The Suez-Hungary Crisis: This Year in History:50 years ago (Diplomatic Dealings-September 1956)

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was firmly committed to stopping Britain and France from going to war over the Suez Canal.

Dulles himself started the cycle of events by cutting off a loan to Egypt for the Aswan Dam. The cutoff occurred because of increasingly close relationship Egypt had with the Soviets.

Dulles knew Egypt would probably take the canal from the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company but figured a possible shutdown of the canal would not stop oil from reaching the United States or Europe because tankers could use alternate routes.

United States foreign policy featured a lot of carrots to keep "developing nations" more friendly towards the United States and less friendly towards the Soviets.

After applying the stick of the loan cutoff, Dulles was apparently willing to give the Egyptians a carrot by allowing them to keep the canal.

Britain and France had decided to prepare for war late in July with September 15th being the date when their forces would be ready to attack.

France continued to ship more and more arms to Israel, which was contemplating a preventive war to stop the Egyptians from using their Soviet suppplied arsenal.

The French were very committed to the idea of war because they wanted to punish Egyptian ruler Abdel Gamal Nasser for supporting the rebellion against French rule in Algeria.

British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was reluctant to go to war without American support which he continued to seek throughout August and into September.

The French Prime Minister Guy Mollet met with Eden on September 10, 1956 to urge military action. Mollet wanted Eden to focus on the canal itself rather than land troops at Alexandria and drive across Egypt to the canal.

Eden agreed that the miltary plan should be revised to land paratroops in the canal area itself.

Meanwhile Dulles called from Washington to push the idea of a Suez Canal Users Association on Eden, who thought it may have some merit.

Nations that used the canal would hire their own pilots and run convoys through the canal with Egyptian interference resulting in "appropriate action."

Unfortunately Eden thought in terms of military action while Dulles meant using the Cape shipping route around South Africa instead.

Dulles was worried that the British and French would attack on September 15th and he wanted to do everything he could to stop it.

The canal users association was his last minute attempt to stop military action against Egypt.

While Eden welcomed the idea not understanding it was a ploy, Pineau said: "I think this is just another Dulles bluff."

The United States opposition to Anglo-French military action was made clear by President Eisenhower at a September 11th press conference. He was asked if the U.S. backed military action.

Eisenhower said: "I don't know exactly what you mean by backing them. This country will not go to war while I am occupying my present post unless the Congress is called into session and Congress declares such a war.....We established the United Nations to abolish aggression and I am not going to be party to aggression.."

On September 13th Dulles put his cards on the table indicating that a Suez Canal Users Association had nothing to do with a threat of force against Egypt and that Egyptian refusal to allow shipping through would mean using the Cape route instead, not shooting at the Egyptians.

This caused celebration in Cairo with Nasser realizing he was free to keep the canal. In Britain Eden had to calm down emotions in the House of Commons from Labor members opposed to war and Conservatives who wanted military action (The Suez Rebels).

Eden knew he had been deserted by the United States and told the house that the Suez Canal issue would be referred to the United Nations Security Council.

This meant that Britain was firmly behind an eventual military solution in Suez.

Dulles flew into London to talk with Eden on September 20th and urged Britain not to refer the matter to the U.N.

Assurances were given that Britain and France would proceed with caution, but in reality by the time Dulles arrived in Washington 36 hours later the Anglo-French approach had been made to the U.N.

The United States had received a diplomatic slap in the face by two nations that felt abandoned by their traditional ally.

At the United Nations, optimistic diplomats dreamed of the concept of international control of the canal, something that Britain and France were willing to accept, but Egypt and its backers including the United States and Soviet Union ultimately would not.

Meanwhile an Israeli delegation arrived in Paris on September 23rd led by Shimon Peres. He brought Israeli intelligence officers who laid out the Soviet weapons buildup in Egypt and Syria and asked the French to join in a defensive war against the Egyptians.

Foreign Minister Pineau flew to London to make the British aware of their contacts with the Israelis. The British approved continued contact about using Israeli help in a military operation against Egypt.

By September 26th a revised military plan that would attack through Port Said into the canal zone was presented to the British and French leaders meeting in London.

The approach to the United Nations was also discussed with Eden hoping to get "firm guarantees" from Egypt that would make international control of the canal unneccssary. The French rejected any compromise in the matter.......

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/484pbqjx.asp

A Man, A Plan, A Canal
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.

Arthur Herman is the author, most recently, of To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (Harper Collins/Perennial).

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