Disaster: From Suez
to Iraq
by |Brian Urquhart
This excellent article by Brian Urquhart in The
New York Review of Books looks at how some of the world’s worst
current problems are the legacy of British imperialism and the Unites States’
reactions to it. Some excerpts, followed
by the article itself:
Only seventy years ago, Great Britain ruled
over more than one quarter of the land surface of the planet. It policed, as
far as anyone did, the oceans and seas, and it was the most important force in
world finance, trade, and economy...
Britain is no
longer a world power. The colonies, dominions, and protectorates that made up
the empire upon which the sun never set, with a few
small exceptions, have gone their own way.
… the empire's most conspicuous legacy is a series of
apparently unresolvable problems. Palestine,
Kashmir, and Cyprus
are in a class by themselves for their insolubility
Volume 54, Number 5 · March 29, 2007
Review
Disaster: From Suez
to Iraq
by Wm. Roger Louis
I.B. Tauris, 1,065 pp., $35.00
by David M. Malone
Oxford University
Press, 398 pp., $45.00
Only seventy years ago, Great Britain ruled over more than
one quarter of the land surface of the planet. It policed, as far as anyone
did, the oceans and seas, and it was the most important force in world finance,
trade, and economy. All this was a source of national pride and a sense of
mission that, for most people, conveniently evaded moral questions about the right
of one race or nation to dominate another. Lord Curzon, the ultimate British
proconsul, wrote that the British Empire was
the greatest instrument for good that the world had ever seen.
Britain
is no longer a world power. The colonies, dominions, and protectorates that
made up the empire upon which the sun never set, with
a few small exceptions, have gone their own way. The Commonwealth still
reflects the positive side of imperial relationships, but it is a pale reminder
of that legendary world of exploration and trade, of bugles and cavalry
charges, of dedicated servants of the empire living out their lives far from
home.
Britain
is still one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, where
the empire's most conspicuous legacy is a series of apparently unresolvable problems. Palestine,
Kashmir, and Cyprus
are in a class by themselves for their insolubility. The first UN military
observer operations were a response to the violence in Palestine
and Kashmir; the first UN peacekeeping force was set up to end the
Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956. The empire also left
behind several states or federations made up of incompatible ethnic or
religious groups whose mutual hostility created instability and even,
occasionally, civil war. Of these, Iraq is currently the most
prominent, and the thorniest.
In Ends of British Imperialism, Wm. Roger
Louis, the historian of the British Empire and Commonwealth at the University of Texas
in Austin,
explains in exhilarating detail the complex process of imperial growth and
dissolution. In The International Struggle over Iraq, David Malone,
currently the Canadian high commissioner in India
and formerly president of the International
Peace Academy,
analyzes the international setting, particularly in the UN Security Council, of
the involvement of the United States
in Iraq.
These two books raise many important issues, among them the question of how far
history must dictate the future and how far the United Nations system and the Pax Americana can take over the law-and-order functions of
the old imperialism.
1.
In the late-nineteenth-century European scramble
for colonies, Africa was colonized almost
exclusively for financial gain and prestige, with, as Louis shows, very little
serious concern for, or knowledge of, the indigenous African population.[1]
Although some of the lots drawn in the European scramble, such as the Congo and Ghana, were economically and
financially rewarding to the imperialists, most of the new colonial possessions
were not. Nor was the desire for colonies only a European fashion. In the
Pacific, Japan annexed Korea in 1910, acquired the former German islands in the
Pacific north of the equator in the Treaty of Versailles, invaded Manchukuo and
China in the 1930s, and entered World War II as an imperial power in 1941.
During the twenty years between the two world wars
the entire British imperial system functioned—for the first and last time—as a
worldwide political and economic institution. Long before World War II the
movement for independence was fermenting, especially in India. That
war's vast demands on British manpower and financial and economic resources
made the expense of empire impossible to sustain.
The United
States was strongly opposed to colonialism
both in principle and in practice, as Franklin Roosevelt made clear to Winston
Churchill in 1941 during the drafting of the Atlantic Charter. FDR insisted
that respect for "inherent dignity" and "equal and inalienable
rights" applied to all members of the human family and not just to those
whose lands were currently occupied by the Axis. The 1956 Suez Crisis, which
Louis regards as the end of British and French imperialism, dramatically
exposed Britain's financial
and military weakness and its dependence on the United States.
