bks wrote:
Quote:
JackRiddler wrote:
That's the kind of threat that nationalism posed: a domino theory variation in which the oil kingdoms turn republican and pro-Soviet. But Egypt was forced to wind down its Yemeni campaign after the 1967 war with Israel. Ultimately the wars with Israel led to its defanging and the long subservience of the Mubarak client regime.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, I would take issue with your euphemistic description of the events in Egypt I bolded, Jack.
So would I, most emphatically. Though they were very costly, it was not "the wars with Israel", but the “peace” that led to Egypt's "de-fanging" (leaving Israel's fangs intact to feed on the flesh of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese people).
It is true that, in 1967, with the U.S. heavily bogged down in Vietnam (a conflict that Kissinger played a key but secret role in prolonging, by sabotaging peace talks that threatened to end it), Israel did offer itself as a proxy for America in the Middle East. In line with Kissinger's vision that America should use global proxies to fulfill its foreign policy objectives (later this was named the Nixon Doctrine), Israel volunteered to do the dirty job of fatally crippling the Egyptian military and discrediting Nasser by launching a war against Egypt. America, of course, would ensure the Israelis' victory by transferring huge amounts of advanced weaponry to Israel prior to the war.
Declassified documents describe the Americans' deliberations about whether or not to accept the Israelis' offer, which concluded with the Americans' decision to "unleash" Israel. Of course, this decision was made far more likely by overwhelming political pressure from the huge number of zionist agents in the Johnson White House. The weapons were transferred, and Israel launched its 'surprise' attack on June 5, 1967. The following account of an interview with Egypt's then-commander of the Air Force and Air Defence, Air Vice Marshal Abdel Halim el Dighidi describes what happened next:
'A lesson we should have learned'
If only because he was the commander-in-chief of the air force and air defence, the testimony of Air Vice Marshal Abdel-Hamid El-Dighidi carries particular weight. His task was to repel the first air raid launched by the enemy, and strike back hard. This plan, if implemented, would have made a dramatic difference in the outcome of the war. Everything was ready, information about enemy plans and strategies was pouring in, yet El-Dighidi was taken by surprise when Israeli aircraft struck. Within 80 minutes, all his aircraft and defences were destroyed. No counterattack was even attempted. The disaster was over before it had begun.
Air Vice Marshal El-Dighidi was twice tried and acquitted by a military court. He withdrew from public life in shame, and died without leaving a written record of what had really happened in detail. He spoke of the war, however, in an interview conducted by Mohammed Uda and Abdallah Imam and published in the weekly Al-Ahali on 29 June 1983.
El-Dighidi began by quoting the words of Moshe Dayan, who had said that Israel's security 'is contingent on the destruction of Egypt's power, which begins and ends in the destruction of its air force'. The 1956 war, said El-Dighidi, "was the first lesson we should have learned fully and on which we should have built our strategy, but in 1967 we were surprised by much the same cause as in 1956. The Egyptian air force could have struck a severe blow to the Israeli airports and thus frustrated the entire Israeli strategy of surprise and intensive air strikes."
The critical question, of course, is why this occurred. El-Dighidi said that, in matters of war, the prime responsibility resides with the military command, mandated by the political leadership to take charge of the battle.
The military command thinks for the army; without it, the army cannot win a war regardless of its strength in terms of men or equipment.
"The tragedy of the 1967 war," he said, "is that it began and was lost within a few hours, without leadership or command."
"Field Marshal Abdel-Hakim Amer, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and chief of staff, was not at his post on the morning of 5 June when Israel struck. Nor were any of the high-ranking officers. They were all with Amer, in his plane, flying over Sinai and reviewing the positions of the troops. Those officers who were not on the plane were waiting on the ground, ready to give Amer an official military salute!
"The tragedy is that this was taking place despite the messages that had been sent to the commanders, the field armies and military intelligence, warning them to be on alert. A message had been delivered at 10.30pm on 4 June, sent by the commander of the intelligence service in El-Arish. It read: 'The enemy has occupied the line joining El-Fateh, Birein, Rafah and Sheikh Zayed, and is expected to launch an attack on the land forces in Sinai at dawn on 5 June.'
"This message notwithstanding, all the commanders had abandoned their posts to wait for Amer. Some, positioned at a long distance from the meeting-place, had abandoned their posts since the previous night in order to be on time for the general's arrival in Beir Tamada early on 5 June.
Lieutenant-General Salah Mohsen was also to blame.
"I received orders from Nasser to be on alert on 14 May 1967 and for all the military forces to be fully mobilised on 17 May. On 30 May, the political and military leaders held a meeting to review different scenarios, and to assess the consequences of finalising military mobilisation and preventing Israeli ships from entering the Gulf of Aqaba."
According to military documents, President Nasser had estimated that there was a 90 per cent chance that Israel would be the first to strike. On 2 June, Nasser held a meeting attended by all the officers in the general military command. He assured them that, 'since a war cabinet has been formed under Moshe Dayan, there is a 100 per cent chance that Israel will strike in two or three days, on 4 or 5 June.'
"Israel, Nasser said, would strike at both our air force and our air defence forces to incapacitate the air force, and eliminate it from the battlefield. He demanded that measures be taken to minimise predicted losses and enable Egypt to strike back forcefully, dealing Israel a decisive blow."
On 5 June, Egyptian radar screens showed a large number of aircraft on the Jordanian front, on their way to Egypt. The information was immediately conveyed to Nasser and the general military command in Egypt. The Agloun message, as it is known, could have been the turning point in the war. It is incredible that all this information went for nought.
El-Dighidi blamed the military commanders who had attended the meeting with Nasser, but claimed never to have received either the Agloun message or Nasser's instructions.
Lieutenant-General Mortagi, the commander of the Egyptian front, Lieutenant-General Abdel-Moneim Riyad, the commander of the Jordanian front, and the commander of the Syrian front were never nformed.
El-Dighidi ascribed the cause of the defeat to the inefficiency and ignorance of high-ranking military personnel who were not qualified to manage a battle of such magnitude. But he excluded from this judgement Abdel-Moneim Riyad (who had been assigned to the joint defence command, possibly to deny him the post he deserved), Field Marshal Ahmed Ismail and Abdel-Ghani El-Gamasi, whose superiors were in control at the time.
