Into the Shadows

Harried Britain discovered last week that, having won the dreary little war in Oman, it must still win the peace. From the sunny desert where, in British eyes at least, victory seemed so bright and clear, the crisis shifted into the shadowy world of diplomacy, where almost nothing is.

As the routed rebel Imam of Oman fled on a donkey before the victorious troops of the British-backed Sultan of Muscat and Oman, eleven Arab states asked the U.N. Security Council to take up Britain's "armed aggression" in Oman, and Moscow joined in with a fevered blast against Britain's "inhuman methods of warfare against the peaceful population of Oman." Sir Harold Caccia, Britain's ambassador to Washington, called on John Foster Dulles to warn him that unless the U.S. supported Britain on Oman, it would be "almost as much a blow as Suez."

With Britain's Baghdad Pact ally, Iraq, as spokesman, the Arab states argued in the Security Council that Oman was independent territory, and British troops and planes had no business there. Britain's Sir Pierson Dixon replied that under the 1920 Treaty of Sib (which the British have never published), the Imam, "a religious leader," had won a measure of autonomy, but that the Sultan was still sovereign over all of Muscat and Oman, and that therefore Britain was within its rights in answering his plea for help. The British pointed out tellingly that none of the Arab states now rushing to the Imam's defense had bothered to grant recognition to him in the two years since he established a rebel headquarters in Cairo.

By a vote of 5 to 4, the Security Council tabled the Arab complaint. After satisfying itself in the corridors that the Arab motion could not pass, the U.S. abstained. Officially, the U.S. pleaded the need of more information, but actually the State Department straddled in the hope of not antagonizing either of two friends, Britain or Saudi Arabia. Beforehand, the State Department had been sufficiently disturbed by Caccia's warnings to ask its own London embassy to predict whether, as Caccia implied, there would be an anguished British outcry against the U.S. for abstaining. The U.S. embassy estimate was that there would not be, and it proved to be right.

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