PC: Britain crushes the 1952 Egyptian revolution

Could Britain decide to crush intervene and crush the 1952 Egyptian revolution

Would Britain be successfully

How would other world powers react
 
Britain could crush the Egyptian Revolution quite easily, even though it barely had a couple divisions in the Canal zone, because it was really close to Cairo and could prevent King Farouq from being dethroned.

Problem being, said intervention would be a clear and blatant meddling in other nations' affairs. At this point, the Americans and British are seriously considering ways to remove Iranian PM Mossadagh, so America condemning Britain supporting a preferred monarch would be hypocritical, but it would strain the relations between them since Britain was supposed to be decolonizing and leaving nations to rule themselves, not rule them from London. American press will probably savage the British actions, and Truman/Eisenhower are going to have to decide carefully how to handle the resultant crisis.

Needless to say, Stalin would hop on the propaganda train and point out the hypocrisy of the "freedom-loving" Western powers, making a big deal about the "Imperialist Capitalist Greed and Arrogance", but unlike Khruschev, doesn't do much. Unless he can get a hard benefit from Egypt, he's not sticking his neck out for it.

The Egyptian monarch survives short-term, but now it's been mortally wounded. It becomes abundantly clear that the King is a British puppet, and that he relies on foreign powers to keep his throne. The next time the Egyptians revolt, the Royal Family is not going to exile but to the firing squads, and the resultant regime is going to be far more hostile to the West.

Mr. Churchill will crow about the British intervention being "a triumph of British power and will", but thirty years down the line it'll be seen the same way the 1953 coup d'etat in Iran was; a short-time success leading to a massive strategic blowback.
 
so America condemning Britain supporting a preferred monarch would be hypocritical, but it would strain the relations between them
Could Britain play it up as restoring the legitimate government or preventing a pro-soviet one from coming to power
 
Could Britain play it up as restoring the legitimate government or preventing a pro-soviet one from coming to power
They could, especially since, unlike Mossadagh's rule, it was not exactly a popularly elected government coming to power, but a military coup. They can just argue that the Free Officers planned to bring the Soviets in.

Except that was a very shaky foundation. Gamal Abdul Nasser was more about playing the two superpowers against one another, what with him, Nehru and Sukarno being the founders of the Non-Aligned Nations movement. It was only when the Western Allies clearly favored helping Israel (or at least didn't want to work with him) that he crossed the line into the pro-Soviet camp - and even then, it was an alliance of convenience, not ideology. The Czech weapons deal of 1955, for example, was because Nasser had gotten sick and tired of Eisenhower trying to stick-and-carrot him by offering aid and weapons sales in return for policies that favor the Americans in the Middle East and the possibility of American military bases, so he took a deal that didn't have so many strings attached. Mohammed Naguib, the face of the Revolution and the first one to take charge after Farouq abdicated, is similarly an unlikely candidate for a Soviet alliance because he was a devout Muslim, and he was supposedly sympathetic to the Islamic Brotherhood on certain political points.

Plus, let's be honest; the monarchy had fallen out of favor for a while, having been considered corrupt and willing to bend over for the British no matter what. The horribly mismanaged Arab-Israeli War of 1948 helped a lot in cementing Egyptian incompetence, especially since Egyptian troops needed British permission to cross the Suez territory and into Sinai in preparation for the war (among other things). Keeping the monarch in place would not exactly be a popular move.
If Britain allowed the CIA to use Egypt as practice for what would happen later with Mossadegh in Iran. Though in that case it would just be delaying the inevitable.
That particular point would require the British knowing in advance of the Free Officers Revolution/coup d'etat. If they had, they'd have at least given the King a heads-up. Or not; Farouq wasn't especially liked.
Not at all well, especially in the Arab world.
Pretty much this. Like the 1953 coup, this would cement Britain's reputation as an imperialistic liar, especially since they supposedly dropped the whole concept of Empire and are no longer trying to rule other nations. Admittedly, Britain will still find allies, even among the Arabs, but like the 1953 coup, it would irrevocably tarnish Britain's reputation and set the stage for future anti-Western sentiment across the Arab world.
 
Except that was a very shaky foundation. Gamal Abdul Nasser was more about playing the two superpowers against one another,
But was it know before he come to power not to mention the monarchy was already pro-western so why not the devil you know?
 
One of the many reasons not to do this was that the US would oppose it strongly. It saw the Free Officers as pro-Western (which was not necessarily wrong at the time):

***

"Washington was well aware that many Arab regimes were quite unstable in the early 1950s. In Egypt, a dissolute king, quarreling politicians, extreme poverty beside a complacent elite, popular dissatisfaction, and growing extremist leftist and Islamic groups combined in a volatile mix. "Talk of a coup d'etat is in the air," wrote U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery in November 1950. The West's prime security interest in Egypt was preserving the sprawling British Suez Canal base for use in time of war or crisis. Secretary of State Dean Acheson urged Anglo-Egyptian cooperation rather than confrontation. Egypt, stung by past British interference in internal affairs, preferred the departure of British troops and the transfer of the base to its own control. When Cairo abrogated the Anglo-Egyptian treaty in October 1951, Washington supported Britain but urged the British to accept a compromise solution.