El-Dighidi, however, claimed full responsibility for the battle from the first sortie to the last, and the lack of essential equipment, mainly low-flying radar detection systems. He claimed that the Egyptian air defence shot down 73 Israeli planes (one third of the total number of Israeli planes which took part in the war).
"Evidently, if we had received some sign that the war had begun, many more planes would have been shot down. I had 300 planes on the ground waiting on first-, second- and third-degree alert, and 150 planes were ready with their pilots strapped into the seats, ready for the signal. They could have been in the air in three minutes, and the rest of the planes would have followed ten minutes later.
"The intelligence service in my command station, however, were spying on me, not for me. Their information was often contradictory because they were fighting for power. I discharged the entire intelligence service only days before the war broke out. I therefore depended on my own men, but one of them betrayed me and did not perform his patrol sortie at the designated time. He had left the command office and gone home.
Hours later, the air strike took place.
"But one man's betrayal does not tarnish the rest who performed their duties, nor should we forget the heroes of the air force. I believe there is some relation between the failure to execute the patrol and the advent of the Israeli planes. They had been assured that the skies were clear of Egyptian aircraft. To say the least, it was a betrayal."
El-Dighidi denied information revealed after the war: that all Egyptian aircraft had been destroyed by the very first Israel air strike. He claimed that the rumour had reached headquarters, and this explains the reaction of the military command, which, he said never commissioned the air force to engage in any operation, because they seemed to have believed the rumour.
"The Egyptian forces did not withdraw, but fell into a state of confusion which rendered it impossible to provide them with any air protection. The men moved in all directions in Sinai, without any order or command. Each was running for his life. No air protection was requested from the commander-in-chief of the armed forces nor from the commander of the front.
"The planes were ready but I had no authority to impose air protection. The commander-in-chief never issued any orders to engage the 212 planes under his command which had been waiting for his orders. The higher ranks were the first to leave Sinai. The decision to withdraw was communicated to us by Field Marshal Amer, and whether it had come from Nasser or not, nobody knows. As commander-in-chief and chief of staff, however, Amer had the right to object to or postpone the orders of the president until a plan for withdrawal was formulated to guarantee a more organised withdrawal and to minimise losses.
"Israel had full information about our forces. Leadership and command no longer existed as soon as the borders were crossed, so within two or three hours, the enemy had penetrated into Egyptian territory to a distance which would normally take a day or two. The military commanders who had abandoned their posts were not able to return immediately and so completely lost control of their forces and their command of operations."
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What neither they, nor Nasser knew at the time, was that Egypt's Vice President and Supreme Commander of the Egyptian armed forces, Field Marshal Abdelhakim Amer had been recruited by the CIA as a mole in the early 1960s, along with the Head of Egyptian Intelligence, Salah Nasr and another Nasser confidant, Anwar el Sadat.
Salah Nasr was a deeply unsavoury character who presided over Egypt's deterioration into a totalitarian police state during the mid- to late 1960s and turned many Egyptians against Gamal Abdelnasser. Reputed to be a sexual sadist, he ran secret torture chambers, ran a huge blackmail operation and a ubiquitous network of informers. He also constantly bombarded Gamal Abdelnasser with reports about infiltration and spies and plots, effectively shrouding the regime in a pervasive atmosphere of paranoia and mutual mistrust. More than four decades later, Egyptians continue to debate whether Nasser was aware of his Intelligence Chief’s extremely destructive behaviour, or whether he was deliberately kept in the dark, with those who would inform Nasser branded ‘spies’ and ‘foreign saboteurs’ and arrested., blackmailed or killed. Ironically, Nasr was one of the few individuals that Gamal Abdelnasser still trusted.
The other was his best friend and long-time comrade Abdelhakim Amer.
After the 1967 defeat, both Nasr and Amer were arrested, tried and sentenced to house arrest, and Abdelhakim Amer died of a drug overdose soon afterward, having either committed suicide or been murdered, depending on who you believe.
Details about the two men's activities were first exposed by Etimad Khorshed, Salah Nasr's wife during the trials of both men on charges of treason and foreign espionage that followed the 1967 disaster, when she supplied the court with documents and eyewitness testimony revealing the extent of the two men's betrayal.
She later wrote a 'tell-all' book during the 1980s, describing her hellish life with Salah Nasr as a traumatized witness and target of his extreme sadism, and a prisoner in her own home. Around two years ago, in 2007, she granted a television interview, which I saw, in which she repeated her eyewitness testimony about Nasr and Amer's frequent conversations in which they made obscene jokes about Gamal Abdelnasser, plotted his overthrow and discussed the money they had received from the Americans, as well as suitcases of cash that Nasr told her had been given to him by the CIA..
“Amer and Nasr used to make fun of Nasser and call him names during their phone conversations,” Khorshid told the privately owned satellite TV Dream. “Nasr would tell Amer over the phone that he had ordered Nasser not to leave his house, or to go to such-and-such because there was an imaginary plot to kill him,” Khorshid recalls, adding that her husband could not stop laughing because he had fooled the head of the state.
Link
Back to the 1967 war. As I mentioned earlier, according to declassified U.S. documents (I don't have links, because I saw them on a program hosted by Mohamed Hassanein Heikal on Al-Jazeera), the U.S. decided to "unleash" Israel on Egypt in a decisive war that would "break" Gamal Abdelnasser and fatally undermine his popularity.
Instead, Israel used the opportunity to also invade and occupy the West Bank and Gaza, along with the Sinai, Syria's Golan and Lebanon's Shebaa Farms, something that the Americans definitely did not want. This is the most likely explanation for Israel's outrageous attack, using napalm, torpedoes and machine gun fire against the USS Liberty, an American spy ship stationed off the coast of Sinai to observe the progress of the war, immediately before launching these 'extra' invasions. (Another explanation is that Israel wanted to prevent a record of its war crimes against Egyptian and Palestinian POWs, thousands of whom were forced to dig mass graves and slaughtered after they had surrendered).
Although the 1967 defeat was extremely traumatic for all Egyptians, very far from leading to Egypt's 'defanging', on the contrary, it made Egypt more determined than ever to liberate the latest territories taken by Israel. The military leadership that had presided over the defeat was replaced with highly competent and dedicated cadres. The Soviet Union supplied Egypt with even more advanced weapons and aircraft to replace those that had been destroyed.
