The Never-Ending War

...And above all, it's refreshingly anti-didactic...

...Nasser did not fullycommit to war until he concluded that Israel had been abandoned by the Western world...

...Meanwhile, the Soviets themselves were divided, and their actions proved it, pulling the Egyptians and the Syrians in all directions, baffling the Americans and the Europeans, frustrating their followers all over the Middle East...

...Oren's account of the fighting never loses Michael Ledeen is a resident scholar the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Both succeeded...

...And as diplomatic micromanagers from Henry Kissinger to Dennis Ross read this book, they will surely observe that every American call for Israeli or Arab restraint over some specific detail—the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, a particular village or historic site—bogged down in nitpicking and prolonged bar-gaining, while the greater war raged on...

...On the eve of battle, General Ariel Sharon remarked that his army "did not look as if it knew what it was doing...

...Six Days of War is not a "message book" (although myriad lessons emerge from it...

...I 72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002 sight of the preeminent importance of political power...

...0 V The War That Never Ended Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon take on Israel, from a 1967 Lebanese newspaper...

...Instead, they were encouraged to dream of a day in which their jihad would ultimately prevail and that come what may, the world would never permit them to experience ultimate defeat...

...Deputy Operations Chief Rehavam Ze'evi, later to become a leader of Israel's extreme right, and Quartermaster General Mattityahu Peled, later head of the far left, agreed that the Egyptian threat had to be eliminated at once...

...As Oren notes in a bittersweet final remark, the Six-Day War never really ended, either for the politicians or for the military or even for the historians...

...Dry, strictly chronological and strikingly devoid of style, introspection, insight or candor, The Russia Hand tells us little that we don't already know, and less than we might have had a right to expect...

...The conventional wisdom has long been that the Six-Day War started because Egypt closed the Straits of Aqaba to Israeli ships...

...Hussein's alliance with Nasser, a result of Israel's decision to wait and not go to war, would increase the pressures on Israel to fight," he says, blessedly refraining from the short sermon on "the law of unintended consequences" that a lesser historian would have produced...

...Certainly, there were Israelis—and Egyptians—who saw it that way, but many others did not...

...And that is because Israel's victory was not recognized by the world community, which set about undoing it even before the cease-fire was in place...

...All of it was rejected by the Arabs, sealing their doom...

...The Egyptian and Jordanian governments were similarly divided...

...The Israelis knew then, and know now, that such advice is an invitation to national suicide.Yet the Europeans continue to invite it and indeed condemn every Israeli response, while showing sympathy for her attackers...

...Spade, is the stuff history is made of—real history, not that junk H.G...

...One of Oren's great merits is that he is not surprised by history's fascinating sloppiness, nor by its entertaining paradoxes...

...And he was profoundly wrong about the intentions of his great ally and protector, the Soviet Union...

...The Arabs claimed from the outset that they were under attack by both Israel and America, that American troops were marching on them, that American (and even British) ships were firing at them and that American planes were bombing...

...if Israel attacks first, we will condemn you...

...And thereafter, over what, if any-thing, to give back to the Arabs, and, if so, what to obtain in exchange...

...both became more aggressive when they were pressured to abandon some limited objective...

...The Israeli government was deeply divided from beginning to end—over whether to attack at all, over where and against whom to attack...

...JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73...

...As Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton read this book, they will surely notice that when Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban spoke at the United Nations on the war's second day, he called on the Arab nations to join with Israel to look beyond the fighting and shape a new Middle East, in which peace would enrich everyone and new generations could be safe from the clouds of war...

...Strobe Lite CLINTON'S MAN FOR MOSCOW The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy STROBE TALBOTT Random House/478 pages/$29.95 REVIEWED BY By Philip Terzian I t used to be said of Andrei Gromyko, the stone-faced (and seemingly eternal) Soviet foreign minister: What a memoir he could write.Well, after Mikhail Gorbachev kicked him upstairs in the 1980s, Gromyko did write his memoirs—and they were achingly dull...

...His strategic goals changed from day to day and sometimes from hour to hour...

...He spoke very clearly to Israel: "If Israel is attacked, we will not permit her to be destroyed...

...A product of the finest education the United States has to offer, a lifelong journalist and citizen of a free society, after eight years as Bill Clinton's principal adviser on the former Soviet Union, he has produced a memoir that might have been drafted by Gromyko's ghostwriter...

...It's beautifully written, building tension with careful understatement, letting the events unfold without distracting adjectives...

...Israel recognized that as an act of war and struck before the Egyptians were ready...

