The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  On 5 November 1956, 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. In the early hours, Murad was sleeping fitfully on a sofa at his Ismailia headquarters when he was awoken by a tall man standing beside him. “I stood up and was astonished to find it was Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was in a very nicely fitted civilian suit. I said to him: ‘Welcome, Mr. President— but what are you doing here? You should be in Cairo. The roads are very dangerous because the British are bombing them.’ He said he was going to Port Said. I said: ‘Forget about it, sir, you must return to Cairo at once because the British paratroopers are expected to land at Port Said in a few hours.’ Nasser asked for a room to rest in and I put him in the British consul’s bedroom. A few hours later, the British were already in Port Said, fighting for the Gamil airbase.”

  Major Murad may thus have prevented Anthony Eden capturing the Egyptian he so hated. Nasser, wearing fresh clothes and smelling of eau de cologne, did return to Cairo—but not before Murad had put an important question to him. “I asked Nasser: ‘Is there an agreement with the Russians for military aid?’ He said there was not. I asked: ‘Not even a gentleman’s agreement?’ He said: ‘No.’ I was furious. I thought that this man must be mad in challenging all three forces at once. I said: ‘Sir, we shall do our best but it will be a miracle if we can stand up against the British, the French and Israel.’ He just replied: ‘Rabina ma’ana’—May God be with us. Then he left.”

  Captain Nasr was living in his apartment in Jumhuriya Street in Port Said when the British landed. “We heard the firing—everyone was told to stay in their homes for twenty-four hours. The first thing I saw when I went outside was a neighbour of mine, Adel Mandour, lying dead in the street. He was a member of the National Guard. He had been shot by a British soldier and he was lying face-down in the gutter with his arms spread out. I remember his mother walked out of her house and just silently lifted him up and took him into her home.” At first the dead were buried privately, but dozens of bodies, most of them civilians, were placed in a mass grave near the airfield. The British stormed an Egyptian police station that held out under intense fire and killed almost all the policemen inside. A British general estimated that almost a thousand Egyptians died in the city, a figure at variance with Major Murad’s high opinion of RAF bomb-aiming. Several civilians were massacred by French paratroopers, one of whom was to write later that he and his colleagues shot dead a group of innocent fishermen because the French had been ordered to take no prisoners. The paratroopers shot others in the face at point-blank range when they pleaded for mercy in the canal.

  “The British were well behaved—they did not steal anything when they billeted men in my apartment,” Captain Nasr said. “But the French behaviour was very different. They treated people very badly. Maybe it was their experience of Algeria but I think they were angry because they thought the canal belonged to them and that they had a right to take it back.” Nasser was publicly supporting the FLN struggle in Algeria.

  At Gamil airport, a young Egyptian guerrilla, Mohamed Mahran Othman, was seized by the British, who wanted to know the whereabouts of Egyptian arms stores. He later claimed that his eyes were cut out by British military doctors in Cyprus when he refused to divulge information about arms dumps or broadcast propaganda for the allies from a radio station in Cyprus. There is no independent testimony to this, although in 1997 I met Othman, whose eyes had clearly been taken from their sockets. He claimed then that the British were also taking revenge for the wounding of a military doctor during his descent onto Gamil airfield. A Parachute Regiment doctor, Lieutenant A. J. M. “Sandy” Cavenagh, the 3rd Parachute Regiment battalion medical officer, was hit in the left eye by shrapnel during his descent on Gamil, although he told me forty years later that he knew nothing of the blind Egyptian’s claims; ironically, Cavenagh had many years later noticed Othman working as a guide in the Port Said military museum, but did not speak to him. A gentle and kindly man, Cavenagh, who was to write a graphic account of the landings, was praised by his commander for continuing, while seriously wounded, to treat his comrades for five more hours.197

  The archives contain evidence of the racism that marked the former imperial army. The poorest area of Port Said was marked on British maps as “Wog-Town,” while a note about propaganda from “Allied Forces Headquarters” on 1 December 1956 refers to the “malicious mentality” of Arabs. The British prevented reporters from reaching Port Said until days after the battle, but a week after the ceasefire, reporter Alex Efthyvoulos was to see bodies still unburied in Port Said.

  The Egyptian commander of Ismailia, Kamaledin Hussein, was outraged when his opposite number in Port Said, Brigadier General Salahedin Moguy, came through on a surviving telephone line. “He told us he had agreed on a six-hour ceasefire with a British general to collect the dead and wounded,” Murad recalled. “Hussein shouted back: ‘How dare you meet an English general without my orders?’ I heard Moguy replying: ‘I am the commanding officer in Port Said and it is my decision.’ Then he hung up.”