The Egyptian army's morale was very high when the War of Attrition was launched by Egypt against Israel in June 1968. At its height, from 1969 to 1970, the War of Attrition saw Israel fighting a crippling low-intensity irregular war with the Egyptians, who were also coordinating with fedayeen (guerilla) fighters from Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Despite Israel's overwhelming superiority in terms of conventional and nuclear weapons, it was neither capable then nor is it capable now of sustaining the economic, military and social damage that a long-term low-intensity guerilla-type war can inflict, especially on multiple fronts.
Furthermore, Arab unity was at an all-time high behind the leadership of Egypt, and the Soviet Union was providing not only large transfers of high-technology weapons and aircraft, but also military trainers, strategists and technical personnel.
These factors combined to create a situation that posed a serious danger to Israel, especially in the long term. But then, in September 1970, at the height of the War of Attrition, Gamal Abdelnasser fortuitously died and was replaced with Anwar Sadat. In what is certainly the bitterest irony of all, Gamal Abdelnasser, who had suffered tremendously from the one-two punch of the 1967 defeat and the betrayal of his closest friend Abdelhakim Amer, had turned to his old comrade Anwar el-Sadat and eventually had appointed Sadat Vice President to replace Amer.
Sadat, upon his accession to power, called off the War of Attrition against Israel, and accepted U.S. Secretary of State William Roger's ceasefire agreement which called for negotiations under the auspices of the UN, based on UN Resolution 242, under which Israel would withdraw from the territories it had occupied in 1967. Although Jordan also accepted the Plan, the provisions of the Rogers Plan were anathema to the Israelis, who wanted at all costs to avoid having the UN broker negotiations, still less to withdraw from the territories, and although they couldn't outright reject the Rogers Plan without alienating important people in the U.S., they quibbled and procrastinated.
Although both Egypt and Jordan had accepted the Rogers Plan, in a great stroke of luck for the Israelis, the Jordanian crisis broke out, taking the heat off Israel for its refusal to sign on to the Plan. Not surprisingly, the fact that Jordan’s King Hussein was on the CIA payroll, and Israel’s key involvement in “Black September” are rarely acknowledged:
Militant Palestinian nationalists hijack four Western commercial airliners and fly the planes and their passengers—now hostages—to a desert airfield near Amman. After negotiations, they release the hostages and blow up the empty airliners for the news cameras.
Jordan’s King Hussein responds by mobilizing his military for a showdown with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), a guerrilla organization based in his country. Hussein worries that Iraq or Syria might intervene on behalf of the PLO, and lets the US know that he would like US support in that event. Instead, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger makes the unlikely suggestion that Israel, not the US, step in to help Jordan if need be. President Nixon uses the incident to challenge the Soviet Union, warning the Soviets not to intervene if the US moves to prevent Syrian tanks from entering Jordan.
Nixon often lets the Soviets and other adversaries think that he is capable of the most irrational acts—the “madman theory,” both Nixon and his critics call it—but Kissinger eventually convinces Nixon to support the idea of Israeli intervention. King Hussein secretly cables the British government to request an Israeli air strike, a cable routed to Washington via Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Nixon gives his approval and Israel moves in. 3,000 Palestinians and Jordanians die in the subsequent conflict, dubbed “Black September” in the Arab world. Hussein loses influence and prestige among his fellow Arab leaders, and the PLO, energized by the conflict, moves into Lebanon.
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Black September effectively buried the Rogers Plan, once and for all. Enter Henry Kissinger, offering the Soviets and Sadat a secret deal very similar to the Rogers Plan in that it provides for an Israeli withdrawal back to the pre-1967 borders, but with two crucial differences: no role for the United Nations, and the Soviets' would completely withdraw their personnel from Egypt and cease arms transfers to that country.
Kissinger's famous insistence on an open-ended step-by-step approach, and Gromyko's equal insistence on at least the outline of a comprehensive settlement, precluded any agreement until Kissinger's climactic talks in Moscow, in April 1972, when this issue remained the single point of major dispute, or as Kissinger put it "the big unsolved problem." Gromyko, exceptionally, even lapsed into English to stress: "Big, big, twice big … if it is not solved, it might poison the summit." ...
Kissinger and Gromyko haggled over it for two lengthy sessions on the final day of the conference, May 29, which ended with an agreement that both of them, but especially Kissinger, considered not anodyne but dynamite -- so explosive that it had to be concealed not only from both the superpowers' clients but even from Rogers.
The concluding words of the part of their talk that was recorded indicates clearly that Kissinger did make some concessions that necessitated secrecy from the Israelis and their US lobby -- notably, agreeing not to challenge the Soviet and Arab contention that Resolution 242 required Israel's withdrawal from the, that is all, the occupied territories. They also specified that the agreement would, besides the written "working principles," include oral understandings, which Kissinger and Gromyko then closeted themselves to finalize. It would be highly surprising if these did not include the troop withdrawal from Egypt, which was the original reason and purpose of the entire exercise. ...
http://hnn.us/articles/41409.html
In fact, as Kissinger well knew, the Soviets did not actually withdraw their military personnel from Egypt until just before Egypt launched the 1973 War, although he deliberately promoted the lie that they had been 'expelled' by Sadat in 1972, a lie in which Sadat and the Soviets collaborated. Why would he do that? Very few analysts have bothered to address this very important question. In fact, there has been a curious silence about the lie itself, which involved a conspiracy between Kissinger, Sadat and the Soviets to pretend that the Soviets had left Egypt when the documentary evidence (see previous link) proves that they had not, before the very eve of the 1973 War.
It makes perfect sense for Sadat and the Soviets to lie about the continued Soviet presence, since Sadat was planning to surprise Israel with a large-scale offensive, for which he would need full Soviet support. But why would Kissinger pretend that the Soviets had left when he knew perfectly well that they had not? Even more puzzling, though both Sadat and the Soviets were pretty cavalier about leaks regarding the Soviet presence in Egypt, it was Kissinger who most strenuously denied it, in fact continued to deny it in his memoirs, even though Soviet and Egyptian documents prove that he knew very well that he was lying.
There is only one logical explanation: he knew that the Soviet presence would be necessary for Egypt to launch a credible war against Israel, and he wanted that war to take place. He wanted it so much, in fact, that he was not only willing to let the Soviets remain in Egypt and cover up their presence, but to turn a blind eye to the large arms transfers the Soviet Union was making to Egypt in preparation for the coming war.
