Why Britain Does Without Nutting

LUBELL, HAROLD

Why Britain Does Without Nutting I Saw for Myself. Reviewed by Harold Lubell By Anthony Hulling. Middle East specialist, economics Doubleday. 103 pp. $3.00. division, Rand Corporation In the...

...Actually, the lady's family moved from Milwaukee to Palestine in 1921...
...Nutting should have heeded his initial reluctance to inflict himself upon his reading public instead of the encouragement of the "several people of judgment" who urged him to reprint his newspaper articles...
...in little over a year, anything remotely resembling a development project could not have been brought to fruition...
...Iran's post-Mos=adegh Seven Year Plan had been in existence on paper only since 1955...
...In Iran, however, "unlike in Iraq, the money just does not seem to find its way through to the development projects...
...Algeria has 1 European to 7 Moslems...
...division, Rand Corporation In the introduction to thi...
...Nutting waxes poetic about economic development in Iraq, where oil money is "not spent elsewhere or frittered away to satisfy ephemeral needs or to create wasting assets/' but is "ploughed back into the earth and industry of Iraq,' and "is used to lubricate and encourage a go-getting and get-building spirit among the people.(In the same paragraph appears the phrase: "I had last seen King Feisal when he was about to leave Harrow...
...With regard to Cyprus, however, he says: "Of course Britain bears a share of the blame for the tragic Cyprus deadlock...
...The most charitable thing to be said about Nutting's collection of his journalistic impressions of a tour of North Africa and the Middle East is that he is now five years older and still atrociously ill-informed...
...book, Anthony Nutting quotes Winston Churchill as saying to him in 1953, after a meeting on the Middle East: "But, young man, you are atrociously ill-informed, you must go and visit these parts and see these people...
...Having "discussed the perplexities of our troubled world personally with" all the heads of state in the areas (including such intellectual powerhouses as King Hussein of Jordan...
...Here in Iraq is a civil service equal in honesty and efficiency with many in the world outside...
...The Algerian people will never admit the fantastic proposition that they and their land are a part of France...
...A second example is Nutting's discussion of the problem of Algeria and Cyprus...
...A third example, Nutting's choicest boner, is his reference to Golda Meier, Israel's Foreign Minister, as "a lady who came to Israel from Milwaukee after the Second World War...
...As the United Kingdom's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, 1954-56, Nutting should be aware of the fact that no oil royalties came into Iran during the Anglo-Dutch-American boycott of Abadan, 1951-54...
...The reason...
...Three examples will suffice...
...It seems not to have occurred to Nutting that in 1957, Iraq's Development Board had been functioning for five years (and had shown remarkably little progress—as well as a good deal of graft—in that length of time...
...But Britain is at least trying to get a Cyprus settlement by other means than the firing squad...
...And, he continues, "in these conditions (of 1 Turk to 4 Greeks) to talk of self-determination is sheer nonsense...
...With respect to Algeria, Nutting is "certain that, if the French Government were to pluck up their courage and pocket a little of their pride, a settlement could be reached,which would secure essential French interests...
...Nutting has turned out a collection of essays, marred by prejudice, lack of information, prep-school enthusiasms and attempts at gamesmanship, that would much better have been left buried in a file of back issues of the New York Herald Tribune...
...Somewhere the money earned by the earth of Iran and the sweat of her people melts into pockets as swollen as they are unproductive...
...His one intelligent suggestion (later urged by others including Nelson Rockefeller)—that some sort of international Middle East Development Fund be set up with part of the area's oil revenues—would have greater validity if this demonstration of the vacuity of its proponent were not available...

Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 24


 
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