Sowing Crisis, page 14
Perhaps the first example of the truth of Rubinstein’s observation was the launching by the Egyptians, against the strenuous advice of their Soviet military advisors, of the campaign against Israeli occupation forces dug in on the east bank of the Suez Canal starting in 1968, which came to be known as the War of Attrition. This artillery and air offensive, together with occasional commando raids, provoked a massive Israeli response, primarily in the form of furious air and artillery bombardments that devastated and emptied of their population the Egyptian cities of Port Said, Port Fuad, Ismailiya, and Suez along the canal. Israel also fortified its positions on the east bank of the canal into a formidable barrier called the Bar-Lev Line. The War of Attrition, which lasted from 1968 until 1970, eventually enflamed all the other Arab fronts with Israel, and had other effects, to be discussed in chapter 6.30 This in turn led to sporadic, unfocused, and initially unsuccessful UN, American, and Soviet mediation to attempt to end the fighting and move the parties toward a negotiated political settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. According to the accounts of Egyptian officials, improving their bargaining position through military means to make possible such a settlement with Israel—rather than outright victory in war—was always their basic intention in launching the War of Attrition, although this was often belied by their warlike rhetoric.31 The fact that in the teeth of bitter opposition from some radical “rejectionist” Arab states, Egypt joined Jordan in accepting UN Security Council resolution 242 of November 22, 1967, which mandated a peace settlement through negotiations (and which Israel refused to accept for nearly three years), indicates that there is some validity to this claim.
In the end, the War of Attrition and the Rogers Plan, put forward by American secretary of state William Rogers for a cease-fire and negotiations (which actually did halt the fighting along the canal in September 1970), combined with mediation by UN envoy Gunnar Jarring and Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko over the same years, failed to resolve the problem that Egypt faced, namely Israel’s 1967 occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, or to bring about a lasting peace. This occupation, the presence of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the cities along the Canal Zone in Cairo and other Egyptian cities, and the need to keep the entire country on a war footing for year after year, had become Egypt’s primary foreign policy and domestic concern. After the death of President Gamal Abdel Nasser in September 1970, subsequent efforts by Egypt to initiate negotiations with Israel via the intermediary of the United States and the UN also failed. War was, in consequence, again inevitable, in spite of the fact that Anwar Sadat, who had now become Egypt’s president, showed himself willing to go quite far in the direction of a separate peace with Israel (which his predecessor Nasser had always resisted), if by so doing he could end the occupation of the Sinai. Sadat proclaimed 1971, his first full year in office, the “year of decision,” hoping to force a negotiated settlement of the conflict.
Newly released American documents show that Secretary of State Rogers was rebuffed by Israel in May 1971 when he presented the Israeli government with an Egyptian proposal that would have produced much the same outcome—a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace—as was later obtained via the successful 1977–79 peace negotiations between Egypt and Israel. However, these later talks only took place after the costly 1973 war, which brought the superpowers to the brink of nuclear confrontation.32 These same newly declassified documents show that President Nixon and national security advisor Henry Kissinger, obsessed with the rivalry with the Soviet Union, actively undercut Rogers’s efforts, demanding concessions from Egypt regarding its relationship with the Soviets as a precondition for American brokering of such a separate bilateral Egyptian-Israeli peace accord.33 Peace in the Middle East, in other words, was less important to the White House than advantage over America’s superpower rival. This was not the last time this was to be the case for either side engaged in the Cold War rivalry.