This explanation is further confirmed by Kissinger’s very revealing actions when the war was launched, deliberately neglecting to inform President Nixon for hours, during the initial time when Israel was at a clear disadvantage, before in effect taking control of the White House for the duration of the war.
Indeed, the 1973 War was launched at a uniquely convenient time for Kissinger to take over. In an intriguing parallel to Salah Nasr’s psychological warfare against President Nasser, to isolate him by promoting his paranoia against internal plotters, Kissinger had already succeeded in isolating President Nixon from his other national security advisors, including Secretary of State William Rogers, Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco and Defence Secretary Melvin Laird, among others, with a combination of relentless backstabbing against them and a bizarrely possessive attitude towards Nixon himself:
Nixon had a running conversation with Haldeman about "the K problem," as Haldeman noted in his diaries. Nixon complained in one taped conversation with the chief of staff: "Henry's personality problem is just too goddamn difficult for us to deal [with].… Goddamn it, Bob, he's psychopathic about trying to screw [Secretary of State William] Rogers." Haldeman feared that if Kissinger "wins the battle with Rogers" he might not be "livable with afterwards." Nixon agreed that he would "be a dictator." "Did you know that Henry worries every time I talk on the phone with anybody?" he told Haldeman and domestic counselor John Ehrlichman in another taped conversation. "His feeling is that he must be present every time I see anybody important."
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Later, having won his battle to isolate Nixon and with the Watergate scandal peaking,
The president was deeply preoccupied, and at times incapacitated by self-pity or alcohol.
On the morning of October 6—Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar—Egypt attacked Israeli forces in the Sinai even as Syria struck the Israelis in the Golan Heights. A combination of complete surprise and effective preparation initially gave Egypt and Syria the advantage.
From the outset Kissinger, who was now secretary of state as well as national-security adviser, centered control of the crisis in his own hands. The Israelis had informed him of the attacks at six a.m. that Saturday, but three and a half hours would pass before he felt the need to consult Nixon, who had escaped Washington for his retreat in Key Biscayne, Florida. At 8:35 a.m., Kissinger called Haig, who was with the president, to report on developments. He said, according to a phone transcript, "I want you to know … that we are on top of it here." To ensure that the media not see Nixon as out of the loop, Kissinger urged Haig to say "that the President was kept informed from 6:00 a.m. on." When Kissinger finally called Nixon, at 9:25 a.m., the president left matters in Kissinger's hands. But he asked, according to a transcript, that Kissinger "indicate you talked to me."
At 10:35 a.m., Kissinger again called Haig. They discussed how to work with the Soviets to bring the fighting to a halt. When Haig reported that Nixon was considering returning to Washington, Kissinger discouraged it—part of a recurring pattern to keep Nixon out of the process. Over the next three days, Kissinger oversaw the diplomatic exchanges with the Israelis and Soviets about the war. Israeli prime minister Golda Meir's requests for military supplies, which were beginning to run low, came not to Nixon but to Kissinger. Although he consistently described himself as representing the president's wishes, Kissinger was seen by outsiders as the principal U.S. official through whom business should be conducted.
On October 7, for example, a Brezhnev letter to Nixon was a response to "the messages you transmitted to us through Dr. Kissinger." On October 9, a telegram to King Hussein of Jordan urging continued non-involvement in the conflict came not from Nixon but from Kissinger.
Although Kissinger spoke to Nixon frequently during these four days, it was usually Kissinger who initiated the calls, kept track of the fighting, and parceled out information as he saw fit. On the night of October 7, according to a telephone transcript, Nixon asked Kissinger if there had been any message from Brezhnev. "Oh, yes, we heard from him," Kissinger replied, volunteering no more. Nixon had to press, asking lamely, "What did he say?"
At 7:55 on the night of October 11, Brent Scowcroft, Haig's replacement as Kissinger's deputy at the N.S.C., called Kissinger to report that the British prime minister, Edward Heath, wanted to speak to the president in the next 30 minutes. According to a telephone transcript, Kissinger replied, "Can we tell them no? When I talked to the President he was loaded." Scowcroft suggested that they describe Nixon as unavailable, but say that the prime minister could speak to Kissinger. "In fact, I would welcome it," Kissinger told Scowcroft.
What is striking is how matter-of-fact Kissinger and Scowcroft were about Nixon's condition, as if it had been nothing out of the ordinary—as if Nixon's drinking to excess was just part of the routine. They showed no concern at having to keep the prime minister of America's principal ally away from the president.
"Very Down, Very Down"
Between October 6 and 19, Washington and Moscow tried to outdo each other in supplying their respective Middle East clients. Initially, with the Egyptians and Syrians doing well in the fighting, the Soviets resisted calls for a cease-fire. But at the end of two weeks, with the conflict turning against them, Brezhnev became insistent on a truce. On October 19, he urgently asked that Kissinger fly to Moscow for discussions on ending the war. With Kissinger and Brezhnev agreeing to put a cease-fire before the U.N. Security Council, Haig, in a message to Kissinger, congratulated the secretary of state on "your Herculean accomplishment." But he warned that "you will be returning to an environment of major national crisis" brought on by the worsening fallout from the Watergate scandal.
The Middle East situation remained dangerous. On the afternoon of October 23, Moscow and Washington began exchanging messages on the hotline about Israeli and Egyptian violations of the cease-fire. The Soviets were particularly concerned about the Egyptian Third Army, which was cut off in the Sinai. The next day Brezhnev complained that Israel was ignoring the cease-fire, and he proposed a joint military intervention to implement the agreement. He warned that if the United States would not agree to this Moscow might decide to act alone. Kissinger cautioned the Soviets against unilateral intervention.
In the midst of these developments, Nixon called Kissinger. But it was not to discuss the Middle East. Nixon was, Kissinger would later write, "as agitated and emotional as I had ever heard him." The call confirmed what Haig had told Kissinger by phone a day earlier. "How is his frame of mind?," Kissinger had asked, according to a transcript. "Very down, very down," Haig replied.
