The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (154 page)

¹⁹
See W. R. Louis,
Imperialism at Bay
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), chs. 32–5.

²⁰
As Salisbury had put it to Eden in a letter of 6 Nov. 1952, Salisbury Papers (Hatfield House). Salisbury elaborated on this theme in another letter written in 1953: ‘The United Nations has become little more than a machine for enabling backward nations to press claims against the great powers to which they would normally not be entitled … As a result, I sadly fear that the strain that is put upon it may eventually kill the institution altogether, which would be a thousand pities.’ Salisbury to Eden, Personal, 18 Oct. 1953, Salisbury Papers.

²¹
Salisbury to Eden, 27 Aug. 1956, PREM 11/1100.

²²
For Lloyd see D. R. Thorpe,
Selwyn Lloyd
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1989); and Lloyd’s own substantial and valuable record, Selwyn Lloyd,
Suez 1956: A Personal Account
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1978).

²³
Largely because of Hammarskjöld’s persistence, these six principles were drawn up at a meeting of the foreign ministers of Egypt, France, and Britain on 12 Oct. 1956. This summary of the principles is from Urquhart,
Hammarskjold
, 167–8. The full text may be found in the version that was formally adopted the following day as SC Res. 118 of 13 Oct. 1956.

²⁴
The Times
, 13 Oct. 1956.

²⁵
For this side of the story see especially Avi Shlaim, ‘The Protocol of Sèvres, 1956: Anatomy of a War Plot’,
International Affairs 73, no. 3 (1997).

²⁶
See D. A. Farnie,
East and West of Suez: The Suez Canal in History, 1854–1956
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 726–7. See also especially Kennett Love,
Suez: The Twice-Fought War
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 421–4.

²⁷
Eden MS. Diary, 12 Sep. 1956, Eden Papers AP 20/1/32 (Birmingham University Library).

²⁸
The diary entries by Harold Macmillan reveal Eden’s uncertainty as well as his ambivalent attitude to the United Nations. In Macmillan’s impression, Eden uttered the phrase about taking the issue to the Security Council only after he became ‘a little rattled’. A few days earlier Macmillan had written: ‘To use force
without
going to the Security Council is really almost better than to use it
after
the Council has passed a resolution against it.’ According to Macmillan’s discerning interpretation of the British dilemma, Eden wavered indecisively and stumbled into the statement in the midst of conflicting pressures of the Parliamentary debate. Macmillan MS. Diary entries 10–13 Sep. 1956. (Macmillan Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.)

²⁹
See Piers Dixon,
Double Diploma: The Life of Sir Pierson Dixon – Don and Diplomat
(London: Hutchinson, 1968).

³⁰
D. W. Brogan, in
The Spectator
, 30 Nov. 1956.

³¹
Macmillan MS. Diary, 19 May 1962.

³²
For two slightly different but complementary accounts, Henry Cabot Lodge,
The Storm Has Many Eyes
(New York: Norton, 1973), 130–1, and Dixon,
Double Diploma
, 263–4.

³³
See Edward Johnson, ‘The Diplomats’ Diplomat’,
Contemporary British History
13, no. 2 (Summer 1999), 193.

³⁴
FRUS 1955–7, Vol. XVI, quoted in an editorial note 841.

³⁵
Minute by Dixon, 23 Jan. 1952, FO 371/96920.

³⁶
The phrase is Brian Urquhart’s in
Hammarskjold
, 173.

³⁷
Dixon,
Double Diploma
, 265.

³⁸
US Mission at the United Nations to State Department, Secret, 30 Oct. 1956, FRUS 1955–7, vol. XVI, 859.

³⁹
Dixon to FO, 30 Oct. 1956, FO 371/121746, quoted in Johnson, ‘Diplomats’ Diplomat’, 182.

⁴⁰
Paul Johnson,
The Suez War
(London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957), 95. On the other hand, Robert Rhodes James correctly points out in a note about Johnson’s book that more than half of the British public supported the Suez military operation. (Robert Rhodes James,
Anthony Eden
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), 555.) Those in favour of the war were not necessarily anti-United Nations, though there was a hard-core group of Members of Parliament including Julian Amery and the Suez group who could certainly be described as hostile, not least because of the belief, accurate enough, that the United Nations would increasingly interfere in the affairs of the British Empire.

