Idea Transcript
Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East
Foreword by Wm. Roger Louis Afterword by Peter Hennessy
For Suzy, Her book
New edition published in 2011 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © Susan Kyle, 1991, 2003, 2011 Foreword © Wm. Roger Louis, 2011 Afterword © Peter Hennessy, 2011 The right of Keith Kyle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Susan Kyle in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 84885 533 5 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in India by Replika Press P.V.T. Ltd
Contents
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
List of Maps and Illustrations Acknowledgements Foreword by Wm. Roger Louis
vii ix xiii
Preface Swing-Door of the British Empire A Jewish State Eden and Nasser Arms and the Dam Turning against Nasser Code-Word ‘De Lesseps’ Plotting Nasser’s Downfall A Matter of Timetables Musketeer The First London Conference Keightley in Command The Birth of SCUA Musketeer Revise The Israeli Factor Taking it to the UN Two Frenchmen at Chequers Sèvres, Conference of Collusion A Parachute Drop at the Mitla Ultimatum The Die is Cast World Opinion Speaks France’s War Slow March to Suez The Empires Strike Back. Phase I: 5 November 1956 The Empires Strike Back. Phase II: 6 November 1956 Picking up the Pieces
1 7 22 39 62 86 110 135 153 167 180 200 217 233 256 272 291 314 332 353 371 392 408 425 444 461 477
vi 27 28 29 30 31
Contents Forced to Quit Last Stands and New Doctrine The End of the Suez Conflict Suez 1991–2001 Epilogue
500 515 532 549 571
Afterword by Peter Hennessy Appendices Notes Bibliography Index
587 589 594 653 665
Maps and Illustrations
Maps ‘Musketeer’ (Plan Unimplemented) The Sinai Campaign Port Said and Port Fuad, 1956
Illustrations President Nasser and Anthony Eden, Cairo 1955 (Keith Kyle) Ships in the Suez Canal (Linden Press, New York) General Nuri es-Said (Hulton Picture Company) King Hussein of Jordan with Glubb Pasha (Linden Press, New York) Colonel Ariel Sharon briefs David Ben-Gurion (Imperial War Museum) Dmitri Shepilov with Nasser (Imperial War Museum) Krishna Menon (Hulton Picture Company) Christian Pineau, Eden and John Foster Dulles (Jonathan Cape Ltd.) Robert Menzies, Mahmoud Fawzi and Nasser (Leo Cooper Ltd.) Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury (Hulton Picture Company) Guy Mollet (Presses Universitaires de France) The Straits of Tiran (Faber & Faber Ltd.) Villa in rue Emanuel Girot, Sèvres (Keith Kyle) Dwight D. Eisenhower (Linden Press, New York) Dulles with Sir Pierson Dixon (Leo Rosenthal) Dag Hammarskjöld (United Nations) Henry Cabot Lodge (Linden Press, New York) Generals Stockwell, Keightley and Beaufre (Charles Lavanzalle) British marines wade ashore at Port Said (Imperial War Museum) General Moshe Dayan with his men (Jonathan Cape Ltd.) Cartoon of Nasser by Ronald Searle (Fayard) Egyptian casualties of the raid on Port Said (Hulton Picture Company) Vice-Admiral Pierre Barjot (Hulton Picture Company) Egyptian prisoners at Port Said (Hulton Picture Company) Destruction of the statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps (Linden Press, New York) General Sir Charles Keightley greeting Lieutenant-General E. L. M. Burns (Hulton Picture Company) Wreck in the Suez Canal (Popperfoto) Anthony Eden resigns, January 1957 (Hulton Picture Company)
Foreword
Keith Kyle will always be remembered for his comprehensive account of the Suez crisis. Yet he was not an historian by profession, nor by any stretch of the imagination did he anticipate that his work would be recognized as a classic work of history. He was personally modest and self-deprecating. As a journalist he was exacting and sometimes fierce. He stood six feet three and to his friends seemed to resemble perhaps an angular and benevolent giant, but to victims of his ruthless questions he probably appeared as an enormous bird of prey. There is carefully suppressed outrage and a sense of betrayal that lies beneath the surface of the book. Yet the account inspires confidence in the reader because it is deliberately balanced and impartial. It can be seen not only as a microcosm of British politics but also of Britain’s place in the world as a great power. It can be read for the sheer enjoyment of the narrative as well as a study of one man’s moral compass. Though he felt passionately that Anthony Eden had violated public trust, Kyle was able to deal in a fair-minded way not only with Eden but also Gamal Abdul Nasser. Historians as well as journalists are usually prisoners of their own era and personal circumstances. Kyle’s writing reflects the intellectual and political currents of his time. He never achieved his long-standing ambition to become a Member of Parliament, perhaps in part because of problems of health beginning in childhood. He was born in 1925. During his early years he began to have spells of absent-mindedness that his friends later regarded as a curious if exasperating