New Crisis, Old Lessons
by Robert Fisk
Dissident Voice
January 16, 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 Sθvres, 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 Sθvres
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?
Robert Fisk is an award winning foreign correspondent for The Independent (UK), where this article first appeared. He is the
author of Pity Thy Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (The Nation Books,
2002 edition)
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.