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The Suez fiasco 1956
Fifty years ago, British imperialism, in alliance
with France and in secret collusion with Israel, invaded Egypt. The
adventure was the Tory government’s response to the nationalisation of
the Suez canal by the Nasser regime. There were mass protests in
Britain. Military action rebounded on Britain and France, forcing an
ignominious retreat. The secrecy and duplicity of the Eden government
have striking parallels with the deception and lies of Blair in relation
to Iraq. LYNN WALSH writes.
THE NATIONALISATION OF the Suez canal on 26 July
1956 was a devastating blow to the British ruling class, which was
struggling to come to terms with the decline and break-up of its
colonial empire. British imperialism had lost the Indian subcontinent –
the jewel in the crown – in 1948. Movements for independence swept
through the remaining colonies. In Cyprus, Aden (South Yemen), and
Malaysia they took the form of armed insurgencies.
The action by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, leader of
Egypt’s nationalist regime, was taken in response to a decision by the
US and Britain (and the World Bank) to withhold financial aid for the
construction of the Aswan High Dam, a major hydro-electric and
irrigation scheme. The British ruling class and the Tory government saw
this as a dire threat to what remained of their colonial empire.
The canal provided vital access to the ‘Far East’
and was crucial to Britain’s trade (a third of the 14,666 ships that
passed through the canal in 1955 were British-owned). Moreover, the
canal was of great symbolic importance to an influential imperialist
faction within the Tory Party – and to the section of British capitalism
that they reflected.
Nasser’s seizure of the canal posed a political
threat to British interests throughout the Middle East, and (in Tory
eyes) threatened the security of oil supplies, increasingly important to
western industrial economies. Harold Macmillan, the chancellor of the
exchequer in the Conservative government of prime minister Anthony Eden,
and a leading hawk on Suez, wrote in his diary (18 August): "If Nasser
‘gets away with it’, we are done for. The whole Arab world will despise
us… Nuri [es-Said, British-backed prime minister of Iraq] and our
friends will fall. It may well be the end of British influence and
strength forever. So, in the last resort, we must use force and defy
opinion, here and overseas".
Throughout the Suez crisis, Eden and his inner war
cabinet operated with extreme secrecy, just as Blair has operated on
Iraq. Macmillan’s diaries, however, now provide a revealing source of
information. Still unpublished in full, they are extensively quoted in
Alistair Horne’s biography: Macmillan, volume I, 1894-1956 (published in
1988).
Macmillan immediately saw that nationalisation could
set a precedent. Other nationalist leaders could follow suit by taking
valuable national oil resources into state control. "The determination
to seize other property", Macmillan told US audiences, "will be too
great; and before we know where we are it may well be that the control
of vital oil supplies, on which western Europe at any rate must live,
will be in the hands of powers which in effect have become satellites of
Russia…" (Horne, p419) Macmillan saw the war over Suez as a war for oil:
"We must, by one means or another, win this struggle. Nasser may well
try to preach holy war in the Middle East and… the mob and the demagogue
may create a ruinous position for us. Without oil, and without the
profits from oil, neither UK nor western Europe can survive". (Macmillan
Diary/Horne, p429)
To preserve their control of the canal, to bolster
their strategic power in the region, and to control the region’s oil
supplies, the Eden government was determined to go to war. But they made
a series of strategic miscalculations. While overestimating their own
strength, the leaders of British imperialism underestimated the power of
rising nationalist forces in Egypt and the Middle East. They were
deluded, moreover, that they could act (in collusion with France and
Israel) independently of US imperialism, now the western superpower.
President Eisenhower’s personal representative, Robert Murphy, summed it
up: "The prime minister [Eden] had not adjusted his thoughts to the
altered world status of Great Britain, and he never did".
Fabricating a pretext
PUBLICLY, THE AIM of Tory policy was to guarantee
the ‘international’ status of the Suez canal. Privately, Eden and
Macmillan were determined to bring about ‘regime change’ (in today’s
jargon) – to bring down Nasser through military intervention.
Recognising that public opinion in Britain and most governments
internationally would oppose such a course, Eden’s inner cabinet were
determined to find – or fabricate – a pretext for invading Egypt.
