BRITAIN: Tony Blair would prefer to avoid comparisons between Suez and Iraq, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
There are no Union flags adorning the Mall in anticipation of familiar pageant, pomp and circumstance. For there will be no royal highnesses mingling with the veterans of this conflict; no cheering crowds to take Queen Elizabeth's salute from that famous balcony on Buckingham Palace. And her majesty's prime minister and first lord of the treasury, Tony Blair, for one, will be relieved - shuddering, as he must, at any mention of "another Suez".
The British public focus this past week has of course been on Iraq, the intractability of the conflict there, the seeming hopelessness of the task confronting Allied forces, and the constant speculation - fuelled by upcoming Congressional elections - about an American search for an exit strategy.
Yet if Mr Blair benefits from widespread ignorance of, and indifference to, this 50th anniversary of Anthony Eden's disastrous Suez war, there will be no shortage of commentators and broadcasters ready to discomfit him with the analogy of the modern-day Anthony similarly embroiled in the politics of the Middle East, the fate of his strategy and the timeline for the return of his troops again apparently driven by the imperatives of the American electoral cycle.
"Whatever happens in the end, it is clear that American policy was made in a hurried, intuitive, secretive and dogmatic way, and that those who pointed out certain awkward realities were brushed aside," writes Martin Woollacott of Iraq in his book After Suez: "The same was true of British policy in 1956."
On Thursday, July 26th, 1956 - just two years after taking power - Egypt's Col Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal through which passed 80 per cent of Western Europe's oil supplies.
Egypt had promised not to do this as part of the 1954 price for British withdrawal. But not only that, as historian Andrew Roberts writes in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900, Nasser "had also chosen the most prominent Western asset in the Middle East on which to stake his adventurous claim", the British stake in which had been purchased in hard currency by Benjamin Disraeli in 1875.
Prime minister Anthony Eden heard the news as he entertained King Faisal II and prime minister Nuri-es-Said of Iraq at 10 Downing Street. And Churchill's successor decided both to follow his own instinct and act on the advice of those present, including Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, with speed and resolution.
Though succeeding Churchill as a peacemaker and "a League of Nations man", the dashing, though then ill, Eden had the impeccable credentials of a man who had resigned as foreign secretary in 1938 over the Chamberlain government's appeasement of Mussolini.
Citing the immediate threat to the oil supply, Eden wrote to President Eisenhower: "As we see it, we are unlikely to attain our objectives by economic pressures alone. My colleagues and I are convinced that we must be ready, in the last resort, to use force to bring Nasser to his senses. For our part we are prepared to do so."
The unfolding nightmare for Eden was that within five days of Nasser's announcement, Eisenhower - facing an election that November - was warning against military intervention by the British and the French. And the prime minister's undoing was to bypass the Americans by way of the secret "collusion" policy which would see Israel invade Egypt first, with the British and French then landing ostensibly to separate the combatants.
The result - a prompt and humiliating evacuation forced by the Americans and a run on the pound which the chancellor, Harold Macmillan, shortly to replace Eden, said could only be met by an IMF loan backed by the US.
"A complete folly", in the words of historian Corelli Barnett, whose book The Collapse of British Power reflects the conventional wisdom that the Suez operation represented a "last thrash of Empire. . . a last attempt by a British government to do the old imperial thing in defence of far-off interests".
For the British left, too, this was an iconic moment, triumph in its own way for their own commitment to nationalisation, and proof that Britain was no longer a world power and would never again be able to act in any international theatre without the sanction of the United Nations.
Yet try telling that to Tony Blair. As Martin Woollacott observes: "It was far easier for Britain to shed her remaining colonies, as she did with great speed in the 10 years after Suez, than to shed the idea that Britain had a special relationship with the world order. In this sense Dean Acheson's observation that Britain had lost an empire but had yet to find a role was mistaken.
"The empire, in British eyes a great structure for the keeping of order, had gone, but the mission of order remained. The role now was to be specially concerned, beyond other nations and perhaps even more sometimes than her successor as leading nation, with the running of the world as a whole.
The assumption was that the British Empire was, if not a precursor to a world state, as some had believed, at least a sort of model, naturally with all kinds of necessary adjustments and modernisations, for how the world should be run in the future."
Woollacott reflects this was also conceived as a desperate business, and that while the US had military resources of a strength never commanded by Britain at the height of Empire, the British decision-making class saw that order was not a strong or impregnable thing but a structure needing constant protection, sometimes by force.
He goes on: "If Britain's understanding of international affairs remained more pragmatic than systematic, still there is a pattern which connects Suez with the Falklands and with Iraq in the 1990s.
"Britain's experience of empire was of a piece with its view of the post-imperial era.
"Although that view stressed the importance of rules, it was also a hegemonic understanding, with multilateral institutions seen as among the places where the leading nation, now the United States, brokered its differences with allies, neutrals and opponents . . . Such dealings, together with direct diplomacy, bluff and subterfuge, and the occasional risky but necessary use of force, would keep the forces of chaos at bay, just as they had in the days of empire."
Whether risky adventure in Iraq has kept or is keeping the forces of chaos at bay is a matter of keen and again growing debate in the UK.
What is not in doubt is that for many Margaret Thatcher's recovery of the Falklands in 1982, doubtless against the advice of many mandarins warning against "another Suez, prime minister", did effectively expunge the memory of that dark and painful episode in the conduct of British foreign policy.
Also not in any doubt is that, in this as in so much else, Blair proved Thatcher's natural heir - and, in one respect, Churchill's too by keeping to the great man's dictum, "never get out of step with the Americans, never".
Nor were the lessons of Suez all one way. In November 1956 Eden wrote to Guy Mollet, prime minister of France, declaring himself in no doubt history would prove they had acted correctly.
"It becomes increasingly evident to me if only from Moscow's anger that we have uncovered preparations which would have exploded in due course at the time selected by the Russians, through Nasser as their instrument. Indeed, the big issue that seems to me to emerge is that if we had not acted, before very long Nasser would have been the ruler of the whole Arab world on Moscow's behalf."
As Peter Hennessy records in his new book Having It So Good - Britain in the Fifties: "History has let Eden down, there are a few partial defenders half a century later but not many."
Andrew Roberts will cheerfully admit to being a minority shareholder. "If only Eden had paid more attention to the sensibilities of the Eisenhower Administration as it faced the 1956 presidential elections, much might have gone differently," he ventures, before recording: "Certainly Eisenhower himself years later admitted that not supporting Eden had been his greatest foreign policy mistake."