Harold Macmillan, who succeeded Anthony Eden as
prime minister after the Suez debacle,
recognized the "winds of change" in Africa
and elsewhere and accelerated the pace of British decolonization. Louis
describes the rush to give independence to colonial holdings in the 1960s as
the "mirror image" of the European scramble for colonies seventy-five
years earlier. However much Africans wanted independence, both colonization and
rapid decolonization were appallingly disruptive. Colonial boundaries ignored
both tribal and economic realities and ran through unexplored country, often
along lines of longitude and latitude. The main result was to undermine the
institutions and traditions by which tribal Africa
had lived for so long. The supposedly superior systems of government, justice,
and administration introduced by the European powers did not have sufficient
time to take firm root before the colonists departed; and some European rulers
did very little to prepare their subjects for self-rule. Much of Africa's present suffering and confusion derives from
these failures.
The Suez Crisis, exactly fifty years ago, which
Louis calls "a deadly set of interlocking miscalculations," dealt a
mortal blow to British and French claims to be great powers. Coinciding with
the Soviet Union's brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolt, Suez split the Western alliance at the worst
possible time. The ludicrous pretense that an Anglo-French invading force was
being sent to protect the canal from a confrontation between Israelis and
Egyptians failed completely to disguise what was in fact a blatant attempt at
regime change—toppling Nasser—and made Britain and France appear ridiculous as
well as mendacious. The Suez fiasco destroyed
the influence of Britain and
France in the Middle East,
where they were soon replaced by the United States.
The performance of some Western leaders over Suez was so strikingly
weird that the actions of Nasser, who had ostensibly set off the crisis by
nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, have scarcely drawn scrutiny. John Foster
Dulles, the US secretary of
state, had declared that the US
would not resort to force over the canal. Eden
therefore believed that Dulles and President Eisenhower would prefer not
to be informed of the British, French, and Israeli plan to invade Egypt, but
would eventually support it anyway. Eden and the French leader Guy Mollet insisted on going ahead with the invasion in spite
of the fact that Egypt, Britain, France, and the United States had reached
agreement, under Dag Hammarskjöld's auspices at the UN in New York, on six
principles governing the future management of the canal, causing Eisenhower to
comment "It looks as though a very great crisis is behind us."
Eisenhower's telephone call to Eden
after the British started bombing targets in and around Cairo dispelled Eden's
fantasies of US support: "Anthony, have you gone out of your mind? You've
deceived me." Eisenhower denounced the invasion, and, by refusing to stop
a potentially catastrophic run on the pound with $1 billion from the
International Monetary Fund and the Export-Import Bank until Eden
undertook to leave Egypt
unconditionally, forced the British to abandon the Anglo-French-Israeli plan.
Early in November Eisenhower was reelected in a landslide victory over Adlai
Stevenson. One positive element of the Suez Crisis was the creation of the
first UN peacekeeping force, a deployment of six thousand soldiers from ten
countries that initiated an important new form of conflict control.
A brief passage in Louis's Suez chapters made me wonder how far the use,
fifty years later, of hitherto classified sources may sometimes give undue
substance to highly subjective stories. Sir Pierson Dixon, the British
ambassador at the United Nations, like other key British ambassadors, whether
in Cairo, Paris,
or Washington, had not been informed in
advance of his country's attack on Egypt. Defending an indefensible
action that he did not believe in was the worst experience of his professional
life. Dixon,
however, was not close to Hammarskjöld and he resented Hammarskjöld's openly
critical attitude toward the Anglo-French-Israeli operation. Nonetheless, by
assembling and deploying within a few days the first UN peacekeeping force,
Hammarskjöld made it possible for the British and French forces to be withdrawn
with reasonable dignity. Reluctantly recognizing this fact, Dixon commented, in a cable to the foreign
office,
Hammarskjoeld, I think, is on the verge of collapse....
Surprisingly enough this strange intellectual whom we have elevated into a
superman is made of flesh and blood.... He literally burst into tears this
evening....
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. Nor was this alleged
loss of control ever mentioned or recorded in their private notes by Ralph
Bunche and others who regularly accompanied Hammarskjöld at all such meetings. Dixon's story allows him
to patronize the "strange" Swedish intellectual to whom the British
were so deeply in debt.