Even before the nationalisation of the canal, Eden,
alarmed at Nasser’s growing influence in the region, had told the
cabinet in March 1956: "I want Nasser destroyed, not removed,
destroyed". Later, Macmillan wrote in his diary (1 August): "we must
have (a) international control of the canal; (b) humiliation or collapse
of Nasser".
Criticising military plans as too limited in their
objective, Macmillan wrote: "the object of the exercise, if we have to
embark upon it, is surely to bring about the fall of Nasser and create a
government in Egypt which will work satisfactorily with ourselves and
the other powers…" The aim should be "to seize Alexandria… and march on
Cairo, to destroy Nasser". (Diaries/Horne, p404, 405)
The French government, led by the pro-Israeli
‘Socialist’, Guy Mollet, was also impatient to launch a military attack
on Nasser. Mollet and company accused Nasser of supporting their prime
enemy, the National Liberation Front fighting to free Algeria from
French rule. But Eden’s government faced more diplomatic problems than
Mollet. The US administration was not in favour of military action,
though Eden and Macmillan convinced themselves that, when it came to the
crunch, the US would fall in with any British action.
Britain was also forced, under international
pressure, to accept a conference of the major canal users (which
convened in London in August). The majority favoured negotiations with
Nasser and were not ready to support an invasion. There was also
pressure for the Suez dispute to be referred to the United Nations (UN).
Moreover, there were more and more indications from Washington that the
administration would not support military invasion of Egypt. Apart from
anything else, Eisenhower was facing re-election in November 1956 and
did not want to tarnish his image as the ‘peace president’. At the same
time, there was growing opposition at home, and even a rebellion within
the ranks of Tory MPs. Faced with this opposition, the Eden leadership
was determined to find a pretext for military action.
"The problem remains", wrote Macmillan in his diary,
"on what ‘principle’ can we have a ‘casus belli’ [an event justifying
war]? How do we get from the conference leg to the use of force?... It
remains a tricky operation". In the war cabinet Walter Monckton, the
minister of defence, raised doubts about whether public opinion in
Britain would support the government’s use of force. "Of course", wrote
Macmillan, "if an ‘incident’ took place, that would be the way out".
(Diaries/Horne, p410)
Macmillan recognised that it was not feasible to go
to war without going first to the UN, however reluctant they were to do
so. The government agreed to go but meanwhile continued military
preparations for an invasion. The parallel with Bush and Blair’s sham
reference to the UN before their premeditated invasion of Iraq is
striking.
One of the government’s leading hawks, Lord
Salisbury, raised difficulties about going to the UN. He told Macmillan
that he had read the UN charter and had "found very little in it that
would seem to justify the use of forceful methods by a member state
until all the means enumerated in the machinery of the UN have first
been tried". He found this "rather depressing". "It must, I feel, now be
for the Foreign Office to produce one [ie some provocation] which is
likely to exasperate Nasser to such an extent that he does something
that gives us an excuse for marching in, either for the protection of
the canal and its employees or of British lives and property". (Horne,
p427) What could be more cynical?
The problem for Eden, Macmillan and the Tory hawks
was that Nasser did not provide them with a casus belli. Claims that his
action was illegal were dubious: the Suez canal was on Egyptian
territory and Nasser proposed to pay compensation to the Suez canal
company’s shareholders. He guaranteed international access to the canal
(except for Israeli ships), and the new Egyptian pilots proved quite
capable of safely navigating ships through the canal. The head of the
CIA in London, Chester Cooper, commented that the British and French
"had already lost the game in late July; whether or not Eden or Mollet
could bring themselves to face it, the world had already accepted the
nationalisation of the Suez canal as a fait accompli". (Horne, p408)
Eden and Macmillan were dismayed when, on 5
September, Eisenhower publicly announced at a press conference that he
unconditionally rejected the use of force. "We are committed to a
peaceful settlement of this dispute, nothing else". It was in September
and early October (prior to the UN security council debate) that the
Tory hawks, in collusion with the French government, set about
manufacturing a casus belli, ‘an incident’ that would justify war.
The stratagem was that Israel would attack Egypt
across Sinai, justifying it by the need to destroy Palestinian fedayeen
(guerrilla) camps from which attacks on Israel were being carried out.
