ABSTRACT
THE FINAL CONSULTATIONS on the British 1966 Defence Review were taking place in the last weeks of 1965. Along with the future of Britain’s aircraft carrier force, and the TSR bomber, the continued British retention of the Aden base was the subject of considerable debate in the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee of the British Cabinet. On 20 December, the subcommittee on Southern Arabia considered a JIC paper on ‘The Effects in the Middle East and Africa of an Early Announcement of a British Withdrawal from South Arabia in 1967 or 1968’. It concluded that, however presented, it would look like an apparent weakening of the British position:
The UAR will certainly make every effort to represent it as a defeat for British policy. Their ability to represent it as a victory for the UAR will however, depend to some extent on the progress of Egyptian withdrawal from the Yemen at the time. If the Egyptian presence in the Yemen is substantially unaltered it would be more readily accepted throughout the Middle East that the British had been forced out by the Egyptian subversive campaign and incline Arab states to give greater weight to UAR pretensions in the area.