Although he did not get what he wanted from Rogers or the Israelis, Sadat got the message from Washington. Partly in response to intense American (and Saudi) pressure on Egypt to cut its ties to the Soviet Union (and also because of the Egyptian military’s intense frustration with delays in the supply of needed equipment and with the arrogant behavior of Soviet military personnel), in 1972 Sadat expelled Soviet military advisors.34 With them went Soviet combat forces that were stationed in Egypt for a variety of purposes, ranging from defense of the Egyptian interior against Israeli air attack to tasks that had nothing to do with Egyptian interests, like air and sea surveillance of American SLBM-carrying submarines. The exodus of perhaps twenty thousand Soviet military personnel served two purposes for Sadat. It constituted an effort to move Egypt closer to the United States in spite of the failure of his 1971 initiative brokered by Rogers and UN mediator Gunnar Jarring. It was also necessary preparation for the launching of a war to liberate the occupied Sinai Peninsula, which the Egyptian leadership now saw was inevitable, since Israel had spurned Egypt’s 1971 political overtures.35 Sadat and his advisors felt they could not go to war with Soviet forces and advisors on their territory, both because this presence might inhibit Egyptian actions and because it might incriminate the Soviets in the taking of a purely Egyptian decision to launch the war.
Given the two-way influence relationship analyzed by Rubinstein that I have discussed, it should be no surprise that after Sadat had ordered the humiliating expulsion of Soviet military personnel from Egypt, the Egyptian leader had no compunction in demanding that Moscow provide new and highly sophisticated weapons systems to enable his forces to launch a crossing of the Suez Canal. This was an operation of which Moscow, wary of jeopardizing its relationship with Washington and afraid that its Egyptian protégés might lose another war, did not approve. Faced with such effrontery, and quite miffed at Sadat, the Soviets nevertheless grudgingly delivered much of the requested weaponry, even though they knew that it would be used for a war the outcome of which seemed highly uncertain to them.36 Just before this, the United States had found that in spite of delivering some of the most sophisticated weapons in its arsenal to Israel,37 efforts by Secretary of State Rogers and the State Department to bring Israel to accept a negotiated settlement with Egypt were stonewalled by an Israeli refusal to consider Sadat’s terms. Clearly both superpowers by this stage were so deeply committed to supporting their respective clients, and so involved in a proxy competition with each other in the Middle East, they had difficulty either in restraining these clients or compelling them to do much of what they wanted.
The limits on the capabilities of the superpowers to restrain their clients became further apparent when Egypt and Syria launched the October 1973 war. This was the last of the exclusively state-to-state Arab-Israeli wars. Thereafter, nonstate actors like the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and, later, Hamas and Hizballah became the main combatants, although, during the 1982 war, Syrian forces were heavily involved for a single week of a ten-week war that was mainly waged by Israel against the PLO. This single instance over a quarter of a century ago was the last Arab-Israeli military conflict in which the military forces of any Arab state played any direct role.38 In some respects, however, the October 1973 war was the most important of them all. It certainly was in terms of superpower involvement. The Soviet leadership feared the potentially negative outcome (and impact on their developing détente with the United States) of an Arab attack, even one like that planned by Sadat and Syrian president Hafiz al-Assad in 1973 with the limited objective of liberating territory occupied in 1967.39 The Soviets could not persuade Sadat to show further patience after he had been subjected to domestic and Arab ridicule by proclaiming 1971 a “year of decision,” when he had failed either to initiate negotiations or go to war. They were thus unable to restrain him from finally going to war.
In these less than ideal circumstances, Moscow went along, albeit reluctantly, with its clients in Cairo and Damascus, who proceeded to launch their October 1973 offensive. The attack achieved the desired effect of strategic surprise, but after initial rapid Egyptian and Syrian advances in Sinai and the Golan Heights, the situation changed as Israel counterattacked, first in the Golan and then later in Sinai. As the war turned sour for the Syrians and then for the Egyptians, the Soviets suddenly found themselves called upon to airlift vast quantities of weapons to replace heavy losses of equipment, notably surface-to-air and antitank missiles and armored vehicles. The United States was in an analogous predicament, as heavy Israeli aircraft losses to new Soviet-provided Egyptian and Syrian missile and antiaircraft artillery batteries, and losses of armored vehicles to new antiarmor weapons in the earliest phases of the war, forced a similar decision on Washington to that taken by Moscow. Soon thereafter, massive air resupply of critical items of military equipment (sometimes taken directly from Warsaw Pact and NATO stocks) was under way to the clients of both superpowers. In a new feature in the series of superpower confrontations over Arab-Israeli wars going back to 1956, there were constant direct communications throughout the crisis between Moscow and Washington (indeed Henry Kissinger, now U.S. secretary of state, was in Moscow part of the time during a late stage of the war, at Soviet request).
