The Suez crisis 50 years ago (#239, Topic F)

Exactly 50 years ago today, a British-French-Israeli alliance invaded the Suez Canal, in the so-called 6-day war. To mark this occasion, yesterday's New York Times had a long op-ed piece, "Stuck in the Canal". Being by a history professor in Boston, the piece was, to my way of thinking, unusually frank, even brunt, mincing no words. It began by saying that "It [the Suez crisis] was the moment when America pushed out the Europeans and then tried to take their place -- and the reverberations are still felt today." Claiming that "Britain and France had gone to war [against Egypt] in order to keep their empires," the author felt that they committed faux pas by keeping the Americans "in the dark" and by lying about Israeli's involvement. USA, it seems, had no quarrel with UK-France's action, only with their timing: "President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary [John Foster] Dulles believed that [Egypt's] Nasser should be overthrown -- some day." But Ike was "angered by British wartime colleagues who had lied and deceived him", saying that "nothing justified double-crossing the United States." This anger had an unexpected consequence: "the Treasury Department threatened to withdraw support of British currency unless the British Army left Egypt." Britain withdrew, Nassar was saved, and the "Suez crisis was over." Ike thought that his actions demonstrated that "unlike the British and French, Americans were not imperalists -- but the third world remained unconvinced. And in Europe, skeptics clamied the episode showed that the Americans intended to steal the empires of Britain and France." And Israel fared no better: "providing evidence to enemies who had asserted all along that Israel was no more than a European imperalist itself." The end result was that Britain decided to follow US's lead while France "began to build the atomic bomb." Interesting history and sober reading.