Critical eye: Mar 22
British troops were mobilised for war at his instigation, yet he claimed to be "a man of peace, working for peace, striving for peace, negotiating for peace. I am still the same man, with the same convictions, the same devotion to peace. I could not be other, even if I wished, but I am utterly convinced that the action we have taken is right." So said Anthony Eden, in the midst of his own Middle East predicament, the Suez crisis of 1956.
Andrew Roberts, reviewing DR Thorpe's Eden: The Life and Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon 1897-1977 in the Sunday Telegraph, saw more than just rhetorical echoes. "Of course Eden was quite right to want to punish Egypt for her piracy," he harrumphed. "Had it come off successfully... it would have proved 'no end of a lesson' to the Middle East in its dealings with the west."
The blame for Eden's downfall lay, Roberts felt, with Eden's unconvinced and self-promoting subordinates (such as "Harold Macmillan, who was after Eden's job") - and with America: "Had Eisenhower been more farsighted than merely fretting about a re-election campaign... his successor today might not be needing to go to war against Iraq today [sic]."
But war against Iraq it is, and the Sunday Times reminded its readers of what the last Gulf war was like for those who fought it. Hugh McManners, reviewing Anthony Swofford's Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War, recalled a British sergeant major saying that "servicemen had been trained to face the horrors of tanks and chemical-biological warfare, 'to jump over a 100ft cliff... but when we got there, it was the size of a matchbox'."
"This sense of anticlimax pervades Jarhead ," McManners wrote, further disconcerting marines already "immature and confused... They don't even understand the concept of jihad." And sex-obsessed, of course and despite everything. He quoted Swofford: "In sexless Saudi we're carrying on our backs the overseas sins of generations of fighting American GIs - gang rapes in Vietnamese jungles, the same in Seoul and Pusan, pregnant Englishwomen abandoned after the second world war, Japanese women raped and impregnated and abandoned during the Occupation..."
They waited six months, McManners noted, and the Gulf war was over in 23 pages, leaving Swofford and his platoon to "poke about unsupervised in abandoned Iraqi positions, looting and, in some cases, desecrating corpses." Then "home to a hero's welcome".