  Early on the morning of 7 November, Murad was plodding gingerly up a narrow canal road north of Ismailia with his sub-machine gun on his back. He had just passed a fishing village called Jisr el-Hind when he saw what he thought were two red poppies moving in the long grass to his right. “Then I could see these two boys, both British paratroopers in red berets, lying in the long grass watching me. They were pointing their guns towards me from about seventy yards away. They pulled out white handkerchiefs and tied them on their bayonets and one of them shouted: ‘Hallo.’ I kept my hand away from my gun and said ‘Hallo’ back to him. In front of me, I could see British tanks and some soldiers pulling barbed wire across the road . . . These two boys could have shot me so I had this feeling that there must have been a ceasefire. I kept thinking: ‘How stupid the British commander was to have stopped here, only thirty-eight kilometres south of Port Said. There is nothing in front of him—he could be in Cairo in only a few hours.’”

  But the British moved no farther. Murad had just stumbled into the very end of the British army’s very last imperial adventure. It took him some time to realise that the Americans had intervened and that an era had also come to an end. President Eisenhower had been furious when he learned that Israel’s invasion had been set up by the Allies—mainly by the French—and, contrary to the Bush doctrine of 2003, reserved America’s right to condemn the whole invasion. Eisenhower’s famous remark to Foster Dulles—that his job was to go to London and tell Eden: “Whoa, boy”—showed just how close he was 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 U.S. 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.” In the aftermath of the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair could not have bettered that. Eden was a sick man—he had just suffered an operation in which a surgeon had accidentally left a medical instrument inside him— and began, as W. Scott Lucas recalls in his account of the drama, to sound out colleagues about his future. On 9 January 1957 he told Harold Macmillan that his doctors had warned him his he
alth 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 U.S. policy. It would be American policy to act unilaterally to “defend” the Middle East. The 1957 Eisenhower doctrine led inexorably to the hegemony the United States now exercises over the world. Now Washington might need Britain’s endorsement to defend her interests—at least in an invasion of Iraq, although even that was doubtful.

  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 on 30 October 1956 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 in 2003, 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.

  “It was all a gamble,” ex-Major Murad was to say thirty years later. “Nasser was very lucky that the Americans intervened and asked the British to cease fire and evacuate—the Americans wanted to replace the Europeans as the big power in the Middle East. But it was luck. If I had been in Nasser’s place, I would not have done this because there was no agreement with Russia. The war was not an equal match—it was not even a war. It was an action taken against the nationalisation of the canal to destroy Nasser’s power. We realised this at the time.”

  But 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.” We would hear all this again in 2002 and 2003, even if Eden’s hatred for Nasser had some limits. “I have never thought Nasser a Hitler,” Eden was to write. “. . . But the parallel with Mussolini is close.” Guy Mollet, the French premier, referred to Nasser as an “apprentice dictator.” He and Eden were both possessed by what Mollet himself called “the anti-Munich complex.”

  IN BRITAIN IN 2003, newspapers screamed their arguments for war. In America they argued with books, heaps of them, coffee-table books recalling the attacks of 11 September 2001, paperbacks pleading for peace in Iraq, great tomes weighed down with footnotes extolling the virtues of “regime change” in the Middle East. In New York, the publishers as well as the media went to war. You only had to read the titles of the 9/11 books—many of them massive photo-memorial volumes—on America’s news-stands: Above Hallowed Ground, So Others Might Live, Strong of Heart, What We Saw, The Final Frontier, A Fury for God, The Shadow of Swords . . . No wonder American television networks could take the next war for granted. “Showdown in Iraq,” CNN announced. “Prepared for War.” No one questioned its certainty. I protested during a live radio show in the United States in January that the participants—including an Israeli academic, a former Irish UN officer, a Vietnam veteran, Tony Benn and others—were asked to debate not whether there should be a war in Iraq, but what the consequences of that war would be. The inevitability of conflict had been written into the script.

  The most recent and most meretricious contribution to this utterly fraudulent “debate” in the United States had been The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, by Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA spook and an ex-director for “Gulf affairs” at the National Security Council. It was the book that all America was supposed to be talking about and its title—The Threatening Storm was, of course, a copy-cat version of The Gathering Storm, the first volume of Winston Churchill’s Second World War history—told you all you needed to know about the contents. Just as in 2002 George W. Bush tried to dress himself up as Churchill fighting appeasement, so Pollack twice pretended that the world was confronting the same dilemma that faced Britain and France in 1938. The Allies could have won in a year, he claimed, if they had gone to war against Hitler then. The fact that Britain and France, though numerically stronger in troops, were weaker in modern armaments—whereas the United States could now crush Saddam’s forces in less than a month—was not allowed to interfere with this specious argument. Pollack accepted that Saddam was not Hitler, but once more Saddam was dressed in Hitler’s clothes—just as Nasser was the Mussolini of the Nile during the Suez crisis of 1956—and anyone who opposed war was, by quiet extension, a Nazi sympathiser.

