Agency and Ethics: The Politics of Military Intervention

CHAPTER THREE: Intervention in Egypt

CHAPTER THREE Intervention in Egypt INTRODUCTION This chapter continues to explore the normative and political nature of military intervention by analyzing the British and French intervention in Egypt in 1956.1 This intervention provides a good “test” of the argument for a number of reasons: One, this attack on Egypt is rarely considered to have originated from within any normative framework. It is usually explained as an attempt by France and Britain to hold on to the strategically important Suez Canal and to ensure the flow of oil through it, an argument more in line with an amoral realist account of intervention. Two, the public lies, or “collusion,” that surrounded this intervention make it a difficult one to which one may ascribe any morally good purpose. Three, the reason for the failure of this intervention is generally thought to reside in the American resistance to the British and French actions and not to any “political response” from within Egypt or anywhere else. Each one of these points has some important truths to it, and this chapter will not attempt to disprove any of them with the discovery of new documentary material. Instead, this chapter, as with much of this book, provides an alternative lens through which to view the events of the intervention. While concerns over the continued flow of oil certainly played a part in the decision to topple Nasser, other concerns, focused on a set of moral obligations felt by both the French and the British, played just as important a role. The British norm revolved around three central tenets: First, although their empire was now in the process of being turned into a commonwealth, the British still believed that they had a number of important “responsibilities” in Africa and the Middle East. Those colonial responsibilities were reinforced in the Middle East by an Orientalist discourse that surrounded British interpretations of the Arabs and Egyptians. Second, the British felt themselves to be the protectors of an international 91 morality and law that they believed Nasser had violated in his duplicitous comments about his aims and in his nationalization of an “international” waterway. Third, many British leaders and members of the House of Commons saw Nasser as Hitler or Mussolini. Importantly, the aspect of Nasser that was analogous to the dictators in this view was not his internal policies but rather his international conduct, especially his failure to keep promises. Thus the British responded to the Hitler/Nasser who invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland and not the Hitler/Nasser who created Auschewitz and Buchenwald. The French also had a set of normative concerns that motivated their participation in the intervention. First, the French believed that they also had a set of responsibilities emanating from their colonial past. These responsibilities took on two different manifestations. One, the French believed that Nasser was undermining their ability to promote French culture , which embodied the best of Western civilization, throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. Two, the French sought to protect the most important of their colonial possessions, Algeria. The second ethic behind the intervention was the French “tacit alliance” with Israel. While that alliance certainly had elements of a traditional security relationship, it also involved a bond based on a particular reading of French and Jewish history, especially concerning the Holocaust. Third, the French also saw Nasser as Hitler, leading them to respond vigorously to his actions in seizing the canal. Because of their more direct experience of Hitler, many of the leaders of the French government, who had also been participants in the French resistance, refused to allow another dictator to act freely in the world. These elements of the French action reveal what can be best described as a combination of a colonial and a humanitarian norm. Yet, while these ethical concerns motivated the French and British actions in the Middle East, they soon came into conflict with the politics of state agency, leading to the downfall of the intervention. The British insisted that they were not like other countries in this area, especially the United States. Thus while the Eisenhower administration sought to find a peaceful solution to the crisis, the British saw this as a typical American refusal to recognize danger, citing their failure to enter both world wars until after Britain and Europe had already born the brunt of the struggle. Second, the British image of itself as protector of the Arabs world prevented it from acting openly with Israel to defeat Nasser. The “collusion” that has...