The Anglo-French ultimatum of 30 October demanding that both Israel and Egypt withdraw ten miles from the canal would have actually involved a 100-mile Israeli advance. Indeed, the plot was absurdly transparent. Eisenhower, though preoccupied by his re-election campaign, was not deceived for long. This stemmed from the plot hatched by Eden, Guy Mollet and David Ben-Gurion, whereby Israel would strike at Egypt and the European powers would intervene on the pretence of separating the belligerents but really with the intention to topple Nasser and seize the Suez area. ‘What does Anthony think he’s doing? Why is he doing this to me?’ Ike was politically outraged that Eden had ignored his statesmanlike advice not to use force, which could only help the USSR in the Cold War, and personally affronted that his old wartime comrade was trying to mislead him about the attack.
‘Bombs, by God,’ President Eisenhower exclaimed. As the UK’s representative at the United Nations reported, British protests against the Russian bombing of Budapest could not carry much conviction ‘if we ourselves are bombing Cairo’. The Russian government, said the British ambassador to Moscow, regards ‘Suez as a heaven-sent distraction from Hungary’. He thus took advantage of the Suez conflict to crush the nationalist uprising in the satellite state. In the face of imperialist aggression in the Middle East, Khrushchev felt that he had to quell opposition in Eastern Europe. The two events were intimately connected. Tunzelmann’s history of the Anglo-French-Israeli assault on Egypt, whose leader, Colonel Nasser, had nationalised the Suez Canal Company and was fomenting anti-colonial feeling throughout the Arab world, is particularly valuable because she juxtaposes it with a blow-by-blow account of the simultaneous Soviet occupation of Hungary.
Full exposure of the squalid and disastrous conspiracy in which he engaged in 1956 has been left to historians. Chilcot has now demolished Blair’s defence: he knew at the time that the intelligence branding Saddam Hussein a threat was not, as he asserted, ‘beyond doubt’ and he publicly declared that no decision to attack Iraq had been taken while privately assuring President George W Bush, himself committed to regime change, ‘I will be with you, whatever.’ No damning official verdict was pronounced on Eden, whose mendacity was far more flagrant than Blair’s.
After their respective incursions into the Middle East both men stressed that they had done what was right and acted in good faith. It not only marks the sixtieth anniversary of the invasion of Suez but also coincides with the publication of the Chilcot Report, which shows how Tony Blair, like Anthony Eden, took Britain to war under false pretences. Alex von Tunzelmann provides no rationale for this book but it appears at an opportune moment.
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