LONDON: Britain invaded an Arab country led by a man the prime minister branded a dictator on a par with Hitler, who supported ‘terrorists’ and was said to threaten vital western interests in the region. The invasion was based on a falsehood.

That was 50 years ago. Yet Anthony Eden’s response to Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal has remarkable parallels with those of his successor, Tony Blair, in another Middle East crisis of the West’s own making.

Eden, who had been foreign secretary in the Second World War, compared Nasser to Hitler (as did the Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell). The situation was ‘the most hazardous that our country has known since 1940’, Eden warned Eisenhower. Blair similarly evoked ghosts of the past. He could not endure the ‘shame’ of appeasement, he said a few days before the Iraq invasion. Britain would face a ‘living nightmare’ if it appeased Saddam Hussein.

Blair, like Eden, had succumbed to that most dangerous affliction of political leaders — misreading history. Nasser was an Arab nationalist. Saddam was a dictator, but no Hitler.

And in their determination to pursue their military adventures, both Blair and Eden kept their colleagues in the dark. Eden secretly colluded with France and Israel in a military operation designed to topple Nasser. Blair may not have deliberately lied to parliament, but he certainly misled MPs — and the evidence suggests he had privately assured President Bush that he would join the invasion. Both Eden and Blair deceived themselves with the help of manipulated intelligence.

It is a historical irony that Eden learned of Nasser’s entirely lawful decision to nationalise the Suez Canal as he was hosting a dinner in Downing Street for the pro-western Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Said. His advice to Eden was to ‘hit him [Nasser] hard’. The Foreign Office minister Anthony Nutting, who resigned in protest at what he described as an insane adventure, observed that Said, Britain’s most faithful Arab ally, was swept away in a bloody revolution two years later, a direct result of the Suez debacle. That paved the way in turn for a Ba’athist coup in Iraq in 1963, when Saddam first appeared — reportedly as a torturer.

The view in Whitehall was that the invasion of Egypt was wrong, indeed unlawful. Compounded by deception — at the time only suspected — this led to deep tension and anxiety across Whitehall, which was largely kept in the dark. “The whole machinery of the Foreign Office was pushed aside,” recalled Harold Beeley, a senior diplomat. “The idea of taking a decision of that magnitude without seeking the opinions of international lawyers, of experts in the Middle East ... was extraordinary.”

Donald Logan, the official who witnessed the secret collusion with France and Israel, noted later: “Eden made his own contacts with his own people in informal meetings with no records. A purely informal network of people convinced that Nasser had to go, was some kind of Hitler, developed around Eden.” Similar criticisms were made of Blair, notably in the sharp attacks on ‘sofa government’ made in Lord Butler’s review of the use of intelligence on Iraq.

The government fought the BBC in 1956 just as it did in 2003. Government law officers were opposed to military action in 1956 as they were in 2003. The UN was ignored. Military commanders were uneasy; some strongly opposed the Suez invasion. They were concerned not least about what they were supposed to do when they landed. Lord Mountbatten, first sea lord at the time of Suez, remarked: “You cannot, I suggest, fight ideas with troops and weapons.” The observation is echoed almost daily now by British commanders. Lord Boyce, the chief of defence staff in 2003, made clear his concerns about the legality of the invasion of Iraq, and the total failure to prepare for the aftermath.

Suez and Iraq both provoked fierce public controversy. They also caused trauma in the intelligence world. There was widespread unease in MI6 about how it was used to provide ammunition against Saddam. Eden’s approach to MI6 to help him get rid of Nasser also caused deep concern, with the agency’s senior officers — including its head, Sir Dick White — strongly disapproving.

That was one reason why the Anglo-American intelligence relationship survived its unprecedented crisis. For there is one fundamental difference between Suez and Iraq. Fifty years ago Washington was opposed to military intervention. And that taught the British government a lesson. When Harold Macmillan succeeded an ill and thwarted Eden, he locked Britain into a deeper special relationship, with a mutual defence pact with the US — which Blair was to accept without question over Iraq.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service