⁴¹
New Statesman
, 3 Nov. 1956.

⁴²
SC Res. 119 of 31 Oct. 1956. This was the first time since the Korean War that the ‘Uniting for Peace’ procedure was invoked to call an emergency session of the General Assembly. Only four days later it was used again with regard to the Soviet use of force in Hungary (SC Res. 120 of 4 Nov. 1956). The ‘Uniting for Peace’ procedure has been used eight more times since then.

⁴³
GA Res. 997 (ES-1) of 2 Nov. 1956.

⁴⁴
Dixon Diary entry for 7 Jan. 1957,
Double Diploma
, 277.

⁴⁵
Leonard Mosley,
Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network
(New York: Dial Press, 1978), 422.

⁴⁶
Finer,
Dulles Over Suez
, 394–6.

⁴⁷
Joseph P. Lash,
Dag Hammarskjold: Custodian of the Brushfire Peace
(Garden City, NY: Double-Day, 1961), 83.

⁴⁸
Dixon’s telegrams to the Foreign Office during these critical days are in FO 371/121746 and FO 371/121747. On the point of expulsion, see Bertjan Verbeek,
Decision-Making in Great Britain during the Suez Crisis
(Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2003), 122.

⁴⁹
D.R. Thorpe,
Eden: The Life and Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon, 1897–1977
(London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), 526. On Eden’s television broadcast see especially Tony Shaw,
Eden, Suez, and the Mass Media: Propaganda and Persuasion during the Suez Crisis
(London: Tauris, 1996), 141.

⁵⁰
For example John Coulson of the British Embassy in Washington wrote on 2 Nov. 1956: ‘It was naturally particularly galling to the Americans … that we should have chosen to cooperate with the French, a country for which they have the greatest contempt and whose policy they consider to be largely to blame for events in the Arab world. Our denials will never catch up with the belief that we and the French conspired with the Israelis to bring this incident about, and we are bound to suffer from the suspicion of deep, if not double, dealing.’ J. E. Coulson to Harold Beeley, Confidential, 2 Nov. 1956, FO 371/121794.

⁵¹
A Canadian resolution for the setting up of an ‘emergency international United Nations Force’ was passed by the General Assembly in the early hours of Sunday 4 Nov. 1956 as GA Res. 998 (ES-1). Subsequent resolutions, such as GA Res. 1001 (ES-1) of 7 Nov. 1956, added concreteness and detail to the proposal.

⁵²
For the Canadians and the creation of the UN peacekeeping force, see especially Michael G. Fry, ‘Canada, the North Atlantic Triangle, and the United Nations’, in Louis and Owen,
Suez 1956.
For the United Nations, chs. 7 and 8 in Urquhart,
Hammarskjold
, are the best account.

⁵³
For example: on 30 October 1956 in a conversation with the French Ambassador Hervé Alphand, Dulles stated ‘that in his opinion there was no difference between Anglo-French intervention at Suez and the utilization of the Soviet army against the civilian population of Budapest’. In protest, Alphand thereupon got up to leave. Dulles then ‘modified’ the accusation to assuage him. (FRUS 1955–7, Vol. XVI, 868 n. 3.) On the other hand, the Editor of the
Sunday Times
, H. V. Hodson, who was in the United States at the time, wrote in a balanced comment that would have applied to Dulles and Eisenhower as well as the American public: ‘Americans are an emotional people and sentiment against Britain and France may flare; but it will take more than this to turn the people against the Anglo-American alliance.’
Sunday Times
, 6 Nov. 1956.

⁵⁴
New Statesman
, 10 Nov. 1956.

⁵⁵
See
The Storm Has Many Eyes
, 131, which records that, as early as 30 October during the air attack on Port Said, Dixon said to Cabot Lodge that if the bombing continued ‘he personally would resign’.

⁵⁶
Dixon to FO, Emergency Secret, 3 Nov. 1956, FO 371/121747.

⁵⁷
Dixon to FO, Emergency Secret, 5 Nov. 1956, FO 371/121748. Dixon’s telegram is printed in full in Richard Lamb,
The Failure of the Eden Government
(London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1987), 265–6.

⁵⁸
Hansard, vol. 560, 75.

⁵⁹
Double Diploma
, 278.

⁶⁰
Dixon to FO, Emergency Secret, 5 Nov. 1956, FO 371/121748.

