There were plenty who thought a sharp rap on the knuckles was a better way of bringing the Iranians to their senses and Britain’s heel. This might prove harder than first imagined, for the Admiralty was having trouble finding the ships required for ‘Buccaneer’ since the navy was heavily committed to the Korean War.15 In the Commons, the Conservatives were restless and wanted blood. Churchill opened the Iran debate on 20 July by taunting Morrison for his cockneyfied pronunciation of ‘Euphrates’. He then bemoaned the loss of India and chided the government for its faintheartedness throughout the Middle East. Britain had only ‘to be pressed sufficiently by one method or another,’ for it meekly to forfeit its rights and interests.16
Brigadier Anthony Head followed up the attack with the charge that there had been too much ‘Socialism’ injected into Britain’s foreign policy, with the result that the Middle East’s masses had been pandered to, while Britain’s prestige languished. The view from the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel was delivered by Julian Amery, who had taken on board some of his father’s paternalist imperialism. According to the younger Amery, Britain had misjudged the true feelings of the man in the bazaar, for an Egyptian had once told him: ‘Independence good for pasha, bad for fellah. British rule good for fellah, bad for pasha.’17 Alas for those of Amery’s mind, fewer and fewer fellahin or their counterparts appeared to regard Britain as their even-handed protector. Attlee closed the debate with a pertinent history lesson, referring back to a previous war waged for the rights of British shareholders: ‘In Egypt I see they are remembering the bombardment of Alexandria. That kind of thing could be done in the Nineteenth Century: it cannot be done now, we are working under an entirely different code.’18
Churchill had been eight when the guns had roared off Alexandria in 1882, and he wanted their thunder to resound in the Persian Gulf. As he later remarked, had he been prime minister ‘a splutter of musketry’ would have been heard and felt by the Iranians.19 Attlee chose ‘Midget’ rather than ‘Buccaneer’. The latter would have dangerously stretched manpower, and an invasion of Iran could easily have driven Mussadiq to appeal to the Soviet Union for help. This was the view of the American Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who thought that whether invited or not, the Russians would snatch at any chance to slip back into northern Persia, their old stamping ground from which they had been evicted with some difficulty five years before.
Attlee had no wish to turn Iran into a Cold War cockpit. Moreover he had, in December 1950, flown to Washington to persuade Truman to disavow General MacArthur’s proposal to use an atomic bomb against Chinese forces in Korea. A soft line on Iran was a diplomatic quid quo pro. On 27 September, Mussadiq took control over the Abadan refinery and its staff departed. ‘We have lost prestige on an unprecedented scale,’ complained the Spectator, ruefully adding that had a coup de main been delivered, the Communist and Arab worlds would have seen the subsequent contest as ‘a simple battle between a top-dog and an under-dog’.20 There was, however, some consolation for those fire-eaters who would have relished the sound of Mauritius’s guns being fired in anger; on 25 October the Conservatives won the general election with a small majority.
* * *
A few weeks after the evacuation of Abadan Island, Acheson stung Evelyn Shuckburgh with the remark, ‘You must live in the world as it is.’21 The events in Iran during the past few months had provided a glimpse into the future. Britain could no longer expect to do business either with deferential sheiks, grateful for a sackful of sovereigns, or conservative and compliant politicians in frock coats and tarbooshes, who could be scared by threats of battleships if they stepped out of line. Now Britain faced populists who ranted about imperialism. Mussadiq was a man in the new mould; he wore green pyjamas when he received Sir Francis Shepherd, the ambassador in Tehran. This insult, together with his habit of swooning in public, convinced Shepherd that the Iranian was mad, a diagnosis which was accepted in Whitehall and by the British press.
