The Threat of War

For a time last week, responsible statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic feared that war was in the making. Messages of alarm shot between Washington, London, Paris and Tel Aviv. U.S. armed forces were alerted--not because attack was believed imminent, but in case it was. Out of their mutual concern, the Western alliance, rent by the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, was put back together again. The price: an incomplete victory in Egypt.

The chief fear was not the war of "rocket weapons" and other "modern and terrible means" that Russian Premier Nikolai Bulganin threatened against Great Britain and France (TIME, Nov. 12). This was taken to be crude and nasty propaganda. The fear was of a limited war in the Middle East, of the kind Soviet Russia likes: perhaps without any Russian soldiers, but instigated and supplied by the Russians.

Bell Rings. The alarm bell did not ring until after Britain and France had already agreed to a cease-fire in Egypt, in the face of the expressed disapproval of other principal allies around the world and a 64-10-5 vote against them in U.N. Israel too had agreed to a ceasefire, but was waiting to exact a victor's satisfaction from Nasser.

Then came reports of Soviet MIGs landing in Syria. The alarm faded in a few hours when intelligence officers concluded that Nasser had simply flown his Russian planes to Damascus to save them from destruction by the British and French invaders.

But at midweek Israeli intelligence (usually quite good) reported that 24 Russian-manned MIG-17s, accompanied by Soviet transports bringing technicians, radar and ground equipment, had landed in Syria. This report fitted in with the recent visit to Russia of Syrian President Shukri el Kuwatly, whose government and army are more thickly infested with Communists than any other Arab state. His was no casual visit. His wife, his daughter, his Foreign Minister and staff. Minister of Defense. Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Propaganda and the manager of the Central Bank of Syria had flown to the Crimea with an escort of Soviet fighter planes. They returned last week with smiles of satisfaction.

Quiet Toughness. Late Wednesday David Ben-Gurion got a personal message from President Eisenhower. Its gist, as relayed by Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban, was that the U.S. had reached a stern decision: unless Ben-Gurion backed down and agreed to retreat from the Sinai peninsula as the United Nations asked, he could not expect any U.S. aid in the event of a Soviet attack. The White House had already made clear to Paris and London that the U.S. did not conceive its NATO commitment to include the Middle East or Cyprus if the Anglo-French persisted in their use of force. In short, so long as Britain, France and Israel had not purged themselves of their aggressions, they were on their own. But Eisenhower had also served notice on the Kremlin in a White House statement: the U.S. would not allow any "new force" to intervene in the Middle East situation except under the mandate of the U.N. This was a characteristically quiet way of asserting a tough stand: the U.S. would not let the Russians intervene.

By the time widespread private fears of war had risen to the headlines, and to the public consciousness, the statesmen were beginning to feel that they had affairs under control. Ben-Gurion hastily reversed his talk of the victory's spoils, agreed to withdraw from Sinai. The Anglo-French hastened to comply with the null plea for an early and easy take-over in Suez by a U.N. police force of soldiers from the small powers. The Middle East crisis became a race between the U.N.--trying for a peace before the Russians could intervene--and the Russians, hastening to raise "volunteers"' by the thousands (and in entire army reserve units), perhaps to move into the Middle East under the guise of peacemakers.

Skillfully, Swedish U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold set about raising the small-power force prescribed by the General Assembly. Within the week he had arranged with seven governments to provide policing troops. The U.S. Defense Department was ready with planes and equipment to ferry some of the force into operation. Switzerland (which is not a U.N. member) was so scared out of its neutrality that it made arrangements for Swissair to airlift 400 men a day from Italy to Cairo.

To the Swift. By week's end the race seemed to be going to the swift. Dag Hammarskjold. working for peace with the kind of quiet effectiveness that would win medals in war, did not wait for the necessary final consent from Egypt's Premier Nasser to assemble the first big contingent of policemen. He set up a U.N. staging area outside Naples, began assembling there 6,000 soldiers from Denmark, Norway, Canada, Colombia. Finland. India and Sweden, for the hop into the Suez area. As they got set. Russia put out a warning that its "volunteers'" would be "allowed" to go into the Middle East un less the British, French and Israeli forces withdrew from Egyptian soil. Red China joined in with talk of 250,000 "volunteers" (the difficulty of transporting them to Egypt boggled the imagination).

As the U.N. force moved in. the pretext for Soviet intervention would vanish. But the conditions that made the threat possible--the hatreds and tensions, the obvious advantage to the Kremlin of involving the West in a drawn-out and profitless war there--remain.

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