by Norman Stone
The Middle East, with oil, had an importance for the world that went far beyond its stage in development; and this was all the more so as the Suez Canal was still, in the 1950s, the essential artery for Western trade. British interests reigned over the oil, which was then very cheap (at around $1 to the barrel, there being seven barrels to the ton) and that made for prosperity in the industrial countries, where the motor car was both a cause and a symbol. The once great Ottoman Empire had collapsed in the First World War, replaced by supposedly national states. The only successful one turned out to be Turkey, based on the Ottoman heartland in Anatolia; the others were semi-colonies. In 1948 another nation state emerged, Israel, which had been carved out of Ottoman Palestine as a Jewish national home; it fought a war against Arab armies, and the native Arab or Palestinian population mainly fled. The implantation of Israel, as a Western outcrop, stood almost as a symbol of Arab weakness, but that was also shown in the French occupation of North Africa or the British semi-occupation of Egypt. The Europeans often took pride in what these occupations achieved, but they tended to co-operate either with a Westernized upper class or with minorities of various sorts, of which the Middle East contained a great many: Christian Copts in Egypt, Assyrian or Chaldean Christians in Iraq, Beduin in Transjordan, diaspora Greeks or Armenians throughout. They also introduced the deadly principle of nationalism and by 1950 that was gaining much ground. In the early 1950s the British and French were losing. In June 1956 the British withdrew the garrison from Suez.
The beneficiary was an Egyptian army officer, Gamel Abdal Nasser, whose ambition it was to put Egypt at the head of an Arab nationalist movement. He had emerged in 1952, when the monarchy was overthrown; at the same time the Iranian Mohammad Mossadegh seized British oil installations (he was, with CIA intervention, overthrown). Nasser now made trouble throughout the Middle East, and especially for the French in Algeria. In 1954 Algeria had erupted, and by 1956 there was a savage war there; he also interfered in Iraq, and its prime minister — very soon to be brutally murdered — told the British that they must get rid of Nasser or he would finish them: ‘It was life and death for the West as well as for Nasser.’ Intelligence did indeed reveal that Nasser had such a plan, and it would of course mean the elimination of Israel as well; he also had his eyes on the revenues of the Suez Canal, through which 80 per cent of western Europe’s oil had to flow. That would mean an Egyptian hand on the windpipe. The British tried to tame him. An anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact existed, linking a ‘northern tier’ of Middle Eastern countries; he was invited to join it. But he was well alive to the new possibilities that the Cold War had presented to countries such as his own. There was now a league of ‘non-aligned’ states, states that had in most cases been recently decolonized, and in 1955 their leaders held a conference at Bandung in Indonesia; preachy Indians loomed large, and so did Yugoslavia. These states now had votes at the United Nations, a body taken seriously, and could play on the guilt that many people in the rich West felt about their imperialist past. At this time, and partly because of the huge success of the Marshall Plan, the idea of government-to-government aid was dominant, and the Bandung countries looked for this. In Nasser’s case, the aim was for technology and specialists to construct an enormous dam on the upper Nile, at Aswan. It would control the waters, prevent devastating floods, allow irrigation of a much larger area on either side of the lower river, and so promote agriculture and especially cotton, which was a principal Egyptian export. Later on, the whole notion of government-to-government aid came into question, and so also did the notion of gigantic dams, but in 1956 both counted as ‘Progress’, and the British had themselves built the first Nile dam, in 1902. Nasser asked them and the Americans for finance, but in 1955 he also took weaponry from the Soviet Union (via Czechoslovakia — 200 planes, including MiG-15s and Il-28 bombers). The target was of course Israel, and Nasser meant to head a sort of counter-crusade, which would also have the effect of eliminating rivals such as King Abdullah in Jordan, who co-operated with the Israelis in the hope of reaching a sensible solution. He was indeed murdered.
Building a dam was very expensive indeed, and if the money came from outside, Nasser could use his own for armaments. In 1955 he had been busy enough. The very future of Israel was under question, as the Egyptians closed the Gulf of Aqaba and the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping, and there were constant border raids — the killing of fifty here, fifty there, with reprisals and counter-reprisals. Jordan, controlling Jerusalem, was also becoming unstable, as Palestinians took refuge there and made life difficult for the new, very young, British-educated king, Hussein. Nasser’s agents now entered the picture, offering a pan-Arab and supposedly socialist nationalism that would sweep away client monarchies such as Hussein’s, and the king had a very hard balancing act to perform. One piece of it was to make a show of independence from the British, and dismiss the legendary Glubb Pasha, who commanded the also legendary Arab Legion, in March 1956. How were the British to handle all of this? Their own self-confidence had considerably recovered in the middle of that decade, as exports were (misleadingly) booming and the domestic economy recovered at last from the post-war emergencies. NATO gave them apparently solid American backing: they had their own nuclear bomb. Why give in to blackmail from a jumped-up Arab nobody? Churchill’s successor, Anthony Eden, was anxious to show his worth, and the Suez challenge put him into an almost hysterical condition. A visit to Cairo in 1955 had not been a success, Clarissa Eden regarding Nasser as a seedy waiter. Nasser had kept his Soviet options open, refused to join the Baghdad Pact, and obviously meant to overthrow Arab kings. He threatened to nationalize the Suez Canal and take the dues that came in from the world’s trade, but he also prompted the Americans to give him the money for the Aswan Dam.
