A Base for John Bull

Britain's Suez Canal base is less a fortress than a giant imperial department store, crammed to its barbed-wire extremities with jets, fieldpieces, trucks, tanks, uniforms and the 10,000 other requirements of a modern army. The world's largest military depot, it can take 250,000 naked soldiers in at one end, march them out the other equipped to the last brass button (which is just about what it did in World War II with 28 infantry divisions).

Last week, as the Egyptian owners gave renewed signs of canceling her Suez lease, Britain sprang a surprise: a 20-year rental agreement for a new war store just across Egypt's western border. London agreed to pay Libya, the Middle East's newest and poorest kingdom (created by the U.N. out of Mussolini's African empire), a dole of $2,800,000 annually for at least five years for economic development, plus another $7,700,000 annually to balance her budget, in return for the right to base British troops and planes in Libya for the next 20 years.

Egypt, getting wind of the negotiations, tried to dissuade her Arab League neighbor, but did not succeed. British power in the Eastern Mediterranean now relies on its bases in Malta (naval) and Iraq (a big air complex at Habbaniya), its military and financial control of the tiny kingdom of Jordan (whose British-trained Arab Legion is the Arab world's finest army) and its army base on the island of Cyprus. Faced with getting out of the Suez, the British at first talked of expanding Cyprus, but ran afoul of Cyprus' lack of harbors and the disfavor of the Cypriotes. The Libya pact was the answer, and an adroit one.

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