Was Suez Worse than Iraq?

I’m perfectly willing to say the Suez invasion was wrong, and that it was catastrophically harmful if the Soviets were really suddenly diverted from loosening their control over Hungary, and presumably the rest of Eastern Europe shortly afterwards. (Though I’ll need to see some pretty strong evidence to actually believe that.)

But in terms of the Middle East, would the consequences (as opposed to the morality) of letting the invasion go forward have actually been that awful? As it was, stopping the invasion immensely raised the prestige of Arab nationalist authoritarians in the Nasser mold. Letting it go forward would, I guess, have given a shot in the arm to communist parties and direct Soviet influence in the region. (Which is what Eisenhower feared and what drove him to intercede.) I can see a case for Communist Syria being worse than Baathist Syria, but the difference doesn’t seem great enough to warrant calling Suez a calamity narrowly avoided.

This is assuming Britain and France really did just want to take the canal and thereby undermine Nasser, not a full fledged occupation or an attempt to directly overthrow him. I think it likely that’s all they did want. They didn’t give a damn who exactly ran Egypt, so long as they were non-communist and less troublesome than Nasser.

From my very limited knowledge of the period, I thought the main significance of Suez to Hungary was that the Russians changed their minds because they saw that the West was distracted and therefore wouldn’t be able to make any effective response to an invasion. In which case without Suez it might just mean that they’d have sent the tanks in the next time there was a crisis in the West.
But if you take this distraction angle, consider all the issues that the Iraq War has distracted the West from. The mess in Afghanistan is immeasurably greater than it could have been because the US government lost interest and wanted a new war. That’s ignoring all the additional problems caused by not paying attention to the Palestinian question, Dafur, North Korea etc. On that score, I think Iraq remains a bigger disaster than Suez even ignoring what happens in Iraq itself.

Yeah, the cold war is full of stories and speculations like this. But as long as the game goes on, our great leaders always prefer to bet the whole farm rather than trying to act rationally. Eisenhower and Khrushchev as individuals were probably the least worse of them all, but that didn’t help much.

Suez was bad – it would have been better not to start it, and possibly better to have finished it, but to begin it and then withdraw was hopelessly silly. But my guess is that Iraq will prove to have been far worse. Except for one point. Bush and Blair are chumps – one can expect no better of them than this horror show. Whereas Eden had once been a top-flight fellow and it is very sobering to reflect that a man of his calibre could be so bloody stupid.

Even if we grant Haslan’s causal claim, that’s a long way from showing that Eden may be held responsible for the unforeseen (and perhaps unforeseeable) distant effects of his actions on the minds of Soviet decision makers. I don’t see that you have established that what happened in Hungary was connected in any morally significant way with what happened in Suez, rather than, say, merely being an entirely accidental consequence, an irony of history. If not, that I don’t think it is fair to see the “badness” of the latter event as inhering in Suez.

(Admittedly, I suppose you wouldn’t have to worry about this if you were a kind of very full-blooded direct consequentialist, but I don’t think you are, are you?)

‘I’d say that now the most salient aspect of the Suez crisis is the degree to which it has almost completely faded from popular memory’.

Right, I am guessing you CAN’T be British then, because believe me, Suez is lodged in the British imagination on a far deeper level than almost any other events post 1945, and I include Vietnam and 1989 in that. Because Suez demonstrated that the four hundred year old British Empire was over.

OF COURSE the Americans have forgotten about it: they helped to dismantle the British Empire, except for the bits (in the middle east) they simply took over. Why should they care?

Oh and please spare me the ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’ thing as though this was a completely unexpected bolt from the blue. One of the key arguments against the invasion of Iraq was that Al-Qaeda would use this as an excuse to create a new Vietnam type situation, thus bolstering (or, essentially, recreating) Al-Qaeda, which was more or less wiped out by the invasion of Afghanistan. And that was precisely what happened: not only was it predictable it was, in fact, predicted.

Incidentally one of the key reasons the Russians could go into Czechoslovakia was because they could see that the Americans were bogged down in Vietnam. They could also see that the Americans had lost the moral advantage: after all, what the Russians did in Czechoslovakia was not very different than what the Americans were doing in Vietnam (well you could argue that in terms of firepower etc. what the Americans were doing was much worse, but you get the basic point).