There was another, equally distressful implication behind Acheson’s observation. Throughout the Iranian crisis, the British government had had to seek American advice and sometimes received it unasked. Much of it had come from George McGhee, a former oil geologist who had served for three years as the State Department’s roving emissary in the Middle East. A former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, McGhee shared his benefactor’s belief in ‘the white man’s burden’, and was therefore more sympathetic to Britain’s present predicament than many other American diplomats. Nevertheless, he was wrongly suspected of being hand-in-glove with American oil interests, and a Treasury official warned Morrison that McGhee’s youth, Texan upbringing and Irish ancestry made him a man whose judgement might be unsound when it came to British interests.22
Anglo-American tensions were as strong as ever they had been during the war, and took a turn for the worse with the appointment as Secretary of State of John Foster Dulles in 1953. Like President Coolidge, another Puritan who achieved high office, Dulles had the demeanour of one who had been ‘weaned on a pickle’, and his anti-Communist fervour was only matched in intensity by his loathing for imperialism. The British ambassador in Washington, Sir Roger Makins, described the latter as a ‘deep seated feeling about colonialism, which is common to so many Americans, occasionally welling up inside Foster like lava from a dormant volcano’.
What lay behind these eruptions was the fear that the United States could become tainted by the vices of its partner in the Middle East. If America was to hold its own in the Cold War, it could not afford to become too closely associated with a declining power which, as public reaction to the Iranian crisis proved, tended to see the world from the bridge of a cruiser or the turret of an armoured car. Vice-President Richard Nixon recognised the danger when he toured Asia during the spring of 1953. He returned to Washington convinced that ‘three centuries of European colonialism [were] on their deathbed’. America would have to distance itself from those powers which were still clinging to their fiefdoms. In a revealing and, given the subsequent course of American involvement in South-East Asia, ironic passage in his memoirs, Nixon wrote of his attempts to woo the nationalists:
Many people in these countries knew America only as an immensely powerful nation that both Communist propaganda and European snobbery [my italics] had painted as crass and rapacious. I reassured them that we were not a colonial power, nor did we approve of the lingering colonialism of our European allies.23
American policy towards the Middle East and Asia was already changing direction. Since 1947, the United States had been cultivating Turkey, which joined NATO in 1951 and offered the USAAF airfields under its own control for nuclear strikes against Russia.24 A British proposal to have the Turkish army placed under Britain’s Middle East command was rejected by the Americans during a planning conference in Istanbul in 1951.25 Henceforward, the aim of America’s policy was to cajole rather than coerce independent Middle Eastern states into the West’s camp. Any action which might be interpreted as an attempt to uphold or further British supremacy would rebound against the United States. Cooperation with Britain was expedient, but outright cohabitation would discredit America and lose friends.
American incursions into a region where Britain had hitherto enjoyed a monopoly of power were resented and, at first, resisted. Towards the end of the war Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia (and his oil deposits) had been lured into America’s orbit by a $25 million loan and a payment of $10 million for the lease of an airfield at Dharan. This was poaching in Britain’s coverts, and in 1943 the India Office banned the establishment of an American consulate in Bahrain.26 Within ten years, the interlopers were unstoppable, because when necessary they could sign large cheques, a luxury denied post-war Britain. By 1960 the United States had distributed $2,702 million to Middle Eastern states.
While usurping Britain’s position in the area, America felt obliged to restrain its ally. After the Iranian crisis, State Department diplomats acted as mediators between Britain and Mussadiq and, during the exchanges
, found him as fickle as his antagonists were stubborn. The British government’s obduracy may have been based on its faith in a novel form of gunboat diplomacy. During 1952 MI6 was busy fomenting a plot to overthrow Mussadiq with the help of Iranian dissidents. This exercise in subversion was known as Operation Boot, and among those drawn in was Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee with Middle East responsibilities.
