| Six British Prime Ministers separate Tony Blair from his predecessor Sir Anthony Eden. They happen to have shared the same Christian name – abbreviated to Tony by the modern-minded Blair and retained as the fuller Anthony by the aristocratic Eden, but more significantly, their prime ministerships will share a common stigma, in Eden’s case, the ill-planned and ill-fated invasion of Egypt in 1956, and in Blair’s case, the illegitimate invasion of Iraq earlier this year. |
| After Colonel Nasser had seized the Suez Canal in July 1956 and appropriated its assets, the British needed to protect the flow of their oil from the Middle East, half of which came via the canal. Aided by the French who were equally vulnerable, they decided to take on Egypt’s defiant new ruler. Eden’s previous experience in confronting the European dictators Hitler and Mussolini had convinced him that it was always important, as he put it in his memoirs Full Circle, ‘to reduce the stature of a megalomaniacal dictator at an early stage.’ [EXTRACT] |
Published in DAWN 15 July 2003, and reprinted in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006). |
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