This indicates what Iraq would have to achieve before it gets remembered in the same way as Suez does in Britain: Iraq would have to somehow bankrupt the US and bring about the end of its worldwide hegemony. Rome wasn’t burnt in a day, and all that, but there’s no sign (yet) that Iraq is going to get THAT bad, although it certainly might.

DC – The post didn’t seem to me to be just totting up all the consequences of Suez, morally significant or not, but passing a general moral judgment on Suez, and on Eden personally, for example:

Iraq has to get a lot worse before [Bush and Blair] can claim Eden’s mantle.

but I could well have misunderstood.

“Right, I am guessing you CAN’T be British then…”

from what I understand, Suez ranks right up there among every Britain’s greatest grievances against the U.S., somewhere between Yorktown and Dick van Dyke’s attempt at a cockney accent in Mary Poppins.

good issue to think about. But the general understanding of our changing world is not that high. This is the most dramatic time for America to face: a fast changing world politics and business. The best book on these issues is: China and the new world order: how entrepreneurship, globalization, and borderless business are reshaping China and the world, by the most provocative Chinese reporter George Zhibin Gu, which is far better than Friedman’s world is flat.

Well, let’s offer the plus side. The british certainly deserved to be kicked out of Egypt in every way, and their propping up of a fatuous corrupt king as a proxy sort of sapped any credibility they had left with the Egyptian population. But the best thing about Suez is that it established an American credibility in the Middle East that was a long time in decaying. It gave Kennedy the right and the arrogance to just tell the Saudis, end slavery now. It gave the U.S. credibility even with Egypt and Syria – I am pretty sure that there is no way Sadat could have made the moves he made if the U.S. had allowed Britain, France and Israel to pick the Egyptian army apart. That American credibility probably managed to make the nationalizations of oil not so disadvantageous to the West, which floated for its “thirty glorious years” up to the 70s on cheap oil.

The terrible reputation of Britain in the Middle East – from every Iranian I’ve ever talked to, Britain is hated much more than the U.S. (a country which the Iranians in the 90s even came to like) in Iran.

Nor, actually, do I think armed confrontation in Eastern Europe in 1956 would have been a pile of jelly beans. I’d even go so far as to say that Hungary, in 1956, still preserved truly fascist sectors, not surprising as the country had been an enthusiastically anti-semitic ally of Germany.

So the other side of the Suez debacle would be: thank God Eisenhower had the brains and the balls to see a bad idea and put the keebosh on it before it got out of hand.

Odd post…the Soviet invasion of Hungary, while a bad thing, was not anything like the humanitarian disaster the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been. Not even close, not even within an order of magnitude.

Of course, for all the unintended consequences of these things to be judged decades have to pass. An Austrian diplomatic mission to Serbia in 1914 was a far greater disaster than the invasion of Iraq, but who would have known that at the time?

For a counterfactual, imagine what Suez would have been if Eisenhower hadn’t intervened. An open-ended occupation of an Arab country by powers with no idea how to run the place and no exit strategy.

Aburish does say in A Brutal Friendship (if I’m remembering correctly, which I wouldn’t rely on) that he liked the first postwar generation of American operatives in the Middle East because they didn’t like colonialism much. But given the choice between rejecting intervention and supporting it they opted for the latter and after that they were as bad as the British.

The Suez/Iraq linkage is certainly useful insofar as it invites the question “has there been any comparable foreign policy stupidity in the fifty years intervening?” as well as supplying the answer “very obviously not”. This is probably why the remaining pro-war people need to be so hysterical (Cohen, Harry’s Place etc) because there’s no other way of avoiding the question.

Dick van Dyke’s attempt at a cockney accent in Mary Poppins.

Don’t forget that woman in Frasier.

‘Aburish does say in A Brutal Friendship (if I’m remembering correctly, which I wouldn’t rely on) that he liked the first postwar generation of American operatives in the Middle East because they didn’t like colonialism much.’

Aburish actually says that the British were better than the Americans. He says (and I’m just passing this information on for what it’s worth) that the British, for all their faults, really did take their ‘civilise the world’ mission seriously: so, for example, they did put pressure on the Saudis to improve their human rights records. This is because, of course, British involvement in Saudi goes way back before they knew the Saudis had oil.

