Hammarskjöld: A Life

12. Unrighteous Shooting Wars

12 Unrighteous Shooting Wars T he British Empire was, among many other things, cozy. At its height before World War I, and even in the less tranquil interwar period, there was almost always a recognizable scene no matter how distant from the British Isles: travelers could find high tea; civil servants and the military posted abroad lived in communities along familiar lines; businesspeople and high government officials found their own kind in exclusive clubs from Rangoon and Bombay to Cairo and Nairobi; native servants were ever at hand to bring more tea, and they vanished at night. Rebellions and expeditions occurred from time to time—young Winston Churchill reported avidly on several for home newspapers—but there was a settled order with the scent of forever. The Other posed no threat. The freedom movement in India was a notable exception, but its leaders were anglicized; the Indian Other spoke English beautifully. One of them, Rabindranath Tagore, won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. For those who had lived this imperial idyll, the rapid dissolution of the empire after World War II, especially India’s independence in 1947, engendered complex emotions: ineradicable nostalgia, the determination to keep and defend what could be kept and defended, anger and humiliation over losses of prestige and influence, realistic acceptance that Britain could no longer afford an empire or expect world opinion to endorse colonialism. “Direct British rule is disappearing,” wrote the exemplary British general who commanded Jordan’s Arab Legion. “History will record that we sailed the seas, that we conquered, that we ruled. But will she remember also that we loved . . . ?”1 Loved or unloved, the Other emerged into daylight, acquired political power, and did everything possible—sometimes with wisdom and diplomacy, sometimes through terror and violence—to hurry Britain home. Among those Others, none was less welcome to Anthony Eden, British prime minister in 1955–57, than Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the months before Eden turned loose an army against Egypt, he is reported to have said, “What’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or ‘neutralizing’ him . . . ? I want him destroyed. . . . I want him removed. . . . And I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt.”2 At much the same 284 Hammarskjöld | A Life moment, president Dwight Eisenhower expressed a detached perspective. “Nasser embodies,” he said, “the emotional demands of the people of the era for independence and for ‘slapping the white man down.’”3 The distance between their views would matter. There were two wars in the fall of 1956. One of them—the Suez Crisis—has attracted retellings and reexaminations to this day. From its shelf in history it radiates an essential warning wrapped in a fascinating story. Many leading participants in the event later wrote about it to shed light or to lie. Like a diagram that induces optical illusions, its key incidents come in many versions. It has all the features of tragedy: in Eden a flawed protagonist with the power to enact his dream and his fall; in France, Britain, and Israel, nations aggressively conspiring; and, without any doubt, terror and pity—terror that major Western powers could be so coldly unwise, pity for all concerned, both warriors and victims. Israel gained a little, thanks to Ben-Gurion’s furious obstinacy. Nasser gained a great deal; he became a hero across the Arab world and beyond. France didn’t solve its problem, which wasn’t Egypt at all, it was Algeria. Britain disgraced itself. And the United Nations, with crucial leadership from the United States and Canada and the support of nearly the entire General Assembly, coaxed all parties back on the rails. The other war, the brutal Soviet suppression of a democratic revolution in Hungary that had proved itself capable of organizing a responsible government in a matter of days, was sealed off from Western influence and nearly worldwide protest. There was little to be done to aid the “freedom fighters.” The United Nations had no leverage, only indignation; Hammarskj öld searched for a way in and found none. The United States was unwilling to treat the issue as a cause for war with the Soviet Union. Britain and France had for the moment shredded their standing in world affairs and supplied the Soviet Union with an incredibly awkward parallel at Suez to its violence in Hungary. The only relief that could be offered was to receive the huge number of Hungarian refugees fleeing their country—some two hundred...