Comparative hegemonies and the current Middle East crisi.

The Suez crisis?  The founding of Iraq?  The history of the previous hegemon 
provides some interesting perspective on the current crisis.

Steven Sherman

The Suez crisis has haunted British governments for almost 50 years - and 
watching HMS 'Ark Royal' leave Portsmouth last weekend brought back memories of 
one of the darkest chapters in our modern history. What's more, says Robert 
FIsk, studying the events of 1956, could prove timely for our hawkish world 
leaders
15 January 2003


There was secret collusion, a fraudulent attempt to use the United Nations as a 
fig leaf for war, a largely unsympathetic British public, journalists used as 
propagandists and our enemy – an Arab dictator previously regarded as a 
friend of the West – compared to the worst criminals of the Second World War. 
Sound familiar? Well, it happened almost half a century ago, not over oil but 
over a narrow man-made canal linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea.

The Suez crisis has haunted British governments ever since 1956 – it hung 
over Margaret Thatcher during the 1982 Falklands War, and its ghost now moves 
between the Foreign Office and Downing Street, between Jack Straw and Tony 
Blair. For Suez destroyed a British prime minister – along, almost, with the 
Anglo-American alliance – and symbolised the end of the British empire.

It killed many civilians – all Egyptian, of course – and brought shame upon 
the allies when they turned out to have committed war crimes. It rested on a 
lie – that British and French troops should land in Egypt to "separate" the 
Egyptian and Israeli armies, even though the British and French had earlier 
connived at Israel's invasion. Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser was described by the 
British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, as "the Mussolini of the Nile" even 
though, scarcely a year earlier, Eden had warmly shaken Nasser's hand in an 
exchange of congratulations over a new Anglo-Egyptian treaty – shades of 
Donald Rumsfeld's chummy meeting with the "Hitler of Baghdad" in 1983. In the 
end, British troops – poorly equipped and treating their Egyptian enemies 
with racial disdain – left in humiliation, digging up their dead comrades 
from their graves to freight back home lest the Egyptians defiled their bodies.

Suez was a complex crisis, but it revolved around Nasser's decision – against 
international agreements – to nationalise the canal and take over the Suez 
Canal Company. British banks and business had long dominated investment in 
Egypt and held a 44 per cent stake in the company, originally negotiated by 
Benjamin Disraeli.

Nasser's takeover was greeted with delirium by Egyptian crowds, who had been 
aghast at America's earlier withdrawal from the Aswan High Dam project. The 
code word for the takeover was "de Lesseps", who had built the canal when Egypt 
was part of the Ottoman Empire, and the moment he uttered the Frenchman's name 
in a radio speech, Nasser's armed collaborators were to storm the company's 
offices. "I listened to the radio throughout his speech," one of them told me 
many years later. "Nasser used the code word "de Lesseps" 13 times – we 
thought he was going to give us all away."

In London, Eden summoned his chiefs of staff. He wanted to topple Nasser – 
"regime change" is a new version of the same idea – and free the canal. But 
the British military informed him it couldn't be done. Troops were out of 
training, landing craft out of commission. "It was only when we eventually 
dropped outside Port Said," a Parachute Regiment officer told me 30 years 
later, "that we suddenly realised how far our army's readiness had declined 
since the Second World War. Our transport aircraft could only unload from the 
side, our jeeps broke down and they couldn't even drop artillery to support us."

So the days and weeks and months that followed Nasser's seizure of the Suez 
Canal were taken up with prevarication, parliamentary lies, desperate attempts 
to form a coalition army and – most damaging of all – a secret meeting at 
Sèvres, outside Paris, in which the Israelis, the British and the French 
agreed that the Israeli army should invade Egypt and that Britain and France 
would then intervene, instruct the Israeli and Egyptian armies to withdraw 
their forces either side of the canal, and then place an Anglo-French 
intervention force in the Canal Zone around Port Said. "Operation Musketeer", 
it would be called, and the British people were duly summoned from their 
postwar lethargy by newspaper editorials that condemned those who questioned 
Eden's right to use military force.

The Times led the way. "Of course, it [public opinion] wants to avoid the use 
of force," the paper's editorial – written personally by its editor, William 
Haley – thundered. "So does everyone and we hope no one does so more than the 
British Government. But that is a far cry from saying that because there seems 
little we can do about it, the best thing is to find excuses for, and forget, 
the whole business. Nations live by the vigorous defence of their interests... 
The people, in their silent way, know this better than the critics. They still 
want Britain great." The Guardian claimed that The Times's editorial was an 
attack on the right to speak out against government in times of crisis – it 
will be interesting to see if this debate restarts when an Iraqi war grows 
closer – and Eden's press secretary, William Clark, played a role not unlike 
a certain spin doctor in Downing Street today.