But the Americans moved in in the late ’30s and then even more so, in the late ’40s purely and simply because of oil. Aburish argues that American involvement in Saudi came, purely and simply, because the big oil companies put pressure on the American government to give the Saudis everything they wanted in exchange for oil concessions and etc.

So in the ’50s (in fact, until Kennedy) the Americans didn’t give a toss that Saudi had legalised slavery. In the same way that nobody gives a toss nowadays that the Saudis (apparently) use crucifixion as an execution method. The western media don’t cover this (the Western media never cover Saudi human rights abuses, unless their political and financial masters judge it to be expedient), politicians never raise it: no one cares. Because the relationship is PURELY about money and power; there is no nonsense about a ‘civilising mission’ or ‘democratisation’ (it’s only when you read a bit about Western involvement in the Middle East since the war that you realise just to what extent Western prattling about democracy is a crock of shit. I mean obviously everyone knows that in the broadest sense it’s a crock, but when you see the details, you realise just WHY the rest of the world is laughing at us for believing this crap).

Alternatively, did the appearance – the reality, in fact – of Western disunity signal that the Soviet Union could get away with it?

An underestimated factor in the decision to stop was spurious intelligence that reached JIC/ME of Soviet aircraft overflying Turkey on their way to reinforce Egypt. According to Peter Hennessy’s The Prime Minister, quoting archival references I’d have to look up, this was included both in Cabinet, PM’s (Old Stripey) and the Queen’s briefings, although it turned out to be utter tosh.

I’ve always wondered where that information came from. Does anyone else think it was the CIA? JIC’s assessments were, up until then, and after the crisis, that the Soviet Union would not do anything for fear of a global crisis, so it was a significant change.

Also, the UK political class seems to have internalised Suez as a massive psychic trauma, even if the policy consequences were not all that great, whereas the French don’t care all that much. Why?

hidari: Right, I am guessing you CAN’T be British then

Yes, well I mentioned that I was talking about how Suez is viewed in the U.S. (the short answer is — it’s not. Ask most Americans who weren’t alive in 1956 about the Suez crisis and you’d get a blank stare — completely unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the Korean War, or the Rosenberg trial or Sputnik). Among best remembered events of that era, Suez would be way down the list.

because believe me, Suez is lodged in the British imagination on a far deeper level than almost any other events post 1945, and I include Vietnam and 1989 in that. Because Suez demonstrated that the four hundred year old British Empire was over.

I’d have thought the fact that the empire would soon be a thing of the past was pretty obvious when India, Pakistan, and Burma all departed almost a decade earlier.

Oh and please spare me the ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’ thing as though this was a completely unexpected bolt from the blue.

I didn’t claim it was a ‘bolt from the blue’ — only that now, Afghanistan might fare more poorly following a withdrawal from Iraq.

Incidentally one of the key reasons the Russians could go into Czechoslovakia was because they could see that the Americans were bogged down in Vietnam.

The Soviets knocked down uprisings in Eastern Europe repeatedly over the decades (East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland). Somehow they always found conditions suitable to do so (up until they finally flinched in 1989, that is).

ejh: The Suez/Iraq linkage is certainly useful insofar as it invites the question “has there been any comparable foreign policy stupidity in the fifty years intervening?” as well as supplying the answer “very obviously not”.

Very obviously not? So we’ve forgotten Vietnam which cost the U.S. > 50,000 dead and set off a decade of social upheaval in the U.S., including domestic revolutionary/terrorist underground organizations? Hell, domestically the U.S. is has been more tranquil during this ‘greatest ever blunder’ than during the Clinton years (with Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City — which, unlike 9/11 were all home grown). Unless things change dramatically, Iraq will end up having little effect on U.S. politics and almost none on U.S. society. It doesn’t seem at all possible that Iraq will be remembered in the U.S. as having had anything close to the impact of Vietnam.

And as ‘greatest blunders’ go, have we forgotten, too, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which failed miserably and hastened the end of the Soviet Union itself?

‘I’d have thought the fact that the empire would soon be a thing of the past was pretty obvious when India, Pakistan, and Burma all departed almost a decade earlier.’