  Before and immediately after the start of the Second World War—the real Second World War, that is—British publishers deployed their authors to support the conflict. Victor Gollancz was a tireless defender of British freedoms. By 1941, we were publishing the bestselling Last Train from Berlin by Howard K. Smith, the brilliant American foreign correspondent’s desperate account of life in Nazi Germany before the United States entered the conflict. But these were often works of literature as well as ideology. What happened in the United States in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq was something quite different: a mawkish, cheapskate attempt to push Americans into war on the back of the hushed, reverent, unimpeachable sacrifice of September 11th.

  Removing Saddam “would sever the ‘linkage’ between the Iraq issue and the Arab–Israeli conflict,” Pollack wrote. In the long term, “it would remove an important source of anti-Americanism” and produce a positive outcome “if the United States were to build a strong, prosperous, and inclusive new Iraqi state . . . a model of what a modern Arab state could be.” Pollack’s argument for war was breathtakingly amoral. War would be the right decision, it seemed, not because it was morally necessary but because we would win. War was now a viable and potentially successful policy option. It would free up Washington’s “foreign policy agenda,” presumably allowing it to invade another country or two where American vital interests could be discovered. And that all-important “linkage” between Iraq and the Palestinian–Israeli war would be over. This theme recurs several times in Pollack’s text, and the narrative—in essence an Israeli one—is quite simple: deprived of the support of one of the Arab world’s most powerful nations, the Palestinians would be further weakened in their struggle against Israeli occupation. Pollack referred to the Palestinians’ “vicious terrorist campaign” without the slightest criticism of Israel. He talked about “weekly terrorist attacks followed by Israeli responses,” the standard Israeli version of the conflict. The author regarded America’s bias in favour of Israel as nothing more than an Arab “belief.” Needless to say, there was no mention of former UN weapons inspector and ex-Marine Major Scott Ritter, whose own tiny volume opposing the war—War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know—was a mere ninety-six-page flea-bite on the back of the pro-war literature churned out in Washington.

  As this material came off the presses, the latest fantasies were seeping out of Washington and London. Stories of further attacks—on the Lincoln Tunnel and the Golden Gate bridge in the States—were mixed with all the scare stories Britons had been fed over previous weeks: smallpox, dirty bombs, attacks on hotels and shopping malls, a chemical attack on the Tube, the poisoning of water supplies, “postcard target” attacks on Big Ben and Canary Wharf, the procurement of 5,000 body bags, 120
,000 decontamination suits, survival classes for seven-year-old schoolchildren, new laws to quarantine Britons in the event of a biological attack. There seemed no end to this government terrorism. Did they want Osama bin Laden to win? Or was this merely part of the countdown to war on Iraq, the essential drug of fear that we all needed to support Messrs. Bush and Blair?

  For these stories provided a vital underpinning to pro-war literature. In the United States, the intellectuals’ support for war in fact went far further than Kenneth Pollack’s insipid book. In Foreign A fairs magazine, for example, Johns Hopkins University Professor Fouad Ajami, constantly disparaging the Arab world for its backwardness, its lack of democracy, its supposed use of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict “as an alibi for yet more self-pity and rage,” announced, “with sobering caution . . . that a war will have to be waged.” And—here was the line for fantasy-lovers to remember—“any fallout of war is certain to be dwarfed by the terrible consequences of America’s walking right up to the edge of war and then stepping back, letting the Iraqi dictator work out the terms of another reprieve.”

  The logic of this was truly awesome. America had to go to war because it had threatened to do so. Its own threat was now to become the cause of war; peace would therefore be more terrible than war. As New York St. Lawrence University Professor Laura Rediehs remarked in a perceptive essay in Collateral Language, one of the best books on the linguistics of this conflict, in a Cosmic Battle between Good and Evil of the kind Bush imagined, the taking of innocent lives by us would be justified because we were good. But when the other side killed innocents, it was unjustified because the other side was evil. “What makes the deaths of innocent people bad, then, is not their actual deaths, but the attitudes and feelings of those who killed them.” By far the most moving contribution towards the anti-war campaign in the same book was that of Amber Amundson, whose husband Craig of the U.S. Army was killed in the attack on the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. “Will the invasion of Iraq really bring us to a more peaceful global community?” she asked her nation’s leaders. “. . . If you choose to respond to this incomprehensible brutality [of September 11] by perpetuating violence against other human beings, you may not do so in the name of justice for my husband.”