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CounterPunch
January
15, 2003
The Fallout of the Suez Still Lingers
New Crisis, Old Lesson
by ROBERT FISK
The Independent
There was secret collusion, a fraudulent attempt
to use the United Nations as a fig leaf for war, a largely unsympathetic
British public, journalists used as propagandists and our enemy----an
Arab dictator previously regarded as a friend of the West--compared
to the worst criminals of the Second World War. Sound familiar?
Well, it happened almost half a century ago, not over oil but
over a narrow man--made canal linking the Mediterranean with
the Red Sea.
The Suez crisis has haunted British governments
ever since 1956--it hung over Margaret Thatcher during the 1982
Falklands War, and its ghost now moves between the Foreign Office
and Downing Street, between Jack Straw and Tony Blair. For Suez
destroyed a British prime minister--along, almost, with the Anglo--American
alliance--and symbolised the end of the British empire.
It killed many civilians--all Egyptian,
of course--and brought shame upon the allies when they turned
out to have committed war crimes. It rested on a lie--that British
and French troops should land in Egypt to "separate"
the Egyptian and Israeli armies, even though the British and
French had earlier connived at Israel's invasion. Colonel Gamal
Abdul Nasser was described by the British Prime Minister, Anthony
Eden, as  "the Mussolini of the Nile"
even though, scarcely a year earlier, Eden had warmly shaken
Nasser's hand in an exchange of congratulations over a new Anglo--Egyptian
treaty--shades of Donald Rumsfeld's chummy meeting with the "Hitler
of Baghdad" in 1983. In the end, British troops--poorly
equipped and treating their Egyptian enemies with racial disdain--left
in humiliation, digging up their dead comrades from their graves
to freight back home lest the Egyptians defiled their bodies.
Suez was a complex crisis, but it revolved
around Nasser's decision--against international agreements--to
nationalise the canal and take over the Suez Canal Company. British
banks and business had long dominated investment in Egypt and
held a 44 per cent stake in the company, originally negotiated
by Benjamin Disraeli.
Nasser's takeover was greeted with delirium
by Egyptian crowds, who had been aghast at America's earlier
withdrawal from the Aswan High Dam project. The code word for
the takeover was "de Lesseps", who had built the canal
when Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire, and the moment he
uttered the Frenchman's name in a radio speech, Nasser's armed
collaborators were to storm the company's offices. "I listened
to the radio throughout his speech," one of them told me
many years later. "Nasser used the code word "de Lesseps"
13 times--we thought he was going to give us all away."
In London, Eden summoned his chiefs of
staff. He wanted to topple Nasser--"regime change"
is a new version of the same idea--and free the canal. But the
British military informed him it couldn't be done. Troops were
out of training, landing craft out of commission. "It was
only when we eventually dropped outside Port Said," a Parachute
Regiment officer told me 30 years later, "that we suddenly
realised how far our army's readiness had declined since the
Second World War. Our transport aircraft could only unload from
the side, our jeeps broke down and they couldn't even drop artillery
to support us."
So the days and weeks and months that
followed Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal were taken up with
prevarication, parliamentary lies, desperate attempts to form
a coalition army and--most damaging of all--a secret meeting
at Sèvres, outside Paris, in which the Israelis, the British
and the French agreed that the Israeli army should invade Egypt
and that Britain and France would then intervene, instruct the
Israeli and Egyptian armies to withdraw their forces either side
of the canal, and then place an Anglo--French intervention force
in the Canal Zone around Port Said. "Operation Musketeer",
it would be called, and the British people were duly summoned
from their postwar lethargy by newspaper editorials that condemned
those who questioned Eden's right to use military force.
The Times led the way. "Of course,
it [public opinion] wants to avoid the use of force," the
paper's editorial--written personally by its editor, William
Haley--thundered. "So does everyone and we hope no one does
so more than the British Government. But that is a far cry from
saying that because there seems little we can do about it, the
best thing is to find excuses for, and forget, the whole business.