Early in 1953, the new Eisenhower administration took over ‘Boot’ which was renamed ‘Ajax’. American Cold War warriors were haunted by the ‘loss’ of Czechoslovakia to a Russian coup d’état in March 1948 and that of China a year after. Iran was seen as vulnerable to Soviet-inspired sedition and Mussadiq had revealed himself as too volatile to make a steadfast ally. The upshot was the implementation of ‘Ajax’ under Kermit Roosevelt’s vigorous direction. In August 1953, an uprising in Tehran was financed and stage-managed by CIA agents with some British help. Mussadiq was toppled and replaced by the exiled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, the son of the former Cossack officer whom Britain had assisted to the Peacock Throne thirty years before. Iran had been snatched for the West, and Shah Mohammed Reza served his American patrons faithfully until 1979. He was, in turn, overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had written of the events of 1953 that Iran had been ‘the slave of Britain one day, of America the next’.27 This was just the invidious comparison which the American policy-makers were striving to avoid. Sir Anthony Eden, the new Foreign Secretary, while satisfied with the result of ‘Ajax’, was ‘jealous’ of what had been an American triumph.28
While on his way to lay Iran’s case before the United Nations in November 1951, Mussadiq had briefly stopped over in Cairo. His welcome was ecstatic, there were anti-British riots, and he joined with the Egyptian prime minister, Mustafa al-Nahas, to declare that ‘a united Iran and Egypt will together demolish British imperialism’.
Al-Nahas had been chipping away at the foundations of British power since January 1950, when the Wafd had come to power with over half the popular vote. Its platform was the same as it had been during the 1920s and 1930s: an end to the British military presence in Egypt and the restoration of Egyptian sovereignty over the Sudan. The disastrous 1948–9 war against Israel had given Egypt a further grievance against Britain, which was accused of having prevented the Egyptian armed forces from acquiring modern weapons. As far as Britain was concerned, Egypt counted for a bagatelle, and had been equipped with what Bevin once called ‘junk’.29
It was the Canal Zone base which remained the chief source of contention. Its barbed wire, concrete and tarmac symbolised Egypt’s subservience to a foreign power, which believed it had the inalienable right to interfere in Egyptian affairs whenever it chose, and had done so as recently as 1942. Furthermore, for those who shaped his destiny, the Egyptian remained a lower form of life. During conversations with senior British diplomats and commanders in 1950, George McGhee detected the ‘traditional condescension’ towards the Egyptians, who were commonly spoken of as ‘Gippies’.30 Contempt was matched by malevolence; another American emissary reported at the end of 1951 that, ‘The hatred against them [the British] is general and intense. It is shared by everyone in the country.’31
McGhee and his colleagues came and went from Egypt as part of an intensive diplomatic effort contrived to prevent it from sliding towards Russia. But attempts to persuade al-Nahas and the rest of the Egyptian cabinet foundered because they insisted that British imperialism, not Communism, was Egypt’s real enemy. Americans tended to sympathise, but they could not ignore the strategic importance of the Canal Zone and its airfields, still earmarked for the nuclear offensive against Russia. The 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty had permitted a garrison of 10,000, but by 1950 the base was home to 38,000 British servicemen, including 8,000 infantry from Mauritius who acted as guards, and contained stores worth £270 million. Ideally, from the American standpoint, the British should have withdrawn, leaving the facilities intact and ready to be put on a war footing at the first hint of an international crisis, a solution which the chiefs-of-staff would have tolerated. Anglo-Egyptian discord might then cease, and Egypt could be invited to join America in an anti-Soviet regional defence pact.31 Negotiations over these points dragged on from the middle of 1950 until the autumn of 1951 in an atmosphere of increasing frustration and acrimony.
On 8 October 1951, al-Nahas unilaterally revoked the 1936 Treaty, theoretically terminating British occupation of the Canal Zone. His sense of timing was acute and provocative; the last British technician had left Abadan Island four days before, and the British general election campaign had been underway for three days. Within a few weeks, the 70,000-strong Egyptian labour force had left the Canal Zone, and a campaign of terrorism began with covert government backing. The new prime minister, Churchill, was beside himself with rage. In the middle of discussions about Egypt on 15 December, he rose from his chair and advanced on Eden with clenched fists. He growled, ‘Tell them [the Egyptians] if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter from which they should never have emerged.’32 He then sat down and warmly recalled his visits to Cairo in the days when the Egyptians had understood their place in the scheme of things.
