The Third World War by John Hackett Read Free Book Online Page B

helicopters. What is more they had battle experience spreading over twenty years—civil war, battle in Central Africa, the great triumph in Namibia. Guided, equipped and encouraged by the Soviet Union and Cubans, they would be a force to be reckoned with in the coming struggle for South Africa.
    The head of state, formerly Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces and a declared radical, had in the end found his own presence at the summit of affairs to be preferred to a return to constitutional rule. The fact that Nigeria supplied an increasing share of US oil imports was no small factor in the situation. Nigeria may have been a long way from Pretoria. It did not intend that distance should muffle its voice or lessen its hostility.
    North-west Africa was mercifully free of much of the turbulence which prevailed in the central, southern and north-eastern areas. Most North-west African states had had their struggles for liberation from the colonial powers; they had had their internal struggles for governments of their own; they had had their experiments in external fishing in troubled waters; they now wanted to be left alone. At the same time they did not wish to be totally excluded from the luxurious game of not letting others alone. Morocco was prepared to offer both advice and troops. But the likelihood of Moroccan troops being deployed as far south as the new seat of war was not great. In any event, quarrels with Algeria and Mauretania, never far below the surface, were simmering once more.
    Algeria herself was the joker in the pack. She was not willing to risk a single Berber or a single dinar in a cause that could be of no direct and immediate economic or political benefit to herself. It was not for nothing that the Algerians had understudied the French for so long.
    Libya was totally different again. Incredibly, Colonel Farouk, Libya’s radical nationalist leader, had survived. Most of the countries in which he had attempted to intervene had shrugged off his intervention. He was always seeking out trouble but never taking up arms;
    always meddling and threatening, but never acting; never in battle, but never out of it.
    All this was bound up with what was happening in Egypt. President Hassan el Samdi had long wanted to have a proper hold on his paymasters—Saudi Arabia and the oil-ribh Gulf states. It was not for him but for his successors to achieve this. When President el Samdi was removed as a result both of food riots and of public disillusion over the Israeli settlement he was succeeded by the somewhat unlikely coalition of the Vice-President, Ahmed Mohamed and the War Minister and Commander-in-Chief, General Aziz Tawfik.
    It was almost a repetition of the Neguib-Nasser relationship. Mohamed was the comparatively respectable front man of the team, even keeping up normal relations with the conservative ruling families of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Tawfik, on the other hand, had the wholehearted backing of the younger elements in the armed forces and of the intelligence services. The latter, chafing at the restraint imposed on them by the previous government, came forward with ambitious plans for creating by subversion a new and grander United Arab Republic, to embrace this time not the maverick Libyans or the ungovernable Syrians, but the sources of Arab wealth in the Arabian peninsula.
    There was one problem: these ambitions could only be realized with massive Soviet help, both to provide the means of military takeover and to stave off any American attempt to intervene in favour of the status quo, and to preserve the supply of Middle East oil to the West. This would be a major change in Egyptian foreign policy, but Egypt was not renowned for consistency in these matters. The adoption of Russian support in the fifties and the repudiation of it in the seventies had been equally sudden and surprising. Egypt had breathed a great sigh of relief at the ending of the state of war with Israel in 1980. But the resulting relaxation of