In Louis's account, the partition plans for India
and Palestine and the independence of Libya and Sudan foreshadow more recent
international problems that have arisen in all these countries, as does the
Anglo-US cloak-and-dagger scheme for regime change that toppled the Iranian
Prime Minister Mohammad Musaddeq in 1953—successful
in the short term, but leading to rebellion and Islamic revolution later on. In
Iraq the 1958 coup and revolution, led by Brigadier Abdul Karim
Qasim, in which the king and crown prince and
Britain's all-powerful ally, Nuri Pasha es Said, were assassinated, swept away British influence in
Iraq forever; not many years later, the country came under the control of the Baathist dictatorship whose overthrow has brought about the
current crisis.
In 1971 the withdrawal of British power, for
reasons of economy, from east of Suez, and most
notably from the Persian Gulf, by Harold
Wilson's Labour government, marked the effective end
of the empire. Looking today at the shining towers, ultra-modern cities, and
colossal opulence of the Gulf States, it is hard to remember that Britain's
surprise decision to withdraw from the Gulf protectorates without designating a
successor caused intense anxiety at the time. The transformation of the Gulf
States and their oil and natural gas reserves into major centers of finance,
trade, and tourism has become a stabilizing element in one of the world's
tensest and most important strategic areas. Even the system of federation—Britain's favored, but usually abortive,
constitutional concept—has flourished in the Gulf in the United Arab Emirates.
2.
Louis's work in archives, diaries, letters, and
memoirs sheds new light on people who were rearranging the geopolitical map of
the world with a self-confidence and a lack of resistance that now seem
inconceivable. British leaders, politicians, and civil servants saw themselves,
usually without undue personal vanity, as leading the world forward to better
times. A rigorous classical education provided many of them with formidable
powers of analysis that were often tempered by style, elegance, and wit.
Louis introduces many striking personalities. Most
are now-forgotten public servants like Sir Percy Anderson, the architect of Britain's
African empire and the star of the Berlin Congo Conference in 1884. A few are
still remembered. Roger Casement, the ultimately doomed Irish patriot, was the
British consul in Leopold II's Congo. In a
1903 report he denounced the Congo Free State
as "a hell on earth" characterized by "wholesale oppression and
shocking mismanagement." His report scandalized Europe
and inspired E.D. Morel's Congo Reform Association. In
1908 the Belgian government annexed Leopold's private Congo estate.
The League of Nations mandates system—a plan drawn
up in 1919 to address the administration of the colonies of the defeated German
and Ottoman empires—was the brainchild of General J.C. Smuts of South Africa,
one of history's more remarkable éminences grises. To secure Woodrow Wilson's support for British
control of important Turkish and German colonies, Smuts suggested the mandates
system as a means of allowing the League of Nations to supervise the
administration of former enemy colonies for which the victorious Allies were
contending. Among the territories put under mandate were Mesopotamia (now Iraq), Palestine,
and Southwest Africa (now Namibia).
Wilson referred to the mandates as a "sacred
trust of civilization" under the League of Nations.
Lord Curzon represents a more
worldly, pragmatic, but elegant view, as when he combined the principle
of national self-determination with confident British realpolitik.
"I am inclined," he wrote,
to value the
argument of self-determination because I believe that most of the people would
determine in our favour...if we cannot get out of our
difficulties in any other way we ought to play self-determination for all it is
worth wherever we are involved in difficulties with the French, the Arabs, or
anybody else, and leave the case to be settled by that final argument knowing
in the bottom of our hearts that we are more likely to benefit from it than
anybody else.
Winston Churchill makes forceful and
sometimes comic appearances in Louis's book. In 1921, as a colonial secretary
who was committed to Zionism, he wrote to Arthur Balfour, the secretary of
state:
Whereas in Mesopotamia [shortly to
become Iraq] we have been
able to study the wishes of the people and humour
their national sentiment, we are committed in Palestine to the Zionist policy against which
nine-tenths of the population and an equal proportion of the British officers
are marshalled.