There was indeed an air of surrealism in what followed. Eden was ill, and bile entered his system; the pain could only be controlled by drugs that slowed him down, and these could only be countered by doses of Benzedrine, not a happy combination. Besides, Eden had always laboured under the mighty shadow of Churchill, who was still a physical presence, always communicating doubt as to whether ‘Anthony’ could really do the job. The influential press tended now to dismiss Eden as a weakling, and his relations with senior Cabinet men were difficult. Now, from Nasser, came an insulting rebuff to a country that still claimed status as a Great Power. Eden would act. It was a sad end to what had been a very honourable career. Eden had been a brilliant Oriental linguist at Oxford, had had a very good First World War and, being utterly uncorrupt, had money worries for much of the time. He had also been morally on the right side in the 1930s, when he wanted to stop Hitler and Mussolini before they truly got under way. But now his judgement went, and a strange petulance governed affairs. Nasser was, he said, another Mussolini. The leading journalist of the period, Malcolm Muggeridge, had it right when he sneered that in any manual for Men of Destiny, invading Egypt was Exercise One, as Eden shrieked into telephones that he wanted Nasser destroyed. There was no thought for the consequences — who would follow Nasser. Eden said he did not care. He and many others seemed to think it would be easy to dispose of the jumped-up Nasser and expressions of such over-confidence are legion. Public opinion was strongly in favour of some action: it did not mind being challenged by Russians, but drew the line at Egyptian Arabs. The problem, familiar to Marxists, was that the Americans were against it.
The final provocation to Nasser came in July when Dulles indicated in an insulting way that money for the Aswan Dam would not be forthcoming. The Americans too were hostile to Nasser, but they were also not anxious to support British imperialism in the area, and CIA men were even encouraging Nasser, to their own ambassador’s dismay (Eisenhower later said that what happened at Suez was his greatest regret). On 26 July Nasser suddenly announced that he would nationalize the Suez Canal, and his men took over the offices of the international (and mainly Anglo-French) company that ran it. This was in breach of an old convention, but these old conventions had
been agreed back in the days when such countries were helpless before British strength, and the Egyptian public was delirious.
What followed was a disaster, in all respects including the fact that the disaster was limited. The French went on to a disaster, to do with North Africa, but it delivered such a shock to their system that they abandoned it, and experienced an economic miracle to rival Germany’s. Suez did not have such an effect in England, and marks the start of a national decline that continued for the next generation. Whitehall still thought imperially: an often quoted comment, and not from Eden alone, was that England could not possibly go the way of Holland. As things turned out, she should have been so lucky: Holland indeed lost an empire, but hers had been a low-wage and heavily agricultural economy, and after the loss of Indonesia she became rich, a major exporter and a well-managed place.
Reservists were mobilized (the Queen signed the document, squaring it on a horse’s rump at Goodwood). Then — in such situations, a very bad move — they were kept waiting around, away from employment and family. Delays mounted. The Americans were consulted, and wartime solidarity was invoked between an Eisenhower and an Eden who had known each other in the old days of glory. Dulles sometimes encouraged, but more often the American line was that force should not be used — instead, a process of negotiation should start, and subversive methods tried. Eden said that Nasser’s hands were on the West’s windpipe and he seems to have thought that if he presented the Americans with a fait accompli, they would have to support him, and he went ahead with military plans. The French, enraged at Nasser’s appeal to Arab nationalism in Algeria, joined in. As negotiations dragged on the two governments reckoned that they needed a pretext for intervention, and a ghost in the machine came to their rescue. There were constant tensions and skirmishes on the Egyptian-Israeli border, as on the Jordanian-Israeli one. The Israelis had a plan to strike, and had bought up-to-date French fighter aircraft with a view to this. They and the French got together: Israel would attack, and claim she was merely anticipating an Egyptian attack; a French admiral came to London looking to give ‘those damned Arabs the lesson they long needed’, and on 19 September, just as Dulles’s backing appeared to weaken, the French and Israelis appeared ready to go ahead on their own. Eden jumped in, and an absurd plot took shape, the British Foreign Secretary wearing a false moustache and a French general suggesting that the Israelis should bomb one of their own cities to give a pretext for Anglo-French intervention. In the event, a secret ‘Sèvres Protocol’ established an agreement: the Israelis would attack on 29 October and the British and French would pretend to intervene to keep the peace and guarantee the Canal’s workings.