Like I say this only goes to show that you are not British. Like most American right wingers, you ignore or at least downplay the extent to which Imperial values motived British foreign policy, well into the sixties (and, some would argue, the early to mid ‘seventies). Remember, Churchill (one of the most aggressively pro-Empire politicians of the 20th century) had retired from being Prime Minister the previous year. And to Churchill, and the Tory party which he led:

a: Giving India and Pakistan their freedom had been a mistake but…
b: it was a ‘one off’.

Churchill governed the country (until, I repeat, 1955) with the assumption that Britain had the Empire, that Britain would always have the Empire, and that Britain could and should intervene in the affairs of any country of the world to further Britain’s (financial) interests: hence his support of the Mossadegh coup. (Americans try and pretend this was about ‘Communism’ but it was clearly an Imperial project).

And there were undoubtedly many many millions of people in the UK who agreed with him. It was Suez that first really demonstrated to the British that Britain’s Imperial days were over, although large elements of the civil service and the intelligentsia didn’t get the message until the ‘Winds of Change’ Speech in 1960. Then, and only then (beginning in 1961) did Britain begin a serious programme of decolonisation.

engels — I promise that I’ll answer your question to me, I just can’t just give it the full attention it needs at the moment.

Two clarifications. 1) Hennessy is very good on the “retreat from Empire” question. He documents the debates within the ruling elite on this. All parties agreed that a retreat from empire was essential, from immediately after the war, and they disagreed only on the timetable. Things went much quicker, in the end, than anyone expected, but not quicker than some wanted. Butler seems to have been a major player in speeding things up, with Macmillan giving him authority but not much encouragement. The Winds of Change speech put into public consciousness something that was already well under way, and was M’s first public indication that he was more or less on Butler’s side.

2) Frasier — both Jane Leeves and Millicent Martin (who plays her mother) are as British as I am. Millicent Martin more so, probably! But neither is in the Dick Van Dyke league I’m afraid…

Also, the UK political class seems to have internalised Suez as a massive psychic trauma, even if the policy consequences were not all that great, whereas the French don’t care all that much. Why?

The British public and to a lesser extent the political class, having been spared the Nazi occupation, arguably had a stronger belief in the country’s status as a “victor nation” than the French.

Also, the Algerian war of independence was on in 1956. That one proved traumatic enough.

Iraq has to get a lot worse before (Bush and Blair) can claim Eden’s mantle.

I don’t know, really. It’s a pretty safe bet that the mess in Iraq is not going to be conducive to a less authoritarian environment in the region. Among many other things, and seeing how the notion of “American sponsorship of democracy” in the Middle East has effectively turned out to be an obscene joke, the voices* that disavow democracy tout court have become stronger.

There’s no reason to think that the repercussions of this blunder won’t be felt for decades.

*: The identification of those voices is, of course, a topic all of its own, and the object of much equivocation in mainstream media outlets.

To clarify: the Soviet block held fast in spite of the ideological waywardness of Yugoslavia or the USSR’s estrangement with China (which allowed in turn, in 1968, Albania’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact). Those were all clear indications of the very real limits of Soviet power.

It’s anybody’s guess what would have happened in the wake of a Soviet pullout from Hungary. An early Western “victory” in the Cold War sounds far-fetched, though. This diminishes the enormity of the alleged unintended consequences of Suez somewhat, I reckon.

And now the region has been rolled back 40-50-60 years to the point where they need to fight for independence again and struggle to maintain it, which is done best with internal power consolidation, not democracy.

I don’t think that’s the case, really. The American power bid in the region is a failure. After all these years, people still tend to give too much credit to the robber barons in the US administration and the think-tanks, simply on the grounds that they call what is still the world’s most powerful country their barony.

The people in charge are not pulpy villains, just venal mediocrities with too much power. There’s no grand, hidden scheme to sow chaos in the region, no translation of “divide et impera” warblogger wank into consistent policy (bear in mind that I don’t think that the occupation’s futile flailing about to assert its control over the many Iraqi factions qualifies as policy, let alone as a consistent one). And if there is indeed one such plan, it only bears witness to these lads’ dilettantism and/or idiocy.

Their only plan consisted in shockin’ & awin’ their way into control of Iraq. The compliance of Iraqis under Ahmed “De Gaulle” Chalabi (or, failing that, Iyad “Adenauer” Allawi) was on the cards, not bedlam. Things have gotten out of hand, and it undercuts them.