"Clark worked in unison with The Times," Tony Shaw recalled in his brilliant 
and sometimes outrageously funny history, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media: 
Propaganda and Persuasion During the Suez Crisis. Clark's job – and here 
there is a deeply uncomfortable parallel with George Bush and the UN – was 
"to prepare the ground for the government's brief referral of the dispute to 
the United Nations... This required a certain amount of ingenuity since Eden 
and the paper had hitherto dismissed the organisation as unwieldy and incapable 
of producing swift results". Eden had told Haley that he wanted to use the UN 
as an instrument solely to prove Nasser's guilt and justify force – which is 
pretty much what George Bush wants the UN arms inspectors to do in Iraq today.

And here is another 1956 Times editorial that could simply be reprinted today 
with the word "Iraq" substituted for "canal": "The objection to the matter 
being simply referred to the UN and left there has all along been, and remains, 
that the UN is likely to be dilatory and certain to be ineffective as a means 
of freeing the canal. But whatever international control is eventually brought 
about by negotiation or otherwise should certainly be under the aegis of the UN 
and the sooner the UN is officially informed of what has happened the better."

The Israelis duly attacked and on 5 November, 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. The British stormed 
an Egyptian police station that held out under intense fire and killed almost 
all the policemen inside. The French were seen machine-gunning to death 
peasants who had jumped into the canal in fear.

At Gamil airport, a young Egyptian guerrilla was seized by the British, who 
wanted to know the whereabouts of Egyptian arms stores. He later claimed that 
one of his eyes was cut out by a British interrogation officer after a 
paratroop doctor was wounded while dropping by parachute, and the other eye 
taken out later when he refused to broadcast propaganda for the allies. There 
is no independent testimony to this, although I have met the man, whose eyes 
have clearly been taken from their sockets. A paratroop doctor was wounded 
while dropping over the airfield, although he told me that he knew nothing of 
the Egyptian's claims – ironically, many years later, the paratrooper saw the 
blind Egyptian in the Port Said military museum, but never spoke to him.

British military papers at the time – many others, like Eden's records of the 
secret Sèvres meeting, were deliberately destroyed in the months after Suez 
– also make no reference to the man's allegation, although some I have seen 
contain disturbing references to the racism that still marked the former 
imperial army. The poorest area of Port Said, for example, was marked on 
British maps as "Wog-Town". The reporter Alex Eftyvoulos was to see bodies 
still unburied in Port Said days later – the British were slow to bring 
journalists to the scene of the brief battle.

But it was the Americans who expressed the most anger. President Eisenhower was 
outraged by the evidence that Israel's invasion had been set up by the allies 
– mainly by the French – and, contrary to the present incumbent of the 
White House, reserved America's right to condemn the whole invasion. His famous 
remark to Foster Dulles – that his job was to go to London and tell Eden: 
"Whoa, boy" – showed just how close he was coming 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 US 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."

Eden was a sick man – he suffered a botched operation – and began, as W 
Scott Lucas recalls in his account of the drama, Divided We Stand: Britain, the 
US and the Suez Crisis, to sound out colleagues about his future. On 9 January 
1957, he told Harold Macmillan that his doctors had warned him his health 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 US policy. It would be American policy to act unilaterally to "defend" the 
Middle East. The 1957 Eisenhower doctrine led inexorably to the hegemony the US 
now exercises over the world. 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 
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 today, 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.

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."

Now where have I heard that before?

HOW A ROW OVER A CANAL BROUGHT THE WORLD TO THE BRINK OF WAR

13 June 1956: Britain gives up control of the Suez Canal.

23 June: General Nasser elected president of Egypt.

19 July: US withdraws financial aid for the Aswan Dam project – the official 
reason is Egypt's increased ties to the USSR.

26 July: President Nasser announces his plan to nationalise the Suez Canal.

28 July: Britain freezes Egyptian assets. Anthony Eden (left) imposes arms 
embargo on Egypt and tells General Nasser he cannot have the Suez Canal.

1 August: Britain, France and the US hold talks. The next day Britain mobilises 
its armed forces.

21 August: Egypt says it will negotiate on Suez ownership if Britain pulls out 
of the Middle East. USSR says it will send troops if Egypt is attacked.

9 September: Five nation conference on the Suez Canal collapses as Nasser 
refuses international control of the canal.

12 September: US, Britain, and France announce their intention to impose a 
Canal Users Association on management.

14 September: Egypt now in full control of the canal.

7 October: Israeli foreign minister Golda Meir says the UN failure means Israel 
must take military action.

13 October: Anglo-French proposal for control of the canal vetoed by the USSR.

29 October: Israel invades Sinai peninsula.

31 October: Despite public protests, allies mount airstrikes on Egypt.

2 November: UN approves ceasefire. Fighting escalates: British and French 
forces mount airborne invasion of Egypt.

7 November: Britain and France agree to a ceasefire: UN Assembly votes 65 to 
one that invading powers should quit Egypt.

