Nahas & New Friends

Egypt's Premier, Nahas Pasha, has one good eye and one that veers off at a tangent. Perhaps the second eye has been roving over the restless Middle East; perhaps it winked at the Fighting French Commander-in-Chief for Syria and Lebanon, General Georges Catroux, and certain political leaders of these onetime French mandates. In Cairo last week they were closeted with Nahas, hatching plans that, after World War II, the Middle East shall be un-mandated.

When the Vichyfrench were cleaned out of Syria last year, the British, assuming military control, handed over civil control to their De Gaullist allies. Britain's job was to prepare strategic Syria against the threat of Nazi invasion. Scores of new airdromes were built, 4,000 miles of highways repaired or constructed across the Syrian badlands.

But the Fighting French had a tougher, more thankless job. From the Vichyfrench administration they had inherited two headaches: food scarcities, caused by a year's British blockade, and a Syrian mistrust of anyone who spoke French. For the first headache the British supplied an antidote in shipments of wheat, rice, coffee. For the second headache General Catroux had a prescription: a promise of post-war independence. But to President Attasi the Fighting French were political nobodies; he refused to negotiate with them. Ousting Attasi and his ministers, Catroux named as president a Syrian whose chief virtue was his willingness to negotiate: Mohammed Tageddine el Hassani. A flimsy, stopgap government, el Hassani's had little popular support, left Syrian Nationalists free to ogle the Axis.

In largely Christian Lebanon, where Moslems are mistrusted, the Fighting French had better, luck. Last week in Beirut they set up a new government under slight, grave-faced Maitre Sami Bey el Solb, who had fought the Turks in World War I side by side with T. E. Lawrence and King Feisal. Around him Premier el Solh gathered a strong Cabinet and prepared to hold a free election for the Presidency and Parliament. And in Cairo, Premier el Solh has another friend even more potent than Fighting Frenchman Catroux: Egypt's roving-eyed Premier, Nahas Pasha.

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