Death on the Nile

...Sadat's eagerness to roll out Egypt as a doormat for U.S...

...It was as if Sadat—this "gigantic personality," in Haig's words— had been swallowed by "his" people, with all his deeds and his consequences, without a sound, without a tear...

...But a persistent heedlessness toward one's intimates, who tend to represent at least some larger social forces and political currents in the society, suggests a degree of isolation that undermines legitimacy...

...Nowhere was this incarnation of geopolitical virtue more appreciated than with respect to Palestine and Israel...

...he asked his aides...

...It took no account of the substantial interests behind the American-Israeli alliance, and the reluctance of any U.S...

...His most important concessions were given against the advice of his closest and most responsible advisers, and each was accompanied by the resignations of major figures in his administration...

...Sadat's search, however, was mainly an effort at effacing the facts of his life before his ascension to power in 1970...

...Sadat, when he acted alone, all but forced on American stategists the idea that their leverage be used to secure Egyptian, not Israeli, concessions...

...Paradoxically, what has sustained millions of Egyptian families, and the central bank's foreign exchange coffers, have been the billions of dollars of remittances of more than a million Egyptian workers— including many professionals and highly skilled workers—who have left the country to find gainful employment...

...leverage on behalf of Egypt, to end Israeli occupation of Arab territories, and to reach a political settlement that included the Palestinians...

...His underlying strategy— his "American strategy," as he called it— stemmed from the premise that the United States underwrote Israel's military superiority and political intransigence...

...The real issue is: Who benefits by their actions...

...Sadat's trip to Jerusalem was the most dramatic of a series of coups de theatre over his eleven-year reign which he hoped would catalyze a transformation of the balance of forces in the Arab world...

...Here, his assassination seemed to prompt genuine grief and regret...

...Time and again, most fatefully at Camp David and in the final treaty negotiations, Sadat succumbed to White House pressures and promises to meet Israeli demands to avoid "failure...

...After decades of Palestinian and Arab defiance of the fact of Jewish statehood, a defiance most closely identified with Sadat's predecessor, Gamal Abd el-Nasser, Sadat was the picture of sweet reason...

...The requirements of security explained the isolation of the funeral cortege, given the many unanswered questions about the behavior of the security forces at the killing ground...

...Kissinger responded with astonishment to the news...

...Does the assassination of Anwar Sadat mean that his strategy has run its course...

...The popular appreciation in this country of Sadat as a "man of peace" is less an accurate reflection of his role in the Middle East than a testament to the power of the state (and the media) to define peace in patently self-serving terms...

...And he elaborated for himself a role in the 1952 revolution quite at variance with the testimony of other participants or the findings of historians...

...They attribute the crackdown that put some 1,500 people in prison overnight in early September to the meeting a few weeks earlier between Sadat and Prime Minister Begin...

...The result was the September crackdown against the whole spectrum of the opposition from the secular Left to the religious Right...

...Sudan's General Numeiry seems to have learned his "Soviet pressures, Libyan threat" lines well enough to win a quick military commitment from the Reagan Administration...

...Investments of foreign multinationals have been scanty, and mainly limited to such nonproductive, service sector industries as banking, tourism, and soft-drink bottling plants...

...It is worth remembering that the year of the trip to Jerusalem opened with the January "bread riots" in Cairo and other major cities that left scores dead and hundreds injured, and shook the foundations of the regime...

...But this immense silence was the precise negation of any "outside agitation...

...One may applaud the strategically timed willingness of a leader to disregard the (usually conservative) advice of his ministers in favor of a bold initiative that could break through a political barrier such as faced Egypt...

...The economic dividends of peace, the promise of prosperity which Sadat held out from the beginning to secure the patient support of the Egyptian masses, have by and large not materialized...

...The markedly reserved reaction of the Saudi royal family was predictable...

...Such commitments were easily shucked, and proved worthless...

...leverage even slightly engaged...

...In the last two years alone, Egypt negotiated some $3.5 billion in U.S...

...The news left the political establishment and the domestic media gasping...

