Historical Perspective
Charles Moore, writing in the Telegraph has a perspective on what the outcome of the politics of personal destruction can lead to. The desperate attempts to blame the other party and especially the head of that party can have unintended consequences.
Fifty years ago on Monday, Britain ordered its soldiers in Egypt to cease fire. An Anglo-French force, secretly colluding with Israel, had invaded because Nasser, the President of Egypt, had nationalised the Suez Canal. Militarily, our invasion was successful, but it caused international political outrage. America and the United Nations denounced it
The ceasefire was a humiliation for Britain, and marked the end of our leading, colonial role in the Middle East. The Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was discredited, and anyway became too ill to continue. In January, he resigned. The Edens sailed to New Zealand via the Panama Canal on a recuperative holiday. Their cabin steward was a young man called John Prescott, who won so many boxing matches that he was presented with a prize bottle of wine by Eden. He continued to punch people in later life, and is now our Deputy Prime Minister.
Many in both main political parties today hope for a similar fate for Tony Blair – though he has already suffered the punishment of having John Prescott as his political cabin steward for more than 12 years – and for a similar reason. They regard the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq as a fiasco, and they want history to say that it closed Mr Blair's career. In America, like-minded people are looking for a comparable humbling of George W. Bush in the mid-term elections on Tuesday.
A more indirect effect of Suez was the fall of the pro-British Iraqi monarchy in a coup in 1958. Ten years later, the Ba'athist elements in the coup gained complete control of government in Iraq, eventually producing the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Another interesting event expected next week is that Saddam could well be sentenced to death.
I mention Suez to suggest a bit of perspective on Iraq today. Judging by their pipsqueak decision to troop in behind the massed ranks of the Welsh Nationalists in the House of Commons this week, and try to force an inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war on the Government, the Tories see advantage in hanging the war round Labour's neck. They also want to edge away from their early support for it.
It might make them pause if they remembered that the blood-curdling Labour denunciations of Eden, which followed only a few weeks after Labour's warlike denunciations of Nasser, did the Opposition absolutely no electoral good. Then, as will soon be the case now, a new man took over the government. By the time of the general election more than three years later, neither party wanted to talk about Suez. The Tories, who had been responsible for it, increased their majority to 107. Today, the parties are reversed, but the lesson is the same.
Read the whole thing. Those who forget the past and all that.
By TC@LeatherPenguin, Saturday, 4 November , 2006 @ 11:47 am
Those who forget the past and all that.
Too right. Whenever I talk to my nephews and nieces, or the second tier squad (with thirty-odd cousins pumping out kids, they are legion! ) I tell them no matter what else they do in school, read history. Don’t pay a godawful amount of time listening to your professor, because the odds are he or she will be “interpreting” the thing. Just read everything you can get your hands on, especially the Brit/Euro authors. They have one hell of a longer view than their US counterparts.