The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (103 page)

The reaction in London was frustration and rage. From the Cairo embassy came a bitter reflection on the futility of continuing the search for agreement. Even if one were made, wrote Robin Hankey, then in charge at the embassy, it was highly doubtful that the Egyptians would honour it. ‘If after making the new defence agreement we are held in the same utter contempt as we seem to have been since the Sudan Agreement, no favourable outcome in the Canal Zone can conceivably be hoped for’.
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The agreement, anyway, was most unlikely to be renewed and ‘may well be turned into a farce before its expiry’. In Hankey's grim view, ‘the effect…on our position in the other Arab countries and on our whole position in the Mediterranean, in the Persian Gulf and in the Indian Ocean would be incalculable…it would far surpass the effect of Abadan or Palestine’.
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Churchill's impatience now boiled over. He had carefully distanced himself from Eden's diplomacy and what he called ‘your treaty’. He was much more receptive than Eden had been to the flouts and jibes of the ‘Suez Group’, the forty-one Conservative MPs led by Charles Waterhouse and Julian Amery who opposed evacuation, and may even have hinted at his private approval. As the Queen's first minister, he did not wish to preside over the liquidation of the Suez Canal base, that great symbol of empire. Like Hankey, he feared that, once a withdrawal began, it would become a rout. Then ‘many in our own party will be able to say “I told you so”, and the others will mock’. Churchill's solution was to make a clean break but exact a revenge: to redeploy British troops to bases elsewhere in the region, but send reinforcements to Khartoum. Egypt would thus forfeit its Sudanese prize. Once this was done, ‘all the Conservative troubles here would be quenched…There is no alternative except a prolonged humiliating scuttle before all the world’.
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Eden rejected this view completely. To leave the Canal Zone without an agreement would be ‘less satisfactory from the point of view of our continuing authority in the Middle East’.
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This was his real concern. He had told Churchill earlier that a unilateral withdrawal posed considerable risks. ‘It could be very damaging to our whole reputation and position if it looked like running away…It could destroy all hope of maintaining our position in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.’
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Nor would it help matters to arouse the suspicions of Sudanese nationalists that London meant to renege on the promises made in the Sudan agreement. Like his officials in Cairo, Eden was inclined to lay much of the blame for Egyptian intransigence on American disloyalty and their tacit subversion of British prestige. ‘The American position over Egypt becomes increasingly unhelpful’, he minuted bitterly. ‘The Americans will have no friends left if they go on in this way.’
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What was becoming uncomfortably obvious was that without American backing there was little that could drive the Egyptians to sign. Lord Salisbury, Eden's stand-in during his long illness in 1953, had made the point bluntly. ‘If we reach an agreement with Egypt’, he told the Cabinet in July 1953, ‘it will…be essential that the Americans underwrite such an agreement if there is to be any prospect of the Egyptians keeping it.’
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Churchill now pressed Eisenhower to refuse the Egyptians economic aid until they agreed on a treaty, but the reply was guarded. How far, Eisenhower asked, was Britain willing to go to support American efforts to isolate ‘the bloody Chinese aggressor’ and oppose its admission into the United Nations?
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Had not the British been happy to trade with China? The implication was obvious. Perhaps it was this that occasioned Eden's anti-American outburst.

