Two New Books Spotlight the History and Consequences of the Suez Crisis
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Version 0 of 1. Below, David Frum’s review of “Ike’s Gamble,” followed by Evan Thomas’s review of “Blood and Sand.” IKE’S GAMBLEAmerica’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle EastBy Michael Doran292 pp. Free Press. $28. Reviewed by David Frum This book is subversively revisionist history with sharp relevance to the present. Listen to whether this tale is familiar. A new administration comes to power, convinced that its predecessor has made a hash of Middle East policy. The new team’s big idea: a bold diplomatic overture to the region’s leading Muslim state. True, that leading Muslim state has a bad habit of sponsoring terrorism and threatening important allies. But the new team believes that much of this bad behavior is a response to provocations by the West and by Israel. Anyway, like it or not, the troublesome Muslim state represents the future, its local enemies outdated legacies of the past. By squeezing Israel and other allies for concessions, the United States could prove its own good faith — and get on the right side of history. This strategic perception gripped its believers so strongly that such terms as “worldview” fail to do it justice. Its proponents “regarded it not as an intellectual construct but as a description of reality itself.” Barack Obama and the ayatollahs’ Iran? Yes. But before that, Dwight Eisenhower and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. The gamble of “Ike’s Gamble,” by Michael Doran, is the determined wooing of Nasser by the Eisenhower administration over its first four years in office. Why that gamble failed is the urgently timely question answered by this deeply researched, tightly argued and accessibly concise book. Hoping to stabilize the region, Doran argues, Eisenhower instead convulsed it. Seeking to assuage radicals, his administration instead empowered them. Doran, a senior director of the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration and now at the Hudson Institute, is a leading expert on radical ideologies of the Middle East. He writes with the authority of the scholar and the familiarity of the senior policy adviser. In 1953, most of the Middle East was ruled by cautious, Western-aligned leaders who had come to power after World War I. They were backed by British military power. British troops protected the Suez Canal, through which oil from the Persian Gulf, also British-protected, moved to European markets. This inherited order began to dissolve in 1952. That summer, a group of nationalist military officers overthrew Egypt’s monarchy. They reviled the government for its failure to destroy Israel, and for a too-cozy relationship with Britain and the West. Although only a colonel at the time of the coup, Nasser soon emerged as the new regime’s dominant personality. The Eisenhower administration relied on the advice of officials who admired Nasser as a nationalist and anti-Communist: a secular modernizer, the long hoped-for “Arab Ataturk.” The most important and forceful of the Nasser admirers was Kermit Roosevelt, the C.I.A. officer who had done so much in 1953 to restore to power in Iran that other secular modernizer, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. To befriend Nasser, the Eisenhower administration suggested a big increase in economic and military aid; pressed Israel to surrender much of the Negev to Egypt and Jordan; supported Nasser’s demand that the British military vacate the canal zone; and clandestinely provided Nasser with much of the equipment — and many of the technical experts — who built his radio station Voice of the Arabs into the most influential propaganda network in the Arab-speaking world. Yet each of these overtures produced only grief — as Eisenhower himself soon came to learn. Offers of aid were leveraged by Nasser to extract better terms from the Soviet Union, his preferred military partner. Pressure on Israel did not impress Nasser, who wanted a permanent crisis he could exploit to mobilize Arab opinion behind him. Forcing Britain out of the canal zone in the mid-50s enabled Nasser to grab the canal itself in 1956. Rather than use his radio network to warn Arabs against Communism, Nasser employed it to inflame Arab opinion against the West’s most reliable regional allies, the Hashemite monarchies, helping to topple Iraq’s regime in 1958 and very nearly finishing off Jordan’s. Bluntly put: Nasser had duped Eisenhower. “Nasser proved to be a complete stumbling block,” Eisenhower confided to his diary as his Arab-Israeli peace efforts failed. “He is apparently seeking to be acknowledged as the political leader of the Arab world.” He has concluded “he should just make speeches, all of which breathe defiance of Israel.” Eisenhower left office with anti-American regimes in power not only in Cairo, but also in Damascus and Baghdad. Eisenhower’s humiliation of Britain and France in the Suez crisis of November 1956 weakened two allies — without gaining an iota of good will from Arab nationalists. Rather than cooperate with the United States against the Soviet Union, the Arab world’s new nationalist strongmen were transfixed by their rivalries with one another. It was instead formerly despised Israel that emerged not only as America’s most reliable ally but also as far and away the region’s most capable military power. “I never should have