⁶¹
Dixon to FO, Secret, 16 Dec. 1956, FO 800/743. On the other hand, Brian Urquhart, who worked under Hammarskjöld at the United Nations, regards Dixon’s account as exaggerated, perhaps revealing more about Dixon himself than about Hammarskjöld: ‘To one who worked with Hammarskjöld throughout his time at the UN, his “bursting into tears” in the presence of Dixon seems so out of character that I find it virtually impossible to believe … Dixon’s story allows him to patronize the “strange” Swedish intellectual to whom the British were so deeply in debt.’ Brian Urquhart, ‘Disaster: From Suez to Iraq’,
New York Review of Books
54, no. 5 (2007).

⁶²
Dixon to Kirkpatrick, Secret, 22 Dec. 1956, FO 371/119189.

⁶³
Dixon to FO, Secret, 16 Dec. 1956, FO 800/743.

⁶⁴
Dixon to Kirkpatrick, Secret, 22 Dec. 1956, FO 371/119189. Dixon’s attempt to correct the perspective was as close as he came in reflecting on the causes of the Suez crisis. In this regard one of the more searching contemporary comments came from the pen of Sir William Strang (Kirkpa-trick’s predecessor as Permanent Under-Secretary): ‘The Western world is now paying the price for the Balfour Declaration and all that flowed therefrom’.
Sunday Times
, 18 Nov. 1956.

⁶⁵
For example, the perceptive comment by Peter Unwin: ‘The final, fatal Soviet decision to intervene … was forty per cent caused by developments in Hungary itself, forty per cent by the impact of those developments on the domestic concerns of the Soviet Union, China and the satellites, and twenty per cent by Suez.’ Peter Unwin,
1956: Power Defied
(Norwich: Russell, 2006), 216.

⁶⁶
Urquhart,
Hammarskjold
, 194.

⁶⁷
UNEF itself was non-neutral in the sense of monitoring the withdrawal of foreign troops from Egypt but neutral in the sense of remaining as impartial as possible. It came as a jolt to the British to be excluded from the peacekeeping mission, indeed not even to be provided with what Harold Macmillan called a ‘fig-leaf’ to conceal abject withdrawal. For a useful discussion of these points, see Neil Briscoe,
Britain and UN Peacekeeping, 1948–67
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), esp. 47, 84.

^*
This chapter benefited from research assistance from Sarah Atwood, Benjamin Tortolani, and from prior research undertaken by Feryal Cherif.

¹
Readers who are inclined to believe that pressure from the press is limited to the contemporary CNN era would do well to read Dean Acheson’s accounts of press pressure on US negotiators around the question of the transfer of the British mandate for Palestine to the UN. Dean Acheson,
Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department
(New York: Norton, 1969).

²
See also David Malone and James Cockayne’s discussion of Iraq in
Chapter 17
.

³
Acheson,
Present at the Creation
, 171.

⁴
Acheson,
Present at the Creation
, 181.

⁵
GA Res. 106 (S–I) of 15 May 1947.

⁶
Brian Urquhart,
Ralph Bunche: An American Life
(New York: Norton, 1993), 153.

⁷
Abba Salomon Eban,
An Autobiography
(New York: Random House, 1977), 99.

⁸
GA Res. 181 of 29 Nov. 1947. While the Commission was established by the General Assembly, it reported to the Security Council.

⁹
Urquhart,
Bunche: A Life
, 154.

¹⁰
SC Res. 48 of 23 Apr. 1948.

¹¹
GA Res. 186 of 14 May 1948.

¹²
Kati Marton,
A Death in Jerusalem
(New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996).

¹³
SC Res. 50 of 29 May 1948.

¹⁴
Urquhart notes that the principles set out by Bunche to guide the operation of UNTSO – consent, neutrality, etc. – hold to this day: Urquhart,
Bunche: A Life.

¹⁵
SC Res. 54 of 15 July 1948.

¹⁶
The Bernadotte plan was fiercely opposed by the State of Israel: Eban,
An Autobiography.

¹⁷
According to Urquhart
(Bunche: A Life, n.
56), Abba Eban, then serving as Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, credited the success of the Rhodes Armistice arrangements to Bunche’s realization that each Arab party should be treated differently through separate negotiations with Israel, rather than through an all-together process.