Then US president Dwight Eisenhower asked of British prime minister Anthony Eden: 'Have you gone out of your mind?' He was none too pleased that Britain and France had connived with Israel to seize the Suez Canal, which had been nationalised by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Eisenhower's displeasure, and that of his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who had his own plans for the Middle East, led to an economic crisis that halted Eden's so-called police action, codenamed Operation Musketeer. In Suez 1956 - The Inside Story of the First Oil War - originally and more appropriately subtitled The Forgotten War, because there's not a whole lot here about oil per se - Barry Turner uses diaries, news reports and oral histories to reveal 'a military failure and a political disaster'. What emerges is a story of 'such folly and crookedness'. Former British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, reviewing this book in The Daily Telegraph, said: 'As in Iraq in 2003, the failure at Suez was not one of military execution; in both cases the whole concept was foolish as well as wrong and doomed to failure.' Even Dulles recognised that an occupying army would only make enemies of the entire Middle East and North Africa.