It was at this point that two important and enduring phenomena in the relations between the superpowers and their clients surfaced, revealing the crucially important effects of the Cold War on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The first, which was evident as the 1973 war drew to an end, was the way each superpower made mighty efforts to exploit the conflict to achieve advantage for itself at the expense of the other, and to prevent its rival from being able to portray an outcome in the Middle East as a triumph for its Cold War policy. October 1973 is indeed one of the most perfect illustrations of this phenomenon. In the very last days of the war, the two superpowers were simultaneously deeply engaged in resupplying their respective clients with weapons and ammunition even as Kissinger engaged in tense final negotiations with the Soviet leadership, while their forces worldwide were poised on a nuclear alert directed against each other.40 This may have been the most serious standoff between the superpowers since the early days of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis: a recent account based on the latest U.S. government documents that have been declassified called it “possibly the most serious international crisis of Nixon’s presidency.”41
The genesis of this dangerous development was deeply rooted in the pattern I have already outlined of superpower one-upmanship over the Middle East. It came about because the Soviets were enraged to find that notwithstanding what they thought was a deal negotiated in Moscow with Kissinger on a standstill Israeli-Egyptian cease-fire, sealed with Security Council resolution 338 of October 22, 1973 (followed by a similar cease-fire resolution, resolution 339, on October 23), Israeli forces kept advancing southward on the west bank of the canal. In so doing they moved closer and closer to Cairo and to a full encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army, which they had cut off and trapped in its bridgeheads on the east bank of the canal. The Soviets were deeply suspicious of American complicity with the Israelis in this maneuver. This suspicion appears to be fully borne out by newly revealed confidential American documents showing that while in Tel Aviv before his return to Washington from Moscow, Kissinger did in fact encourage the Israelis to advance in direct contravention of his commitment to the Soviets. Just before leaving, he in effect gave the Israeli leadership further precious hours for their offensive, saying, “You won’t get violent protests from Washington if something happens during the night, while I’m flying.”42 The Soviets were outraged that Kissinger appeared to be aiming at giving America’s proxies an advantage on the battlefield when fighting ceased (which in fact is what happened).
In a blunt message to Nixon, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev demanded a joint American-Soviet military intervention to separate the two sides. Should this not take place, he warned that the Soviets might be obliged to intervene unilaterally with their military forces to impose a cease-fire, since UN resolutions to this effect were not being respected by the Israelis. Simultaneously, the Soviets began to move some of their forces, including paratroop divisions and nuclear tactical-missile warheads, movements that were instantly picked up by American intelligence monitoring, as the Soviets knew they would be. This provoked Washington to place American nuclear and conventional forces at DefCon3, the highest peacetime level of alert. This clear signal of American resolution was combined with menacing language from Kissinger: a message he sent to Moscow described Brezhnev’s “suggestion of unilateral action as a matter of the gravest concern involving incalculable consequences.”43
Having been brought by the actions of their clients, and by their own rivalry, to somewhere near the brink of nuclear war, both superpowers now stood down. The result was yet another UN Security Council cease-fire resolution, 340, of October 25, 1973, which this time was eventually respected by the Israelis, who by this point had already encircled the Egyptian Third Army and had achieved most of their objectives on the ground. The United States and the Soviet Union thus reached the level of a nuclear confrontation, essentially in order for each to show the other that it would not back down in what had by now become a central arena of the Cold War competition between them. This is an indication of just how high the stakes of this regional conflict had become for both sides. Just how high they were, and how serious this confrontation was, is often ignored by those who focus on the central strategic relationship between the superpowers, or classic standoffs like those over Berlin and Cuba. Thus, as experienced a policymaker as Richard Holbrooke could describe the Cuban Missile Crisis as “the world’s only superpower nuclear confrontation.”44
The second phenomenon, which emerged in the wake of the 1973 war but had recurred before this, was the strict subordination of the goal of achieving Arab-Israeli peace to what were seen in Washington and Moscow as much more important Cold War considerations. There had already been at least one important example of such a subordination in the years that followed the June 1967 war, when both the United States and the Soviet Union chose to escalate quite drastically the arming of their protégés. The size and sophistication of both Arab and Israeli arsenals grew with alarming rapidity in consequence, to the point that the tank and air battles during the 1973 war were the largest since the battle of Kursk between the German and Soviet armies in 1943. The two superpowers in effect made a decision to ply both sides with armaments rather than cooperating in restraining their clients and aggressively seeking implementation of Security Council resolution 242 of November 22, 1967, which provided an agreed basis for a resolution of the conflict, and which both the United States and the USSR had voted for.