Kissinger and Haig decided to convene a meeting of national-security officials to devise a response to Brezhnev. Kissinger acknowledges in his memoirs that Nixon was by then asleep, and that he and Haig decided not to get him up. "Should I wake up the President?," Kissinger asked Haig during a 9:50 p.m. phone conversation on October 24, according to the transcript. "No," Haig answered. A half-hour later, in another phone conversation, it is Kissinger who has become reluctant. "Have you talked to the President?," Haig asked. "No, I haven't," Kissinger replied. "He would just start charging around I don't think we should bother the President." Haig persuaded Kissinger to at least shift the meeting from the State Department to the White House, as a way to leave the impression that Nixon was "a part of everything you are doing." Was Nixon on sedatives that would not allow him to function effectively? Had he been drinking? Was he simply preoccupied, as Kissinger suggests in his official recollections? For whatever reason, Kissinger did not want the president involved.
It was an extraordinary turn of events. None of the seven officials who met for more than three hours, until two a.m., had been elected to office. Yet they were setting policy in a dangerous international crisis, and coming to a decision that should have rested with the president: directing U.S. forces to raise America's worldwide level of military readiness from Defense Conditions 4 and 5 to Def Con 3, a level reached only once before, during the Cuban missile crisis. (U.S. readiness would be raised on only two subsequent occasions, during the 1991 Gulf War and on September 11, 2001.)
The worldwide alert was coupled with a message delivered to the Soviet Embassy at 5:40 a.m. It described "your suggestion of unilateral action as a matter of the gravest concern involving incalculable consequences."
Although the White House issued a statement attributing to Nixon the decision to put the nation on high alert, and Kissinger repeated this assertion at a press briefing, it was Kissinger and the six other national-security officials in the early-morning hours who actually chose to do it, though presumably confident that they reflected Nixon's wishes. But how confident could they really have been? As Kissinger would remind Haig the next day, according to the transcript of a phone call, "You and I were the only ones for it. These other guys were wailing all over the place this morning."
The alert became worldwide news, and it also achieved its objective. The Soviets agreed to stay out. When Kissinger received word that the Soviets had backed down, he spoke with Haig, not Nixon, and in that 2:35 p.m. phone conversation he expressed concern about how the decision-making process would be viewed if it ever became public. According to a transcript of the call, Kissinger told Haig, "I think I did some good for the President." Haig replied, "More than you know." They agreed that, as Kissinger put it, without the alert "we would have had a Soviet paratroop division in there this morning." "You know it, and I know it," Haig responded. "Have you talked to the Boss," he asked. "No," Kissinger said. "I will call him. Let's not broadcast this all over the place otherwise it looks like we (cooked) it up." (The parentheses are in the original transcript.) Only afterward did Kissinger, at 3:05 p.m., place a call to Nixon, greeting him fulsomely with the words "Mr. President, you have won again."
Aware that the events of that night, if made public, would be controversial, Kissinger maintained that putting the country on alert was Nixon's order as commander in chief. According to a transcript of a phone conversation between Kissinger and Nixon, a reporter asked Kissinger at the press briefing, "Was this [alert] a rational decision by the President?" Kissinger told Nixon that in reply he had "said it was [a] combination of the advice of all of his advisors … that the President decided to do this." It is a careful formulation. But I have found no document or transcript showing or suggesting that the president signed off on the action. And there is a moment, at once haunting and pathetic, when Nixon seems to underscore his own passive role in a fait accompli, wanting to be seen as in the loop. Immediately after the 3:05 conversation, Nixon called Kissinger back, hoping to lure him to the White House for a display of public consultation: "I think it would be well for semantics, no semantics, I mean, if you could come over here, make an appearance, dash over to say hello. You know, to sort of, what are you doing now?"
The extent to which Kissinger had come to believe that decision-making should rightfully rest in his own hands rather than the president's can hardly be exaggerated. As he prepared to travel to the Middle East on November 5, Kissinger wanted Haig and Scowcroft to assure him that Nixon was under control. Specifically he worried that the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, might get in to see the president and extract unwise commitments. "I have to talk with you about how to conduct yourself while I am gone," he told Scowcroft, according to the transcript of a telephone call. "I am sure the Russians will try something … to get hold of the President. It is essential they don't get anything I didn't give them."
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It is really quite mind-boggling that Henry Kissinger, who has never been elected by the American people to represent them in any way, was able to hijack the entire United States, including its entire military, and literally hold the world hostage for Israel. Just as incredible, is the fact that almost everybody who was associated with the Nixon presidency became tainted with disgrace except for by far the greatest criminal of all, guilty of the most outrageous crimes, "Henry the K" who somehow walked away from the Nixon administration with an enhanced reputation as a Great Statesman, his advice eagerly sought by Democrats and Republicans alike. In fact, I recall reading about one public opinion poll in the U.S. that found Henry Kissinger to be the most admired man in America.
But back to our question: Why was Kissinger so careful to ensure Egypt’s capability to launch a war against Israel, why did he do everything possible to make sure most of the Israeli establishment would be taken by surprise and then take over the U.S. presidency, authorizing emergency arms transfers to Israel and risking a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union in order to prevent Israel being forced to make any concrete concessions as a result of the war? What was the real purpose of the 1973 War, from the point of view of its chief architect, Henry Kissinger?
In order to answer these questions, we need to understand that above all, Kissinger is a master chess player. In chess, each move can never be understood in isolation, but only as part of a larger strategy. Similarly, Kissinger’s career is characterized by a number of actions that make no sense or seem contradictory viewed by themselves, but make perfect sense when the total picture is taken into account. Looking at Kissinger's career as a series of discrete episodes reveals a pattern of failure after failure, seemingly unrelated to each other. Only by looking at the very big picture can Kissinger’s true genius be properly understood. The wider the perspective one uses, the more this is true.
After all, he played a key role, first in the Johnson administration, and then in the Nixon White House in escalating the Vietnam War, a war that had two important consequences, among others: first, it severely strained the American military and ruined America’s appetite for foreign invasions, making his recommendation that the U.S. henceforth rely on regional proxies to fulfill its policy objectives much more attractive. More specifically, it provided Israel with a more receptive audience in America for its offer to act as its proxy in the Middle East than it otherwise would have been, and thus allowed Israel's advocates in the U.S. to justify a drastic increase in the transfers to Israel of advanced weaponry and economic and political support.
Second, the gigantic debts incurred by the U.S. in Vietnam forced it to abandon the gold standard and seek another basis for the U.S. dollar. It was Kissinger who forged the agreement with the oil-producing states of the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, that specified that they would sell oil exclusively for U.S. dollars, and that they would invest those dollars in U.S. banks (mainly Rockefeller banks), in exchange for American guarantees that these regimes would be kept in power.
