by Conrad Black
The Canadian House of Commons had met on July 28 when St. Laurent and Pearson received from Eden the first hint that Britain was considering military action. Progressive Conservative foreign policy spokesman John Diefenbaker starkly warned the government that his party was solidly behind the British, come what may. Pearson responded to him, agreeing that the seizure of the canal was “to be condemned … [as] a violation of an international convention,” and said that Canada was consulting closely with countries more directly concerned with the problems raised by the canal. Diefenbaker compared Nasser with Hitler and Mussolini, but Nehru and other Asian and African governments were sympathetic to Nasser. (Gandhi had been somewhat sympathetic to Hitler too, unaware that Hitler had urged Eden to shoot him and Nehru.) St. Laurent and Pearson were more sympathetic to Britain than the United States was, but they felt that any recourse to force had to be under the aegis of the United Nations, which was still taken somewhat seriously as a legitimizing organization. All this was delusional: Nasser had the canal, and the British and French could seize it back, with or without the Israelis, but had no ability to hold it indefinitely. Diefenbaker demanded that Canada attend Dulles’s conference, despite Pearson’s explanation that since Canada did not use the canal it had not been invited.
Dulles and Murphy told the Canadian ambassador in Washington, Arnold Heeney, on August 4 that the British and French were threatening to go to war. Australia and New Zealand were supporting drastic action by the United Kingdom and France; Nehru and Pakistan and Ceylon favoured Nasser, and Canada held the neutral balance in the Commonwealth, as it did to some extent between the British and Americans, except that both those powers were going to do what they thought best with little consideration of Canada, a peripheral player whose only possible influence would be at the United Nations.
On September 3, the Canadian high commissioner in London, Norman Robertson, told senior members of the British government that Canada understood Britain’s position and agreed that the Suez Canal must not be dependent on the whims of any one country but that Canada would not support a premature recourse to force. At the NATO meeting in Paris a few days later, British foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd told Pearson that Israel might intervene. Pearson said that Israel wouldn’t solve the problem; it would unite the Arabs behind Nasser.21
Pearson wanted to move it to the United Nations, but Dulles refused (certainly under orders from his president) and objected to Britain and France trying to manoeuvre the UN into approving severe measures against Egypt. This was a bit rich given the large contribution the Americans had made to the problem by doing a U-turn on Aswan and pushing Nasser into the arms of the Russians. Pearson was trying to get the Western Big Three singing at least partially from the same song sheet. Britain and France ignored the Americans and on September 23 asked for UN discussion of the seizure of the canal by Egypt. On September 21, Canada had agreed to sell Israel twenty-four warplanes, and France had secretly been supplying Israel with tanks and aircraft all year. Joint staff talks took place between the British, French, and Israelis, and a military plan was agreed on October 3 between the three powers. The UN Security Council was immobilized by the Soviet Union, which vetoed a proposal that Suez Canal tolls be paid to a users’ association. On October 8, Eisenhower, trying to diffuse and confuse as only he knew how, urged the State Department to make “any proposal” to distract Nasser and announced that the United States would not countenance the use of force but that it was building at once sixty-thousand-ton tankers that would reduce British and French dependence on oil coming through the Suez Canal and reduce toll revenues in the canal. On October 16, Eden was back in Paris and agreed with the French and Israeli governments to proceed with the seizure of the canal. The final touches were added to the plan, and an agreement signed on October 24: the Israelis were to attack Egypt on November 1, and Britain and France would then intervene as peacemakers and require both sides to withdraw from the canal and occupy the canal zone; Israel would take the Sinai and the Anglo-French force that would operate and protect the canal would be supplied via Israel. Israel’s occupation of the Sinai and access to the canal for its ships was an understandable incentive. The French didn’t care if the scheme was exposed as a scam; they wanted only to kick the Arabs hard and send a message to the Algerian guerrillas. The Americans were ineffectual and part of the problem and not of any solution. But Eden, and future prime ministers Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, and senior officials like Rab Butler, Eden’s senior minister, had all taken leave of their senses and could not seriously have thought that even domestic British opinion would support such a mad enterprise.
On October 29, Israeli paratroopers were dropped twenty-five miles from the Suez Canal, and on October 30, Britain and France issued an ultimatum to Israel and Egypt to withdraw ten miles on either side from the canal within twelve hours. Canada learned of this from the British as it happened, with the usual breezy assertion that Britain hoped it could count on Canadian support, although Pearson and Robertson had made it clear that Canadian support would not be forthcoming. It was the same British assumption that Canada was a tail to the British kite as had existed at the time of the South African War, and St. Laurent found it very annoying. St. Laurent and Pearson, with a divided cabinet and Parliament, set about designing a position that would hold an adequate level of public support. Eisenhower, who was up for re-election five days later, summoned the British chargé, in the absence of the ambassador, and reminded him that the United States had pledged in 1950 to uphold any party in the Middle East that was the victim of aggression. The British and French position was that they were the victims of aggression by Nasser and that Nasser was clearly addressing the canal takeover partly at the Americans for having withdrawn their support for the Aswan project, and the British, French, and Israeli governments did not believe the implicit threat by Eisenhower. The British told the United States it considered the 1950 agreement a dead letter. The U.S. government publicly stated that it thought otherwise and that Egypt was the wronged party.
