Something's Got to Happen

Richard Casey, Australia's handsome Minister for External Affairs and an old Egypt hand, stopped off at Cairo last week, en route to the Paris U.N. meeting. After talking with Egyptian friends, Casey sat down with a scotch & soda and told newsmen: "This situation of tension can't go on indefinitely. Something's got to happen." Did Casey see a way out? a newsman asked. "No," said the diplomat, "I don't."

Nobody else seemed to, either. Having said that the British were through in the Suez Canal Zone, Nahas Pasha's government was both too weak to force them out and too scared of its own aroused people to talk sensible compromise.

The British lion, which had seemed mangy and moth-eaten in Iran, put on a show of bared fangs that stunned the Egyptians. British Tommies, not overly tender with their bayonets, picked up Egyptian officials who were making trouble and booted them out of the zone. As the 40,000 Egyptian laborers who served the zone installations faded away, British tanks rumbled into neighboring villages and herded laborers into British-run camps. Said the British: they were not running press gangs, merely giving "safe conduct" to the workers.

The Egyptians fell back on hot words and glorious tales. One Cairo paper issued an extra with a story, completely fabricated, of how a cucumber-laden truck, confiscated by the British, blew up when the hungry Tommies started to unload it, killing 250 men. Handbills crying "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" appeared in British camps. Irregular units, fired with bloodthirsty language, popped out all over the delta.

The British plan (if it could be called a plan) was to let Nahas Pasha's incompetent government discredit itself completely, whereupon the King, who dislikes Nahas, would fire him. Moderates would come to power and make a deal with the British. It didn't work out that way in Iran.

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