Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

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.