Very little of what was happening made any sense. The British and Americans, instead of behaving like allies, were behaving almost like adversaries. The motives of everyone else were understandable, including Canada, which had no standing except to champion international organizations, the traditional recourse of secondary powers, bolstered in this case by Canada’s fervent desire to prevent a schism in the Western ranks. St. Laurent was, by some measurements, the French-speaking world’s most respected incumbent statesman, given the revolving-door governments in France, but France and Israel just wanted to kick the Arabs. Britain was having a beau geste moment of Kiplingesque nostalgia, and all the West was hiding behind a misplaced conviction that the other countries wouldn’t dare follow through on their threats: Britain, France, and Israel wouldn’t dare go to war without consulting with the Americans; and the Americans wouldn’t dare desert their greatest allies. No one was leading, except, in his troublesome way, Nasser. And in the midst of it, as the Russians were salivating at the prospect of sowing mayhem in the Middle East, their own brutal usurpation of control of Eastern Europe started to crumble.
Following the release of Khrushchev’s address denouncing Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956, riots erupted in Poland in June and the puppet satellite regime was thrown out and replaced by former leader Wladyslaw Gomulka, whom the Soviets had forced out as a Titoist in 1948, when Tito was seceding from the Soviet Bloc, and who was in prison awaiting execution when Stalin miraculously died in 1953, whereupon he was released. On October 22, the disturbances spread to Hungary, and the following day the premier the Soviets had fired as a loyalty risk to them, Imre Nagy, was recalled. While Nagy promised democratization and a rising standard of living, the Soviets dispatched units from their occupation forces in Hungary to Budapest to “maintain order.” All Hungary erupted, with spontaneous uprisings and freedom fighters throwing Molotov cocktails to blow the treads off Soviet tanks
(as Molotov himself accompanied Khrushchev to Warsaw and approved an arrangement with Gomulka whereby he would support Soviet foreign policy but experiment somewhat in domestic policy). Nagy announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and its neutrality in the Cold War, while the Soviet ambassador in Budapest, Yuri Andropov (a subsequent chairman of the Soviet Communist Party), claimed to be negotiating the withdrawal of the Soviet occupation forces. Eisenhower doubted the sincerity of the Russians but could not resist smug self-congratulations in his inner circle on the swift disintegration of the Eastern Bloc in response to all the Republican electioneering drivel about “liberation” and “roll-back.” Nagy was an innocent, and Eisenhower did nothing to deter the Soviet Union from reimposing its will in Eastern Europe. The United States had been encouraging Eastern Europe to revolt on Radio Free Europe and Voice of America for ten years, and they appeared to be reaping the harvest, just as the West headed, very conveniently for the Russians, over the cliff into ludicrous disarray, because of an infelicitous joint outbreak of counter-historical British stupidity and American delusion in the Middle East.
Parallel to the American misjudgments of the Middle East was another intelligence failure almost as complete as that which did not detect the clandestine Red Chinese invasion of Korea. The Grand Alliance of Roosevelt and Churchill had deteriorated to the point where Eden would not allow American intelligence flights over the Soviet Bloc to originate in the United Kingdom (so much for Eisenhower’s imaginative Open Skies proposal of the previous year). And those flights, which now took off from Germany, detected an Israeli forces buildup which was judged to presage an invasion of Jordan, but neither aerial reconnaissance nor fervent efforts by the United States to crack the codes of the British, French, and Israelis (three of America’s closest allies) discovered the extent of the buildup of an Anglo-French invasion force on Cyprus. A tragicomedy of errors was afoot. The Americans were stuck on the theory that the Anglo-French expected them to save their chestnuts again, as, according to the American version, they had done in both world wars. All three of the colluding powers underestimated the extent of Eisenhower’s hostility, but all they wanted was for the United States to remain on the sidelines while they knocked the stuffing out of Nasser. Given the abrupt American cancellation of aid to the Aswan Dam, it was eccentric for the United States to wax so protective of Nasser, who identified the United States as an enemy as odious as the other three in his ferocious tirades to the Arab world. On October 30, the founding premier of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, sharply rejected Eisenhower’s warnings not to advance and wrote that “Israel’s survival is at stake.”
