Read the Bowen article, but not so sure about his merging of the end of the British Empire with the Suez situation. India (and the newly and disastrously deadly formation of the two Pakistans - in the east and in the west) was August, 1947; Suez didn’t happen until 1956. Empires don’t run on air - especially as they age, the cost of administrating and financing them becomes more and more burdensome as the early, exploitative opportunities run out and an ever more sophisticated, rich and selectively educated group of indigenous people asserts its dream and newer realities. The fiscal equilibrium alters.
I think a peaceful (if from only the British perspective) granting of independence made more than a little financial sense. Adventures in Kenya were no less problematic and past their sell-by; death by spear is no less terminal than death by rocket. The creation of the state of Israel was no better thought through than was Trump’s current struggle in the quicksands of Islamic psychology, where death, depending on circumstances, becomes something of religious value. You don’t defeat an adversary, one willing to don an explosive vest, by traditional means: it requires entirely different strategies where that defeat can just as convincingly be seen by the “losing” side as an unadulterated victory. Few, and most certainly not the US’s own supreme leadership possess the ability to imagine, never mind deliver such a resolution to today’s bellicose adventure.
There is something quite remarkable to be experienced in beholding how Israeli land grabs into internationally accepted Palestinian territories goes on, ceaselessly, whilst the US looks the other way; one has to be kinda shortsighted oneself not to have figured these things out, how these circumstances could have come to be. Of course, a few seconds of thought to the Irish situation should help make the Israeli/US relationship somewhat less opaque. Oh well, nobody ever learns anything other than the lessons, but having learned them doesn’t quite equate with following their teaching.
