President of the Dictators’ Club

Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt is fêted as an anti-imperial hero, but as Alex Rowell shows, his true legacy in the Middle East is a wave of copycat despots

WE ARE YOUR SOLDIERS by Alex Rowell

416pp, Simon & Schuster, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£25, ebook £9.99

As Baghdad correspondent for The Telegraph after the fall of Saddam Hussein, I hired “Colonel Ahmed”, an exRepublican Guard officer, as a driver-cum-bodyguard. He was pleasant, punctual and handy in a scrap, but in the run-up to the country’s first elections in 2005, I was surprised to see him backing the “Free Officers and Civilians Movement”, one of more than 200 newly-minted parties. The party traded on nostalgia for the era of Brig Abd al-Karim Qasim, who served as Iraq’s prime minister before being overthrown by Saddam’s Ba’ath Party in 1963. Yet Qasim himself had launched a coup back in 1958, when Iraq’s Anglophile royal family were killed.

According to journalist Alex Rowell’s new book, We Are Your Soldiers, Qasim was just one of many Arab strongmen inspired by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. To this day, Nasser is hailed as a modern-day Saladin: the anti-imperialist who prised the Suez Canal from the imperial clutches of Britain and France. Rowell, however, tells a less flattering story, charting Nasser’s dictatorial rule from 1953 to 1970, and how he encouraged other local tyrants to follow suit.

Rowell is as good as his word. In 400 blood-soaked pages, he traces Nasser’s influence from one Arab capital to another. The rot starts in Egypt itself, where Nasser’s own Free Officers’ movement topples the monarchy in late 1952. The debonair young lieutenant turns Egypt into what Rowell calls “a political wasteland: no parties, no protests, no press, no civil society”. Nasser’s acolytes abroad are even worse. From Iraq and Syria to Yemen and

Libya, coups are mounted by young officers who set up copycat Revolutionary Command Councils, with everyone in dark glasses and military uniforms. It’s tempting to call this a “Dictators’ Club”, albeit Nasser constantly interfered in his protégés’ affairs.

Covering skullduggery across seven different countries, this book’s narrative is complex at times, and occasionally I struggled to follow the cast of coup-mongers; but Rowell is an eloquent writer, weaving the intrigue into the region’s wider history. He points out, too, that the legend of Nasser as the Arab warrior who vanquished his colonial foes is built on shaky ground. Britain and France lost the Suez confrontation largely because America refused to back them.

Rowell also laments how, half a century after Nasser’s death, the Middle East continues to embrace military strongmen, and that the latter have largely weathered the Arab Spring. In Egypt, Gen Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took power in a 2013 coup; in Syria, Bashar al-Assad still clings to power; in Libya, Gen Khalifa Haftar runs the country’s east as his personal fiefdom. For the record, my old Iraqi driver’s “Free Officers and Civilians Movement” party vanished after getting just 6,000 votes. But across the region, Nasser’s toxic legacy lives on.

Looking to the future: Gamal Abdel Nasser, pictured in December 1964