Visit from Nasser

For the past 19 months, Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser has lavished ill-spared funds and fighting men on the backward, arid republic of Yemen, where a revolutionary leader backed by Nasser is struggling against the stubborn remnants of the ousted royal regime. Nasser has committed 36,000 Egyptian troops -- one-third of his entire army -- but the royalists still control the countryside, penning the revolutionaries in a few garrisons. Last week, paying his first visit to Yemen since the 1962 coup, Nasser was plainly anxious to decide whether to cut his losses or to continue the costly desert war.

To judge from his tumultuous reception and Nasser's own rhetoric, the war was already won. Making no mention of the royalists or of the Saudi Arabian regime that until last July supplied them with arms and money, Nasser turned his wrath on the British, whose vital military base in adjoining Aden he termed "the occupied South." Vowed Egypt's President: "I swear to God to expel Britain from all parts of the Arab world. We shall shed blood and sacrifice souls, and we shall be as victorious as we were in Egypt and Yemen." For good measure, Nasser swore also to "redeem" Israel, which he called a "stooge" of Britain and the U.S.

Hailed as "the greatest man in the world" by Yemeni President Abdullah Sallal, Nasser inspected "the battlefronts of freedom." However many men he may lose, Nasser pledged, "their reward lies with God." Then he flew back to Cairo, where he was to discuss the Yemen conflict with Crown Prince Feisal, newly installed Regent of Saudi Arabia, Nasser's longtime archfoe. No longer. In a recent interview, Nasser allowed that he was now "very happy" with the Saudi Arabian regime. He will be even happier if the talks with Feisal end in a face-saving solution for the stalemate in Yemen.

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