eccentricity. They were manifestations of a disease that struck him down more than once. His interest in history became evident when he was a student at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1943. His tutor was A.J.P. Taylor. Called to duty in the last years of the war, Kyle served in Burma and India. His experience in the twilight of the Raj led him to support Indian political aspirations and strengthened his scepticism about the future of the British Empire. He returned to Oxford and seemed destined for a career as an historian. Taylor and other dons believed that he possessed a first-class mind. Then catastrophe struck. He was the victim of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), which causes incapacitating fatigue and listlessness. After leaving Oxford he seemed lucky to obtain a job at the BBC. Yet he began to
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write with such grace, verve, and accuracy that in 1953 he caught the attention of Geoffrey Crowther, editor of The Economist. This was a piece of supreme good luck in Kyle’s life. During the Suez crisis he was in Washington, DC, as the American correspondent of The Economist. The book that he wrote some three decades later reveals the same sharp, witty and clear style as the weekly magazine. The Suez crisis had long antecedents but its immediate cause was Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956. Three months later, on 29 October Israeli forces invaded Egypt and were followed by British and French troops. Many at the time thought that it was a coordinated attack, but Eden claimed that the British and French had launched their expeditions only to keep the peace between the Israelis and the Egyptians. Kyle was among those who believed from the outset that there was collusion. But it was not until thirty years later, during the research for his book, that he discovered evidence of a smoking gun. The British archival records on the Suez crisis became accessible in 1987. Working early mornings and weekends, Kyle took the lead not only in research in official sources but also in interviewing surviving participants. Their previous reticence usually gave way to an inclination to set the record straight. More than any of the rival historians investigating the crisis, he set the pace in examining French, American and Israeli records as well as the British. Kyle did not have access to the Egyptian archives, but he interviewed Egyptians who had recollections or views on Nasser and the origins of the crisis. The Soviet perspective is perhaps the weakest part of his narrative, though even here he provides unusual insight. The book has a British core, but Kyle’s grasp of the international complexity of the crisis reassures the reader of its overall context. The Suez crisis occurred at the same time as the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising. It was also a presidential election year in the United States. In Kyle’s retelling of the story, the Cold War parts of the puzzle interlock with the national and regional parts. Kyle built on the work of previous historians – notably Kennett Love’s Suez – The Twice Fought War, published in 1969 – but his book was the first to examine motives and aims on the basis of extensive reading of private papers as well as archival sources. His meticulous research is reflected in the pen portraits. Nasser emerges as a charismatic, defiant, anti-British Arab nationalist (or, more accurately, an Egyptian nationalist). Eden appears as a man of flawed character whose swings of mood ranged from the exhilaration of watching troops go into battle to the melancholic and subdued yet determined outlook of Dunkirk. Eden was under such heavy medication that there can now be no doubt that it interfered with his judgement. Certainly his actions baffled President Eisenhower and the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. In the British view Dulles was duplicitous. He led the British to believe that he supported them whereas in fact the
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opposite was true, and with a moralistic twist. Dulles thus appears along with Nasser in British demonology. If there is an actual villain in the piece, it is probably the Chancellor of the Exchequer and future Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, who cheered Eden on and then left him in the lurch. Kyle however is far too shrewd to reduce the crisis to issues determined by personality. His description of the interplay between the individual and the state helps to explain why the book continues to attract general readers as well as specialists in British and Middle Eastern history. There are three ways in which the reader can estimate the significance of the Suez crisis, though they are mainly implicit rather than explicit in Kyle’s book. He does not sermonize on the crisis as a watershed in British history. Yet it is clear from his account that the result came as a revelation