...President Johnson, Secretaries Rusk and McNamara and the other key decision-makers in Washington were so alarmed at these accusations (remember, all this was taking place against the background of the Vietnam war, with Johnson desperate to convince the world that he was a peacemaker, not a warmonger) that they devoted enormous energy to proving that the United States was not involved...

...Characteristically,Talbott was determined to master the then-popular science of Kremlinology—he wrote a thesis on the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and later translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs—while Clinton intended to have a good time...

...It's a bargain—less than a dime a page, less still if you engage in the rewarding work of studying the notes and bibliography...

...It's real history because it shows that nothing happened the way it was planned and that the Israelis earned their celebrated victory because they reacted faster and better than their enemies to almost end-less discoveries that reality was far different from what they expected...

...One must wonder what might have happened if the full magnitude of Arab folly had been recognized, if Israel's sovereignty over the conquered (not occupied) territories had been accepted, and if the Arabs had been told that they had invited disaster and deserved their thrashing...

...Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East MICHAEL B. OREN Oxford University Press/446 pages/S30 REVIEWED BY By Michael Ledeen As most everyone knows by now, if you want to know about the Six-Day War, just get yourself a copy of Michael Oren's book...

...And after they attacked, over the war's basic mission, and thus over when and where to accept a cease-fire...

...And he carefully dismantles the many myths that emerged from the war, above all the legend of the invincible Israeli armed forces...

...Inyet another paradox that will baffle and frustrate the diplomatic "realists," ambiguity proved the greatest restraining force...

...Those who believe that Nasser had a clear plan for the destruction of Israel—and that the closure of the straits was the first step in that plan—will learn otherwise...

...Talbott chose journalism and Philip Terzian writes a Washington column for The Providence Journal...

...Wells writes about...

...Perhaps the enemies of America and Israel would have learned a lesson, rejected the fanatics in their midst, and, left to their own devices, come to terms with reality...

...And Oren delights in reminding us that warriors often change fundamentally once they leave the armed forces and enter politics...

...Talbott first met Clinton during the famous ocean voyage in 1968 that trans-ported the future president, and assorted future Friends of Bill, to Oxford and their Rhodes scholarships...

...If Israel's victory in 1967 had been recognized, we might have avoided the necessity of delivering their ultimate defeat in our own war against the masters of terror and the visionaries of the resurgence of Islam...

...Both sides moved tentatively so long as they were unsure of the positions of the great powers...

...It's passionately dispassionate, producing sympathetic portraits of major and minor actors on all sides...

...He was not a closet reformer, but a functionary who had served, and thrived, since Stalin's day...

...And so it goes...

...But the biggest lesson of all is the one that our own leaders should take to heart today...

...Oren's book is real history because it paints a full picture of men engaged in the real world, all of whom had incomplete pictures of what was going on, all of whom were forced to guess about all kinds of crucial facts—from their enemies' intentions to their own military and political capabilities—and nearly all of whom were fighting political battles within their own governments at the same time they staggered into real war on the ground...

...And the Israelis gained a lot of time, far more than they had expected, not through their own diplomacy, or even from American largesse, but rather from an enormous blunder by the Arabs (and a blunder they are repeating as I write...

...The Israelis knew from the beginning that they would eventually be reined in by the United States and that they therefore would have to tailor their military strategy to fit into the time allotted them by the Americans.Thus, the ultimately crucial strategy was political: buy time, hoping the Arab armies could be routed...

...It now lies to us to write the final chapter of the Six-Day War...

...Unlike their own wars, in which the victors were granted their fill of the spoils, the Europeans, Russians and Americans embarked on an endless political campaign to claw back land and glory for the defeated Arabs...

...Nasser deliberately staffed his bureaucracy in order to limit the authority of his most prestigious hawk...

...It's amazingly thorough, based on material from Arab, American, Israeli, Soviet and European documents and living persons...

...Strobe Talbott, by contrast, has no such excuse...

...The current European appeasement of Arab imperialism was clearly prefigured in the position of France's Charles de Gaulle...

...Of course, there may be reasons for this...

...It's what Sidney Greenstreet famously told Humphrey Bogart after finishing telling the story of the Maltese Falcon: "That, Mr...

...It's everything a fine work of history should be...

...And when Washington proposed a cease-fire after the first day's fighting, it was summarily rejected by Syria, Iraq and Egypt, even though the Arab rout was on, the Egyptian air force had been totally destroyed and the Syrians were in such a shambles that the Arab "street" echoed with the bitter witticism that Syria was prepared to fight to the death of the last Egyptian...

...To be sure, poor old Gromyko put pen to paper when the Soviet Union was still a going concern...