Sunday, October 29, 2006
Fifty Years Since Suez
The Suez Crisis occurred fifty years ago. In a vital piece in the New York Times David Fromknin, author of A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, provides a pretty good capsule outline of why Suez was such a vitally transformative moment. Not surprisingly for an article trying to boil such a monumentally complex geopolitical scuffle down to a usable essence, there is some overstatement and reductionism, but on the whole Fromkin shows why this easily misunderstood event was so crucial to the world that emerged from it.
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2 comments:
If you're interested in vacuous comment on Suez, try the right-wing blond bombshell "historian" Andrew Roberts' comments on the BBC website recently. Apparently, if it were not for treacherous liberal conservatives and those damn Yankees, colonialism would have eased to a genteel and civilised end and the whole world would be perfect again. Still, he does conclude with a lovely anecdote relating to more recent Anglo-American co-operation, where a correspondent to the Times replied to a US embassy official's comment that the US had always pledged "to stand by your nation, through thick and thin" with the single word "Suez".
Actually, it's also worth noting that the attention given to Suez here in the UK - including a wonderful documentary series - bears comparison with the absence of attention to the anniversary in France.
British Rob -- we've missed you. Thanks for the heads up.
I do find the contrast between England and france illustrative, but then again, doesn't that in some ways capture the entire endeavor of decolonizing nicely?
Cheers --
dcat
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