BRITAIN, NASSER AND THE BALANCE OF POWER IN THE MIDDLE EAST 1952–1967 CASS SERIES: BRITISH FOREIGN AND COLONIAL POLICY ISSN: 1467–5013 Series Editor: Peter Catterall This series provides insights into both the background influences on and the course of policy-making towards Britain’s extensive overseas interests during the past 200 years. Whitehall and the Suez Crisis, Saul Kelly and Anthony Gorst (eds) Liberals, International Relations and Appeasement: The Liberal Party, 1919–1939, Richard S.Grayson British Government Policy and Decolonisation, 1945–1963: Scrutinising the Official Mind, Frank Heinlein Harold Wilson and European Integration: Britain’s Second Application to Join the EEC, Oliver Daddow (ed.) Britain, Israel and the United States, 1955–1958: Beyond Suez, Orna Almog The British Political Elite and the Soviet Union, 1937–1939, Louise Grace Shaw Britain, Nasser and the Balance of Power in the Middle East, 1952–1967: From the Egyptian Revolution to the Six Day War, Robert McNamara BRITAIN, NASSER and the BALANCE OF POWER in the MIDDLE EAST 1952–1967 From the Egyptian Revolution to the Six Day War ROBERT McNAMARA National University of Ireland, Maynooth FRANK CASS LONDON (cid:127) PORTLAND, OR First published in 2003 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS Crown House, 47 Chase Side London N14 5BP This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” and in the United States of America by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS c/o ISBS, 920 NE 58th Avenue, # 300 Portland, Oregon, 97213–3786 Website: www.frankcass.com Copyright © 2003 R.McNamara British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data McNamara, Robert Britain, Nasser and the balance of power in the Middle East, 1952–1967: from the Egyptian revolution to the Six-Day War.—(Cass series. British foreign and colonial policy) 1. Great Britain—Foreign relations—Middle East 2. Middle East—Foreign relations—Great Britain 3. Great Britain— Foreign relations—1945–1964. 4. Egypt—Foreign relations— 1952–1970 I. Title 327.4′1056′09045 ISBN 0-203-49530-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-58192-X (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-7146-5397-7 (Print Edition) (cloth) ISSN 1467-5013 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McNamara, Robert, 1974- Britain, Nasser and the balance of power in the Middle East, 1952–1967: from the Egyptian revolution to the Six-Day War/Robert McNamara. p. cm.—(Cass series-British foreign and colonial policy, ISSN 1467–5013) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. v ISBN 0-7146-5397-7 (Print Edition) (cloth) 1. Egypt-Politics and government-1952–1970. 2. Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 1918–1970. 3. Great Britain-Foreign relations-Egypt. 4. Egypt-Foreign relations-Great Britain. 5. Great Britain-Foreign relations-1945–1964. 6. Arab nationalism. 7. Panarabism. I. Title. II. Series. DT107.827.M394 2003 327.41062′09′045–dc21 2002041579 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book. Contents Series Editor’s Preface viii Acknowledgements x List of Abbreviations xi Maps xiii Chronology of Events xv 1. Introduction: Delusions of Grandeur in the Middle East 1 2. The Historical Context of Anglo-Egyptian Relations, 1800– 11 1952 3. The New Regime and the Base Agreement, 1952–54 23 4. Suez, 1956 40 5. Issues and Stakes in the Aftermath of Suez, 1957 64 6. Crisis in Syria, 1957 92 7. From the Creation of the United Arab Republic to the Iraqi 113 Revolution, 1958 8. Decision for Détente, 1958–59 137 9. The Difficulties of the Anglo-Egyptian Détente, 1960–62 157 10. Aden, Yemen and the Decline of the Anglo-Egyptian Détente, 175 1962–63 11. Confrontation with Nasser, 1964 189 12. The Labour Government and Nasser, Part I: 1964–66 204 13. The Labour Government and Nasser, Part II: 1966–67 224 14. Britain, Nasser and the Six Day War, 1967 237 vii 15. The Six Day War and its Aftermath 262 16. Conclusion 278 Bibliography 288 Index 298 Series Editor’s Preface ON 24 JULY 1952 Harold Macmillan noted in his diary ‘In Egypt, a military coup d’etat (which may prove healthy) has intimidated the King, the corrupt old politicians, and the corrupt old generals. It remains to be seen how soon the “Young Egyptian” movement will itself be corrupted.’ It is easy to forget, in the light of subsequent events, that the coup, shortly followed by King Farouk’s abdication, was not seen necessarily as a bad thing from the British point of view. Egypt may have been central to British policy in the Middle East—straddling as it did the strategically important Suez Canal, the bases protecting which housed some 70,000 British troops—but the relationship with the old regime had been fraught with difficulties. There were disputes over finance, over the Egyptian claim to the Sudan and, not least, the looming requirement to renegotiate the terms on which the British remained in the Suez bases. On his accession to power Nasser and his colleagues thus already found a very full agenda of Anglo-Egyptian problems. Nasser did, however, bring a rather different ideological approach to that of the old political classes—such as the nationalist Wafd—he despised and suppressed. As Robert McNamara argues here, he sought not just nationalist goals such as the removal of the British from Egypt, but pan-Arabist ones which brought him into conflict with other Arab leaders—and through them the British—throughout the Middle East. In this there was a consistency of aim if not of allies. The Saudis, for instance, had no particular reasons to look with favour on the British and were more well-disposed towards Egypt in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, in contrast, Nasser’s support for the revolution in Yemen was to help pave the way for a rapprochement between the British and the Saudis which, for the former, bore fruit, amongst other things, in the first of a long and continuing series of defence contracts. Thus the Anglo-Egyptian problems Nasser inherited were replaced by new ones. By July 1954 the Bases Agreement was largely resolved, and with it the related financial disputes, aided by the fact that the British regarded the ix garrisons as having been rendered essentially redundant in the new situation of nuclear weapons. The British meanwhile also found his replacements rather more amenable on the Sudan than Farouk had been. Thereafter, however, as McNamara shows, the disputes between the two countries instead extended to the whole Middle East, exacerbated to some extent by the anxieties that Nasser was some kind of Egyptian Mussolini formed by some British statesmen. This account is therefore of importance for much more than the study of Anglo-Egyptian relations. And in explaining these wider Middle Eastern conflicts McNamara has also had skilfully to untwine the interlacing threads and complexities of Anglo-American cold war strategy in the region. Here, for instance, is explained for the first time in detail the hopes—and their eventual frustration—that Macmillan in 1957 entertained of action with the Americans to achieve Nasser’s overthrow. The Suez Crisis of 1956 thus does not emerge as the turning point it was once claimed to be. McNamara instead shows that it was the Iraqi revolution of 1958 that arguably had more of an impact on Britain’s strategy in the Middle East, a point also made in a rather different context by Orna Almog’s book in this same series. Within ten years Britain’s presence in the region had changed from a military and strategic one centred on Iraq and Aden to a much more commercial one focused on the conservative monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula. Poignantly, as McNamara points out, this triumph for Nasser however coincided with the disaster of the Six Day War. As this book powerfully argues, in the end, whilst both were able to tackle with some success the Anglo-Egyptian problems they found in 1952, Nasser’s broader attempts to reconfigure the power relations of the Middle East ultimately proved as barren as those of his old adversary, Anthony Eden. Peter Catterall London