Nations live by the vigorous defence of their interests... The
people, in their silent way, know this better than the critics.
They still want Britain great." The Guardian claimed that
The Times's editorial was an attack on the right to speak out
against government in times of crisis--it will be interesting
to see if this debate restarts when an Iraqi war grows closer--and
Eden's press secretary, William Clark, played a role not unlike
a certain spin doctor in Downing Street today.
"Clark worked in unison with The
Times," Tony Shaw recalled in his brilliant and sometimes
outrageously funny history, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media: Propaganda
and Persuasion During the Suez Crisis. Clark's job--and here
there is a deeply uncomfortable parallel with George Bush and
the UN--was "to prepare the ground for the government's
brief referral of the dispute to the United Nations... This required
a certain amount of ingenuity since Eden and the paper had hitherto
dismissed the organisation as unwieldy and incapable of producing
swift results". Eden had told Haley that he wanted to use
the UN as an instrument solely to prove Nasser's guilt and justify
force--which is pretty much what George Bush wants the UN arms
inspectors to do in Iraq today.
And here is another 1956 Times editorial
that could simply be reprinted today with the word "Iraq"
substituted for "canal": "The objection to the
matter being simply referred to the UN and left there has all
along been, and remains, that the UN is likely to be dilatory
and certain to be ineffective as a means of freeing the canal.
But whatever international control is eventually brought about
by negotiation or otherwise should certainly be under the aegis
of the UN and the sooner the UN is officially informed of what
has happened the better."
The Israelis duly attacked and on 5 November,
the Anglo--French force landed around Port Said, many of them
carried in a fleet of ageing warships from Cyprus. At Gamil airfield,
780 British paratroopers were dropped and 470 French paratroopers
landed at two bridges on the canal at Raswa. The British stormed
an Egyptian police station that held out under intense fire and
killed almost all the policemen inside. The French were seen
machine--gunning to death peasants who had jumped into the canal
in fear.
At Gamil airport, a young Egyptian guerrilla
was seized by the British, who wanted to know the whereabouts
of Egyptian arms stores. He later claimed that one of his eyes
was cut out by a British interrogation officer after a paratroop
doctor was wounded while dropping by parachute, and the other
eye taken out later when he refused to broadcast propaganda for
the allies. There is no independent testimony to this, although
I have met the man, whose eyes have clearly been taken from their
sockets. A paratroop doctor was wounded while dropping over the
airfield, although he told me that he knew nothing of the Egyptian's
claims--ironically, many years later, the paratrooper saw the
blind Egyptian in the Port Said military museum, but never spoke
to him.
British military papers at the time--many
others, like Eden's records of the secret Sèvres meeting,
were deliberately destroyed in the months after Suez--also make
no reference to the man's allegation, although some I have seen
contain disturbing references to the racism that still marked
the former imperial army. The poorest area of Port Said, for
example, was marked on British maps as "Wog--Town".
The reporter Alex Eftyvoulos was to see bodies still unburied
in Port Said days later--the British were slow to bring journalists
to the scene of the brief battle.
But it was the Americans who expressed
the most anger. President Eisenhower was outraged by the evidence
that Israel's invasion had been set up by the allies--mainly
by the French--and, contrary to the present incumbent of the
White House, reserved America's right to condemn the whole invasion.
His famous remark to Foster Dulles--that his job was to go to
London and tell Eden: "Whoa, boy"--showed just how
close he was coming to cutting off all support for Britain. By
28 November, the British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, was
telling the Cabinet that "if we withdrew the Anglo--French
troops as rapidly as was practicable, we should regain the sympathy
of the US government".
Questioned by the 1922 Committee about
the collusion of Israel, Britain and France, Eden said that "some
[half--truths]--and if they existed at all, they were not serious
or many in number--were necessary, and always are in this sort
of operation which demands extreme secrecy". On 20 December,
he lied to the House of Commons. "I want to say this on
the question of foreknowledge and to say it quite bluntly to
the House, that there was not foreknowledge that Israel would
attack Egypt--there was not. But there was something else. There
was--we knew it perfectly well--a risk of it, and, in the event
of the risk of it, certain discussions and conversations took
place, as, I think, was absolutely right, and as, I think, anybody
would do."
