream - a unified Arab World.

The dream of Arab unity had taken a huge leap.

 

But there were problems in the new Middle East. Jewish peoples had either been forced or persuaded to leave their ancestral homes in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco and Syria and emigrate to Israel.

The newly formed UAR was begin to tear apart under the dissent borne of suspicions and rivalries between the Egyptians and Syrians.

The Arab World had a hero, but it had still not been able to win back Palestine. And while Nasser had won many political battles, he had yet to score a battlefield victory against the Israelis who had delivered a punishing defeat to the Arabs in 1948.

Nearly 20 years later, the Arabs new-found sense of pride would come face to face with the harsh realities of yet another defeat.

Source: Al Jazeera

Arab Unity: Nasser's Revolution - Arab Unity - Al Jazeera English

Last Modified: 29 Mar 2008

In the 1970s, the Arabs and Israelis fought wars but Egypt soon sued for peace.

 

The struggle to keep Palestine, the homeland of the Palestinian Arab people, an inseparable part of the greater Arab Nation is one of the main issues at the heart of the Question of Arab Unity.

The two states - Arab and Jewish - as envisioned in the 1947 UN partition plan never came into fruition as Arabs and Israelis fought wars, gained and lost land and further plunged the region into conflict.

Over half of the Palestinian population fled the violence or were expelled by Jewish settlers. Almost two decades after the war of 1948, the Palestinians found themselves still living in camps. New solutions were needed, and the Palestinians began to think about pro-actively tackling their problems. Could Arab Unity be forged through war against a common enemy?

As the Palestinian Right of Return became an integral rallying call at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the defeated powers of Egypt and Syria began to plan a military strategy to retake territory lost in the 1967 war.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president who was humiliated in June 1967, began a campaign to re-equip, retrain, and revitalise the Egyptian Army in hopes of eventually recpaturing the Sinai peninsula.

Syria also began to retrain its military forces with an eye on securing the lost Golan Heights.

On October 6, 1973, as Jews celebrated Yom Kippur, Arab forces - mostly comprising of Egyptian and Syrian troops - launched a surprise attack against Israeli forces.

Crossing the Suez, the Egyptians breached the Bar-Lev defence perimeter, which Israeli tacticians had believed to be impregnable.

Initially, the Arabs made remarkable gains on the battlefield.

The Iraqi contingent - which consisted of 30,000 troops and 550 tanks - that was sent to assist the Syrians caught the Israelis completely by surprise, pushing back their counterattack forces.

But within one week, Israel turned the tide, forcing Egypt and Syria to the verge of another massive defeat.

International pressures and Cold War diplomacy between the US and the Soviet Union brought the war to an end on October 26.

Though Egypt, Syria and Iraq suffered losses at the end of the war, the initial gains proved that the Arabs could win major battlefield engagements.

These 'victories' provided the Arabs with psychological momentum, overturning the humiliations stemming from the 1967 defeat, and paving the way for diplomacy.

Camp David

On November 19, 1977, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, became the first leader to visit Tel Aviv and address the Israeli Knesset.

He called for a full implementation of UN resolutions 242 and 338, which were considered the cornerstones of any Arab-Israeli peace treaty.

By the time Egypt and Israel formally signed a peace treaty and opened diplomatic relations at Camp David in 1978, the Arab World had become fragmented.

Suspicions that Sadat had betrayed the Egyptians during the 1973 War came to the forefront as Damascus and Baghdad accused Cairo of prioritizing its own interests while abandoning the rest of the Arab World.

In 1979, the Arab League expelled Egypt. In 1982, Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon as Iraq and Iran were engaged in a bloody border war.

In 1989, the Arab League reinstated Egypt in the hopes of unifying the Arab World.

But a year later, another conflict, this time between two sovereign Arab states, would further split the Arab World.

Source: Al Jazeera

Peace after the Yom Kippur War? - Arab Unity - Al Jazeera English

Hussein Elrazzaz Last Modified: 07 Oct 2013

Forty years on, we explore the story of what Egyptians call the October War and Israelis the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

An Israeli armoured column on its way into Syria during the October War between Israel and Egypt and Syria [Getty Images]