In seeking the mandate of Palestine,
Balfour had another consideration, the prospect of "connecting Mesopotamia
with the Mediterranean by rail and pipe-line
through all-British protectorates." As Louis notes, when Ernest Bevin, the
post–World War II foreign secretary, announced in the House of Commons that he
would stake his political future on solving the Palestine problem, Churchill commented that
"no more rash a bet has ever been recorded in the
annals of the British turf."
What Louis calls "boyish boisterousness"
and echoes of school run rather disarmingly through British imperial history. Leo Amery, a much-respected voice of true
imperialism in the Tory Party, was based in All Souls, Oxford,
and served as Churchill's wartime secretary of state for India. They had
been schoolmates at Harrow, where Churchill once
pushed the fully clothed Amery into the swimming pool. This episode colored
their friendship during more than half a century of public life together.
"There is no doubt," Amery wrote in his remarkable diaries,
"that if one stands up to Winston and argues with him...the argument
[often] sinks into the subsoil and comes out as a Winstonian
flower later on." On the future of India, Churchill told Amery in
1944,
You...have become
like Wavell and Linlithgow [the two most recent
viceroys of India]...more
Indian than the Indians, [and yet you] are attacked in the House of Commons as
being a narrow-minded old-fashioned reactionary! It serves you right!
When Churchill finally gave in to Amery's arguments
for early Indian independence he muttered, "When you lose India don't
blame me."
Sometimes an unadopted
decision that might have made a substantial difference later leaps out from the
page. General Smuts suggested that the United
States should be given the mandate of Palestine. Lloyd George agreed, but later
changed his mind. (It is not clear whether the United
States would have accepted the Palestine mandate.) George Louis Beer, the
much-respected American expert on mandates at the peace conference, objected
strongly to the Urundi/ Rwanda
mandate being given to Belgium
instead of Britain.
The British traded it for assurances that Belgium would support the peace
treaty. "By such things," Beer wrote, "is the fate of three and
a half million human beings determined!"
3.
On November 5, 1914, Britain
recognized Kuwait as an
independent state under British protection and declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Next day a combined British and Indian
force landed at Foa in what is now Iraq and secured the area around Basra, ostensibly to
protect an Iranian oilfield that supplied the Royal Navy.[2]
This was the first stage of an involvement that cost the British large losses
of life and money, but for many years ensured access to Iraqi oil. With the
British intervention, the inhabitants of the new state of Iraq were caught up in an increasingly violent
and oppressive history, culminating with the US involvement in the current
fiasco.
In combining three incompatible Mesopotamian
provinces of the Ottoman Empire into a single sovereign state, the British
created the basic problem that the United States is now desperately
trying to resolve. In The International Struggle over Iraq, David Malone
comments that "the fractious nature of the Iraqi state...to a degree
invited totalitarian control." Moreover, "keeping Iraq on a war
footing greatly facilitated this approach." As we are seeing now, it takes
a very firm, if not brutally firm, hand to keep Iraq together as a nation.
Among the scores of books about the US involvement in Iraq
since 2003, little has been written about the proceedings in the UN Security
Council concerning Iraq from
1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, to 2006. As president of the International Peace Academy,
David Malone had unusually free access to the Security Council and its members.[3]
Malone's clear-eyed account of the UN involvement in this eventful and violent
period, culminating in the Security Council's refusal to legitimize the US
invasion, sheds new light on the many actions of the UN in relation to Saddam
Hussein's Iraq, actions that, if not totally ignored, are still usually
assumed, at least in the United States, to be a UN failure.
In 1991 the United Nations was hailed by President
George H.W. Bush as an agent of a "New World
Order." After Desert Storm, the council set extraordinarily intrusive
terms for Saddam Hussein's surrender, including the destruction of his weapons
of mass destruction (WMDs) and other offensive weapons,
to be supervised on site by UN inspectors. It also declared Iraq's liability for the enormous losses Kuwait had
sustained during the Iraqi invasion. (This liability was partly met by about
$16 billion from the Oil-for-Food budget.) Malone traces the degeneration of
this unprecedented expression of international will into the bickering and
recrimination that preceded George W. Bush's decision to launch the unilateral
invasion of Iraq
in 2003.