The Ben-Gurion government was only too willing to oblige. Britain and
France would then call on ‘both sides’ to withdraw from the ‘threatened
canal’. Israel would, of course, agree; but Nasser would almost
certainly refuse. A British and French invasion force would then
intervene, taking up a position between the two sides – to secure a
ceasefire and protect the canal!
A small cabal around Eden (including Macmillan and
Lord Salisbury) concealed the real character of the intervention from
most of the Tory cabinet (who only found out about the Anglo-French
collusion with Israel on 24 October, when the plan was presented to them
as a fait accompli). Many of the key meetings took place without minutes
being taken, and in some cases minutes were destroyed. Macmillan even
destroyed sections of his private diaries. The Eden government made the
ultimately fatal mistake of concealing the collusion with Israel from
its US ally, brazenly denying it when challenged by US officials who had
received intelligence reports of the Anglo-French and Israeli
preparations.
Some in Whitehall, however, had deep misgivings. Sir
Walter Monckton, the minister of defence, was unhappy about the weakness
of Britain’s logistical preparations, and later resigned from the
government. More principled opposition came from the First Sea Lord,
Louis Mountbatten, the most influential of the chiefs of staff, who was
against the whole operation on political and humanitarian grounds. He
considered: "That an armed amphibious assault against opposition in a
built up area… would cause the deaths of thousands of innocent women and
children since we obviously had to bomb and bombard the coast’s defence
gun positions". (Keith Kyle, Suez [1991], p202)
Mountbatten also raised a crucial question which no
one else appeared to have considered: "what steps were being taken to
ensure that, in the event of successful operations leading to the
downfall of Nasser, a new government could be found in Egypt which would
both support Britain’s policy for the operation of the canal and would
also have the support of the Egyptian people. He said he feared that the
Egyptian people were now so solidly behind Nasser that it might be
impossible to find such a government". (Kyle, p202) Eden ordered him to
keep his nose out of political matters.
Despite outright opposition to Anglo-French military
intervention from most of the canal users, the UN security council and
the US, Eden, Macmillan and company decided to go ahead. On 29 October,
in accordance with the plan, Israel invaded Sinai. Britain and France
issued their ultimatum to Egypt and Israel: Nasser, as expected rejected
it. On 31 October, British forces opened the five-day softening up
bombardment of Egyptian airfields and defence installations, while the
British war fleet set sail from Malta.
Many smelt a rat. But in parliament, Selwyn Lloyd,
the foreign minister, blatantly lied, denying there had been any prior
agreement between Britain and Israel over the attack. Eden’s government
narrowly survived a vote of confidence, by 218 votes to 207.
When Eisenhower heard about Israel’s invasion of
Sinai, he exclaimed: "You tell ’em [the Israeli government] that, God
damn it, we’re going to apply sanctions, we’re going to the United
Nations, we’re going to do everything that there is so we can stop this
thing". When he found out that the British government had actively
deceived him about the Anglo-French collusion with Israel, he was
incensed. The US threatened sanctions against Britain and France, and
quickly implemented economic measures which forced Britain to call off
its military action.
Enforced retreat of Anglo-French imperialism
ANGLO-FRENCH FORCES invaded Egypt on 5 November,
backed up by heavy naval bombardment. They rapidly pushed back the
Egyptian army, quickly taking Port Said. Israeli forces had already
halted their advance across Sinai, coming to within a few miles of the
canal. Militarily, Britain and France won an easy victory, with
disproportionate casualties on the Egyptian side. At least 3,000
Egyptian troops were killed, and over 7,000 taken prisoner. Anglo-French
forces lost around 33 dead, while Israel lost 180. But the two European
powers won only a pyrrhic victory on the battlefield. They had suffered
a devastating political defeat, with a massive loss of prestige, even
before they landed on Egyptian soil.
The Eden government faced mass opposition at home,
with splits within the government and the Tory Party. Even some of his
friends thought that Eden had gone mad – the charitable view was that he
was ill and temporarily unbalanced.