pressured Israel to evacuate the Sinai,” Eisenhower lamented in 1965. He endorsed Israel’s pre-emptive Six Day War of 1967 in an interview a few weeks after the fighting. As an enriched and empowered Iran becomes more aggressive abroad and more repressive at home, will such regrets eventually haunt President Obama too? That may depend more on the personality of the president than any external event. Eisenhower was a pragmatist in the strictest philosophical sense: someone who judges the truth of theories according to their success or failure in practice. He came to office holding one view of the Middle East. When that view failed, he discarded it in favor of another. But pragmatism of that kind is a very unusual trait, and especially unusual in politicians. Eisenhower may have rethought his gamble on Nasser. The subordinates who executed the policy, however, insisted to the end that any failure was somebody else’s fault. Their self-justifications have reverberated into journalism and history. “The ‘inside story’ of the Eisenhower administration’s Middle East policy,” Doran writes, “comes to us not from Eisenhower and Dulles but from . . . the very men . . . who were most personally invested in the courtship of Nasser, and who fought against all efforts to abandon it. . . . Muscular Western policies, we learn, will almost always backfire.” With only a very few edits and updates, this mode of analysis will serve marvelously to excuse any disappointments in the Iran legacy the current generation of policy makers may leave behind. Here’s the lesson that Doran wishes they would learn instead: the error of the belief “that distancing the United States from Israel would win the good will of all Arabs, and especially the Egyptians.” This belief “prevented them from recognizing the deepest drivers of the Arab and Muslim states, namely their rivalries with each other for power and authority.” Americans wish to solve problems — and they are accordingly always quick to assume that problems must have solutions. Does a nation express grievances against the United States? Mollify them with concessions and compromises. Do the grievances sound irrational? Begin a process of trust-building that can lead to more fruitful dialogue. Do they traffic in imperial fantasies and threats of genocidal violence? Downplay those as overheated rhetoric for domestic consumption. After all, that’s how Americans behave. And isn’t everybody on earth fundamentally like us? Not so much, Doran warns. “The Middle East is in the throes of an historical crisis, a prolonged period of instability. American policy can exacerbate or ameliorate the major conflicts, but . . . in the Middle East, it is prudent to assume that the solution to every problem will inevitably generate new problems. Like Sisyphus, the United States has no choice but to push the boulder up a hill whose pinnacle remains forever out of reach.” Doran’s profoundly humbling message will not be very welcome to ambitious policy makers of any political stripe. For that reason, it is all the more valuable as the Obama administration leaves office unchastened by adverse experience — and its potential successors assess the grim options they inherit. David Frum, a senior editor at The Atlantic and chairman of the British think tank Policy Exchange, was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush in 2001-02. ◆ ◆ ◆ BLOOD AND SANDSuez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for PeaceBy Alex von TunzelmannIllustrated. 534 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $32.50. Reviewed by Evan Thomas In the mid-19th century, the historian Thomas Carlyle popularized the Great Man Theory, arguing that history was made by the heroism of soldiers and statesmen. The Great Man Theory has long since been junked by academics, if not popular historians. The course of history, the scholars say, owes more to impersonal forces and serendipity than to the efforts of some dead white males. That is true enough, but from time to time, at critical instances, great men have made a difference, for better or for worse. The Suez crisis of 1956 was one of the moments. It began as a last gasp of colonialism, a plot by Britain and France, working with Israel, to reclaim the Suez Canal, recently nationalized by Egypt. The scheme was the fruit of human folly, principally and most notably that of the British prime minister, Anthony Eden. The grand conspiracy was doomed to fail. The canal was blocked for months, causing a crippling oil shortage in Europe. The Arab-Israeli conflict worsened, and the Muslim world was inflamed against its old overlords in the West with lasting consequences. The botched invasion occurred just as the Soviet Union was crushing a rebellion in Hungary, its Eastern bloc satellite. When the Kremlin, seeing the opportunity to divert international attention from its own outrages, issued a letter widely interpreted as a threat to attack London and Paris with nuclear weapons, the great powers seemed for an instant to be lurching toward World War III. The turmoil and danger created by the Suez crisis and the Hungarian rebellion have largely faded from popular memory. With “Blood and Sand,” Alex von Tunzelmann, an Oxford-educated historian with an eye for human detail as well as a sure-handed grasp of the larger picture, does a marvelous job of recreating the tension and bungling that swept up Cairo, London, Moscow, Budapest, Paris and Washington during