He had little choice, however, but to rehearse to his colleagues the urgency of reaching some kind of agreement: ‘If we do not succeed, we are in a bad position.’
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Failure would mean the more or less rapid erosion of Britain's Arab prestige. It would reduce Britain's claim on the support of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. And, if the Suez base were simply abandoned, it would be almost impossible to persuade British opinion to accept other commitments in the Middle East. When the Chiefs of Staff weighed in with a warning that a withdrawal agreement was of the ‘utmost importance’, a subtle change could be seen coming over the British approach. However useful the Canal base might be in a general war (now thought less likely), it was more important to get out – to save money, men and morale. Indeed, in the spring and summer of 1954, geostrategic change suggested that the base was now of secondary value at best. Its exposure to air attack was greatly enhanced – or so it was argued – by the advent of the hydrogen bomb. Secondly, the strategic defence of the Middle East was conceived more and more in terms of the ‘Northern Tier’ states – Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan – backed up by the use of tactical nuclear weapons and local air bases: the drift of American thinking since mid-1953. What mattered most to the British was a dignified exit from the Canal Zone and (increasingly) reassurance that their use of the Canal would not be affected by a military withdrawal. When the Americans promised to delay any aid until Egypt signed up, and Nasser let it be known that an attack on Turkey would permit reactivation of the base, a light seemed to glint at the end of the tunnel. But clinching the deal seemed as elusive as ever. In Cairo, General Neguib was first removed as the leader of the Revolutionary Command Council and then restored. The transfer of power to civilian rule and a return to party politics were promised and rescinded within a matter of days.
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It was only during April that Nasser's authority seemed firmly established. The British still fretted over how to present the concessions they were now willing to make (the use of civilian labour to service the base) and how to ensure that, with no military presence, the Egyptians could be held to their promise to maintain the base and respect free transit through the Canal. Churchill and Eden now agreed (Eden with some show of reluctance) to seek more explicit American help. At the Washington conference in June (mainly taken up with discussion of Churchill's scheme for a summit conference with the Russians), Dulles and Eisenhower gave the vital assurance: Nasser would be told that all American aid would depend on his keeping the promises made in a treaty.
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The British agreed to give way on the uniforms question. Within three weeks, the ‘heads of agreement’ had been signed in Cairo. The British would pull out completely over the course of twenty months (by June 1956), leaving civilian contractors to look after the base. They could use the base to help defend either Turkey or an Arab state from attack. But the treaty would last (as Nasser insisted) not twenty years but seven.

It is an intriguing question as to what persuaded Churchill to give his reluctant assent to the retreat he disliked. In his public defence he stressed the impact of the new H-bomb as making the Canal base redundant. But, if that were the reason, as a Tory critic remarked later, why was so much of the treaty concerned with its future use?
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In the Cabinet discussion, there is more than a hint that the H-bomb was a rabbit pulled out of the hat: it gave Churchill the escape route that he (and the government) needed, dousing (for the moment) the smouldering backbench rebellion. Churchill may also have wanted to clear the decks for his real ambition – the summit with Stalin's successors. The more interesting question is what the agreement meant for Britain's Middle Eastern position – the main justification that Eden advanced. Leaving the base was meant to give Britain's regional
imperium
a new lease of life, not to signal a general retreat. It did not turn out like that.

In fact, the Canal base agreement embodied a transfer of power as important as any that was made in the retreat from empire after 1945, with the single exception of the withdrawal from India. This was veiled at the time from the makers of policy (although not from their critics). They averted their eyes from the three critical factors that governed the course and outcome of their diplomatic ordeal. The first was the change in the nature of Egyptian politics. Disillusioned with the Wafd and the king, the British were not unsympathetic to the military rulers who replaced them. Nasser, they thought, was a ‘realist’ and honest. The political turmoil of 1952–4 made it harder to see that the chaos and corruption of ‘liberal’ Egypt was making way for an authoritarian regime driven restlessly forward by populist nationalism and geopolitical ambition. The Canal base agreement was its ticket to power. The British liked to think that Nasser would be a new Ataturk, the Turkish strong man with whom they had come to amicable terms after 1922. Nasser, they thought, would follow the Ataturk model, and devote his political energy to internal reform. It was a drastic misjudgment. The second great shift may have been easier to see but harder to acknowledge. Again and again the men on the spot had complained that their efforts to make the Egyptians see reason had been frustrated by the nods and winks of the American ambassador, Jefferson Caffery. At a much higher level, the British were dimly aware that Washington was pursuing a different agenda, that they could not match its promise of aid, and that without American backing the treaty they sought would be hard to achieve and worse to enforce. The Canal base agreement was a silent reminder that British authority now needed the weight of American power, and was unlikely to flourish without its support. The third was the change from Egypt to Iraq as the strategic pivot of the British position. The growing importance of the ‘Northern Tier’ states (Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan) as the main barrier to a Soviet advance had helped to devalue the Canal base and ease the pangs of the British withdrawal. It made the British now eager to build up Iraq as the main Arab component of a new Middle Eastern alliance, and to attach as many Arab states as they could to what became known as the ‘Baghdad Pact’
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of which they themselves would also be members. This would be the new platform of their Middle Eastern position: an Arab ‘bloc’ of which the ‘Hashemite’ kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan and the Syrian Republic (domination of Syria was an old Hashemite aim) would be the core members. But, between the Hashemite kings and the Iraq ‘strong man’ Nuri as-Said on the one hand, and Nasser on the other, there was little love lost. Both claimed the leadership of the Arab world. Thus the curious sequel to the British agreement with Nasser was their strategic partnership with his bitterest enemies.