Eden was a sick man--he suffered a botched
operation--and began, as W Scott Lucas recalls in his account
of the drama, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez
Crisis, to sound out colleagues about his future. On 9 January
1957, he told Harold Macmillan that his doctors had warned him
his health was in danger if he stayed in office and that "there
was no way out". Macmillan was stunned. "I could hardly
believe that this was to be the end of the public life of a man
so comparatively young, and with so much still to give,"
he wrote. "We sat for some little time together. We spoke
a few words about the First War, in which we had both served
and suffered... I can see him now on that sad winter afternoon,
still looking so youthful, so gay, so debonair--the representation
of all that was best of the youth that had served in the 1914--18
war."
Eden's resignation marked the end of
the last attempt Britain would ever make to establish, as Scott
Lucas writes, "that Britain did not require Washington's
endorsement to defend her interests". Henceforth, Britain
would be the servant of US policy. It would be American policy
to act unilaterally to "defend" the Middle East. The
1957 Eisenhower doctrine led inexorably to the hegemony the US
now exercises over the world. In Egypt, Nasser ruled to ever
greater acclaim, even surviving his appalling defeat at Israel's
hands in the 1967 Arab--Israeli war, suppressing all domestic
opposition with executions and torture.
Suez distracted the world's attention
as Russian troops stormed into Budapest and crushed its revolution.
Some never forgave the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell for his November
broadcast in which he labelled British troops as aggressors--unlike
today, there was at least a serious political opposition to the
government in the House of Commons--while The Observer lost readers
it never recovered for opposing the war.
The last word should go to Eden just
after the British landed at Suez. "If we had allowed things
to drift," he said, "everything would have gone from
bad to worse. Nasser would have become a kind of Muslim Mussolini,
and our friends in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even Iran would
gradually have been brought down. His efforts would have spread
westwards, and Libya and North Africa would have been brought
under his control."
Now where have I heard that before?
HOW A ROW OVER A CANAL BROUGHT THE WORLD
TO THE BRINK OF WAR
13 June 1956: Britain gives up control
of the Suez Canal.
23 June: General Nasser elected president
of Egypt.
19 July: US withdraws financial aid for
the Aswan Dam project--the official reason is Egypt's increased
ties to the USSR.
26 July: President Nasser announces his
plan to nationalise the Suez Canal.
28 July: Britain freezes Egyptian assets.
Anthony Eden (left) imposes arms embargo on Egypt and tells General
Nasser he cannot have the Suez Canal.
1 August: Britain, France and the US
hold talks. The next day Britain mobilises its armed forces.
21 August: Egypt says it will negotiate
on Suez ownership if Britain pulls out of the Middle East. USSR
says it will send troops if Egypt is attacked.
9 September: Five nation conference on
the Suez Canal collapses as Nasser refuses international control
of the canal.
12 September: US, Britain, and France
announce their intention to impose a Canal Users Association
on management.
14 September: Egypt now in full control
of the canal.
7 October: Israeli foreign minister Golda
Meir says the UN failure means Israel must take military action.
13 October: Anglo--French proposal for
control of the canal vetoed by the USSR.
29 October: Israel invades Sinai peninsula.
31 October: Despite public protests,
allies mount airstrikes on Egypt.
2 November: UN approves ceasefire. Fighting
escalates: British and French forces mount airborne invasion
of Egypt.
7 November: Britain and France agree
to a ceasefire: UN Assembly votes 65 to one that invading powers
should quit Egypt.
24 December: British and French troops
depart Egypt.
27 December: 5,580 Egyptian PoWs exchanged
for four Israelis. Operation to clear sunken ships in canal starts.
15 January 1957: British and French banks
in Egypt are nationalised.
19 April: First British ship pays Egyptian
toll for use of the Suez Canal.
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