The Crowd Looking On

In London's bombed and gutted streets in World War II, a perilous and lonely skill was developed to a specialist's high art--the defusing of ticking, active bombs which might go off at any moment if not delicately handled. Such an art was needed in the Middle East last week. There the specialists had first to rope off the area (which is the intent of the Eisenhower Doctrine), and then to take apart the mechanism of destruction.

First to be delicately unwrapped was the complication of Israel's troops in Egypt (see below). If this could be done, the next step was to get to the inner mechanism of trouble: the problem of the Suez and of the Soviet presence in Egypt. It was anxious work, and the ticking went on loud and clear.

One of the difficulties was that the job of defusing had to be done with a crowd looking on. President Eisenhower had pledged to work within the framework of the United Nations. Yet the U.N., while sitting in judgment on the Middle East, was itself also being judged. The whole Middle East crisis began over British, French and Israeli disbelief in the U.N. as an effective instrument of peace and justice. When Britain and France later had to promise the U.N. to withdraw their invading armies from Egypt, that necessity only increased the anger of what used to be the U.N.'s most respectable 'supporters in those countries. They agreed to bow to the "decent opinion of mankind" as determined by a U.N. vote. But. they asked, did anything happen when Russia defied that "decent opinion" over Hungary, or India defied it over Kashmir?

More and more, in circles once sympathetic to the U.N., the question was being raised: How good a barometer of mankind's opinions is the U.N.? In point of fact, argued the questioners, many of the millions presumably represented by delegations in the U.N. are not free to choose their own governments, let alone influence their governments' votes in the U.N. All this was true. Even the most loyal supporters of U.N. have to swallow hard at sanctimonious lectures on morality being delivered by agents of tyrannies.

Yet as the ticking in the Middle East went on, the onlooking U.N. was not living up to the worst forebodings. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, required to work within a narrow mandate, was showing an imaginative ability to steer things towards a settlement. The U.N.'s worst offender, Soviet Russia, last week tried to push through a mischievous resolution investigating U.S. "aggressive actions" in the Middle East, and though the U.S. itself cheerfully voted for the resolution in the steering committee, to show that it had nothing to hide, the proposal was defeated 8 to 6 in committee and 53 to 13 in the General Assembly.

Though India was still defiant over Kashmir, Jawaharlal Nehru had to pay a price in diminished moral prestige. In what is often the favorite playground of U.N. demagoguery--the touchy subject of colonialism--a unanimous General Assembly last week adopted a moderate resolution encouraging France to work out its own problems in Algeria. And in the complicated Middle East, where religious hatreds, economic rivalries and power struggles all have their angry spokesmen in the U.N., there was a general willingness (to which even Russia had to pay lip service) to try the way of mediation.

And so the specialists were free to go about their work. The U.S. had not, as some critics said, simply dumped all its problems on an ineffectual U.N. The perilous undertaking in the Middle East centered on U.S. diplomacy, working outside the U.N. as long as it could hope to be effective, but not in conflict with it.

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