24 December: British and French troops depart Egypt.

27 December: 5,580 Egyptian PoWs exchanged for four Israelis. Operation to 
clear sunken ships in canal starts.

15 January 1957: British and French banks in Egypt are nationalised.

19 April: First British ship pays Egyptian toll for use of the Suez Canal. 
   21 January 2003 16:56




Le Monde diplomatique 

  -----------------------------------------------------

  January 2003

                      APPOINTMENT WITH WAR

                  Iraq: the imperial precedent
    _______________________________________________________

  The United States seems determined to enforce regime change
   in Iraq, but far less certain just what regime it wants to
    replace that of Saddam Hussein, or what kind of Iraq it
   hopes to set up after the war. But the state of Iraq as we
     know it is in fact the almost accidental result of the
  British invasion of Mesopotamia in 1914, and subsequent poor
   imperial choices and default decisions. History, as ever,
                     has been here before.

                                            by CHARLES TRIPP *
    _______________________________________________________

    IN BAGHDAD, an authoritarian regime, backed by military
    force, exercises a powerful grip over Iraq and poses a
    direct strategic threat to the interests of the major
    Western power in the region. A military expedition
    against the regime is mounted and, after a campaign that
    proves more difficult and costly than anticipated,
    Baghdad is captured and a new political order established
    under Western military and political control. But just as
    it seems that direct foreign rule is establishing the
    shape of the future for Iraq, rebellion breaks out among
    Iraqi army officers on the streets of Baghdad and
    throughout the Shi'ite centre and south of the country,
    putting the whole enterprise in jeopardy.

    The uprising is eventually crushed, but the cost of doing
    that leads to a radical rethink in the army of occupation
    and in its government back home. In place of the
    ambitious visions once entertained by the occupiers, a
    more modest, cheaper plan emerges. It recognises the
    existing socio-political hierarchy in Iraq and hands
    control of the state, under Western surveillance, to the
    administrative and military elites of the old regime.

    This is not a prediction of the next 12 months in Iraq.
    It is a description of events that took place over 80
    years ago, when Great Britain conquered the three Ottoman
    provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul and welded them
    into the new state of Iraq. The fact that there are
    echoes of the present and of possible future scenarios in
    Iraq has less to do with some irreducible essence of
    Iraqi history than with the logic of imperial power. If
    there is a war, the United States could find itself
    facing choices similar to those faced by Britain between
    1914 and 1921. It is worth reflecting upon those choices
    to understand whether the exercise of imperial power in
    the task of state reconstruction has a similar logic.
    This could throw light on the kind of Iraq which an
    American military occupation might bring into being.

    When the British invaded Mesopotamia in 1914, they did
    not intend to create a state. Their immediate objective
    was the security of their position in the Persian Gulf.
    But military success led to greater ambitions and by 1918
    British forces had occupied the whole of what is now
    modern Iraq. Throughout the territories a civil
    administration was established, based on the model of
    British India, where many of the officers and officials
    had gained their experience.

    It was a mixture of direct and indirect rule: the
    enterprise was controlled by British-staffed ministries
    in Baghdad, but British political officers in the
    provinces depended upon local community leaders to
    guarantee social order and collect revenues. Excluded
    from these arrangements were the predominantly Sunni Arab
    or Arabised Turkish administrative and military elites of
    the former Ottoman state. A distinct British imperial
    order began to emerge, centred on Baghdad, gradually
    penetrating all levels of society and appearing to
    consolidate British interests.

    But with the end of the war in 1918, different ideas
    about the nature of those interests surfaced in different
    branches of the British state. Some held to a strong
    imperial vision that believed that it was part of
    Britain's mission to practise the micro-technologies of
    power, to make society fit the new administrative order.
    Another view, influenced both by moral doubts about the
    imperial project and practical questions of resources and
    commitment, advocated a lighter touch. Here the argument
    was that Britain had only two basic requirements of any
    government in Mesopotamia: that it should be
    administratively competent and that it should be
    respectful of British strategic requirements. It was this
    view which triumphed and upon which the state of Iraq was
    founded (1).

    Events in Iraq, as well as in the wider international
    sphere and in Britain, contributed to this outcome. In
    1920 the principles of national self-determination
    created the idea of League of Nations mandates -
    territories of the defeated Central Powers which one of
    the victorious powers would bring eventually to
    independence as sovereign states. The idea was taken up
    by those in the British government who wanted to maintain
    its global influence and control at minimum cost,
    financially and militarily. Given the changing public
    mood in Britain in 1919-20 about the uses of public
    expenditure, and the alarm in government about the cost
    of empire, this seemed an ideal solution.