The result is that, for the first time since the end of WWI, the main forces in the region will be autochthonous powers like Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia or Turkey. The problem is that this relative independence comes about under the least auspicious of circumstances i.e. in the wake of the Iraqi debacle.

At any rate, don’t read too deeply into my utterances. Even when I’m sort of serious, I strive to imbue them with a trollish “edge” that is not necessarily amenable to nuance or accuracy.

I write mostly for my own amusement, and to practice my English. Otherwise I merely aspire to be a barely tolerable gadfly.

Well, I don’t know if it’s by design or by accident, but the region is unstable now, that’s the fact.
This means that most of the players need US support to survive.
Which means that they are falling deeper and deeper into semi-colonial protectorate status.
Which means that they will now have to get thru this stage again, the stage of acquiring some sort of common identity – pan-Arabic, Islamic, whatever works – to shake it off, to nationalize the resources, to kick the westerners out. This can’t be done by democratic means, too easy to subvert.
So, by design or by accident, this seems like a serious setback for the region; might take decades to recover.
Unless something dramatic happens, of course, some kind of collapse of this ‘new world order’.

This is very good

Eden, schmeden. Too much emphasis on the role of the individual in history, if you ask me. Dialectical materialism, man, dialectical materialism; back to the basics. Yeah, and the guy who calls himself ‘engels’ should be saying this, not I.

‘Eden resigned shortly after the Suez debacle, mainly because of ill-health, but also because, although he never seems to have acknowldeged the seriousness of his own failure, he understood that it made his position untenable’.

This is a very important point, I feel. Allegedly, Eisenhower began his post-Suez phone conversation with Eden with the words: ‘I assume you have lost your mind?’

Nowadays, it would be Bush phoning up Blair and saying: ‘I have lost my mind. Fancy losing yours and joining me?’ And Blair saying ‘Sounds great!’.

The fact that Iraq is already one of the greatest disasters of modern times and neither Blair nor Bush seem to have even noticed (let alone apologised) is a sad comment on the moral (and sanity) of our current political class.

Hmmm, I appreciate this is just a blog post but I do think the issue of moral responsibility is more complicated than that; and the claim that it’s just about foreseeable consequences seems pretty controversial to me.

I do think that Bush and Blair may clearly be held responsible for the killing in Iraq but I remain highly sceptical that Eden may be held responsible, in the same way, for all the wrongs committed in the course of the Soviet re-invasion of Hungary and subsequent occupation and years of Communist rule.

also it’s a bit unfair to thomas arnold, who introduced the teaching of mathematics and modern languages at rugby

engels — there are other things than foreseeable consequences, sure (and I implied one of them by saying that there could be excuses grounded in the moral quality of the action). But you don’t really think that the consequences I’m invoking against Eden were foreseeable in the relevant sense, right?

My point was not just about Blair, Bush, and the political class, but also voters. Had Eden remained leader his party would have been blown out of the water.

I hate to break to the, um, older generation of Brits populating this discussion, but as a 30 year old, educated (no honestly) British woman, the Suez Crisis is not embedded in my consciousness at all. I know the bare bones, and that is more than most people of my age. It did not feature in our history lessons, nor did it feature in general social discourse.

The generations who are now growing/grown up don’t have things like the Suez Crisis, or (much as the baby boomers will find it difficult to understand) Vietnam or even the civil rights movements in their living memory.

All this talk about the Iraq war being “one of the greatest disasters of modern times” reminds me of the addendum Budd Schulberg wrote in 1989 to his classic, “What Makes Sammy Run?” in which he ranted at length about the earth-shattering, historic corruption represented by the Iran-Contra scandal. Needless to say, it’s rather jarring to open a novel written during the 1940s about the 1930s, only to find the author harping on a 1980s political controversy that had already faded into obscurity by the late 1990s. I understand that historical perspective sometimes evaporates in the heat of the moment, but it’s worth reminding oneself that the significance of current events can rarely be judged except in retrospect.

