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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| A Man, A Plan, A Canal |
| 2006-07-26 |
| What Nasser wrought when he seized Suez a half century ago. by Arthur Herman 07/31/2006, Volume 011, Issue 43 ON JULY 26, 1956, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, at that time the most vital international waterway in the world. The Middle East, and all of us, still live under the shadow of the fateful events his decision triggered 50 years ago. Even more than the Cold War, the Suez crisis has shaped the world we live in. And at its heart was the biggest American foreign policy blunder since the War of 1812. The socialist Proudhon said the origin of property was theft. The same could be said of the modern Middle East. By any objective standard, Nasser's seizing of the canal was theft. Until that July, it had been administered by a private company headquartered in Paris and owned by international shareholders. Nasser had even signed an agreement recognizing the Canal Zone's autonomy two years earlier, which allowed Great Britain to pull out the last troops from its bases in Suez. That withdrawal, of course, freed the Egyptian dictator to do what he pleased. Nasser decided to grab the canal to pay for his ill-conceived dam on the Nile at Aswan. He also reasoned that the resulting international outcry would only build up his reputation in the Arab world, and that the response from a declining British Empire, and the rest of the West, would be all talk and no action--even though Suez was vital to Britain and Europe for their oil from the Persian Gulf. This was Nasser's one miscalculation--but in the end it proved unimportant. In 1956, memories of Hitler and Mussolini were still fresh. Appeasing demagogic dictators who broke international law had few advocates. Just three years earlier, Iran's Mossadegh had tried to nationalize Iran's oil wells. The British and the CIA had kicked him out of power for his pains. Britain's prime minister, Anthony Eden, assumed he had to respond to Nasser's move with some show of force, especially if he wanted to lay claim to being Winston Churchill's political heir. He also saw an opportunity to reassert Britain's authority on the world stage after the loss of India. But ,unlike Churchill, Eden had no understanding of history; he had, in historian Paul Johnson's words, "a fatal propensity to confuse the relative importance of events." He also never understood, as Churchill had, that to use military force, one had to be ready to use it to the hilt. So, when the British high command informed Eden it would take six weeks to assemble enough ships, planes, and men to take back the canal and topple Nasser, Eden turned to the French for help. They in turn appealed to the Israelis. For some time the Israelis had wanted to wipe out the Palestinian guerrilla bases which had sprung up along their border with Egypt since the 1948 war, camps run by a Palestinian student-turned-Nasser flunky named Yasser Arafat. So Israel's chief of staff, the 41-year-old Moshe Dayan, drew up a plan with the help of a young paratrooper colonel named Ariel Sharon for an incursion into Gaza and Sinai in coordination with an Anglo-French landing at Suez. The Israelis assumed the West would back up bold action against hit-and-run terrorists and those who supported them. But they, and their allies the French and British, had not reckoned on the United States. President Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, were preoccupied with the Cold War. Like their Democratic predecessors, they were reluctant to support any move that smacked of "colonialism," no matter how justified. And Eisenhower, in Stephen Ambrose's words, was "uncomfortable with Jews" and never understood the threat Israel faced from its Arab neighbors. So the Americans refused to endorse the Suez invasion. "We do not want to meet violence with violence," Dulles said--words that have a disturbing echo today. Then the Americans went further. If the British and French attacked Egypt, Eden was told, the United States would not back them up in the United Nations. Finally, in late October, after weeks of hesitation and prevaricating, the British, French, and Israelis struck. The British and French Operation Musketeer was a stunning success; in the face of the Israeli attack, Nasser's army collapsed. French paratroopers and tanks were poised to roll into Cairo. But then, with American encouragement, U.N. secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld became involved. To this day in elite circles, his name is treated with pious reverence second only to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. After his death, his face even graced an American postage stamp. In fact, Hammarskjöld was arguably the worst secretary general in the history of the United Nations. He was certainly the most devious. He was the bleak prototype of another U.N. apparatchik, his fellow Swede Hans Blix. Smug, icily cerebral, essentially humorless, he possessed a smooth arrogance that concealed a bottomless pit of liberal guilt. Suez was the making of him. From the start, Hammarskjöld steered the U.N. debate away from the question of how to deal with a lawless dictator, making it an open forum for denouncing "Western imperialism." The loudest voices came from the Russians and their Communist allies, who made Israel their particular target (even as Russian troops were crushing the revolt in Hungary). Nasser