Don Murray is one of the most prolific of the CBC's foreign correspondents, filing hundreds of reports - in French and English - from China, Europe, the Middle East and the Soviet Union. He is currently based in London.

During his 30 years with CBC, Murray has covered a multitude of major stories, including the advent of perestroika and glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union. He wrote A Democracy of Despots, a book documenting that collapse and the rebirth of Russia. While in Berlin, he covered the peace agreement ending the war in Bosnia and, in London, covered the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the peace agreement in Northern Ireland. He authored Family Wars, a major feature article for the International Journal paralleling the troubles in Northern Ireland and the war in Bosnia. In recent years he has covered the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.


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"I want him destroyed, can't you understand? I don't want an alternative. And I don't give a damn if there's anarchy and chaos [afterwards]."

The leader had spent several impatient months waiting to launch the invasion. In public he had gone along with several initiatives linked to the United Nations to find a peaceful solution but he had already decided on military action.

And so it began, not in March 2003, but in November 1956. This was not Iraq but Suez and the leader was not George W. Bush but Britain's Anthony Eden. The man the prime minister wanted destroyed was Gamel Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader who had taken power in a military coup that toppled the monarchy in 1952.

In July 1956, Nasser suddenly nationalized the Suez Canal. It had been owned and operated by an Anglo-French company and for more than 75 years the canal had effectively been under British control. British troops had been stationed along it until forced to leave by Nasser early in 1956.

For Eden, nationalization was a blow to British power and influence in the region, a challenge that had to be taken up and repulsed. He was encouraged in this direction by secret intelligence reports that Nasser was a subservient ally, almost a tool, of the Soviet leadership.

And so Britain prepared to intervene militarily. But the British government needed a cover story. Israel offered to provide one and France willingly joined the cabal. At a secret conference outside Paris in October 1956 the deal was agreed. Israel, which had been fighting an guerrilla war with Egypt for years in the Sinai, would invade the Sinai and deliver telling blows to the Egyptian army. Britain and France would react with an ultimatum: both Israel and Egypt must stop hostilities immediately or they would intervene. It was an ultimatum Nasser could never accept.

And so it unfolded as planned, at least at first: the Israeli military incursion, the Anglo-French ultimatum, the Egyptian refusal, the British military intervention. Seven hundred British paratroopers were dropped into the desert. Their goal was to take Port Said and then the canal.

Then it all fell apart. The Egyptians sank ships in the canal, effectively blocking passage along it. The Soviet Union threatened nuclear retaliation, thousands marched in London in protest, and the American president, Dwight Eisenhower, said no.

This last was the key reaction. Eisenhower was furious because the British had hidden their plan from him. He was running for a second term as president. The election was the following week. Hungary was already boiling in revolt against Moscow, which was about to send in troops to crush the uprising. Eisenhower wanted no more foreign crises. He demanded that the British stop, turn around and leave Egypt. And his treasury secretary made it clear the U.S. would stand by and watch the pound crash until the troops were out.

Eden capitulated on Nov. 6 and went to the British House of Commons to announce his humiliation. "The face was grey except where black-rimmed caverns surrounded the dying embers of his eyes," one observer said of Eden's appearance that afternoon. He stepped down within weeks.

It was also the end of the British imperial illusion: the idea that Britain was an autonomous world force that could act without the approval, indeed against the wishes, of the United States. That policy was rapidly replaced with a new one: "Hug them close." The doctrine continues to this day, never more enthusiastically than under Tony Blair, that the British government must get as close to the American administration, any American administration, as possible.

On the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the British military intervention in the Suez crisis, the British House of Commons held a debate on Iraq. It was, amazingly, the first time the British House had discussed the bloody occupation of that country in more than two years. The debate was on an opposition motion, and the British government wanted to say as little as possible on the subject. Prime Minister Tony Blair made that symbolically clear by not even showing up.

The opposition called for an independent inquiry into the preparations for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This, said Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, would send the "wrong signals at the wrong time" and the motion was narrowly defeated. Yet one prominent opposition leader said it would make little difference: Tony Blair's political tombstone would still read "Iraq."

Suez was only mentioned in passing but a closer look suggests intriguing parallels.

The intelligence that galvanized Eden, which said that Nasser was a pawn of Moscow, was based on a hazy source called "Lucky Break." Minutes from the Soviet politburo, made public after the collapse of the Soviet Union, suggest that Lucky Break was making it up: the Soviet leaders were as surprised as the rest of the world by the nationalization of the canal. In the modern British parlance, the intelligence was "sexed up."

Eden's announced goal, to safeguard the canal for international shipping, had little to do with his real goal: regime change. As he was preparing to invade he met Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the hero of El Alamein. Montgomery asked what Eden's objective was in taking the canal zone. Eden replied that the objective was "to knock Nasser off his perch."

"And after that?" Montgomery asked.

Eden had no answer.

Eisenhower spared the British the rigours of a barely considered occupation. That was a blessing in disguise: Even as the Egyptian army was losing to the British, Nasser was organizing citizen militias and calling on his people to fight a guerrilla war against the invaders.

The British withdrawal sent Nasser's stock soaring and unleashed a wave of Arab nationalism that hastened the British and French retreats from the Middle East and North Africa. But Nasser made the mistake of believing his own propaganda: he had pushed back the British, the French and the Israelis in 1956, his armies could defeat the Israelis alone. He was wrong: The Israelis crushed his troops in the six-day war of 1967.

The final word should go to Gen. Charles Keightley, the commander-in-chief of the forces sent to Suez. In his final despatch to the politicians in London, he wrote: "The one over-riding lesson of the Suez operation is that world opinion is now an absolute principle of war and must be treated as such."

Almost five decades on, as the U.S. and Britain, hugging close, prepared to invade Iraq, those words had apparently been forgotten.