The contrast between each giant’s competitive, muscular “military diplomacy” via arms supply, and their altogether feeble and unfocused statecraft in favor of a negotiated solution, could not have been more glaring for the six years between the 1967 and 1973 wars. Of course, at this stage of the conflict neither side could monopolize peacemaking and thereby obtain unilateral advantage (that ostensibly happy state was not far away for Kissinger and the United States). At the same time, they were far too wary and suspicious of one another to cooperate consistently. Stoking the arms race and therefore making regional war more likely, indeed inevitable, while ostentatiously flexing superpower muscle was in the end just so much easier for both sides. This irresponsibility in the pursuit of the narrowest form of unilateral interest complicated and deepened the conflict and contributed directly and massively to producing two of the most destructive of the Arab-Israeli wars: the nearly three-year-long War of Attrition ending in 1970, and the October 1973 war. One example during this period of the United States and the USSR placing Cold War advantage in the Middle East over the promotion of peace between Arabs and Israelis has already been described: the preference of Nixon and Kissinger, in 1971, for advantage vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, over the arrangements that were proposed by Sadat and were futilely brokered by UN mediator Gunnar Jarring and U.S. Secretary of State Rogers for a separate peaceful settlement between Egypt and Israel.
The period after the 1973 war witnessed perhaps the most egregious examples of this phenomenon, in the form of Henry Kissinger’s vaunted Middle East shuttle diplomacy from the end of the October 1973 war until 1976. It is important to recognize that Kissinger had at least one important accomplishment on these exhausting trips: he defused the dangerous battlefield situation in the immediate wake of the 1973 war that had produced the October 1973 nuclear alert, and that threatened to lead to more war and to more superpower confrontations. He succeeded in doing this by negotiating first a disengagement agreement between Egypt and Israel, then one to halt continued fighting between Syria and Israel, both in 1974, and then another Egyptian-Israeli Sinai disengagement agreement in 1975. However, at the same time, and perhaps even more important to Washington, his actions had the effect of delivering Egypt fully into the American camp and removing it definitively from the Soviet one. This was clearly the primary objective of Kissinger and the two presidents he served, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. However, there was a cost to this achievement, which came at the expense of the possibility, however slim, of an overall comprehensive peace in the region: at no stage did Kissinger engage in multilateral talks or any other form of negotiations involving all the Arab parties and the Soviets.45 Nor did Kissinger try to go any further with unilateral American efforts to make progress toward a final peace between Syria and Israel, or one between Jordan and Israel. He did not even contemplate dealing with the Palestinians. In all of these cases, unlike that of Egypt, no advantages for the United States at the expense of the Soviets could be expected. What the three disengagement agreements did, beyond the paramount achievement of winning over to American influence the largest Arab state, Egypt, was to calm the fighting and ease tension on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts with Israel: both have stayed almost entirely quiet in consequence for the subsequent quarter century. They did this without Kissinger even treating, let alone resolving, the core issues of the conflict, starting with the central issue of Palestine.
