WASHINGTON REPORT: A Star in the East
Getlein, Frank
WASHINGTON REPORT A STAR IN THE EAST The givers were all Jews and Moslems, but they gave this city the best Christmas present it's had in years. This was, of course, the abrupt, unscheduled,...
...Addressing the Knesset, Sadat went unswervingly down the Arab hard-line and repeatedly said he was not interested in a separate peace at all...
...The Kissinger claque in the press gang has suffered substantial attrition since their man formally became a public entertainer, but the hard-core regulars rallied around to claim the Sadat initiative as the ultimate triumph of the old eavesdropper's shuttle diplomacy, a claim apparently based on the undeniable fact that Sadat's flying time between the two capitals was roughly the same as Kissinger's and the claque's in the old days...
...With an assured peace and with Yasir Arafat's fearless fighters of children dealt out, Israel can afford to return the Sinai and to come to some accommodation on Gaza and the West Bank...
...There have just been too many deaths in the desert, too much time lost in the urgent task to make independent Egypt a self-sustaining nation...
...If there is indeed such a thing at all as an Arab world, Egypt is the natural leader of it...
...The second most encouraging was that in pressing the cause of relief for the refugees, he referred to the Palestinians, not to the P.L.O...
...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MIDDLE EAST BREAKTHROUGH THE SHDH T INITIII TIVE President Sadat's visit to Israel was elegant politics, chivalric, passionate and eloquent, quite unlike the bureaucratized drab to which we have become accustomed...
...Jordan has always been a reluctant participant in the wars, sometimes an abstainer, having learned early that in this case at least war does not pay...
...In another, the ruin the prolonged war has brought to Egypt is merely the worst case, or one of the worst, of a great deal of the third world...
...That interpretation at least has the merit of being entirely consonant with Kissinger's other great diplomatic achievement, the prolongation of the War Against Indochina for another eight years...
...It shook the Israeli government out of its public intransigence, and made some ,sort of acceptable formula for the Geneva conference seem a real possibility...
...If Sadat ends up with a separate peace with Israel, he will have done so only after his open and dedicated efforts at a joint peace have been stubbornly rejected by the others...
...Whether it might have been viable or not, Arab socialism never got started because Arab war-making has taken all the time, thought, energy and money thai any Egyptian or other Arab leader in the area could scrape together...
...In that grand old phrase debased by Henry Kissinger between bombing fits, peace was at handDand for the first time ever in the Thirty Years War of the Middle East...
...In one way, the fate of Arab socialism in Egypt recalls the fate of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society: Vietnam was a much more suitable accompaniment to Nixon's benign neglect...
...With Kissinger departed into show biz, the Egyptian and Israeli governments were undistracted for a change and able to get down to the business of peace...
...You can denounce Sadat's journey to Jerusalem on many grounds if you are an Arab leader: War is more fun, for instance, or whatever happened to driving them into the sea, and so on, but this must be the first time a friendly meeting between the heads of two hostile states has been described as being against the cause of...
...Moreover, movement in such negotiations toward a relatively stable peace---and distantly, the administration of such a peace--wiU require major American commitments...
...The most encouraging thing about the Sadat journey was the journey itself...
...So unexpected was this auxiliary gift that the recipients here didn't know quite what to make of it, picked nervously at the wrappings, peeked before opening and only at the urgings of grown-ups belatedly got around to saying Thank you...
...The reason it must go into these non-productive, anti-productive, activities is that they are easy to understand and profoundly gratifying to the monarchical leader in ways that improved crop yields can't compete with...
...Their fiercely negative reactions to the threat of peace have produced precisely the isolation of Egypt that is the first requisite for a separate peace...
...Peace itself, should it be arrived at, is the gift incomparable, but the Sadat initiative and the Begin response gave Washington another gift as well, freedom from an assumed responsibility that has to be, after all, that of the principals, cannot really be that of friends, fans, backers or observers, however well-intentioned...
...The first was the inherent and supreme evil of International Communism, conceived to be a massive monolith bent on the military conquest of the entire planet...
...Like Jefferson, contemporary Americans are well-advised to tremble when they reflect that God is just...
...No doubt this is one of those questions that can never be answered, but the opposite interpretation surely is at least as tenable, namely that all that shuttle diplomacy was what kept peace from happening...
...That dictum must be accepted, too, by those Arab leaders who gathered in Tripoli to denounce Sadat's peace initiative as a blow to the cause in the Mideast...
