Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (96 page)

The element of instability was increased by Britain’s growing disinclination to act as paramount power in the area. As early as October 1946 Britain decided to pull most of its troops out of the Middle East to East Africa, with Simonstown near Capetown replacing the big naval base at Alexandria. Attlee disliked the Arab leaders: ‘I must say I had a very poor view of the governing classes.’
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‘ The Palestine mess, even more than the débâcle in India, disgusted
British public opinion with the whole idea of imperial responsibilities. It shook even Churchill: ‘Simply such a hell-disaster’, he told Weizmann in 1948, ‘that I cannot take it up again… and must, as far as I can, put it out of my mind.’
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But that was only the start. Farouk’s grotesquely luxurious lifestyle and the corruption of his regime (the 1948 defeat was blamed on an arms scandal) had led to growing criticism, which came to a head when he married a new queen, Princess Narriman, and took her on a much-publicized honeymoon during Ramadhan in 1951. To distract the public, he unilaterally abrogated the Anglo—Egyptian Treaty on 8 October. Early the next year he began guerrilla warfare against the Canal Zone, where Britain had a vast base: thirty-eight camps and ten airfields, capable of accommodating forty-one divisions and thirty-eight squadrons. Old-style monarchs are ill-advised to invite the mob on stage. On 26 January it took over Cairo, murdering Europeans, Jews and the rich of all nations. The young officers, who had bitterly resented the higher direction of the war against Israel, saw an opening. Six months later their Free Officers Committee sent Farouk packing on his yacht, loaded with his lifetime collection of trinkets and pornography.

The leading spirit was Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser, who soon elbowed aside the popular general, Mohammed Neguib, initially set up as figurehead. The son of a postal-clerk and a coal-merchant’s daughter, he began with some radical ideals. In the disaster of 1948 he told an Israeli staff officer that he envied the socialist
kibbutz
system of farming, which he contrasted with Egypt’s absentee landlordism. As this stage he blamed the British, not the Jews: ‘They manoeuvred us into this war. What is Palestine to us? It was all a British trick to divert us from their occupation of Egypt.’
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His
Philosophy of the Revolution
was a frothy mixture of Marxist tags, western liberalism and Islam: good, flatulent stuff. He was an archetypal member of the ‘Bandung generation’: adept at words, but not much else. Like Sukarno, he was brilliant at devising slogans and titles: he often changed the name of the party he created and of the gimcrack Arab federations he negotiated. His particular speciality was crowd-manipulation. His windy rhetoric went down well, especially with the students, and he seems to have been able to goad the Cairo mob into chanting any slogans he wished, often changing them from day to day.
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Once in power, Nasser was soon corrupted by it. Like Sukarno, he dissolved the parties. He set up People’s Courts and accumulated 3,000 political prisoners. He always maintained a modest degree of terror. It was ‘necessary’. Egypt was a poor country with a rapidly growing population (40 million by the 1970s) and a cultivable area smaller than Belgium. Nasser’s philosophy did not embrace workable
ideas for the creation of wealth. Such ideas as he had promoted its consumption. So terror was not enough. Like Sukarno, he needed a foreign enemy; preferably several. His rule was a deafening series of overseas crises to cover the sad silence of misery at home. First he intensified the campaign against the Suez base. But the British agreed to evacuate it, leaving behind only care and maintenance units. The agreement signed 27 July 1954 gave Nasser almost everything he asked for. When Churchill’s colleagues defended it in the Commons, the old man sat with head bowed. So Nasser turned on the Sudan, a potential satellite. But it slipped from his grasp and moved towards independence.

Then Nasser went to Bandung. It completed his corruption, as it did for other young nationalist politicians. Why sweat at the thankless task of keeping a poor country fed and clothed when the world stage beckoned? Bandung opened Nasser’s eyes to the opportunities the age offered to an expert publicist and sloganizer, especially one prepared to play the anti-colonialist card. And he had been holding one in his hand all the time: the Jews! Israel was easily rationalized into a general imperialist conspiracy theory. Azzam Pasha had produced the exculpatory mythology as long ago as 16 July 1948. The Arabs had lost because of the West: ‘England and America followed every Arab effort to obtain arms and opposed it with all their force, while at the same time they worked resolutely and vigorously to assure the flow of war materials and troops to the Jews.’
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After Bandung, then, Nasser reversed his earlier analysis. He worked to build up a coalition of ‘anti-imperialist’ Arab states, to overthrow the decision of 1948 and then to create an Arab superstate with himself at the helm.

