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.
The final provocation to Nasser came in July when Dulles indicated in an insulting way that money for the Aswan Dam would not be forthcoming. The Americans too were hostile to Nasser, but they were also not anxious to support British imperialism in the area, and CIA men were even encouraging Nasser, to their own ambassador’s dismay (Eisenhower later said that what happened at Suez was his greatest regret). On 26 July Nasser suddenly announced that he would nationalize the Suez Canal, and his men took over the offices of the international (and mainly Anglo-French) company that ran it. This was in breach of an old convention, but these old conventions had been agreed back in the days when such countries were helpless before British strength, and the Egyptian public was delirious.
What followed was a disaster, in all respects including the fact that the disaster was limited. The French went on to a disaster, to do with North Africa, but it delivered such a shock to their system that they abandoned it, and experienced an economic miracle to rival Germany’s. Suez did not have such an effect in England, and marks the start of a national decline that continued for the next generation. Whitehall still thought imperially: an often quoted comment, and not from Eden alone, was that England could not possibly go the way of Holland. As things turned out, she should have been so lucky: Holland indeed lost an empire, but hers had been a low-wage and heavily agricultural economy, and after the loss of Indonesia she became rich, a major exporter and a well-managed place.
Reservists were mobilized (the Queen signed the document, squaring it on a horse’s rump at Goodwood). Then — in such situations, a very bad move — they were kept waiting around, away from employment and family. Delays mounted. The Americans were consulted, and wartime solidarity was invoked between an Eisenhower and an Eden who had known each other in the old days of glory. Dulles sometimes encouraged, but more often the American line was that force should not be used — instead, a process of negotiation should start, and subversive methods tried. Eden said that Nasser’s hands were on the West’s windpipe and he seems to have thought that if he presented the Americans with a
The Israelis staged a very clever operation, carried out with panache. Four Mustangs, flying only twelve feet from the ground, cut Egyptian telephone connections, and a few hundred paratroops secured the essential desert pass. By 5 November the Israelis were on the Canal, occupying, also, the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba from which their shipping had been banned. It no doubt helped that, on 31 October, the British bombed Egyptian air bases. The day before, Eden had told the House of Commons that the Israelis and Egyptians would be told to stop while an Anglo-French force occupied the Canal Zone. He even tried to claim that this was not ‘war’, but ‘armed conflict’, and of all absurdities suspended deliveries of arms to Tel Aviv. Almost at once, problems emerged. The dollar reserves were declining, and in any case mobilization was a very slow business: the British had put resources into nuclear