Instead of seeing it as a challenge to wind down the violence in the Middle East, pressure Russia without blowing up Europe, and find common ground with the countries that would be its principal allies again after all the dust settled, the American government, ever oblivious to its own role in starting the unfolding debacle, was driven by affronted amour-propre. On October 30, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (grandson of Woodrow Wilson’s nemesis and at the UN as a consolation prize for losing his Senate seat in Massachusetts to the swiftly rising John F. Kennedy), introduced a resolution at the Security Council asking for Israel to withdraw to the previous border. To enable the British and French to support the resolution, the British ambassador, the very articulate Sir Pierson Dixon, asked for it to be broadened to include criticism of Egyptian conduct. Lodge rejected this, and both Britain and France vetoed the resolution, which Lodge, Dulles, and Eisenhower should have known would happen. Australia and Belgium, out of loyalty to Britain and France respectively, abstained, and the Soviet Union and five other countries voted with the Americans. Later that day, the British and French also vetoed a Soviet resolution, on which the United States abstained. On October 31, the Canadian cabinet met to consider the reply to Eden that St. Laurent and Pearson had prepared, as the RAF dropped warning leaflets on Port Said at the north end of the canal and events generally bustled past the distant and providentially disconnected Canadians. Eden won a confidence motion 270–218, which was uncomfortably close enough for this risky a move and came after a powerful address by Hugh Gaitskell, Clement Attlee’s successor as Opposition and Labour Party leader, denouncing the move as insane and uncivilized.
St. Laurent’s message to Eden was the best balance that could be struck between the desire of most Canadians to support the British (St. Laurent had told some of his more anglophile ministers that they were “just talking with your blood”22) and the correct judgment of the Canadian leaders that the tripartite military action was mad and illegal. St. Laurent conveyed his regret that Britain had plunged ahead without consultation. He expressed understanding of Britain’s circumstances and motives for acting, but stated that Canada was unable to support the action and was suspending any military assistance to Israel (including the just-approved sale of the twenty-four fighter planes). While emphasizing relations with the United Kingdom and the importance to Britain of the Suez Canal, St. Laurent expressed particular concern about Britain’s departure from the spirit and charter of the United Nations; about the severe stresses being placed on Commonwealth unity (Nehru had condemned the three attacking powers, as expected); and about the strain being placed on Anglo-American relations, which, St. Laurent wrote, were more important to Canada than anything except the survival of Canada itself. He purported to write with regret but with the candour that profound friendship required. The only dissenting minister was the formidable and long-serving agriculture minister, James G. Gardiner, who said the Middle East was no concern of Canada’s and it should duck the whole issue.
Eden was disconcerted by the message and, with the usual failure of the British to have any sensitivity for the Canadian perspective, surprised by it. There were slightly farcical scenes even in Ottawa in keeping with the trajectory of events in the world, as reporters were allowed to fill the corridors between the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office, where the cabinet met, and grilled St. Laurent and his colleagues at intimate range as they went into and out of meetings. At one point, an exasperated St. Laurent disappeared into the Cabinet Room and then reappeared, saying to the news-hungry media, “It’s too bad you can’t come in and tell us what to do, but we’re the ones who have the responsibility.”23 At the November 1 cabinet meeting, Pearson reported that he had telephoned London and Washington to ask if they would support a proposal for a UN force, but both had replied that while that might be part of an eventual solution, it would not be appropriate now (as the invasion of Egypt was getting into full swing). Pearson told the cabinet that he would do what he could to avoid the British and French being condemned by the General Assembly and to promote the re-establishment of order by an international police force. He went at once to New York and the UN and urged Dulles to slow down and allow time for compromises that would put less strain on the Western Alliance. Dulles was now engaged in an inexplicable race with the Russians to masquerade as the more friendly to Egypt and the more outraged by the aggressions of America’s three allies, and the Soviets were uninhibited in their histrionics by the discomforts of their own jackbooted occupation of Eastern Europe.
Dulles told Pearson that their three allies had “damaged the whole cause of freedom by placing us in an inferior position morally to the communists. We could be having a showdown right now over this Hungary situation but for their actions.”24 Like almost everything all the protagonists said, this was half true and half false. The Americans could have all the showdown they wished over Hungary, but they had no stomach for it. They had no forces engaged in the Middle East, and if they had moved light forces into Hungary when Nagy requested it, as he shortly would, and offered the neutralization of a substantial part of Europe to the Russians, it might have been effective, at the least in wrong-footing the Russians. Eisenhower and Dulles preferred to claim that the Anglo-French-Israeli action, the absurdity of which was not at issue, prevented the United States from acting st
rongly in Central Europe, which, in fact, they had no disposition to do, as Eisenhower acknowledged in his memoirs.25
Lodge alit on the idea of a UN force at about the same time Pearson did, and wrote up a resolution for him, which he said Pearson should move, as the Indians and others, as well as the Soviet Bloc, would reject it if they knew it came from the United States. Pearson had heard on November 1 from Norman Robertson in London, after conversations Robertson had had with senior British and French officials, that a police action of adequate size would be welcomed by London and Paris, as would Canada’s role in leading it.26