The Cold War played into his hands. As part of the containment of the Soviets, Britain and America had been constructing a Middle Eastern alliance, embracing Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. It was known as the ‘northern tier’. Much against America’s will, Britain was anxious to tie this grouping to its own system of Arab clients, notably Iraq and Jordan. Anthony Eden, who had at last succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister, wanted to bolster Britain’s sagging leadership in the area with American assistance. The new regime in Russia of Nikita Khrushchev, eager to retrieve Stalin’s mistakes in 1948, saw Nasser’s emergence as a chance to leap over the northern tier and create client states of their own. The Russians offered to back Nasser’s anti-Israeli coalition with a huge supply of Iron Curtain arms on credit. Nasser was delighted. So at one bound, the Russians were over the tier, and he was in business as a Third World soldier-statesman.

Nasser did not forget the other lesson of Bandung: non-alignment. The idea was to play off East and West against each other. That meant dealing with both and being the property of neither. The Bandung
philosophy was for the new nations to create their own industrial bases as fast as possible, making themselves independent of ‘imperialism’. Provided the money is there, it is actually easier and quicker – and of course much more spectacular – to build a steel plant than raise agricultural productivity. Nasser returned from Bandung determined to hasten a project to build a giant high dam on the Nile at Aswan. It would provide power for industrialization and extra water for irrigation, raising the cultivable area by 25 per cent.
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But the dam required a World Bank loan of $200 million, mainly from America. There were a great many economic and environmental objections to the scheme, objections which in the end proved fully justified – the net effect of the dam, completed by the Russians in 1970, was actually to increase unemployment and lower agricultural productivity. At all events, after much havering, the Americans turned down the project on 19 July 1956. This was the kind of blow a high-risk regime like Nasser’s could not suffer in silence. He retaliated by nationalizing the Anglo—French Suez Canal.

The Suez crisis of 1956–7 was one of those serio-comic international events, like Abyssinia in 1935, which illustrate historical trends rather than determine them. Britain’s decline as a world power was perhaps inevitable. The rate of decline, however, was determined by its own national will. Post-war events had suggested the will was virtually non-existent. Relative industrial decline had also been resumed, with a vengeance, as the economic crisis of autumn 1955 suggested. Sir Anthony Eden, who had waited so long in Churchill’s shadow, was not the man to retrieve a lost game. He was nervous, excitable, intermittently sick, and with a fatal propensity to confuse the relative importance of events. In the 1930s he had, at one time, considered Mussolini more formidable than Hitler. Now, obsessed with the need for Britain to play a Middle Eastern role independently of America, he saw Nasser as another Duce. ‘I have never thought Nasser a Hitler,’ he wrote to Eisenhower, ‘but the parallel with Mussolini is close.’
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This was the wrong way to play it. Nasser needed and wanted dramas. Indifference was the easiest way to shrivel him. That was Eisenhower’s tactic, mainly because it was election year and ‘peace’ has always proved the highroad to American voters’ hearts. The difficulty was that Eden needed a drama himself. His first year in power out of Churchill’s shadow had been a let-down. He was criticized, especially in his own party, for lacking ‘the smack of firm government’. As the
Daily Telegraph
put it: ‘There is a favourite gesture with the Prime Minister. To emphasize a point, he will clench one fist to smack the open palm of the other hand. But the smack is seldom heard.’ It was a measure of Eden’s unfitness that he allowed himself to be mortally
rattled by this jibe, which evoked from him ‘a pained and pungent oath’.
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He would give them a smack all right!

The evening Eden got the news of Nasser’s nationalization decree, he called the service chiefs to Downing Street. He asked them to prepare an invasion of Egypt. They reported back that it was impossible in under six weeks. That should have settled the matter. A country which cannot invade a small Arab state in less than six weeks is not a great power and had better devise other ways of pursuing its interests. Besides, it was not clear that Nasser had done anything illegal. He had not broken the 1888 convention which governed the Canal. To nationalize foreign assets with due compensation (as he proposed) was the right of every sovereign state. When the Iranian regime of Mohammed Mussadeq had nationalized the British oil refinery at Abadan in 1951, Britain – after, it must be said, much huffing – had sensibly left it to the CIA to knock Mussadeq off his perch. In any case the Canal agreement was due to run out in twelve years. By the time the first flush of anger had worn off, all this had become clear. Eden should have tied Nasser up in negotiations, waited until Eisenhower was re-elected and then concerted with him means to pick the Colonel off. But the Prime Minister wanted his smack. The French were of like mind. The Fourth Republic was on its last legs. It had lost Indo-China; it had lost Tunisia and was in the process of losing Morocco; it was embroiled in an Algerian revolt which Nasser was noisily abetting. The French wanted to pull him down and they preferred to do it by frontal assault rather than intrigue. They, too, wanted a drama.

