The protocol of Sevres might well have imagined Egyptian weapons of mass destruction. Here a case of a concocted strat of a war.
Lessons of the Suez Crisis
editorials and opinion
By MATTHEW STEVENSON
The Providence Journal
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Although President Bush invoked the bloodbaths of Indochina to argue that America should not cut and run from Iraq, the better historical analogy is the autumn 1956 crisis over the Suez Canal.
That quagmire began when Gamal Abdul Nasser, appearing in the role of Egypt's Saddam Hussein, nationalized the canal, then the property of British and French investors. In his history of the crisis, "Suez: Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East" Keith Kyle describes him as "a tall, handsome, well-built man of austere tastes, great political ambition and the soul of a conspirator."
Nasser nationalized the canal after the U.S. government refused to help finance construction of the High Dam at Aswan. In response, British Prime Anthony Eden, together with the French, plotted to take back what they believed to be theirs.
Still bitter over Neville Chamberlain's 1938 Munich appeasement, Eden saw in Nasser someone prancing on the stage sets of fascism and vowed to protect Western interests, if not their bondholders, by responding with an early variation of shock and awe.
One of the co-conspirators in the restoration was the French foreign minister, Christian Pineau, who noted: "The English are incapable of acting without a pretext." In this case, in the Paris suburb of Sevres, the British and the French persuaded the Israelis to attack Sinai and threaten the canal, thus offering Eden a pretext to intervene militarily. Kyle writes: "Eden was requiring the Service Chiefs, at scarcely any notice at all, to dress their work in an entirely fresh political guise, as if they were peacekeepers."
Proof of this collusion emerged both at the time of the crisis and later in the memoirs of former Prime Minister Edward Heath, who wrote: "We've got an agreement. Israel has agreed to invade Egypt. We shall then send in our own forces, backed up by the French, to separate the contestants and regain the Canal." The protocol of Sevres might well have imagined Egyptian weapons of mass destruction.
Like the Bush administration, Eden and his gang had little use for the United Nations, fearing a Russian veto or Third World denunciations. U.N. Secretary-Gen. Dag Hammarskjold tried to broker a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Chasing the ghosts of Munich, Eden wanted nothing that smacked of appeasement and unleashed the dogs of war.
In the first phase, following the Israeli attacks in the Sinai, British and French bombers attacked Egyptian airfields hoping it might lead to regime change. The long lead times for an amphibious assault made it impossible both to position troops and also claim that England wanted peace. Instead of an amphibious landing at Alexandria or a tank attack from Libya, Britain and France dropped paratroops on Port Said, where they became bogged down in the quicksand of political outrage.
Most crucially, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to support the empires' striking back. With considerable foresight, he feared estrangement from the developing world. Nor, more practically, did he think Britain and France had the military assets to carry out the military operation successfully.
World and local opinion forced Britain, France and Israel to surrender their positions to U.N. peacekeeping forces. What probably changed imperial hearts and minds in the desert was the run during the crisis on the British pound, much the way the issues behind the U.S. dollar's collapse may force the Americans out of Iraq.
Ironically, it was also in the service of propping up a wobbly Iraqi government that Britain had intervened in Egypt. Justifying the attack, the British ambassador in Tehran wrote: "The result of our present action against Egypt will leave Egypt militarily weak and unable to cause further trouble....(t)his will leave Iraq (then, in effect, a British protectorate) as the major Arab power, to which, if the other Arab states are worried about Israel, they will have to look for protection."
Nevertheless, within a year, the Iraqi opposition had overthrown and killed the client government and its monarch, a fate that may await those in the Sunni triangle who have done the Bush administration's local bidding.
While withdrawing from Suez, Britain and France tried to advance a case for their military successes, much the way the U.S. likes to spin Iraq as a battle being won in the larger war on terror. The British foreign minister proclaimed that Israel was no longer "hemmed in," that Nasser and Egyptian expansionism had been challenged, and that the Soviet Union had been checked from interfering in the Middle East.
Although the words now sound like U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's brave new world after military success in Iraq, the fact is that Suez ushered Britain and France both out of the Middle East and off the stage of global power. For starters, Nasser seized all British and French investments in Egypt. Within a few years of the Suez crisis, Britain and France had departed from Iraq, Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and much of the Persian Gulf. They might well have been the heirs to the declining Ottoman Empire, signing various treaties later known as "the Capitulations."
Matthew Stevenson is the co-host of "The Travel Hour," a new radio program, and the author of "An April Across America" (www. odysseusbooks.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com). |
