Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. Hazem Kandil

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СКАЧАТЬ after resolving to launch war against Nasser, France approached Israel. Egypt’s new neighbor was alarmed by the Czech arms deal, and believed it had only a narrow window of opportunity to cripple Cairo’s drive for military parity. Israel and France developed intimate military links in the 1950s as French armaments and aviation industries sought clients with long shopping lists and generous funds to help them achieve economies of scale. Transactions increased in value from a few Mirages and Mystères to a deal to help Israel establish its first atomic reactor, in Dimona. Moreover, the Mossad shared intelligence with the Service de Documentation et Centre de Espionnage (SCCE) regarding FLN activities. Now France offered Israel a full military partnership in a joint assault against a common enemy, an offer it could hardly refuse. On September 21, Shimon Peres, the man responsible for French-Israeli military cooperation, was invited to France to plan the operation.⁹

      The aim of the tripartite plot, as set in the Sèvres Protocol on October 24, 1956, was simple: toppling Nasser and establishing control over the Suez Canal. However, the military plan and the logistics required to pull it off were anything but simple. Israel was assigned a diversionary role. Its forces would roll into Sinai to draw in Egypt’s army. The two Western powers would then demand an immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of each force to equal distances from the Suez Canal. Egypt would certainly refuse because such a withdrawal would mean surrendering Sinai to the Israelis. Citing the need to safeguard the international waterway, Britain and France would occupy the Suez Canal Zone. First, Egyptian airfields would be bombed to neutralize the air force and unnerve the population; then a naval barrage would smother canal defenses to allow paratroopers to be parachuted in; and finally, a full-fledged airborne and seaborne invasion would wrest the canal cities away from Egypt and advance to Cairo to install a friendly government.

      As agreed, Israel’s elite strike force, the 7th Armored Brigade, stormed into Egyptian territories on October 29, 1956. Nasser issued his orders for the six battalions stationed there to block the Israeli advance until the 4th Armored Division could cross the canal to join the battle. The next day, Egypt received warnings through its ambassadors to London and Paris to withdraw ten miles from the canal within twelve hours to avert international intervention. Nasser’s suspicions that a plot had been hatched were soon confirmed when Britain and France raided Egyptian airports, ravaging the country’s air force. By the end of October, Egypt was confronting a force four times as big as its own, with 1,000 jets, 700 tanks, and two naval fleets with 130 warships. This was “the largest amphibious fighting force since the end of the Second World War.”¹⁰

      Naturally, Egypt’s military command was startled. When Nasser got to GHQ on October 31, he was advised to surrender himself to the British to spare the country from total destruction. Amer, who was apparently suffering from a nervous breakdown, cried: “The air strikes will send the country back a thousand years. I cannot expose my countrymen to such a massacre.”¹¹ Ahmed Hamroush, who was present at the meeting, describes how Nasser harshly responded to Amer’s pleas for submission: “Nobody is going to surrender; everybody is going to fight … Your behavior is unmanly; the first shots have hardly been fired. Not only must I take direct command of the army, but I also don’t want you issuing any orders … If you can’t do better than mope like an old hag then you will be court-martialed.”¹² Unshaken by the defeatism of his chief military commander, Nasser offered to lead the battle personally, a suggestion to which Amer quickly conceded. The president gathered that if the army was dispatched to face the Israelis in Sinai it would be caught between a rock and a hard place as soon as the Franco-British forces landed in the Canal Zone, and the road to the capital would be virtually undefended. He thus ordered all forces to pull out of Sinai in forty-eight hours (by November 2) and dig in around the banks of the canal. Despite the pressure, Nasser planned the withdrawal meticulously; his successful delaying tactics saved two-thirds of the men and equipment. He also prevented the pilots from joining the battle because he felt they were not yet equipped to take on Western aces. After effectively benching Amer, the president authorized the sinking of fifty cement tanks at the canal’s northern entrance to block an invasion from the Mediterranean, even though he knew this would obstruct navigation in the entire canal. On November 2, Nasser gave a resounding speech at al-Azhar mosque, rallying Egyptians for an all-out popular resistance. He put Zakaria in charge of coordinating popular resistance throughout the country, and dispatched three former RCC colleagues to organize resistance in the canal cities, especially around Port Said, before visiting the battlefront himself days later.¹³

      In a few days, the attack came to a halt. British and French troops evacuated on December 22 with no gains to speak of, followed by the Israelis in March 1957. Why did the tripartite campaign falter so soon? Nasser’s swift measures certainly had some effect. In addition, the British part of the military operation faced several logistical complications. British troops had evacuated the canal in June 1956 and were already too far away; the closest detachment was in Malta, six days’ sail from Egyptian shores. Assembling the troops once more proved to be one of the most “laborious, elaborate, and time-consuming” mobilization processes in military history.¹⁴ Part of the reason for that was that Britain, as Harold McMillan confessed in his memoirs, wanted to prepare for all eventualities. This is a better way of saying that his government “lacked the imagination and initiative to move on from the Second World War … launching a Normandy-style armada by the sure knowledge that in the time it took to cross the Mediterranean world opinion, already sympathetic to Egypt, would have moved much farther in that direction.”¹⁵ Ultimately, however, it was the actions of two countries that really mattered: the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States was not willing to accept a reverse to the retrenching of European imperialism after it had finally began to replace British and French hegemony in the Middle East, and the Soviet Union considered an assault on a country with which Moscow had just established military cooperation an unforgivable insult. It was their fierce rejection of the attack—one of the very few things they agreed on during the Cold War—that brought it to nothing.

      Although the Egyptian military was officially defeated (it was forced to withdraw from Sinai, and could not prevent allied air attacks or occupation), the Suez War was hailed as a “political triumph.” Of course, Nasser’s calculations had turned out to be flawed: he ruled out an Israeli intervention; he thought Franco-British competition in the Middle East would preclude their cooperation; he believed France was totally consumed in Algeria and could not afford to open another front; and he estimated that the time and cost needed to assemble a substantial British force was too prohibitive.¹⁶ Still, the president displayed great political agility in mobilizing popular resistance and securing diplomatic support out of all proportion to his country’s strength. His arousing speeches and confident attitude inspired Egyptians to resist fiercely, and the stories of their heroic defiance are still part of the folklore of the citizens of the canal cities. Also, the way he presented Egypt’s case to world opinion, and his willingness to compensate Britain and France for their lost shares in the Suez Canal, turned the table on the aggressors. He also proved to be a successful tactician, delaying the aggressors’ success and managing to bring home two-thirds of the army intact.

      But at the same time that Nasser’s political leadership was being celebrated in Egypt and throughout the developing world, Amer’s mediocre military abilities were exposed. Analyzing the military balance sheet, Egypt’s future war minister Abd al-Ghany al-Gamasy explains:

      The political victory might have overshadowed our dismal military performance, but there was no escaping the fact that we failed to secure the country from the east or the north; that the belligerents only yielded to international pressure; and that Israel managed to secure at least one considerable gain in exchange for its withdrawal: an international peacekeeping force stationed in Sharm al-Sheikh to guarantee freedom of Israeli navigation through the Straits of Tiran into the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea. Amer was supposed to reshuffle the general staff and service heads, upgrade the air force and air defenses, and establish a strong presence in Sinai to deter future Israeli aggression; none of this was done.¹⁷

      Keen on preserving the patronage network they had established, СКАЧАТЬ