[A-List] US, UK imperialism: historical parallels

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

New crisis, old lessons
The Suez crisis has haunted British governments for almost 50 years - and
watching HMS 'Ark Royal' leave Portsmouth last weekend brought back memories
of one of the darkest chapters in our modern history. What's more, says
Robert Fisk, studying the events of 1956, could prove timely for our hawkish
world leaders
The Independent
15 January 2003

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.