Shortly after midnight on October 5, 1973, the telephone rang in the London home of Dubi Asherov, an Israeli case officer handling an Egyptian spy referred to as ‘The Source’. It was ‘The Source’ and his message was simple: “I need to meet the boss, urgently.”
Asherov called Tel Aviv to wake his superior, Zvi Zamir, the director of Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad. Within just a few hours, Zamir was on his way to the British capital, where he met ‘The Source’ in a Mossad safe house. The information he heard there was astonishing – but what made it all the more important was the identity of the man delivering it.
“Ashraf Marwan was one of the best spies in espionage history,” explains Ahron Bregman from the department of war studies at King’s College, London. “He was the perfect spy. He was not only clever and very, very efficient but he was also very close to the information. He was a relative of [Gamal Abdul] Nasser [the Egyptian president from 1956 until 1970] and he was the right hand man of President [Anwar] Sadat [who ruled Egypt from 1970 until 1981].”
So, when Marwan told Zamir that the following day at 6pm Egypt and Syria would launch an attack on Israel, there was every reason to believe him. But was this a genuine leak from the very centre of Egyptian power or was ‘The Source’ delivering information that was designed to deceive?  

All-out war

On the morning of October 6, 1973, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the Israeli cabinet met in an emergency session. It decided on the immediate mobilisation of reservists and devised a defence plan, codenamed ‘Dovecote’, which would be triggered two hours before the start of the battle.
At 2pm, 6,220 Egyptian air force jets crossed the Suez Canal, heading for Sinai, while Syrian jets simultaneously began a massive aerial strike on Israeli positions in the Golan Heights.

The two countries had launched an all-out war against Israel – and they had done it four hours earlier than ‘The Source’ had led the Israelis to believe they would. Their aim: to liberate the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights - territories occupied by Israel six years earlier during the Six Day War.  
Despite earlier intelligence warnings of an upcoming Arab attack, the head of Aman, Israel’s military intelligence, General Eli Zeira, was convinced there was nothing to worry about. As a result, Israel was completely unprepared. Its regular army was outnumbered and its reservists were not yet in place.
While Sadat’s close relationship with the Soviets guaranteed a supply of military hardware, the Israelis knew that he had been unable to obtain the latest generation of attack weapons and that without them their military might outweighed that of Egypt.
But, ever since the humiliation of the Six Day War, Egyptians had longed to see their country fight back. “There was a devastating feeling of crisis and defeat then,” explains Egyptian author and journalist Gamal El-Ghitani.
And while the Egyptian people agitated for war, the most powerful constituency of all, Egypt’s army, was also desperate to show that it could take on – and defeat – the enemy it faced across the Suez Canal every day.

A point to prove

Aware that his country’s weapons were dated and that it lacked the ability to liberate the Sinai in its entirety in a military operation, just four months after taking power, Sadat had offered the Israelis a peace deal if they would withdraw from Sinai. Golda Meir, the then Israeli prime minister, rebuffed the offer.
So, left to contemplate a war, Sadat found an ally. Syrian President Hafez al-Assad had come to power through a coup d’etat in 1970, and he too had a point to prove to his people.
Hisham Jaber, the director of the Middle East Studies Centre in Beirut, explains: “Hafez al-Assad was the defence minister during the 1967 defeat, and was held mainly accountable …. So, since al-Assad came to power in Syria, he started to absolve himself of the 1967 defeat, and to prepare the Syrian army for the next battle.”
In a series of meetings throughout 1973, Sadat and Assad refined their war plan, giving it the codename ‘Badr’ after the Prophet Mohammed’s first victorious battle.

Crossing the Suez Canal

Syria began concentrating its troops in the Golan, while Egypt did the same on the Suez Canal. But, having responded to a similar build-up five months earlier only to find that the Egyptians had gone no further than the edge of the Canal, Israeli military intelligence was determined not to make the same costly mistake.
“In a document that Aman published at noon … [on] October 5, it was a perfect description of the Egyptian army [getting] ready to go to war,” says Israeli military historian Uri Bar-Joseph. “The bottom line was we nevertheless believed that there was no change in the Egyptian estimate regarding the balance of forces with the IDF, and therefore the likelihood for war is low.”
Within minutes of the first aerial attacks, a massive artillery barrage began. Under the cover of artillery fire, the first wave of Egyptian ground troops crossed the Canal – 4,000 men in 720 rafts. With the war already half an hour old, ‘Dovecote’ was rushed into action. But, by 5pm, 45 Egyptian infantry battalions had crossed the Canal. ‘Dovecote’ had failed.
By sunrise on day two, the war appeared to have been an unequivocal success for Egypt’s armed forces; 100,000 men, more than 1,000 tanks and over 10,000 other vehicles had crossed the Suez Canal with only minimal losses.

An advantage lost

On the Golan front, three Syrian infantry divisions crossed the 1967 ceasefire line known as the Purple Line. And, two hours into the war, the Syrians gained their first significant victory when they captured ‘Israel’s Eye’ – a key Israeli vantage point 2,000m above sea level on top of Mount Hermon.