An Anglo—French seizure of Alexandria, termed ‘Operation Musketeer’, was ready for 8 September.
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This scheme, though crude, would probably have worked if pursued with resolution. But Eden kept postponing and eventually scrapped it, in favour of a much slower and more difficult occupation plan for the Canal itself, which seemed to him more legal. The truth is, Eden could not make up his mind either to go right outside legality, or stick firmly within it. A perfectly viable alternative was to allow the Israelis to dislodge Nasser. She and the Arab states were still technically at war. The Egyptians were blockading Israel’s access to the Indian Ocean, in itself an act of war, and they refused her ships passage through the Canal, in flagrant breach of the 1888 convention. Much more serious, however, was that Nasser was clearly building up the military strength, with Soviet help, and the systematic military and diplomatic alliances, to launch a concerted assault on Israel, which would end in genocide. The process was actually concluded on 25 October 1956, when he formed a unified Egypt-Syrian-Jordan command. This process provided moral justification for an Israeli
pre-emptive strike at Egypt. The French approved such a course and were in fact supplying Israel with arms to pursue it, including modern fighters. But she lacked the bombers to knock out Egypt’s air force and so guarantee her cities from air attack. Only Britain could supply those. But Eden turned this option down too. It went against his deepest instincts, which were pro-Arab.

The scheme he finally settled for, after much dithering, might have been calculated to get him the worst of all possible worlds. On 22–24 October, at secret meetings in Sàvres, near Paris, British, French and Israeli representatives cooked up an immensely complicated plot, under which Israel would attack Egypt on 29 October. This would provide Britain with a righteous pretext to reoccupy the Canal to protect lives and shipping there. Britain would issue an ultimatum which Israel would accept. Egypt’s refusal would allow Britain to bomb the airfields. Then the Anglo—French would land by force at Port Said. Much ink has been spilt over this ‘collusion’, which both Eden and his Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, denied to their dying day.
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But the French and Israeli participants later insisted there was a concerted scheme. General Moshe Dayan, the Israeli army commander, reported Lloyd as urging ‘that our military action not be a small-scale encounter but a “real act of war”, otherwise there would be no justification for the British ultimatum and Britain would appear in the eyes of the world as an aggressor’.
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Even this absurd scheme might have worked if Eden had possessed the will to go through with it to the bitter end. But he was an honourable man. He made a half-hearted Machiavelli. As a proxy-aggressor he was wholly incompetent. The transparency of the plot was obvious to all. The Labour opposition repudiated it and set up an uproar. The cabinet, kept imperfectly informed, was uneasy from the start and terrified at the violence of the American reaction once the invasion got under way. In letters of 2 and 8 September Eisenhower had warned Eden in the most emphatic terms not to use force, which he was sure would be counter-productive: ‘Nasser thrives on drama.’
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He was infuriated by Eden’s springing this ill-conceived mine beneath him in the last stages of his election campaign. He literally ground his teeth, a habit of his when angry, and instructed the US Treasury to sell sterling, something a great many other people were already doing. This had an immediate effect on Eden’s cabinet, where he was already sandwiched between two would-be successors: the old Appeaser, R.A.Butler, who wished to pull the party in the direction of the Left, and Harold Macmillan, who wished to pull it in the direction of himself. Both behaved in character. Butler said nothing but opposed the scheme behind the scenes. Macmillan urged boldness; then, when failure loomed,
switched sides and, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, urged that there was no alternative but to comply with Eisenhower’s wishes for a cease-fire. Eden collapsed on 6 November, only a week after the adventure was launched and twenty-four hours after the first Anglo-French landings took place. His capitulation followed a particularly fierce message from Eisenhower, which may have included the threat of oil sanctions.
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Thereafter he retreated into sickness and resignation.