The Israelis staged a very clever operation, carried out with panache. Four Mustangs, flying only twelve feet from the ground, cut Egyptian telephone connections, and a few hundred paratroops secured the essential desert pass. By 5 November the Israelis were on the Canal, occupying, also, the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba from which their shipping had been banned. It no doubt helped that, on 31 October, the British bombed Egyptian air bases. The day before, Eden had told the House of Commons that the Israelis and Egyptians would be told to stop while an Anglo-French force occupied the Canal Zone. He even tried to claim that this was not ‘war’, but ‘armed conflict’, and of all absurdities suspended deliveries of arms to Tel Aviv. Almost at once, problems emerged. The dollar reserves were declining, and in any case mobilization was a very slow business: the British had put resources into nuclear weaponry, and had run down the effectiveness both of their army and of their navy. They could not get troops to the Suez area inside a month, and though they did have troops at a base in Libya, they shrank from using these, for fear of offending wider opinion. In fact the Chiefs of Staff objected to an immediate action, threatening resignation: they were just not ready. A British force did eventually leave from Malta and Cyprus — bases both too far distant, given that speed was so essential: the world, confronted by the fact on the ground of an immediate occupation, might have accepted it (as Dulles later said, ‘Had they done it quickly, we’d have accepted it’ and Eisenhower shook his head: ‘I’ve just never seen Great Powers make such a complete mess’). Four days’ delay occurred, while British and American diplomats had a public wrangle. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Mountbatten, showed his usual instinct for the possible, and was only narrowly stopped from resigning as he sensed the unfolding fiasco. The Americans became incensed at being told such obvious lies by men whom they imagined they could absolutely trust, and as the Anglo-French force steamed forth, the American fleet in the area disrupted its radio communications and used submarines to shadow it. Then disaster went ahead. The Canal was blocked by the Egyptians, and oil imports dwindled, prices rising. Junior Foreign Office people threatened mass resignation. The Americans at the United Nations denounced the expedition, and that body produced a resolution in which all countries but a faithful few condemned the British and French: Eden even received a letter from Moscow on 5 November, vaguely threatening retaliation, just as the paratroops at last landed. That was bluster, but a further move was not bluster. The pound sterling was an artificially strong currency, and now the Americans refused to support the pound. It fell — reserves dropping by $50m in the first two days of November, and by 5 per cent of the total in the first week. At that rate, there would be none left by the early weeks of 1957. The end was humiliating, as the American Secretary of State told the United Nations that he could not support his allies. Just as he said so, the landings at Port Said finally occurred on 5 November, but by then it was far too late, and a ceasefire had to follow by the evening of the next day. The broken Eden retired ill to the house on Jamaica where Ian Fleming wrote his James Bond books — one imperial fantasy meeting another. The conclusion at once drawn in London was that never again would the Atlantic link be risked.
The conclusions drawn in France were rather different. She had entered upon Suez because she blamed Nasser for problems in North Africa: he supported, and inspired, an Arab nationalism there, and especially in Algeria. French governments after the war faced colonial troubles. Burke had remarked that political life was a partnership of the dead, the living and the yet unborn, but in France the dead predominated. The theory — very theoretical — behind French republicanism had been that, regardless of origin, all citizens of the republic were French. This was very far from being senseless, and even went back to the Revolution itself, when Robespierre had declared that the colonies might perish, provided that justice survived. The rising socialist François Mitterrand himself talked of a France ‘from Flanders to the Congo’, and representatives of the overseas departments or colonies sat as of right in the chamber, sometimes attaining cabinet rank. Determined, after the terrible experience of German occupation and liberation by the Americans and the British, to reassert France’s status in the world, post-war governments let themselves be dragged into a hopeless struggle to retain Vietnam. That ended with the defeat of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, after which a (brief) sensibly run government, under the Radical Pierre Mendès France, gave up. But far worse was to come in Algeria. North Africa had been taken over by the French at various stages. Tunisia and Morocco were taken over in 1881 and 1912 as protectorates, their native rulers kept intact, though controlled by the French. They were not colonies in the strict sense, nor were there many French colonists. For France to give independence in return for useful economic and cultural links was therefore not very difficult, and in 1956 this duly happened. Algeria was different. French rule went back to 1830, and the country at that time had been both vast and empty. It was also quite varied in composition, and the French could divide and rule easily enough. They developed the country, and by 1950 there were a million colonists, known as pieds noirs, apparently because their feet, after trampling the grapes for the wine harvest, turned black. Many of these pieds noirs were not French at all but came from all over the Mediterranean coasts and islands. There was much Arab immigration as well, and as medical impr
ovements got under way, that part of the population greatly expanded (as it has continued to do). In republican ideology, Algerians were French citizens, but on the ground matters were very different: the natives — by origin in many cases no more native than the pieds noirs — had far less political weight, and in the 1930s French governments were dilatory about reform. In effect they were captured by the pieds noirs, and very few of these were prepared to concede anything to the Algerians. As often happens in such situations, from the United States through Ottoman Greece and British India, the opponents of change did have some right on their side: once the empire went, the way would be open to slavery, or ethnic cleansing, or absurd religious divisions. In any case, almost all Frenchmen were convinced that they were carrying out a civilizing mission in Algeria, and even the Communists supported Algérie française, though of course expecting that differences between Moslems and others would be vastly reduced in scale once the revolution applied, as in the Soviet Union, its solutions to the national question. Governments in Paris were overthrown just for suggesting reform, which came tardily. Riots and repression followed and educated Algerians, rebuffed, looked to Arab nationalism, to the example of Egypt, where Nasser had established himself at Anglo-French expense in 1952.
