The Pragmatic Superpower by Ray Takeyh

Author:Ray Takeyh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

WAR ERUPTS

On October 6, as Egypt and Syria began their concerted military assault, Richard Nixon was reading his daily intelligence report assuring him that the Arab states would not launch a war. The recently appointed successor to Rogers as secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, was in New York at the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly and was awoken with the news of the attack by his aide Joseph Sisco. The invasion was timed to coincide with Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews. Israelis filed into their synagogues to commemorate the Day of Atonement, only to be shocked by the call-up of reserves for yet another war. As enemy forces advanced, most of Israel’s national leadership was scattered throughout the capital while much of its standing army was on leave.

The Egyptian offensive was remarkable for its daring and precision. Massive shelling rocked the Israeli positions in western Sinai. The famed Bar-Lev Line along the eastern coast of the Suez Canal, behind which lay Israeli fortifications, was traversed by Egypt’s air force as nearly half of its fleet flew over the defense perimeter. Egyptian commandos began crossing the canal and overrunning Israeli trenches. In the meantime, the northern frontier saw tank attacks by the Syrians, who made up for their lack of skill with courage and tenacity. The element of surprise proved devastating.

From the outset both Nixon and Kissinger saw the war as a Soviet provocation. “I think what happened is that the Russians told the Egyptians that there will not be any progress unless there is stirring in the Middle East and those maniacs have stirred a little too much,” Kissinger confided to White House chief of staff Alexander Haig.11 Nixon similarly mused, “It is hard for me to believe that the Egyptians and Syrians would have moved without the knowledge of the Soviets, if not without their direct encouragement.”12 Uppermost on the minds of the president and his secretary of state was how the crisis would affect great-power jockeying. Nixon, already mired in the Watergate scandal that would systematically devour his presidency, had little time to manage the war. Handling of the U.S. response largely devolved to Kissinger.

By insisting that the Russians had instigated the war, Nixon and Kissinger denigrated the achievements of their own détente policy. The Soviet leadership did not want a war in the Middle East for they feared that a crisis could entangle them in a confrontation with the United States, endangering arms-control talks and trade relations. The White House had defended détente from its critics by claiming that the policy forced the Soviets to restrain their rash impulses and privilege great-power cooperation above petty gains. And yet when the war broke out, the administration quickly discarded its own sober estimates and blamed Moscow.

Despite Arab gains, the administration’s assessment of the Yom Kippur hostilities relied on impressions of the 1967 war and the notion that Israel would prevail quickly and decisively. Kissinger assured the Special Actions Group assembled from across

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