became the new hero of the "nonaligned nations," the Fifties code phrase for the new countries in Asia and Africa who were ready to play one Cold War superpower against the other. According to at least one insider, although Hammarskjöld personally despised Nasser, he deferred to Nasser's ambassador "on all points and at all stages" in arranging a final cease-fire and calling for a British, French, and Israeli withdrawal. To Hammarskjöld, the issue was simple. If you were European and white, you were always in the wrong. If you were nonwhite, you were a victim of something and ipso facto in the right. Even so, Hammarskjöld's U.N. resolutions would have remained so many scraps of papers had President Eisenhower not threatened to break the pound sterling on the world's financial markets. Eden's will to fight burst like a soap bubble. French and British troops began pulling out in March 1957. Nasser triumphantly claimed his canal; Israel withdrew from Gaza and the Sinai. The Suez crisis was over. But the damage it did was, and remains, incalculable. Eisenhower had wrecked the trust between the United States and its former World War II allies for a generation; in the case of France, for all time. If anyone wonders why French politicians are always willing to undermine American initiatives around the world, the answer is summed up in one word: "Suez." Suez destroyed the United Nations as well. By handing it over to Dag Hammarskjöld and his feckless ilk, Eisenhower turned the organization from the stout voice of international law and order into at best a meaningless charade; at worst, a Machiavellian cesspool. Instead of teaching Nasser and his fellow dictators that breaking international law does not pay, Suez taught them that every transgression will be forgotten and forgiven, especially if oil is at stake. As for Nasser, Israel moved to the top of his agenda. Attacking the Jewish state became the recognized path to leadership of the Arab world, from Nasser to Saddam Hussein to Iran's Ahmadinejad--with the U.N. and world opinion standing idly by. Nasser also poured money and arms into Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization, making it the world's first state-sponsored terrorist group. And again, the world did nothing. This, in the end, was the most egregious result of Suez. Hammarskjöld had ushered in a new era of international gangsterism, even as the U.N. became an essentially anti-Western body. Its lowest point came less than two decades later, in 1975, when it passed a resolution denouncing Zionism as racism and a triumphant Yasser Arafat addressed the General Assembly with a pistol strapped to his hip. Suez destroyed the moral authority of the so-called world community. Fifty years later, we are all still living in the rubble. © Copyright 2006, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved. |
| Posted by:mcsegeek1 |
| #5 And that, folks, is how sh*t happens. IIRC, Nasser raised Suez Canal tolls so high that it started drawing traffic around the Cape of Good Hope. Nasser was a disaster for Egypt. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2006-07-26 19:17 |
| #4 Thanks Mac and phil_b. Ike had some strange quirks. His preference for covert over overt action and his resignation to the USAF theory that the era of ground war was over and that land forces were obsolete stand out. He damn near destroyed the Army in the late 50's. I'll have to read that book once I get through the other door stop that I'm working on right now. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2006-07-26 18:47 |
| #3 The USA was anti-colonialism, particularly French colonialism. BTW, I agree with the writer. Suez was a serious strategic error by the USA. He fails to mention the ME nationalisation of oil companies that resulted from Suez and the consequent power of OPEC. Had the British/French retaken Suez, the world would be a very different place. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-07-26 18:22 |
| #2 No, 11A5S, they didn't. Foster Dulles was sick and in the hospital. The US was talking out of both sides of its mouth ("Nasser must be made to disgorge..." "The US does not agree to the use of violence...") and Anthony Eden thought he truly had a green light to go. He also was a sick man who was recovering from gall bladder surgery and on some pretty heavy drugs. If you're really interested, there's a doorstop book called "Suez" that covers the whole thing from start to finish. It will make you want to cry to read how woefully inept the British were and how pusillanimous the US was. We're still paying for Eisenhower's siding with Nasser both in the French hatred for us and the Arab world's sneering disdain. Nasser needed a good public ass-kicking followed by a hanging at the nearest palm tree. Instead, he became an Arab hero just because we refused to back the Euros when they went to retrieve their property. It was by far the biggest foreign policy mistake of the Eisenhower presidency; Francis Gary Powers doesn't even come close. |
| Posted by: mac 2006-07-26 18:19 |
| #1 Did France and the UK not consult with the US prior? Or did they consult with someone at State and it never made its way up to Ike? There has always been something fishy about this whole episode. I've always found it hard to believe that the same Ike that took covert action in Iran and Guatemala, wouldn't support the UK and French in this campaign. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2006-07-26 17:51 |