Between the two Iraq
wars, the United States
initiated, and later turned over to the UN high commissioner for refugees,
Operation Provide Comfort, which saved nearly two million Kurdish refugees from
winter in the mountains after Saddam Hussein suppressed the Kurdish uprising at
the end of Desert Storm. The US and Britain set up "no-fly" zones
over northern (Kurdish) and southern (Shia) Iraq and
assigned air patrols to enforce them. In 1998, the combined US-UK Operation
Desert Fox delivered four days of intensive bombing of Iraqi military and other
targets. None of these activities was specifically authorized by the Security
Council. "Within this creeping unilateralism," Malone writes,
"were sheltered the seeds of the confrontations that would undermine the
Council's authority in 2003."
Malone quotes Martti Ahtisaari, later the president of Finland, who
was sent in March 1991 to assess the damage caused by Desert Storm. "The
recent conflict," Ahtisaari concluded, "has
wrought near apocalyptic results on the economic infrastructure of what was
until recently a highly urban and mechanized society." The desperate
conditions caused in Iraq
by Desert Storm in 1991, and later by the UN sanctions, led the UN to set up
its largest and ultimately most controversial humanitarian operation, the
Oil-for-Food Program. It had been taken for granted that reconstruction should
be paid for by Iraq's
oil, its main surviving asset, but five years elapsed before Saddam Hussein
would accept even the limited degree of international control of aid to the
civilian population that was required by the Security Council. Malone comments
that with the commencement of the Oil-for-Food Program in 1996, "The most
comprehensive sanctions in UN history were now matched by the largest
humanitarian relief operation on record." The operation was funded by $64
billion of Iraqi oil revenues.
I have already written in these pages
about the so-called scandals of the UN Oil-for-Food Program, which, while it
achieved its purpose, probably did more damage to the reputation of the UN and its
secretary-general than anything since the withdrawal of the peacekeeping force
from Sinai in 1967—another misreported and widely misunderstood episode.[4]
Malone comments,
A steady drumbeat of attacks on the
UN—and on Kofi Annan personally—was initiated in the United States.... That the timing
of these attacks appeared so blatantly aimed at inhibiting any further
enhancement of the UN's role and at assuaging
disappointment that "the UN had been proven right on Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction" took nothing away from their seriousness.
In fact what scandal there was, with one exception
involving a payment to an official, was almost entirely a matter of bribes and
kickbacks arranged by Saddam Hussein with oil companies and other firms with
whom he negotiated directly without UN involvement.[5]
A much larger sum involved some $12 billion in profits from oil smuggling to Jordan, Syria,
and Turkey, an il-legal operation that was condoned by the United States
and the Security Council.
No previous international inspection
body had been as intrusive as the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM)
that searched for and destroyed Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
Malone's account of this complex tragicomedy shows both its perversity and its
historical bearing on the 2003 US
invasion. The Iraqis were telling the truth when they said that their WMD programs were destroyed in the mid-1990s, but they
provided no reliable evidence for this claim, and hardly anyone believed them.
Interminable Iraqi obstructions and deceptions made no sense to the Western
powers and Western observers if in fact the WMDs were
already destroyed. Even the UN inspectors did not believe in their own success.
That Saddam was bluffing in order to impress Iran and other nations in the
region did not seem to have occurred to most of the Western officials involved.
Under its second director, Richard Butler of Australia, who succeeded Rolf Ekewes of Sweden
in 1996, UNSCOM became a political football in the
Security Council because of Butler's sensational
estimates of Iraqi WMDs and later because of
allegations that the United
States was using UNSCOM
for its own intelligence purposes. The mission was withdrawn in 1998 after
prolonged obstruction of its activities by the Iraqi regime. When its
successor, UNMOVIC, returned to Iraq under the
leadership of Hans Blix in November 2002, it found no
WMDs but it had no time to make a comprehensive
inspection report before the United States invaded.
Before the US attacked, however, Hans Blix made it clear to the Security Council that the UN
inspectors were no longer being obstructed; that they had found nothing after
investigating five hundred sites, including those identified by national
intelligence agencies; that to carry out adequate inspections he needed
"months, not years"; and that the Security Council resolutions
authorized a subsequent monitoring unit intended to sound the alarm if the
regime again started to develop WMDs. The further
inspections that Blix asked for, and which the US invasion precluded, would almost certainly
have removed the main reason given for the US attack. Perhaps that is why they
are so little mentioned. Both UNSCOM and UNMOVIC demonstrated the value of determined inspections,
especially in the context of sanctions and a credible threat of force.
