A misguided faith in force
LONDON
WHEN BRITONS reflect on conflicts past, the war of choice is World War II when plucky Britain stood alone against the might of Hitler -- their finest hour as Winston Churchill called it -- a war in which the British and their come-lately Allies finally prevailed.
Britons would rather forget their disastrous last gasp of empire 11 years after that victory: the invasion of Suez, the 50th anniversary of which is now upon them. Anthony Eden, the British prime minister at that time, had come to regard Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser as an implacable engine of destruction, threatening every interest the West had in the Middle East -- ready to create an Arab empire that would inevitably turn all the region's oil wealth over to the Soviets.
The French thought they could hold on to what was left to them in North Africa if Nasser could be stopped from aiding and abetting the rebellion in Algeria. Israel, then only eight years old, saw a chance to humble the most formidable Arab power aligned against the country, and gain some territory as well. Israel's prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had wider ambitions than Suez. He dreamed of annexing southern Lebanon up to the Latani River, take the West Bank, which belonged to Jordan, and give the rest of Jordan to Iraq, then in the hands of a Hashemite king.
So it was that the three powers cooked up a secret deal that involved Israel seizing the Sinai, with the British and French grabbing the Suez Canal, which Nasser had annexed earlier that year, pretending only to insert themselves between the warring Egyptians and Israelis in the name of keeping the peace.
How all this "magical thinking" failed when President Eisenhower said no is recalled in a thoughtful new book by Martin Woollacott titled "After Suez, Adrift in the American Century." The parallels with today's Anglo-American attempt to force the West's will on the Middle East are unavoidable.
"Like Suez, the intervention in Iraq in 2003 was intended not only to bring down a hostile leader but to have an exemplary effect on the whole region," Woollacott writes. "Like Suez, it was intended to demonstrate a capacity to dominate and control." The difference is that today there is no "great kindred spirit waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces" that the worn out and no longer formidable British and French had broken.
Eisenhower saw that Eden was inflating Nasser into a much more powerful enemy than he was, or could be. "The irrationality of British fears in the 1950s had its parallel in America in 2003 when the dangers represented by Osama bin Laden on the one hand and Saddam Hussein on the other were both exaggerated and conflated," Woollacott writes.
One can hear the echoes of Eden in President Bush's fears of an evil empire-like Muslim caliphate from Indonesia to Spain -- as if Islamic extremists had the remotest possibility of achieving such a goal.
"It is not that there is no threat at all -- that would be a foolish argument," Woollacott writes. "But sensing a threat is different from identifying it, and identifying it is different from a measured response to it."
One can hear the echoes of the Suez debacle today in Iraq because the United States, like the British at Suez, forgot "that force not skillfully shaped to a realistic political end is not a solution to anything," Woollacott writes. "Britain in 1956 had technical military superiority but neither the political authority, nor the political understanding to make war effective." Like the British at Suez, "those who controlled the American government [in 2003] had come to assign a role to force that force alone could not fill. The same was true of the Israelis as they ploughed into Lebanon in the summer of 2006. "
America's support of Israel's march into Lebanon revealed that the Bush administration had lost none if its faith in force as a "clarifying" agent despite its failures in Iraq.
Woollacott recalls the cultural scene of 50 years ago when fantasies, such as James Bond, filled the gap between the memory and reality of British power. When Eden fell from grace after Suez, he chose to lick his wounds in the Caribbean home of Bond's creator, Ian Fleming.
The historic legacy of Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and Bush is more likely to resemble that of the hapless Eden than Churchill, whom the president is said to admire.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