to virtually all concerned that Britain could no longer act independently from the United States – in effect that Britain could no longer be regarded as a power of the same rank as the Soviet Union or the United States. What previously had been widely suspected now seemed to be obvious. Britain was in decline. In retrospect the Suez crisis can be seen as marking a stage in the dissolution of the British Empire. The second theme, also mainly implicit, is the triangular relationship between the individual, the government, and the United Nations. The Suez crisis divided the British public. Some held that the Egyptians needed, in Churchill’s phrase, a good thump to teach them a lesson. Others thought that Britain had flouted the United Nations by attacking Egypt. Kyle believed the latter, and that is the reason for the underlying sense of restrained anger in the book. He felt that the Eden government had violated the trust of the British people by entering into a secret alliance with France and Israel, and by waging war against Egypt with only a clique within the cabinet making the actual decisions. British ministers of all ranks probably had a greater awareness of the details of the operation than Kyle describes, but he has a point. The Eden government was now regarded by about half the British public as a national and international renegade. In Kyle’s view, it became increasingly clear as he continued to examine secret documents after the publication of his book that Eden had betrayed his country. This judgement became more explicit in the second edition of his book published in 2002 (which incorporated his later archival and other findings). His public disillusion with the British government, and with Eden as a statesman, was certainly apparent in a speech he gave at the Reform Club only a few months before his death in 2007 when he argued that Eden had undermined the charter of the United Nations as well as the principles of parliamentary government in Britain. Books such as this one are interesting precisely because they have an argument and weigh evidence, but there is a third and final reason why Kyle’s work remains of contemporary as well as historical interest. He is
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concerned with the reasons why governments intervene and when intervention might be justified. Throughout he clearly writes from an anti-interventionist outlook. But he is also willing to challenge assumptions. British military forces were not as incompetent as critics assumed at the time. What might have happened had the British invasion been a success? British military power was by no means negligible. British forces were still effective in colonial or quasi-colonial circumstances. The intervention might well have succeeded with clearer direction, a better timetable, and more coordination with French and Israeli allies. British troops could certainly have captured all of the canal had they not been stopped in their tracks half-way when the United States threatened economic warfare against the British government. The dynamic of the invasion might have led the British to take Cairo. They might have turned the clock back to 1882 and found themselves in another occupation of Egypt. The possibility of successful intervention makes for chilling comparison with the recent American invasion of Iraq. How might the British have managed Egypt after reoccupation? There was no advance speculation. A plan did not exist. Perhaps they were lucky that the US government demanded cessation – another curious conjuncture of unanticipated and unique circumstances, the very stuff of interlocking intricacies that Kyle explores with incisive and clear detail. Wm. Roger Louis Kerr Chair in English History and Culture and Distinguished Teaching Professor The University of Texas at Austin 2010
Afterword
Suez was Keith Kyle’s masterpiece. It blended all his remarkable array of gifts: his formidable scholarship which was the product of his natural curiosity; his journalism-honed word power; that exquisite courtesy which translated into a polite questioning that no insider witness could resist however much they meant to. And the sum of these gifts was so much greater than the parts. It dawned on me during this year after the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War that Keith’s Suez is the inquiry we never had into that extraordinarily significant affair. We may have had to wait 35 years between the ending of the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt for Keith’s audit to appear. But he was to Suez what Oliver Franks was to the Falklands and Robin Butler and John Chilcot are to Iraq. Few books can make such a claim but I would certainly make it for Keith. The man and the subject were met. It is a book that will endure. Peter Hennessy, FBA Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History Queen Mary, University of London 2010
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