Malone describes the battle between
multilateral institutionalism and unilateral "realism" at the UN. He
outlines the developing tragedy of the US
occupation of Iraq
and the gradual resumption of UN political assistance to the Coalition
Authority in setting up the various interim Iraqi governing bodies and in
organizing elections. "If the Iraq
saga has taught the US
and the UN anything," he writes, "it is that each needs the
other."
Malone makes useful and realistic analyses of the
challenges facing both the Security Council and the UN Secretariat, among them
the problem in the Security Council of national interests taking priority over
the pursuit of international peace; the need to coordinate military, security,
and humanitarian considerations; the future use of inspections; the use of
sanctions; and the advantages and disadvantages of diplomatic ambiguity, for
example, phrases like "serious consequences" or "material
breach."
Among his conclusions Malone writes:
It would be tragic if it took a
nuclear detonation or a devastating chemical attack (possibly engineered by a
terrorist group) to galvanize the Council members into a greater willingness to
work together. Operation Iraqi Freedom stands as a powerful testament to the
risks of going it alone.
Louis's and Malone's books are
centered respectively on the 1956 invasion of Egypt
by Britain, France, and Israel,
and the invasion of Iraq by
the United States
in 2003.[6] The
first adventure, ill-advised and without legitimacy, sounded the death knell of
two imperial regimes. What will the second one do? There can be no doubt that,
for the time being at least, both the standing and the influence of the United States
in world affairs has been seriously damaged.
Since the Second World War international organizations,
which were mostly founded on the initiative of the United
States, as well as a large majority of the world's
governments, have depended on the United States for international
leadership and much else. In spite of aberrations like the Vietnam War, it was
almost taken for granted that the US would sponsor essential new
undertakings, lead and provide resources in times of crisis, continue to
provide vital economic aid, and send large-scale and urgent relief in times of
trouble. During the cold war it was also taken for granted that the umbrella of
United States
armed strength would cover other countries if they were threatened. In the
United Nations it was generally accepted that strong US support was essential for any
serious action. Madeleine Albright was not far off the mark in the early 1990s
when she called her country the "indispensable nation."
The policies and actions of the George W. Bush
administration, and especially the disaster in Iraq, have put the future
possibility of this kind of world leadership in serious question. They have
accelerated a process of historical change that was already in place after the
end of the cold war with the rise of other economic and political powers and
with other less tangible forces, including the new accessibility of information
and communication, and the spread of fundamentalist religion. The Western
notion of universal progress through democratization, cooperation, and,
perhaps, globalization, with Western powers in the pilot's seat, is beginning
to seem rather old-fashioned. Perhaps the conventional concept of world
leadership itself is now also outmoded. One thing is sure; like the Suez adventure in 1956, the occupation of Iraq has become
an unintended historical turning point, with far wider consequences than its
authors ever had in mind.
—February 28, 2007
Notes
[1] At
the Berlin Congo Conference (1884– 1885), over which Bismarck presided, the
British ambassador, Sir Edward Malet, protested, in
response to Bismarck's opening speech, that commerce was not the exclusive
subject of the conference. "While it is desirable to secure a market in
the Congo
country, the welfare of the natives is not to be neglected."
[2] For
a highly readable account of this and subsequent British actions, see William
R. Polk's excellent Understanding Iraq (HarperCollins, 2005), Chapter 3,
"British Iraq."
[3]
While at the IPA, Malone also edited an invaluable reference work, The UN
Security Council: From the Cold War to the
Twenty-first Century (Lynne Rienner, 2004).
[4]
"The UN Oil-for-Food Program: Who Is Guilty?" The New York Review,
February 9, 2006.
[5] The
Australian government recently revealed that an Australian company, AWB Ltd., had paid more than $224 million to Saddam
Hussein's government in kickbacks and bribes and devised a system of payment to
deceive the UN. See Raymond Bonner, "Panel Says Australian Company Paid
Bribes," The New York Times, November 28, 2006.
[6] In
a new and convincingly argued book, After Suez: Adrift in the American
Century (I.B. Tauris,
2006), Martin Woollacott traces a direct line from
the Suez disaster to the United States' 2003 intervention in Iraq and the
related effects on US and British foreign policy and on the situation in the
Middle East.
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