    In Iraq, many people resented the mandate as a light
    disguise for British imperial control; by contrast,
    certain British imperial servants in the country saw it
    as a dangerous abdication of responsibility (2). The
    clash between these two views led to the Iraqi Revolt of
    1920. This began in Baghdad with mass demonstrations of
    urban Iraqis, both Sunni and Shi'ite, and the protests of
    embittered ex-Ottoman officers. The revolt gained
    momentum when it spread to the largely Shi'ite regions of
    the middle and lower Euphrates. Well-armed tribesmen,
    outraged by the intrusions of central government and
    resentful of infidel rule, seized control of most of the
    south of the country. It took the British several months,
    and cost thousands of lives - British, Indian and Iraqi -
    to suppress the revolt and re-establish Baghdad's control

    The revolt had two profound consequences. It persuaded
    the British that the cost of trying to rule Iraq would be
    too high and that it was imperative to set up a
    fully-functioning Iraqi government, army and
    administration. Furthermore, it made it almost inevitable
    that when the British looked for the cadres to govern the
    new state, they should choose the Ottoman administrative
    and military elites displaced during the war. The British
    saw these men as having proven experience in running a
    modern state, as well as a pragmatic grasp of the
    importance of Britain in helping them to entrench
    themselves in power, and in securing Iraq in the region.
    The leaders of the majority Shi'ite population and of the
    substantial Kurdish minority were seen as potentially
    mutinous, as well as too encumbered by tribal and
    religious traditions to govern a modern state.

    These considerations shaped subsequent British policy in
    Iraq. Amir Faisal of the Hijaz was installed as king,
    sustained by mainly Sunni Arab former Ottoman officers
    and officials. They took over the administration from
    departing British officials and formed the backbone of
    the new Iraqi officer corps. British influence continued
    through its advisers in the Iraqi ministries, through its
    two major air force bases in the country and through the
    multiple ties which bound the two countries together and
    sustained Britain's informal empire even after Iraqi
    independence in 1932.

    In the sense of safeguarding British strategic interests,
    the advocates of the minimalist or indirect approach to
    the question of political order in Iraq appeared to have
    been vindicated. However, they had also laid the
    foundations for a distinctive form of state in Iraq. This
    was affected both by the authoritarian inclinations of
    the new governing class, as well as by their prejudices
    towards the diverse communities who formed the majority
    of the Iraqi population (3).

    The relevance of this to the present situation is not
    only that Saddam Hussein's regime is a direct descendant
    of this pattern of government. It is also that the
    temptation confronting the US, if and when it tries to
    organise the future of Iraq, may be similar to that which
    faced the British government and its officials in 1920.
    In the aftermath of a military invasion and the likely
    overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, the US will face a
    choice.

    It can try to bring about a fundamental change in the way
    Iraq is governed and commit the time and resources
    necessary to make that happen. Or it can set up an Iraqi
    administration which will carry out the principal wishes
    of the US - respect for American strategic interests and
    maintenance of order - thereby allowing an early
    withdrawal of US forces. This would mean recognising much
    of the existing power structure in Iraq, as well as the
    narrative of Iraqi history that brought the present
    regime into being. Faced by internal resistance and
    fearful of risking American lives and resources in a
    project of state reconstruction increasingly remote from
    the interests of the American public, it is quite
    possible that the US administration would opt for
    disengagement from Iraq's internal affairs.

    This might contradict the present declarations being made
    in Washington promising a mission to transform Iraq into
    a beacon of democracy in the region. It would certainly
    cause despair among those Iraqis who have seen the US as
    their main hope of radical political change. But for the
    US, as for the British 80 years ago, the lower risk, the
    lesser cost and the short-term advantages may outweigh
    the possible future benefits of fundamental social
    transformation in Iraq.
      ____________________________________________________

    * Reader in Middle East politics, School of Oriental and
    African Studies, University of London, author of A
    History of Iraq, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

    (1) Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq 1914-1932, Ithaca
    Press, London, 1976, pp 20-40.

    (2) Tawfiq al-Suwaidi, Mudhakkirati [My Memoirs], Dar
    al-Hikma, London, 1999, pp 70-72; Sir Arnold Wilson,
    Mesopotamia 1917-1920 - 'A Clash of Loyalties
    , Oxford University Press, 1931, pp 303-323.

    (3) Sati` al-Husri, Mudhakkirati fi al-`Iraq 1921-1941
    [My Memoirs in Iraq], vols 1 and 2, Dar al-Tali'a,
    Beirut, 1967-68.

                                                             

                                     Original text in English


      ____________________________________________________

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2003 Le Monde diplomatique