In earlier times the British might have laughed at Cairo's annoyance. But now they could not afford to do so. An intelligence briefing in late 1954 spelt out their dilemma. The political threat from the Soviet Union, declared the Joint Intelligence Committee, could be intensified at any time and no Arab state had the means to resist it any more than it could beat off a military assault. British help was needed, but ‘xenophobia is endemic in the Middle East as a whole’, while the end of the Raj ‘had undermined confidence’ that British power would be used to restrain or protect the Middle East countries’.
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Britain's position was not getting easier; it was now more precarious. But its stake in the region seemed greater than ever: the Western interest in excluding Soviet influence; the British need to be seen as the West's regional guardian; and Britain's share of the oil industry, much of it located in northern Iraq. In April 1955, Eden, now at last prime minister, committed Britain to the Baghdad Pact and to building a new Arab alliance. Nasser's riposte was not long in coming. By the following September he had arranged to buy arms from the Soviet bloc and break the embargo that the West had imposed. The Soviet entrée had begun in earnest. Nasser's prestige and Egypt's military power were now certain to grow. Nasser proclaimed himself champion of the pan-Arab cause and denounced Britain's friends as betrayers and toadies. The Baghdad Pact was a ‘relic of colonialism’. Whether Iraq, Britain's main Arab ally, and its tight oligarchic regime under Nuri as-Said, would survive the political storm seemed uncertain at best. ‘If we lose Egypt’, minuted the British official in charge of Middle East policy, ‘we shall lose the rest of the Arab World.’
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This was the setting in which the British began their ‘descent to Suez’.

The stages passed in rapid succession. By October, the British had begun to fret over their oil supplies if Soviet influence and Egyptian hostility continued to grow. ‘Our interests’, said Eden (in what proved to be a prophetic phrase),

were greater than those of the United States because of our dependence on Middle East oil, and our experience in the area was greater than theirs. We should not…allow ourselves to be restricted overmuch by reluctance to act without full American concurrence and support. We should frame our own policy in the light of our interests in the area.
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In December, Nasser, with Saudi support, raised an outcry in Jordan and blocked the kingdom's accession to the Baghdad Pact. The British were furious. In March 1956, while the British Foreign Secretary was actually visiting Cairo, the British commander of the Jordanian army, General John Glubb, was dismissed – a move widely (but wrongly) attributed to Nasser's machinations. In the same month, Plan Alpha, the Anglo-American effort to draw Nasser into peace negotiations with Israel and lance the boil of anti-Western feeling, broke down completely. Today, recorded Evelyn Shuckburgh, head of the Foreign Office's Middle East department on 8 March, ‘we and the Americans really gave up hope of Nasser and began to look round for means of destroying him’.
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For Eden, especially, the destruction of Nasser had become a priority. ‘It's either him or us, don't forget that’, he said.
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But, as the British pondered how to isolate Nasser, events in the region spun out of control. When the United States blocked the funds for the Aswan High Dam, Nasser's grand project, his response was even more daring than the Soviet arms deal. On 26 July, with all British troops safely out of the Canal Zone, he nationalised the Suez Canal Company, an Anglo-French enterprise with a substantial British government holding. It was an astonishing move. It seemed to prove beyond doubt that his ultimate aim was to drive Britain out of the Arab world bag and baggage.