In fact, the Suez crisis is a great example. Although it was no doubt shocking at the time, we can see in hindsight that its effect on the Middle East was minimal. Nasser’s entire pan-Arab project was all the rage for about a decade, then collapsed utterly in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. By the mid-70’s–when the oil crisis finally gave the Arab world a bit of global clout–Nasser’s successor had already evicted his Soviet advisors and thrown in his lot with the US, and was about to make peace with Israel. Meanwhile, Ba’athism had devolved from a pan-Arab cause to a mere platform for personality-cult autocrats in Syria and Iraq. In other words, the Nasserite project was pretty much doomed regardless, and it’s hard to see what long-term difference the Suez crisis could have made, regardless of its real or hypothetical outcome.

As for its effect on Britain–well, there’s already consensus here that it was far more symbolic than real. British colonialism was already pretty much a dead letter by 1956, and while Suez may have driven the point home to the doubters in vivid fashion, in practice it likely neither sped nor slowed the Empire’s demise. Likewise, those who see the Iraq war today as a momentous world turning point may ultimately discover that there’s less historical heft to it than meets the eye.

Suez twisted the knife in the British Empire’s heart but didn’t insert it in the first place. The World Wars did that, especially World War I, which the Brits really didn’t need to enter (or could have played a peripheral role in), but instead got millions of their best and brightest slaughtered or wounded in, while liquidating centuries’ worth of treasure. Whatever the claims of enforcing the treaty on Belgian sovereignty, it’s pretty clear that ultimately, imperial expansion was a big motivating factor, which subsequently led to the carving up of Ottoman Territories– and this, too, blew up in the Brits’ face, as Iraq in particular rebelled against the British in the 1920’s. The way the Japanese smashed the Brits at Singapore in 1942 (on the heels of the Blitz and the Narvik disaster) obviously humiliated the British in the eyes of “inferior brown people” who had theretofore respected British military power, but the question arises of why the Brits managed to get themselves slaughtered so badly in Singapore in the first place, by an undermanned and undergunned Japanese force at that. It had a lot to do with the British tottering well before Singapore due to WWI– Gallipoli, the Somme, Passchendaele, and even the paltry “gains” of WWI (the Ottoman Territories) erupting in bloody rebellion against the British, a disaster all around. Interestingly, the Iraqi rebellion occurred around the same time as the Irish War of Independence, in which the Irish guerrillas not only defeated the British, but actually achieved more than casualty parity against the British forces, something that had occurred in only about a half-dozen or so other colonial wars in which the Brits were involved (e.g., Afghanistan in the mid-1800’s, South America with the River Plate invasion before that).

What this all goes to show furthermore, speaking of Afghanistan and the River Plate, is that the British Empire was very fragile even at its peak in the 1800’s. It didn’t last nearly as long as e.g. the Roman, Spanish, Portuguese or medieval Arab empires, didn’t involve as much territory or people as is often overstated (only half of India was ever under British control, and most of the land within the “empire” was uninhabited wasteland in the Canadian north and Aussie interior), and the British also had a nasty habit of losing embarrassing colonial wars against “darkie” adversaries for whom they had contempt. An entire British army got wiped out in Afghanistan in the 1840’s and did so again around 1880 at Maiwand and in the guerrilla conflict that followed. Two British invasions of the River Plate in South America after 1805 (Napoleon was a useful distraction) were defeated by a bunch of Spanish/Creole/African ne-er-do-wells led by some French mercenary named Liniers– around the same time that the original Muhammad Ali smashed the British in Egypt. Even in Haiti of all places, the British got whacked by L’Ouverture, though L’Ouverture had a powerful ally in yellow fever, I guess. Fast-forward to after WWII– but before Suez in 1956– and the British were getting spanked around in Indonesia in the Anglo-Indonesian War of 1945 (basically trying to force Anglo-Dutch control over the pesky Indonesians to prevent both their empires from crumbling, failed miserably esp after Surabaya), while getting kicked out of Israel/Palestine by Irgun bombings in 1948.

What it all adds up to, frankly, is that the British were a pretty lousy imperial military power– what “empire” they had largely depended on buying off local chieftains and incorporating them into the British capitalist/mercantilist system, which indeed worked for a while so long as the British banking houses could bribe the nawabs into keeping quiet. But after WWI with the British nearly bankrupted, the Exchequer started to run out of bribe money, with much less incentive therefore for local luminaries in the colonies to play along. After WWII those angry natives were not only angry but well-armed, as the Brits learned to their detriment.

“Bullshit” as in “vintage wingnut bullshit”, that is.

marksmanship

No, really.