...In truth, he was all too susceptible—fatally so—to the blandishments of his "good friends," the Jimmy Carters, the Henry Kissingers, the David Rockefellers, who nurtured his self-image as a "world statesman" in exchange for his readiness to marginalize the Palestine question and conclude a separate peace with Israel...

...He dictated an autobiography and called it, a little pompously, In Search of Identity...

...Sadat's "bold" and "courageous" decisions, stretching back through the decade, left him with little choice but to accede, and to hope that some even more monumental gesture of accommodation would at least turn the tide...

...Death on the Nile Fear and Thumb-Sucking on the Potomac BY JOE STORK The fusillade of automatic weapons fire that raked a Cairo reviewing stand on October 6 may have taken Anwar Sadat's life and robbed the Middle East power pageant of its leading man, but it had its most stunning impact in Washington...

...Normalization was the explicit policy of the Sadat government, but the Israelis could see that it was not working on the popular level...

...Sadat was determined that the Israelis should have no excuse for foot-dragging on the final Sinai withdrawal next April...

...How else can we understand Menachem Begin, the bomber of Beirut, calling Sadat's killers, without a trace of irony or shame, "the enemies of peace...

...The time to implement such a strategy suggested itself in the early 1970s...

...His "open door" economic policies, marked by the infusion of private fortunes and speculative investments from his region's oil-producing states and the export of more than a million Egyptian workers to them, undermined the material base of the simple, traditional peasant values he celebrated...

...Sadat projected an image of humble piety but cultivated the companionship of tycoons and the confidence of the old landed rich...

...He made requests, not demands...

...In these all-too-frequent circumstances, Sadat's only trump was his incontrovertible weakness: failure to lend him minimal support would risk his overthrow, either by military coup or through popular unrest...

...Egypt represented but one of the forces at work in the region...

...The growing dependence of the industrialized countries on oil supplies from the Gulf and North Africa, and the increasing assertive-ness of the oil oligarchs, individually and through OPEC, seemed to provide the necessary material incentives for Washington to shift its ground...

...Sadat, in the end, appeared to have surrounded himself with loyalists who would not challenge him...

...From an Egyptian perspective, Sadat's course of alignment with the United States and Israel has promised much and achieved little...

...Sadat made an impression, but not the one he intended...

...In an era when others were spiteful and insulting, Sadat was a model Third World leader, courteous and deferential to his Western counterparts...

...From this he deduced that an effective course would be to secure U.S...

...They are, most surely, gravely shaken...

...Here was a leader whose "boldness" and "vision" rendered him capable of almost any compromise, of turning yet another cheek to the insults and provocations of his adversary, Prime Minister Menachem Begin...

...He wrote "Middle East Oil and the Energy Crisis," published in 1975 by Monthly Review Press...

...He was, it appeared, ideally suited to the American purpose of forging an alliance of Israel and the conservative Arab regimes against any manner of threat to the oil riches of the Persian Gulf...

...military credits, and Washington's five-year modernization program for the Egyptian military ("Project Peace Vector") will cost an estimated $6 billion...

...Current United States plans to memorialize Anwar Sadat with enlarged and extended war games, non-stop B-52 bombing runs from North Dakota to the Egyptian desert, and speeded-up deliveries of M-60 tanks and supersonic war planes are, regrettably, fully in character with the relationship Sadat established in his pursuit of "peace...

...In the Arab world, the repercussions of Sadat's murder will be greatest for the regimes most conspicuously aligned with the United States...

...military incursions in the region was perfectly in keeping with the peace he represented...

...Why didn't he get in touch with me...

...But the silence out beyond the security cordons, in the streets and squares usually teeming with people, was unnerving...

...The one conclusive and tangible consequence of Sadat's "American strategy" is Egypt's full integration into the Pentagon's plans for the Middle East...

...Their room for maneuver in this regard is now much reduced, and the imbroglio over the AWACS sale can only have intensified their discomfort...

...Sadat abstracted his strategy from its working context: Washington's leverage on Israel would materialize only if its policy makers were persuaded that it was necessary to protect American economic and strategic interests in the Middle East...