In effect, Kissinger made them an offer they couldn’t refuse: either the U.S. would simply invade Saudi Arabia and take it over (overtly or covertly), or the Saudis would not only be allowed to remain in power under American protection, but they would individually reap untold wealth, on at least three conditions: 1) the bulk of the money would be invested in Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan banks; 2) Saudi Arabia would use some of the petrodollars to increase its share of the financing of the U.S.’ covert network of religious fundamentalist groups; and 3) Saudi Arabia would increase its purchases of military hardware at vastly inflated prices from the U.S. At the same time he was making his "offer" to the Saudis, Kissinger was also busy persuading the Shah of Iran to raise petroleum prices:
The Shah had originally been steadfastly opposed to pushing up prices through coordinated OPEC oil production reductions. He changed his mind all of a sudden, as Yamani says, in 1973 when Kissinger convinced him that he would need the oil revenues to turn his country into a regional superpower, the ‘policeman of the Gulf’. This makes perfect sense since Kissinger presided over the US withdrawal from Vietnam – the Nixon Doctrine – and envisioned a scheme where regional allies would carry out imperial duties for the US. …
The purpose of Yamani’s trip to the US during the October War was to inform the Americans of the Saudi position, that oil production would continue to decline until something tangible was done by the US about Israel and Mideast peace. Turns out that, when he met Kissinger, Kissinger had a fit when he discovered that Yamani had talked to other administration members before he got to him. Yamani’s impression was that Kissinger didn’t want the information he was disseminating – it had also leaked out into the press – to get back to President Nixon!
Link
(Incidentally, after the Iranian revolution in 1979, the billions of petro-dollars that the Shah had invested in Rockefeller Banks were simply confiscated by the banks, who in effect stole the property of the Iranian people. Iran has been trying for decades to get its money back, without success.)
The oil price hikes almost single-handedly engineered by Henry Kissinger in 1973-74 had two fatal consequences: first, they directly led to the destruction of the movement of Non-Aligned States that Egypt’s Gamal Abdelnasser had helped create to unify post-colonial states and forge economic, military and political interdependence among them to replace their dependence on, and subservience to, the West.
These countries, following the dramatic rise in prices that followed the 1973 oil embargo, were forced to seek ever-increasing loans of U.S. dollars in order to pay for their energy imports. Using the flood of petro-dollars that poured into its banks, Rockefeller in turn financed agencies like the IMF and the World Bank, who were only too happy to issue loans to these ‘Third World’ countries, at usurious interest rates and on condition that the borrowing states make extremely damaging political and economic concessions. Within a few years, the Non-Allied States, which had formed an increasingly powerful global alliance to combat Western imperialism and colonial projects such as Israel, were no more; instead of the original meaning of “Third World” as a statement of independence from both the Soviet and the American camps, it became a euphemism for poverty, economic backwardness and dependence on the West.
Anyway, back to the situation that followed the Naksa, or the Egyptian defeat in 1967.
The 1967 Six Day War had been a stunning triumph for Israel and created the myth of Israeli invincibility, which nobody believed more than the Israelis themselves. Drunk on victory, inflamed with hubris, they could not see the long-term dangers inherent in their current situation.
Kissinger did. As I mentioned earlier, the Arab Front was united as never before, the Soviet Union had raised the quantity and quality of arms transfers to its allies in the region, the United Nations was adamant that Israel withdraw from the Arab territories, the Non-Aligned States was still a powerful movement opposed to Israel’s colonialism, and the War of Attrition was creating a new generation of battle-hardened and highly motivated fighters. In such an environment, even if Sadat was working on behalf of his American bosses, there was no way for him to capitulate to Israel without risking a popular revolt against his regime. Egyptians and all the Arabs had suffered a traumatic and catastrophic defeat in 1967, and were determined to recover the territories at any cost.
Henry Kissinger's very own secret "peace plan" alternative to the U.S. Rogers Plan (which he obviously had no intention of respecting, since he later suppressed or denied its provisions) had two important advantages for Israel. First, unlike the Rogers Plan, it established the U.S., rather than the U.N, as the main broker for negotiations between Israel and Egypt. Second, it secured an agreement from the Soviets to withdraw from Egypt and cease providing arms to that country (just not quite yet, though Kissinger, the Soviets and Egypt would pretend they had).
There is reason to believe that during the period from 1970 to the launch of the Egyptian-led war against Israel in 1973, and during the war itself, Sadat secretly coordinated every move with the man he was later to refer to as his “good friend Henry”, through trusted third parties at first and later in telephone conversations.
The war took most of the Israeli establishment entirely by surprise, no doubt because they had been assured by “Henry” that no such war was being planned. The shock proved traumatic, and shook the Israelis’ belief in their own invulnerability as nothing else could have. It also provoked the Israeli Right, led by Menachem Begin, into openly accusing Kissinger of organizing a ‘treasonous’ conspiracy with certain Labour figures, notably Israel’s Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, to LIHOP the Yom Kippur War, despite Begin’s own warnings that the war was being planned. Far-right Israeli investigative journalist Barry Chamish describes this conspiracy:
Israelis still believe the war was a giant intelligence failure. Nonsense. The Mossad saw a million Egyptian soldiers and most of the Syrian army on its borders and they warned the government of an impending war. What it didn't know was that Defence Minister Moshe Dayan had cut a murderous deal with US Secretary Of State Henry Kissinger, of the highest executive branch of the CFR, not to mobilize the Israeli army. Worse, Dayan thinned troops on the Suez Canal to 600. Had there been a mere 6000 soldiers waiting, not an Egyptian would have crossed the canal and a million would have potentially been wiped out.
On the Golan, Dayan had a last minute change of heart and added 50 tanks. Israelis have been told that, under the brave leadership of Col. Kahalane, these fifty just barely saved the nation. More Nonsense. The Syrians swept to a bridge on the Jordan River within a day and stopped. They stopped because the deal was no Israeli callup for no capture of pre-67 land and the Syrians abided by the terms. Had they cheated, the road to Tiberius and the Galilee was all theirs, unimpeded. At best, Israel would have surrendered and traded the Galilee for the Golan.
http://yitzhakrabin.blogspot.com/2008/0 ... -2008.html
Chamish’s claim that if the Syrians had “cheated” on the deal with Kissinger, they could have taken back the Golan, is belied by what we now know about Kissinger’s secret and illegal takeover of the U.S. president’s authority, placing the United States military on high global alert to intervene should the Arabs try to re-take any territory, and, through the emergency airlift of weapons to Israel that he also illegally authorized, ensuring that Israel had access to more and better military hardware and technology than all the Arab armies combined. Also given the deep involvement of Kissinger with the CIA, and Sadat's recruitment as a CIA asset in 1960, it is not inconceivable that Kissinger had been Sadat's ‘handler’ perhaps for many years, although this is speculation.