Churchillian fury was being translated into a plan to restore the old order in Egypt. By the end of December, Whitehall’s strategists had concocted Operation Rodeo, a repeat performance of the 1882 occupation of Egypt. Forces from the Canal Zone, reinforced by units from Malta, Libya and Cyprus, were to occupy Cairo, the Nile delta and Alexandria, the last being taken by an assault from the sea. Ground troops and aircraft could be mustered within thirty-six hours, warships within seventy-two, and the coup’s main objectives could be achieved within a day.33
In the meantime, the Canal Zone had been placed under military government, which involved disarming all the Egyptian police within its perimeter. On 25 January 1952, an auxiliary detachment at Ismailia refused to give up their guns, barricaded themselves inside their station and were evicted only after a siege in which fifty were killed and a hundred wounded. At last the ‘splutter of musketry’ had been heard, and the ‘about-time-they-were-taught-a-lesson’ Conservatives were cock-a-hoop. Their oracle, the Daily Express, proclaimed that Britain was now ‘making a mighty affirmation of its Imperial Destiny’.34 The Egyptians answered with an equally bloody affirmation of their destiny; within three days, Cairene mobs had stormed the citadels of their overlords and burned down the Turf Club, Shepheard’s Hotel and various British commercial premises, murdering those of their occupants whom they caught.
The Canal Zone was now embattled and could no longer be counted upon in an emergency. Like the British garrison, Egypt’s old ruling class also had their backs to the wall. King Faruq sacked al-Nahas and his ministry immediately after the riots, and was himself deposed in July 1952 by a knot of army officers led by General Mohammed Naguib. The stout monarch shuffled off to continue his sybaritic existence in various Mediterranean resorts. Egypt’s new governors were soldiers who, following the tradition of Urabi Pasha, regarded themselves as the nation’s saviours, ordained to lead it, advance its honour and defend its integrity. They were idealists who wanted a social revolution, and their creed was a blend of Islamic ethics, pan-Arabism and socialism.
British reaction to the July revolution was fumbling. The embassy had no forewarning of trouble, and the ambassador was on holiday. Five days after the coup, the chargé d’affaires suggested that Britain could reverse the course of events ‘by a clear show of determination and by an immediate show of force at the appropriate moment’.35 The ghosts of Cromer, Milner and Allenby would have applauded.
The CIA was better informed. It had got wind of the plot against Faruq, but it was unperturbed, having long recognised the need for radical social change inside Egypt. Moreover, the Americans had good reason to believe that the revolutionaries, of whom Colonel Nasser was the most dynamic, might align with the West
if carefully handled. Britain remained the chief obstacle to such an understanding. Soon after he had taken over the State Department, Dulles described Britain’s presence on Egyptian soil as the ‘psychological block’ which prevented Egypt from joining an anti-Soviet pact.36 Furthermore, the Canal Zone had now become a strategic white elephant. Incidents during the past two years had revealed how vulnerable it was to sabotage by disaffected Egyptians, and recent advances in thermonuclear weapons (America exploded its first hydrogen bomb in March 1954) dictated that in future bases would have to be smaller and dispersed. As it was, the USAAF’s airfields in Turkey were now operational, making their British-run, Egyptian counterparts redundant.
There was, therefore, no purpose in Britain’s continuing to dig its heels in. The 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty expired in 1956, and in July 1954 arrangements were agreed for a piecemeal evacuation of the base over the next two years. There was a settlement too of the old dispute over the Sudan, where Britain had made an astute alliance with local nationalists who were averse to any restoration of Egyptian sovereignty. On 1 January 1956 the Sudan became independent.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 70