Internationally, Britain came under intense pressure
from every direction. The Soviet leadership made thinly veiled threats
that it would take military action against Britain and France. The Suez
invasion was a propaganda gift for Khrushchev, distracting attention
from the brutal Soviet oppression of the Hungarian uprising which
exactly coincided with the Suez action. Khrushchev was able to pose as
the defender of small colonial states against imperialist oppression. In
the UN, the overwhelming majority of the Security Council was strongly
opposed to the Anglo-French action. What was decisive for Britain,
however, was the Eisenhower administration’s resort to devastating
economic measures against the British economy, which forced Eden and
company to abandon their military adventure.
When Nasser took control of the canal, the Labour
leaders denounced his action. Both Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour Party
leader, and Aneurin Bevan, on the left of the Labour leadership,
referred to Nasser in the same breath as Mussolini and Hitler. Their
position was hardly distinguishable from that of the Eden government:
they opposed nationalisation and supported ‘internationalisation’ of the
canal under the control of the major users or the UN. (Though they did
not call for the internationalisation of the Panama canal.) Bevan
justified this position, which let the Tories off the hook, with the
spurious argument that socialists should favour internationalism rather
than nationalism. Some Labour leaders, however, like Emmanuel Shinwell,
a former defence minister, completely supported the Eden government,
including military action against Egypt.
Gaitskell and Bevan did not expect that the Eden
government would launch an invasion against the Nasser regime. They
strongly opposed military action, and called for a UN force to secure a
ceasefire and secure international control of the Suez canal. Their
opposition to the Eden government undoubtedly strengthened under
pressure of the explosion of popular anger provoked by the military
adventure. Suez produced some of the sharpest and most bitter
parliamentary clashes in living memory. Bevan, like many others,
strongly suspected collusion between Britain, France and the Israeli
government, and taunted the Tories to admit the truth.
Opinion polls showed that 37% thought the British
action was right, while 44% opposed military action. Among active,
political layers of the workers, there was an explosion of anger against
the Tory government. Military action was seen as an imperialist
intervention against a small, ex-colonial country rightly laying claim
to its main national asset. There was an "outburst of spontaneous
popular protest that swept the country", remembers one veteran. (Neville
Hunnings, Letter, The Guardian, 14 July 2006) "I can remember in London
passing innumerable street orators all over the place, not just in the
obvious places like Hyde Park, but in side streets off Charing Cross
Road or wherever they could gather a crowd".
Moved by this tide of protest, the National Council
of Labour (representing the Labour Party, the TUC and the Cooperative
movement) called an emergency meeting on 1 November to launch a campaign
against the government’s action under the slogan, ‘Law – not war’. A
resolution was passed calling for an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal
of Israeli forces from Egypt, and a UN peace conference to settle the
dispute.
But the Labour leaders were clearly fearful that
protest action would spill over beyond the bounds of parliamentary
pressure. The resolution called on the British people "to bring
effective pressure to bear on the government in support of these
policies through normal constitutional parliamentary methods, and to
refrain from taking industrial action as a means of influencing national
policy in the present crisis". On 4 November there was a massive
national demonstration in Trafalgar Square, with an estimated 30,000 or
more participating. This was undoubtedly the biggest national
demonstration since the pre-war period.
If Eden, Macmillan and Co thought they could ride
out the political opposition at home, they were soon forced to face the
fact that they could not survive a massive run on the pound, which
threatened to bankrupt the weak British economy. Although he was
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Macmillan seemed to forget his financial
responsibilities during the Suez episode, in which he played a more
prominent role than even Selwyn Lloyd, the foreign secretary. Yet he was
well aware that military action could cause a devastating run on the
pound. "We shall be ruined either way; but we shall be more inevitably
and finally ruined if we are humiliated [by not standing up to Nasser]".
(Diaries/Horne, p415)
Despite clear warnings from senior Treasury and
Foreign Office officials, Macmillan was deluded that, when it came to
the crunch, the US would support Britain. Unlike the French government,
which secured an IMF loan before the military action started, Macmillan
took no precautionary measures to defend the pound. Sure enough, when
British forces started bombing Egypt on 30 October, Macmillan had to
warn the cabinet that "our reserves of gold and dollars were still
falling at a dangerously rapid rate". (Diaries/Horne, p437) Things went
from bad to worse. After his successful re-election on 6 November – and
having discovered the full extent of the British government’s duplicity
– Eisenhower ordered economic sanctions against Britain. The US Federal
Reserve orchestrated a run on the pound, and Britain’s gold reserves
fell by a further £100 million in only a week (or by an eighth of their
remaining total). Moreover, the US treasury made it clear it would block
an IMF loan for Britain to stabilise the pound.