On the defensive

In Sinai, however, the Egyptians had used their success on day one to secure defensive bridgeheads, and were subsequently prepared for the inevitable Israeli counterattack when it began on October 8.
Yosri Omara from the Egyptian 2nd Infantry Division recalls: “We received orders to fire. We fired at them with every weapon we had …. It was a massacre … in the true meaning of the word …. The Egyptian RPG soldiers were moving like birds, like birds jumping from one tree to another. They would hide behind a ramp till the tank was 50m away and within range, then they fired at it. They would knock that one out then move on to the next tank.”
For the first time in its 25-year history, Israel was on the defensive. And, as the first week of the conflict concluded, it suffered another serious blow. On October 13, in front of the world’s media, the last of Israel’s Bar-Lev line of fortresses along the eastern coast of the Suez Canal surrendered to the 43rd battalion of Egyptian commandos.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes, seeing the Israeli soldiers waving the white flag, and humiliated,” says Hamdy El-Shorbagy from the Egyptian 43rd Commando Battalion.
The streets of Cairo filled with Egyptians reveling in their military’s triumphs and the first liberation of land occupied by Israel in the Six Day War provoked an enthusiastic response across the Arab world.
But in less than 24 hours, Israel had mobilised two armoured divisions, which soon turned the Syrian advance into a retreat. The Israelis advanced, capturing territory deep inside Syria.

Two different wars

Eight months earlier Sadat and Assad had forged the plan to launch a war against Israel on two fronts. But it now seemed that the two presidents had entirely different concepts of the war they had planned together.
“Assad told me that from the moment of his seizure of power, his ambition, his dream, was to avenge the defeat of 1967 when Syria had lost the Golan to Israel and when Assad himself was the defence minister,” says Patrick Seale, a British journalist and Hafez al-Assad biographer. “So I think he felt it as a personal responsibility for the recovery of the land. Assad saw the war, which he was planning, as a war of liberation.”
Sadat, on the other hand, had sought a limited war to focus the minds of the world’s superpowers, and to jump-start the stalled peace process.  
A week into it, Sadat’s personal target had already been surpassed, and a swift victory appeared to be in sight. So when, on October 13, the British ambassador to Egypt delivered an offer to broker a UN ceasefire resolution, which he said the Israelis were prepared to accept based on the current positions, seduced by success, Sadat refused. He would, he stated, only accept a ceasefire if Israel withdrew from the whole of Sinai.
“Things were going very well for Sadat,” explains Abraham Rabinovich, the author of The Yom Kippur War. “He didn’t want to stop the war. Something dramatic had to be done to persuade him to agree to a ceasefire; maybe even to get him to request a ceasefire, and the only thing that could work was [the] crossing of the Canal. That might scare him enough.”
On the morning of October 14, the Egyptian armour moved east. But the Israelis were waiting in pre-prepared positions and, within the first few minutes of battle, the Egyptians suffered significant casualties. By midday, 250 tanks had been lost and the Egyptian general command ordered all advancing forces to retreat.
On the Syrian front, the Israelis had suffered heavy losses, but achieved significant gains - advancing to within 35km of Damascus, and occupying new territories to bring to the bargaining table. They were now able to turn their attention south to the Egyptians. The plan to cross the Suez Canal had been finalised and given the name ‘Stouthearted Men’. But first they would have to take on the southern flank of the Egyptian 2nd army, which stood in the way of an Israeli advance.

