Better than Expected

Of all the obstructions in the Suez Canal, the Egyptians were sure that the hardest to remove would be the cement-laden Akka, which they sank midway in the canal, and the tangled wreckage of the Firdan bridge, which they dynamited and then accused the Anglo-French of having destroyed from the air. In 2 1/2 days last week two powerful German lifting craft and a pair of tugs cleared a passage past the dynamited bridge with so little apparent difficulty that a disquieted Egyptian army officer watching from the bank remarked: "By Allah, we did not expect them to work that fast."

Though Lieut. General Raymond A. Wheeler, U.N. salvage chief and retired U.S. Army engineer, had listed some 50 obstructions to be cleared from the canal, only eleven of these have turned out to be major. Many are barges or fishing vessels so small that salvage vessels can haul them away in a few hours. One mighty heave by the two big lifting vessels pulled away half of the Firdan bridge, which was one of the eleven major obstructions. Anglo-French salvage vessels have all but cleared away a third at Port Said. Last week U.N. salvage ships, including British and French vessels now finishing their job in Port Said under the U.N. flag, pulled out three smaller wrecks and tied into half a dozen more. The LST Akka remains the big obstacle, and the commander of the force assigned to it has not yet decided whether he can cut and remove it piecemeal, or will be forced to blow it apart with resulting damage to the canal. Nonetheless there was now optimistic talk of clearing the canal in a month less than the earlier estimates and of opening it to ships up to 10,000 tons by early March. All of this was a sharp answer to uninformed talk in Britain of U.N. dilatoriness, an attack which may prove as baseless as the earlier British assumption that only their pilots knew how to maneuver ships through the canal.

The successful beginning of the canal clearance also put new pressure on Nasser, who had counted on the blocked canal as Egypt's best lever for getting the world to pry Israel out of Sinai and Gaza. The Israelis, who have so far given up barely half of Sinai, are demanding U.N. guarantees that Egypt will neither reoccupy Gaza nor obstruct passage for Israeli ships through the Gulf of Aqaba.

Economic problems are also catching up with Nasser. Last week the Egyptian regime began rationing kerosene, which millions of its subjects use for heating and cooking. As a result of declining government revenues, Cairo announced a 10% cutback in public spending. Nasser's need for the canal revenues is the best weapon the rest of the world has against his attempts to haggle too long over a Suez political settlement. At week's end, in the usual Egyptian style, the Cairo newspaper Al Ahram announced that Egypt would negotiate with Britain and France only if new governments took over in those countries and apologized to Egypt for their predecessors' misdeeds.

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