the harrowing two weeks of Oct. 22 to Nov. 6, 1956. The background of the crisis was complex, and some readers may get slightly dizzy as the author corkscrews back in time from her gripping narrative. But the ultimate reward is a deeper understanding of the forces at work, as well as a wild ride down a zigzag trail left by the flailing of men with bloated and broken egos. Von Tunzelmann begins her yarn with an arresting anecdote related by Anthony Nutting, a minister in the British Foreign Office. It was March 1956, and Nutting had been working on a plan to lessen the influence of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic president of postcolonial Egypt. Interrupted at dinner at the Savoy Hotel, Nutting took a call from Prime Minister Eden. “What’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or ‘neutralizing’ him, as you call it?” Eden said, shouting over the phone. “I want him murdered, can’t you understand?” Nutting (in his own telling) began to protest but Eden insisted: “I don’t want an alternative. And I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt.” Then the prime minister hung up. Eden is a tragic if rather unappealing figure in von Tunzelmann’s account. Bred to his class at Eton and Oxford, he looked the part of a perfect gentleman. He took first-class honors in Persian and Arabic at Oxford, and during his career at the Foreign Office, he had shown sensitivity to the emergence of nationalism in the Middle East. He had served bravely on the Western Front in World War I and capably as Winston Churchill’s foreign secretary during World War II. But he was not well. “His flashes of temper and fragile nerves led some to wonder about his genetic inheritance,” von Tunzelmann writes. “His baronet father had been such an extreme eccentric — complete with episodes of ‘uncontrolled rages,’ falling to the floor, biting carpets and hurling flowerpots through plate-glass windows — that even the Wodehousian society of early-20th-century upper-class England had noticed something was up.” As prime minister, Sir Anthony took to calling ministers in the middle of the night to ask if they had read a particular newspaper article. “My nerves are already at breaking point,” he told his civil servants. In October 1956, he collapsed physically for a few days. According to one of his closest aides, he used amphetamines as well as heavy painkillers, and a Whitehall official said he was “practically living on Benzedrine.” He was obsessed with Egypt’s Nasser, the leader of a group of nationalist army officers who had deposed the pro-British monarchy in 1952 and seized the British- and French-controlled Suez Canal in July 1956. About two-thirds of Europe’s oil was transported through the canal; Nasser had his “thumb on our windpipe,” Eden fumed. Eden made Nasser “a scapegoat for all his problems: the sinking empire, the sluggish economy, the collapse of his reputation within his party and his dwindling popularity in the country at large,” von Tunzelmann writes. Resentment sharpened into vendetta. Over the summer and fall, Eden concocted a cockamamie scheme, called Operation Musketeer, to stage an Israeli invasion of Egypt, followed by an Anglo-French peacekeeping force for the “protection” of the canal. The Israeli and French conspirators had their own foolish reasons for going along; significantly, the United States was kept in the dark. Fortunately, when the crisis broke, Eden’s recklessness was foiled by the calm resolve of the American president, Dwight Eisenhower. Genial in public and so fond of golf that he installed a putting green outside the Oval Office, Eisenhower was easy to underestimate. But having liberated Western Europe as supreme allied commander and seen firsthand the waste of war, he was determined as president to keep the United States out of armed conflict. He also had an “instinctive sympathy with the postcolonial predicament,” von Tunzelmann writes. Eisenhower was not always well served by the rhetoric of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles or the machinations of his brother, Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence. And Eisenhower had a temper. “Bombs, by God,” he shouted when the British began striking Egyptian air fields. “What does Anthony think he’s doing? Why is he doing this to me?” But Eisenhower was shrewd and he could be coldly calculating. Understanding that the British would need to buy American oil, he quietly put Britain into a financial squeeze, forcing Eden to back off the invasion. Eisenhower was also, unusually for an American president, willing to say no to Israel. The Suez crisis blew up just as America went to the polls to vote on a second term for the president. His staff secretary, Andrew Goodpaster, recorded: “In this matter, he does not care in the slightest whether he is re-elected or not. He feels we must make good on our word [to defend Egypt]. He added that he did not really think the American people would throw him out in the middle of a situation like this, but if they did, so be it.” When others were losing their heads, Eisenhower kept his. Though never explicitly stated, the take-away from von Tunzelmann’s book is obvious: When it comes to national leadership in chaotic times, temperament matters. Which makes her book not only exciting and satisfying but also timely. Evan Thomas, the author of “Ike’s Bluff” and “Being Nixon,” is working on an authorized biography of Sandra Day O’Connor. |