Over the past quarter century, I have spent considerable time in the Middle East, as a visitor and as a researcher. I have no formal training in the history or culture of the region, but these accounts come from my study, personal interviews, and observations made over that period. My research centered on oil development in the region and I used these projects in developing and teaching courses in the History of Oil, taught at the University of Wyoming from 1995-2017 and scheduled for spring, 2020.
“Egypt’s Vietnam”: Saudi Arabian and Egyptian Intervention in Yemen, 1962-1968
The most serious humanitarian crisis in the world today is caused by man–not nature. It is the on-going three-year war in Yemen where millions of civilians have been affected–many killed by bombs and missiles, many others dying from the worst outbreak of cholera in modern world history. Sadly, it does not have to continue. The United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran each could step forward to demand an end to the violence.
Initially a civil war between warring factions with different religious beliefs, the intervention of foreign powers has turned the formerly localized violence into a proxy war with local civilians becoming the main victims. The Saudis and Emeratis have sent in mercenaries, many of whom seem outside the constrictions of international law.
The Yemenis, civilians as well as those on both sides, continue to suffer. Yet it is clear that Saudi Arabia and the UAE and, on the other side, Iran, are becoming poorer, less constrained by rules of war, and also more authoritarian due to the ruinous war. The United States, by furnishing war materiel to the Saudi/UAE sides, lose international standing by ignoring the human rights violations inherent in the war. The U. S. should not be encouraging continuation of the war and more violence against civilians by selling more bullets, bombs, other war materiel.
Making the war even worse for its disregard for humanitarian values are seemingly unrelated incidents such as the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the Trump administration’s unfettered support for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, considered the mastermind behind it by our own intelligence services. The CIA and all others have all but confirmed his clear role in ordering the murder of Khashoggi. By backing the Crown Prince’s foolish attacks on Yemen and the Khoshoggi murder, a clear outgrowth of the Saudi misadventure in Yemen, America’s moral standing has faded rapidly.
This is not the first time innocent civilians of Yemen have died in a civil war evolving into a proxy war. It happened before in the 1960s when Saudis and Egyptians sent military forces to Yemen, intervening on opposite sides. From 1962 to the time of Egyptian withdrawal of troops in 1968, the war cost Egypt some 20,000 killed in action and thousands of others wounded. Some Egyptian historians say the toll was even greater. Untold millions of Egyptian pounds were spent backing the “republican forces” against the “royalist forces,” those being backed by Saudi Arabia–some say costing the kingdom up to $1 million per day at the height of the war.
Initially, Egypt had no reason to intervene–nor did Saudi Arabia. It was a localized civil war between two political factions in Yemen. The Nasser leadership, however, injected Egypt into the fight, arguing they were defenders of Arab nationalism, regardless of where it was being threatened. But has modern accounts assess the result, the war “brought not only famine and ruin to Yemen, but destruction to his home country of Egypt.” Millions of ordinary Egyptians paid the price for Nasser’s “nationalism,”–the thousands killed and wounded, the millions impoverished by war taxes to support the invasions. (This, of course, was separate and apart from the 6-Day War and other wars with Israel).
When I was in Egypt many years ago, I met several veterans of what historians there called “Egypt’s Vietnam.” There was one astute local historian who told me that it should have been a lesson to the U. S. in Vietnam–thus, the Vietnam War should have been called the “U.S.’s Yemen.” Ordinary Egyptians were trapped by stubborn politicians who continued to commit more and more troops to a losing effort. Thousands of civilians and many soldiers died while many Egyptians became inured to the violence of the war.
In that Yemen war, Saudi Arabia backed the one side, opposite the side Egypt supported. Some historians argue that the Saudi Arabia population, then as now, did not feel the full extent of the casualties because the king’s government hired “mercenaries”–few, if any, of their own citizens actually engaged in the fighting.
Unlike Egypt in the 1960s, consequences of the current destruction of Yemen, may persist well into the future as lives are lost and the moral standing of the warmakers of Saudi, UAE, Iran, and the U. S., erode in the eyes of other nations. Granted, using and losing mercenaries in the war won’t affect any of the outside protagonists, but there will be a devastating financial cost. Underwriting the war may have a longer term impact on all of countries, to say nothing of the increasing paranoia of their respective leaders. There will be unexpected consequences showing themselves in perverse ways. For instance, how did the war influence the murder of Khashoggi? The asinine “life sentence” handed down on a British doctoral student (released finally by a National Day amnesty on Nov. 28)? Trump’s cruel immigration policies and utter disregard for the troops fighting in far-away wars?
Not having been a student of modern Middle East war and diplomacy, I had my first enlightening conversation about “Egypt’s Vietnam” with a retired engineer at the Gezira Club on Zamalek Island, just down the street from our flat. We were sitting outside the reading room, having tea with several other friends, when he told me about his service in the disastrous Yemeni War. (I first thought he was referring to the wars with Israel, but he made it plain that it was war against Saudi Arabia in the civil war in Yemen).
After comparing notes of his service at the front in Yemen as a young soldier in the early 1960s and my Marine Corps service during Vietnam (I was not sent to Vietnam), we both concluded that the leadership of our respective countries finally had “learned the lesson of Yemen/Vietnam.” If history is any guide, other world leaders tempted by greed or ego to conduct similar foreign mis-adventures learned from our respective “Yemens/Vietnams.” Sadly, how wrong we both were!
While we never spoke of it, it is likely that our friend Ali, a jewelry/silver merchant in the Khan al-Khalilli, knew a good deal about the war, too, as did every Egyptian of a “certain age” in those years. (During the Mubarak years, politics was not discussed in Egypt, even among friends). For decades after the war, Ali accepted in trade the works of Yemeni silver merchants from the 1960s and back into time. Apparently, Yemen dealers furnished much of it to the thriving Cairo silver resale market, but other silver pieces were still turning up from Egyptian families. Some of the pieces almost certainly made their way to Cairo in the 1960s as war prizes or gifts from people in gratitude for help. Once the warriors died, the pieces had no cultural meaning for survivors beyond war goods that had been collected by the now deceased relatives.
We bought several pieces of Siwa jewelry, pieces made by silversmiths in the Bedouin regions of western Egypt through the centuries. But we bought other pieces. Ali and others often referred to this jewelry as “brought back to Egypt from Yemen.” The provenance of the pieces, to say the least, was “clouded.” Even though we have researched them for many years now, identifying the silver actually seemed easier to accomplish than learning more about the 1960s “Egyptian Vietnam.” Some brief accounts of the war appeared in a couple of books I indexed for AUC Press. (I indexed a couple of dozen of their books over a decade or so from 1999-2011). Some references appear in works of Egyptian literature and a small exhibit about the war occupies a small room in the Egyptian Military Museum at the Citadel in Cairo.
Like the legacy of Vietnam seems to be fading from the American consciousness, so too is the story of the Yemen War of the 1960s–“Egypt’s Vietnam.” Neither of the societies can afford to forget the difficult lessons the wars taught earlier generations. Disastrous wars can re-emerge to ravage societies of today, just as they did in the past. Egypt’s “Vietnam” and America’s “Yemen” should not be forgotten–but also never repeated.
Articles in this section are based solely on the observations and research of Phil Roberts. He is not an expert on the region, but provides these observations for discussion and enlightenment.