"Acheson was appalled at Prime Minister Winston Churchill's preference for military responses. When massive riots broke out in Cairo in January 1952, Washington refused Churchill's request for U.S. forces to help squelch the unrest. Acheson replied that the base could not be maintained against the Egyptians' wishes. To solve the impasse, the United States suggested the creation of the Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO), designed to integrate Egypt and the Suez base into a collective security pact. A "Northern Tier" pact was a fallback option. Failure to resolve the Anglo-Egyptian stalemate, warned Assistant Secretary of State Henry Byroade in July 1952, "would lead to riots and disorders which the Egyptian authorities might not be able to control." American influence, he urged, must help produce a compromise. Just forty-eight hours later, Nasser's Free Officers overthrew Egypt's monarchy.

"The United States had some knowledge of but little involvement with the coup. The CIA's Kermit Roosevelt visited Cairo shortly after the January riots, and U.S. officials still hoped that a strong prime minister might take matters in hand. In late March, however, Roosevelt learned of the planned revolution and of Nasser's role as leader of the Free Officers, a group that the U.S. embassy had considered a purely reformist organization concerned only with military affairs. A few hours after the takeover, Major Ali Sabry, one of the plotters, contacted his friend Lieutenant Colonel David Evans, a U.S. military attache, with a message from the new revolutionary council. Its sentiments were pro-Western, Sabry announced, and he requested that the Americans block any British intervention. When King Farouk personally called the American and British embassies to request help, both refused. The revolution had triumphed.. .

"In his first evaluation of the new regime, Ambassador Caffery considered the Free Officers to be an amorphous group without any program, "bound together by common disgust with their superiors." Their figurehead leader, the popular General Muhammad Naguib, was not "a particularly strong or intelligent leader."' Nevertheless, the officers seemed friendly to the United States and expressed a desire to take part in the Middle East's defense. Britain quickly offered military aid in exchange for settling the base issue. Caffery was generally optimistic: the United States should not rush Egypt toward an acceptance of MEDO, he suggested, but it should help Cairo build an effective and inexpensive military force for protecting the country.

"As predicted, the new Egyptian government began to court the United States. .."

Barry Rubin, "America and the Egyptian Revolution, 1950-1957," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 73-90 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2149315
 
But was it know before he come to power not to mention the monarchy was already pro-western so why not the devil you know?
In which case, they try to market that excuse to the British and American public. The Arab public (especially the Egyptians) aware of how unpopular Farouq was, will not buy that excuse. And in the end it just means the same thing; the Western powers talk a lot of guff about freedom of choice and self-determination, but won't hesitate to force their will upon third world when it suits them. The British are already considerably unpopular by the Egyptians by virtue of being in Suez, which is supposed to be Egyptian sovereign land; them interfering in local politics will only exacerbate that. And that resentment will simmer all the more strongly.

To be honest, the monarchy had its supporters, and the Free Officers, while popular with the Armed Forces, didn't have all the Armed Forces on their side, mostly junior to mid-level ones, with a few generals like Naguib to give it a respectable air. There were bound to be monarchists in the Army who could have recovered and struck back had the British in Suez bought them time by stalling the Revolution. But the bottom line is, the monarchy was deeply unpopular with the Egyptians at that point. Britain can sell the world its side of the story, cause the Egyptians themselves aren't buying it, and neither is anyone else in the Middle East. Coup fails, the British pat themselves on the back, and then a few months later British troops start dying in alleyways behind Egyptian nightclubs and pubs, followed by terrorist attacks against British barracks, where once it was just loud and angry protests. Nobody in Egypt will ever rest knowing the British intervened personally in Egyptian matters. And even if it doesn't get as bad as that, nobody will trust the British again in Egypt. When a second revolution does come, like in Iran, it will be very hostile to Western powers.

Plus, on some level, people in the West will know the British are full of shit when they try to say they were stopping Soviet sympathizers from taking over. The 1953 coup faced considerable criticism even though it was considered an intelligence success at the time, since it was clearly an attempt to keep Iran's oil under British control. At least the 1953 coup had the excuse of Mossadagh being leftist (though he was definitely not Communist), and that it was conservative elements in the Iranian Armed Forces that overthrew him (albeit with US money and support) not actual foreign troops.
 
But was it know before he come to power not to mention the monarchy was already pro-western so why not the devil you know?

But if the monarchy was unpopular and would be made even more so by British intervention to save it from immediate overthrow, it certainly seemed better to acquiesce in the Free Officers coming to power than to let the opposition to the monarchy find its outlets in the Communists or the Muslim Brotherhood.
 
I think to be fair to the idea at the time the British wanted to remain in control of the Suez Canal and by proxy the country as well. If they had crushed the revolution with force and stayed there in the short term they would be able to hold the country with the Egyptian royal family's blessing. Going into the long term though eventually the other parts of Egyptian society would find another way to get rid of British influence and cause a much bigger disruption.
 
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