So. The Yom Kippur War went ahead as planned, the Egyptians destroyed the “indestructible” barrier that the Israelis had erected to keep them out (the Bar-Lev Line), and as they crossed the Suez Canal, the sense of despair that had haunted all the Arabs after 1967 immediately evaporated, to be replaced with a huge surge of national pride and self-confidence. The Israelis, in contrast, were forced to come face to face with their own vulnerability. With this psychological re-balancing between Israel and Egypt, suddenly conditions were propitious for the start of Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy” to bear fruit, something that would have been inconceivable before the 1973 War, when Israel felt invincible and the Arabs were spurred by the traumatic memory of 1967 to reject any possibility of negotiation or compromise.
Menachem Begin, whom I mentioned earlier, was among the most prominent Israelis to denounce Kissinger’s duplicity in the lead-up to the Yom Kippur War, and to express his disgust with what he saw as incredible stupidity at best, and treason at worst, on the part of the Labour Party’s leadership. Many Israelis shared his view, and swelled the ranks of the Likud, contributing to its victory in the 1977 elections, the first time in Israel’s history that it was ruled by any party other than Labour.
Interestingly, it was this same Menachem Begin who, as Israel’s prime minister, later made a complete about-face and participated with Sadat in the Kissinger-brokered Camp David “Peace” Agreement, which provided for Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai, captured from Egypt in 1967. How to account for this? Barry Chamish, and other right wing Israeli pundits, explain that Kissinger, Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon, along with Nazis and “Jew haters” like Jimmy Carter are all members of a secret cabal centered on the Council on Foreign Relations, whose real objective is “another Holocaust”:
The man who told me what happened was Yossi Orr, a co-inventor of the Uzi and a political insider. It was 1979, Sadat had made his historic trip to Jerusalem, I suspect but cannot prove, with the approval of the big boys, and Begin was at Camp David with now-proven Jew hater, Jimmy Carter, and his CFR, Trilateral Commission gang of Mondale, Vance and Brzezinzki.
What Begin didn't know was that Moshe Dayan, the unpopular, yes, traitorous Foreign Minister Carter had forced on him, was working with the CFR. Alongside him was Ezer Weizmann, outside the scope of this discussion. According to Orr, Begin gave up his lifetime ideology due to deep psychological brainwashing. His coffee was drugged and his aides backed Carter's on every point and issue. Begin collapsed mentally and gave up every inch of the Sinai.
Link
Hm. That’s certainly one explanation. Another is that Begin was effectively persuaded by Kissinger that it is in Israel’s interest to sign a separate ‘peace’ agreement with Egypt, thus, with one stroke of his pen decapitating the Arab Front and leaving it fragmented and in disarray.
Furthermore, although Israel would return the Sinai to Egypt, under the Camp David Agreement Israel would have special access to its rich oil resources and it would remain a demilitarized zone, easily re-taken at any time, should Israel feel the need to violate its promises at Camp David (Israeli strategists claim that re-capturing the Sinai, given the Camp David-mandated lack of Egyptian military defences there, would take Israel “a few hours”).
While Sadat made much of the so-called “peace dividend” that Egyptians would enjoy as a result of Camp David, in reality this translated into massive loans from the IMF and World Bank that rapidly swelled Egypt’s national debt and left Egypt vulnerable to the manipulations of these international predators, along with USAID projects, all of which have combined to gradually destroy Egypt’s agricultural, industrial and social infrastructure, including health care and education. At the same time, Sadat nurtured the Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi movements that had been fought by Gamal Abdelnasser, in order to destroy the secular and Leftist opposition, including Nasserists, who rightly perceived Sadat as a great danger to Egypt. From 1970 to 1981, the country underwent a dramatic transformation: from a secular, independently-run nation with a good system of public education and health care, an economy based on industrial and agricultural development, part of an emerging global alliance against Western and Soviet imperialism, into a heavily indebted client state with a disintegrating economy and social infrastructure, growing sectarian tensions between Muslims and Christians, plagued by poverty and despair, and corruption so rampant it beggars belief. This process has only accelerated during Hosny Mubarak’s rule.
bks said:
Quote:
Sadat's adversarial relationship with EIJ long predated his assassination, dating back to the so-called "corrective revolution" of the early 1970's. That's a fresh operation against "extremists" in Egypt, years after the disengagement in Yemen.
I would think Sadat's brutal policy toward them would have been approved of (maybe even was approved of) by the Israelis. Alice would know better than me. I'd be grateful for her perspective on this.
Strictly speaking, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad did not exist until 1984, long after Sadat was assassinated. Unlike Islamic Jihad, which was an extremist offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood whose members became impatient with the Brotherhood’s insistence on non-violence, we still know very little about the EIJ, other than that it was led by Ayman Al-Zawahri after his release in 1984 from an Egyptian prison for complicity in the assassination of Sadat, and that it supposedly merged with 'al Qaeda'.
Actually, Sadat’s “corrective revolution” of the early 1970s did not at all target Muslim fundamentalists of any kind. On the contrary, his regime actively supported the most extreme elements and gave them free rein to terrorize and even murder Leftists and Nasserists, most of whom were intellectuals, journalists, university professors and other professionals unprepared and unable to deal with thugs armed with metal chains and knives. It was Sadat who made an amendment to Egypt’s constitution that specified that “Egypt is a Muslim country” and that its laws must be consistent with Islamic religious law. He also made the state television stations pause five times per day to broadcast the call to prayer. His regime passed a law that allowed building owners to obtain free water and electricity, and to be exempt from property taxes, if they allow part of the building to be used as a mosque, prompting the rapid proliferation of jerry-built mosques in practically every second or third building (well, that’s an exaggeration, but only a slight one). The Saudis were allowed to spend huge amounts of money promoting their Wahhabi brand of Islam among Egyptians, through very overt and sometimes covert means.