The Battle of Chinese Farm

The ensuing fight would centre around an Egyptian agricultural development on which work had begun in the early 1960s with the help of Japanese experts. When they had occupied the area during the Six Day War, the Israelis had mistaken the Japanese writing on irrigation equipment for Chinese. The farm had now been recaptured by the Egyptians but at dusk on October 15, Israeli tanks started their assault on the ‘Chinese Farm’.
By the morning of October 16, 15 rafts had reached the Canal and begun ferrying Israeli tanks to the west. The crossing went almost unnoticed by the Egyptians and, later that same morning, in his first public appearance since the war started, Sadat led a victory parade through the streets of Cairo.
Egyptian reports about the Israeli crossing were confusing and underestimated the scale of the problem. It was only when the Israeli forces in the west went on the offensive that the Egyptians realised their enemy was already in their backyard.
The Egyptians suffered heavy losses. After two days of heavy fighting over the Chinese Farm, the remnants of the brigade that had blocked the road to the Canal retreated - but only after making the Israelis pay a steep price.
“Yes, [it was a] painful victory, very painful, mainly because of the dead and the wounded,” remembers Uri Dan, an Israeli war correspondent. “In one night of the crossing of the Canal, we lost some 400 people. Tanks were fighting, some of them we saw in broad daylight later, one barrel against another, like two sword combatants in medieval time[s]. But, here they were tanks, both of them destroyed, maybe most of the people in … them dead. The valley of death next day, along the Canal was terrible, but we were on the other side of the Canal.”
On October 18, the Israeli high command decided to capitalise on the successful crossing, building their presence on the western bank of the Canal to three armoured divisions. One division would move north to surround the Egyptian 2nd army and capture the city of Ismailia. The other two divisions would move south to encircle the Egyptian 3rd army and capture the city of Suez.
Soon after, Sadat summoned the Soviet ambassador to Egypt and told him that he was ready to accept a ceasefire. This time, however, it was the Israelis who had no interest.
“We can say that Israel had a greater interest in the ceasefire not kicking in right at that moment because it still had work to do – still territory it wants to capture,” explains Rabinovich.

Global implications

Two weeks into the war, and with the opposing forces locked in a stalemate, Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state, arrived in Moscow. His goal was to agree a UN ceasefire acceptable to Egypt’s Soviet allies.
On October 22, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 338, calling for a ceasefire. The fighting was due to stop at 6.52pm Middle Eastern time. But as morning broke on October 23, Israelis forces went into action as normal. By the end of the day they had bypassed Suez City and reached the port of Adabia.
The Egyptian 3rd army, dug in on the eastern side of the Canal, was surrounded by Israeli troops on every side – 35,000 men were cut off from their bases.
On October 23, the Security Council reconvened to confirm the ceasefire - issuing Resolution 339 and directing that UN observers be dispatched to the front. This new ceasefire was scheduled to go into effect at 7am the following day. But, once again, Israel broke it.
“Their main target was a big city, the conquering of a big city, either Ismailia or Suez. A city with a big name,” explains El-Ghitani. “They were fighting more of a media battle, but at the same time, they wanted to achieve a bigger political goal.”

The battle for Suez

Until the Six Day War, Suez was a flourishing industrial city and port. But after 1967, the city found itself on the frontline between Egypt and Israeli-occupied Sinai. A target for Israeli attacks, it was soon reduced to rubble. A quarter of a million people were evacuated leaving the city virtually abandoned. Just 5,000 people remained to manage the infrastructure and man the remaining factories.
Early on October 24, just as the new ceasefire was scheduled to start, Israeli tanks and troops moved into the semi-deserted city. But they soon encountered resistance from a small militia. By the time they were driven from the city, 80 Israeli soldiers were dead and 120 wounded.
On the same day, an alarming message reached Washington: the Soviets were considering taking unilateral action to impose the ceasefire. With Richard Nixon, the US president, submerged in the ‘Watergate Scandal’, it was left to Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state, to handle the crisis. He decided to respond to the Soviet threat with a show of force. The US armed forces state of alert was raised to the highest level in peacetime.
Walter J Boyne, the author of The Two O'Clock War says: “The question of the US versus [the] Soviet Union always boils down to mutual annihilation: we could’ve killed everybody in the Soviet Union, they could’ve killed everybody in the US, and the rest of the world would’ve gone. It was an absolutely insane situation. The thing that saved it was that each side knew that if a war occurred the leaders themselves would get killed. So when you know you are going to get killed in a war, not just some poor peasant soldier is going to get killed, you make different decisions about starting a war.”
The next day, diplomacy prevailed, the Soviets stepped back and the alert was defused. But for a full 24 hours, the world had stood on the brink of a war between two nuclear superpowers.
Meanwhile, the UN Security Council issued Resolution 340 – its third in less than four days.

Fighting on alone

As the balance shifted in favour of Israel, other Arab countries sent troops in support of Syria and Egypt. The Syrian front was strengthened by the arrival of expeditionary forces from Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The plan was to use this cocktail of Arab forces to drive the Israelis out of the pocket they had occupied in the Syrian mainland.
The date of the attack was set for October 23. But it would never happen, because Egypt’s Sadat had accepted a UN ceasefire that would take effect that evening.
Al-Assad now faced the prospect of fighting on alone, so the Syrians, too, bowed to the inevitable.
But one major open sore remained for Tel Aviv. The Israeli listening post on top of Mount Hermon had been captured by Syrian paratroopers on the first day of war. With Israel now in the ascendant, on October 23, the Golani Brigade attacked. They suffered heavy losses but secured their prize.