...must be prepared to play an active role in encouraging negotiations...
...The United States already played a major role in Sadat's calculations...
...One leader, Sadat, has awakened from the dream of military grandeur...
...Increasingly, however, America...
...Egypt has been the big loser in the wars of the so-called "Arab world" against Israel...
...The second was the absolute indispensability of the United States, not merely in the fight against Communist conquest, but in world affairs at large...
...This was based on two assumptions, neither exactly axiomatic as things have turned out...
...As many observers note, Egypt's economy is desperately needy, and her military, deprived of Soviet 23 December 1977:806...
...The problem of the reluctant recipients was not of their own making, but the product of the preponderance of American foreign policy thinking since the Truman administration...
...For all his flair, Sadat is a master in the factional politics of the Middle East, and he went to Israel, as he said, only after "long thought...
...The ease for some kind of peace, separate, unanimous or in fits and starts, is overwhelming in Egypt's statistics of population, agriculture and national product...
...In contrast, the claqueurs' interpretation has the big bugger going in opposite directions on his two major programs, unless, of course, you accept the Orwellian dictum that war is peace, which, now that I think of it, probably was accepted not only by the claque but by its hero: for Kissinger, we can now understand, the words, Peace is at hand, actually meant here comes another all-time, world record bomb-drop, preferably on Christmas Eve, and he was incapable of seeing any contradiction between what he said and what he meant...
...If he takes one, on the public record, it will be almost by being forced to do so by the others...
...They created him, after all, and are entitled now to uncreate him...
...The subsequent Arab Recalcitrance, of course, has been sobering...
...if it's what the others don't want, then they're dumb...
...Money and effort cannot be spared for education, agriculture and small industries because it must go into spectacular but inappropriate projects, such as the Aswan Dam, or, more usually, into uniforms, super-modern weapons, war and the preparation for war...
...The working of the shuttle bemused the world, including the principals in the Israeli-Arab dispute...
...If Egypt decides there will be peace, there will be peace and Commonweal: 805 it doesn't much matter what the cheerleader states, such as Libya and Algeria do or say...
...He expected, and was willing to chance, the hostile Arab reaction...
...Part of the funk at Foggy Botton came from the undeniable perception that although we had not crowed, the sun rose in the east just as if we had...
...Perhaps better than if we had, as a' matter of fact, a conclusion still being resisted but strongly tempting to those of us who have always suspected the sun would make it every day will-we, nill-we, as Peter Ustinov used to say doing his camp George III...
...If that's what Sadat wants, he's smart...
...Suddenly, everything seemed possible...
...peace...
...Syria has been fiercer than Egypt in press releases, but it is really unthinkable that Syria would try the old drive-'em-into-the-sea act by itself...
...If Sadat really is aiming at the separate peace he is accused of seeking, the other Arab leaders couldn't have played more neatly into his hands than they have...
...These, of course, are remote prospects, but America, inhibited by post-Vietnam reticence, needs to be prepared before the event...
...As long as the bouncing ball was in the air, nobody else had to do anything and nobody did...
...The Tripoli meeting is irrelevant to what is happening in the Middle East, almost as irrelevant as the dismay of State Department Arabists at ~ losing their traditional role of running upstairs, downstairs, back and forth between two non-meeting parties like so many characters in a Feydeau farce...
...Egypt lost more land, more soldiers, more equipment and more money than all the rest put together...
...By accident or design, the Carter administration has played a shrewd hand in the Middle East, leaving the limelight to local leaders and applauding them when it seemed appropriate...
...If we didn't do it, nobody else would because nobody else could...
...Not to be overlooked in all of this, of course, is the role of the Pentagon as an institutional Andrew Undershaft, arms merchant to the world...
...Despite Arafat's presence in Tripoli, Syria disowned him by fighting him in Lebanon and now Sadat has followed that example...
...It disturbed official routines and upset conventional wisdom, rousing excited expectations and boding dread...
...Nevertheless, Sadat's venture brought peace in the Middle East from among the pieties back into the world of living hope...
...This was, of course, the abrupt, unscheduled, unexpected and, in some parts, at least, of the State Department, decidedly unwelcome opening of direct, twoparty relations between Israel and Egypt, Sadat's visit to Jerusalem, his enthusiastic welcome by Israeli officials and people, and the ensuing follow-up events, not least important the no less enthusiastic welcome home by the Egyptian President's own people...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 26