Suez brought home the real extent of British
capitalism’s economic decline. Within a few days, the Eden government
was forced to accept a ceasefire in Egypt. Macmillan had been
transformed from a super-hawk to a super-dove. One Tory MP, Brendan
Bracken, commented: "Until a week ago, Macmillan, whose bellicosity was
beyond description, wanted to tear Nasser’s scalp off with his own
fingernails… Today he might be described as the leader of the bolters.
His treasury officials have put before him the economic consequences of
the Suez fiasco and his feet are frost-bitten". Ironically, when Eden
was pushed out of the Tory leadership in January 1957, Macmillan deftly
distanced himself from the Suez adventure and emerged as the new prime
minister.
From Eden to Blair
THE SUEZ CRISIS was a turning point in the decline
of British imperialism. It shattered the arrogant pretensions of Tory
leaders like Eden and Macmillan, who still thought they could dictate to
colonial and semi-colonial states and send punitive military expeditions
if their writ was challenged. The Suez fiasco forced Britain’s imperial
ruling elite to begin to face up to the organic weakness of British
capitalism following the second world war. The awakening of nationalist
consciousness – and the counterweight to imperialism provided by the
Stalinist bloc – meant that Britain (and France) could no longer cling
on to a spread of colonial possessions. Britain was forced to accelerate
the political independence of its remaining colonies, though it fought
rearguard actions against insurgencies in countries like Malaysia, Kenya
and Cyprus, attempting to hand over to compliant national governments.
The multinational corporations, accepting the inevitability of political
independence, were developing new methods of economic domination, a
policy of neo-colonialism. The lingering imperialist mentality of the
British ruling class, however, continued to retard the development of
British capitalism.
Suez also demonstrated that Britain was no longer
capable of acting independently as an imperialist power. US imperialism
had emerged from the second world war as a military, economic and
political superpower – the only rival to the Soviet bureaucracy. The US
followed an ‘anti-colonial’ policy. US imperialism, which was not based
on colonisation, sought the break-up of the old European empires to
allow free access of US business to their former territories. No US
administration would now tolerate freelance activity by diminished
British imperialism dependent on US economic support. After Eden,
British governments, Tory and Labour, accepted a subordinate, supporting
role strategically and economically to US imperialism.
French capitalism followed a different course.
Humiliated in Egypt and subsequently forced out of Algeria, the French
ruling class under de Gaulle, turned to building the European Economic
Community (now EU), founded in 1957, as a counterweight to the US.
Regarding Britain as an American Trojan Horse, de Gaulle kept Britain
out until 1973.
Today it is not a Tory government, but the New
Labour government of Blair that is pursuing a policy of military
intervention. In 1956 Gaitskell, Bevan, and most of the Labour leaders,
for all their limitations, opposed military intervention. At that time,
the Labour leaders were forced to reflect the anger of an angry rank and
file. In contrast Blair, under the guise of promoting a new
‘humanitarian interventionism’, extols liberal imperialism and the need
"to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive
attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still
live in the 19th century" (Robert Cooper, ‘The new liberal imperialism’,
The Observer, 7 April 2002). Like Eden, Macmillan and company, Blair has
shown himself ready to use deception and lies, over and over again.
Unlike the Eden government, however, Blair has not attempted to act
independently of US imperialism. On the contrary, Blair is Bush’s
poodle. Britain’s limited military forces act as an appendage to the
colossal military machine of US imperialism, as much to provide
political cover for Bush as for their firepower. Nevertheless,
Afghanistan and Iraq are reckless military adventures on the part of US
imperialism, and Blair has allowed British forces to be sucked in to the
morass. As Suez rebounded on Eden, Afghanistan and Iraq are now
rebounding on Blair.
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