...The separate peace had isolated Sadat not only within the larger Arab world but, more significantly, within Egypt itself...

...administration to strain that alliance on behalf of the uncertain relationship Sadat represented...

...Henry Kissinger proclaimed that his goal was the "expulsion" of the Soviet Union from the Middle East, so Sadat, in July 1972, expelled 17,000 Soviet military advisers...

...In the view of knowledgeable observers, including opposition leaders, the growth of popular opposition to the regime had not reached the threatening point at the time of the assassination...

...While Brzezinski snarled at "the forces of turbulence and radicalism," the masses of Egypt marked Sadat's passing with an utter indifference which may have been even more shattering than the shooting itself...

...interests and prestige that stretched from Indochina to Central America, from southern Africa to Iran and Afghanistan, Sadat's realignment of Egypt with the United States represented a feat of the most impressive global proportions...

...According to terms of the treaty signed in Washington, this Israel quid required an Egyptian quo—full normalization of relations with Jerusalem...

...Almost certainly, his murder marks a further unraveling of the web of alliances of different regimes and social classes which have sustained American policy in the Middle East since the end of World War II...

...The move against all legal forms of dissent, from whatever quarter, undoubtedly raised the likelihood of conspiratorial, underground, terrorist activity...

...His first wife, lacking Jihan's glamor, is a non-person...

...If Cairo had become like Teheran, it would be easy enough to blame Libyan radio propaganda, or ubiquitous "Soviet proxies...

...Haig could be forgiven if, in Cairo, he felt a bit like the Emperor Jones...

...The return of the Sinai, assuming it is completed, had the high political price of separation from the Arab world, including Arab markets, and desertion from the Palestinian cause...

...For all the public enmity between them and Sadat in recent years over the separate peace, Sadat's open connivance with the United States buffered their dealings with Washington and allowed them to assume an ill-fitting mantle of Arab patriotism...

...In a decade of setbacks to U.S...

...The premise was sound enough, but Sadat's conception was fundamentally idealist...

...In compensation, Sadat got Jimmy Carter's "sacred word" to press for Israeli concessions on Palestinian issues in the next stage...

...Sadat's treaty with Israel, ratified in Washington and purchased with billions of dollars of military credits, was nothing so much as a trilateral military pact...

...The official disarray was evident in the wild charges by Secretary of State Alexander Haig and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of Libyan responsibility...

...Cairo's opposition leaders surmise that Begin insisted that Sadat take firm and unambiguous measures against the increasingly active, vocal, and numerous opponents to the 1979 treaty...

...Thus Sadat was buried in the company only of diplomats and dignitaries, a few have-been Presidents, and one would-be Shah...

...In the United States, his popular image was not burdened with these ambiguities...

...Joe Stork is a writer with the Middle East Research and Information Project in Washington, D.C...

...Why didn't he demand of me all kinds of concessions first...

...ZbigniewBrzezinski, who once cultivated a reputation as a "big thinker," turned aside an invitation to think about the political dynamics behind the event: "I don't think it is really so much a matter of what the Moslem fundamentalists by themselves stand for...

...Who was Anwar Sadat...

...He was unsurpassed in his eagerness to accommodate, and second-to-none in his vociferous anti-communism and hostility toward the Soviet Union...

...It was clear the assassination was not the start of a popular upheaval...

...Sadat probably did not set out to reach a separate peace with Israel, but this was the irrefutable logic of his course...

...It is the one domain where his strategy has succeeded...

...The Today show's Tom Brokaw wondered aloud about "Life after Sadat...

...The endorsement of the AWACS sale by most of the Secretaries of State and Defense, national security advisers, and chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff going back to the Kennedy Administration—a rogues' gallery of those responsible for the last twenty years of American policy—should have been reason enough for any Senator to vote against the recipe for disaster AWACS represented...

...A military supply relationship with Washington was on Sadat's agenda from the start...

...Only when Egypt moved in concert with at least some of the other major Arab states—as in the October War—was U.S...

...An utter disaster for Americans," NBC's John Chancellor exclaimed...

...I thought he was a fool," Kissinger later recounted...