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Title: Whitehall and the Suez Crisis (Diplomacy and Diplomats) by Saul Kelly, Anthony Gorst ISBN: 0-7146-5018-8 Publisher: Frank Cass & Co Pub. Date: January, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $64.50

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent contribution to understanding the Suez crisis
Comment: The Suez crisis, the British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956, was an important moment in Britain's history. This collection of fourteen essays studies the roles played by the politicians' chief advisers. The essays are based on new research in Britain's archives, although key files, like MI6's and the Joint Intelligence Committee's, and those on the Government's War Book, are still closed. And Eden ordered the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, to destroy all the evidence of the collusion between Britain, France and Israel.

This is a very important book. The contributors add a great deal to our knowledge of this deplorable episode. Particularly outstanding is Lewis Johnman's essay on the role of Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, the Foreign Office's Senior Legal Advisor.

Sir Pierson Dixon, the UK Permanent Representative at the UN, warned Eden, "it is quite out of the question to extract from the Security Council a good vote on a resolution designed to justify subsequent use of force, particularly force exerted by two nations without further reference to the United Nations."

Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice agreed, "It is very difficult to get into the heads of people in this country that the Security Council is not an institution for settling disputes, or even for doing justice between nations, but an institution for preventing or stopping wars ... The argument that by going to the Security Council we have done everything possible and that the Security Council having proved itself impotent, we are now justified in going ahead on our own, may well appeal to public opinion in this country, but the argument is based on a misconception of the real functions of the Security Council."

Fitzmaurice also noted, "under the Charter any preventative war initiated by a government on its own responsibility is aggression." Lord McNair, ex-President of the International Court, concurred, telling the government, "our intervention is illegal."

In 1953, Eden had written a Cabinet memorandum that said, "In the second half of the twentieth century we cannot hope to maintain our position in the Middle East by the methods of the last century. ... Our strategic purposes in the Middle East can no longer be served by arrangements which local nationalism will regard as military occupation by foreign troops." After the attack, as the British Ambassador to Egypt accurately predicted, "The British and French could not continue their occupation indefinitely. They would have to leave again."

The government said that no attacks would be made on areas where civilian casualties were inevitable, then ordered the bombing of Cairo and Heliopolis. The British government's illegal use of force at Suez led to the 1958 Iraqi revolution against the pro-British government, destroyed any prospects of peaceful relations with the Arab world and wrecked Britain's reputation across the world.