All of this was done under the supervision of Sadat’s American handlers, and certainly to the Israelis’ glee. The late 1970s, 80s and 90s were also a time of expanding Israeli influence in Egypt’s economy, especially in the agricultural sector. Coincidentally, this was a period when Egypt’s Agriculture Ministry began to be perceived as extremely corrupt, with numerous scandals involving the import and use of DDT and other toxic and cancer-causing chemicals by ministry officials in exchange for bribes. Today, Israel enjoys a virtual monopoly on seed production through its supposedly “Egyptian” producer, NubaSeed, and the use of purchased GM seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides has been stealthily taking over in what’s left of Egyptian farmlands.
IIRC, the roundup of 'Muslim fundamentalists' that followed Sadat's assassination ensnared the 'Blind Sheikh' and Al-Zawahiri, yes? All of this during the time the US is funnelling tens of millions of dollars (which will ultimately become billions) to mujahedeen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.
A tangled web, but where's the evidence that US or Israeli pressure was the reason Sadat went to war with the radicals, or that the 1967 war was somehow responsible? Don't see it.
If I've made a mess of any part of this, Alice or anyone else who knows better, please set me straight.
It is indeed a tangled web: Sadat never actually went to war against Islamic radicals, as I mentioned earlier. By the late 1970s, one could accurately say that he was "at war" with pretty much every faction within Egyptian society: Copts, Muslims, Secularists, Leftists, Rightists, you name it.
Also, during the mid- to late 1980s, during uber-spook Frank Wisner’s tenure as American ambassador to Egypt, I have personally heard from reliable sources here in Egypt that he was involved in cultivating a mini-Qaeda network that specifically included the “Blind Sheikh”, Omar Abdelrahman (whom the CIA later arranged to transport to the United States) and others, who just happened to be the very ones who were “hunted” by the United States, later on...
Also, I’m pretty certain that some of the most extremist fundamentalist organizations were covertly funded and supported by Israel, opportunistically introduced like fish into the sea of general fundamentalism-promotion that was being carried out by the Saudis, Americans and the Egyptian regime under Sadat. There are numerous accounts of arms being smuggled from Israel through the Sinai to Islamic Jihad and other extremist groups, in exchange for carrying out a list of targeted executions of prominent Egyptian intellectuals and political figures. Unfortunately, this has led to a crackdown against all the Bedouins of Sinai, who have been accused of working for the Israelis and unjustly treated like a “fifth column”. Yet the Bedouin have an illustrious history of patriotism and of acting as Egypt’s eyes and ears on the border with Israel, so the alienation of these people only serves Israeli interests, ironically enough.
Incidentally, “Islamic Jihad” no longer exists. Its members were all hunted down, rounded up and imprisoned in the years following Sadat’s assassination. In prison, they were visited by a succession of highly credible Islamic scholars who were able to show them how alien their beliefs and actions are to genuine Islam. I’ve seen some of them interviewed on television, and have no doubt that their remorse is genuine. After serving their time, most have been released, but unfortunately, they’re finding life on the outside to be very difficult, since few people are willing to hire them or give them a chance. It must be a real struggle for them not to give in to bitterness and despair.
Given what we know about Sadat and the Islamic extremists that assassinated him, ie that both were instruments of their CIA handlers, it is worth considering the possibility that one was used to eliminate the other. I believe that this is very probable for a number of reasons, but they'll have to wait for another time.
Anyway, back to Henry Kissinger. We've only scratched the surface of his key role in shaping the current realities of the Middle East, and already this is a mammoth post. I believe even a book would not be enough to do Henry Kissinger justice.
I find it fascinating that so many 'analysts' insist that Kissinger is not a zionist, but merely a servant to American elite interests. On the contrary, I view Kissinger as an uber-zionist whose incredible, perhaps unequaled contributions to Israeli hegemony have been made possible precisely because he has deliberately packaged them in a way calculated to appeal to U.S. elite interests. Whenever 'elite' interests conflicted with Israel's hegemonic interests, Kissinger invariably ensured that the latter would prevail. As one example, whose interests were served when Kissinger hijacked the U.S. presidency and put the U.S. armed forces on global nuclear alert, just to ensure that Israel would be free to continue violating the ceasefire agreement that America had formulated?
His apparent collusion with Sadat and the Soviets during the run-up to the 1973 War may look to some like a 'betrayal' of Israel, but in fact it has turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to that shitty little country. Without the 1973 War "shaking things up," as Kissinger described it, the War of Attrition would have most likely continued until Israel was exhausted and forced to withdraw from the 1967 territories. Already during the brief time the War of Attrition was allowed to continue, Israel was registering the kind of heavy, regular losses that can only be compared to those of the last days of Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon, which forced it to withdraw in 2000.
Instead, as a consequence of the 1973 War and the subsequent Camp David Agreement, the Arab front was deprived of its most important member state, and Kissinger's “friend” Sadat threw wide open the gates of Egypt to the economic hit-men, the Wahhabists flush with dollars, the spooky terrorists, the Israeli spies and the corrupt lackeys with delusions of grandeur for whom Kissinger so carefully and meticulously paved the way.
Bottom line: what Kissinger accomplished for Israel during his frenzy of activity in the period before, during and after the 1973 War is nothing less than the elimination or neutralization of every element that threatened Israel prior to the 1973 War:
-the Arab Front was politically fragmented and demoralized;
-the Soviet Union was no longer Egypt's ally or arming Egypt;
-by neutralizing Israel’s most formidable opponent, Egypt, Camp David freed Israel’s hands to pursue its bloody expansionist policies in the Occupied territories and southern Lebanon;
-the United Nations had been sidelined and replaced by Kissinger himself (followed by a long succession of zionist “Middle East foreign policy experts”) as "peace broker"; international law was fatally undermined, no longer considered relevant to "Middle East Peace";
-the movement for Non-Aligned States was de facto destroyed;
-the War of Attrition not only was called off, it could never be re-started, because its parties were now actively hostile to and suspicious of each other;
-Israel had returned the Sinai, which it had illegally occupied in 1967, but contrary to international law, it was returned with a series of conditions that allowed Israel to continue to benefit from it, and others that undermined Egypt's sovereignty over its own territory.
Not bad for a "non-zionist".
