Hero of the crossing : how Anwar Sadat and the 1973 war changed the world

336 Pages·1978·3.1 MB·English

by  Thomas W. Lippman

Hero of the Crossing
N
O
AN Damascus
Israeli-occupied territory B
E
L SYRIA
Golan
Heights
Mediterranean Sea
West
Bank
Jerusalem
Gaza
ISRAEL
S
u
e JORDAN
z C
a
n
a
l
Sinai
Cairo
Peninsula
G
ulf
of SAUDI
Su ARABIA
e
z
EGYPT
Red Sea
0 25 50 mi
Egypt, Israel, and Syria on the eve of the 1973 War.
HERO OF THE CROSSING
How Anwar Sadat and the
1973 War Changed the World
THOMAS W. LIPPMAN
Potomac Books
An imprint of the University of Nebraska Press
© 2016 by Thomas W. Lippman
All rights reserved. Potomac Books is an imprint
of the University of Nebraska Press.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Lippman, Thomas W. author.
Hero of the crossing: how Anwar Sadat and the
1973 war changed the world / Thomas W. Lippman.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978– 1- 61234– 702– 8 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn 978– 1- 61234– 795– 0 (epub)
isbn 978– 1- 61234– 796– 7 (mobi)
isbn 978– 1- 61234– 797– 4 (pdf)
1. Sadat, Anwar, 1918– 1981. 2. Presidents— Egypt.
3. Israel- Arab War, 1973. 4. Egypt— Politics and
government— 1970– 1981. I. Title.
dt107.85.l565 2016
956.04'81— dc23
2015033701
Set in Next LT Pro by L. Auten.
Contents
Acknowledgments . . vii
A Note on Arabic Words and Names . . ix
Introduction . . xi
Chronology of Key Events . . xix
1. The War of Redemption . . 1
2. The Eclipse of the Soviet Union . . 41
3. Oil Goes to War . . 82
4. Stranger in a Strange Land . . 117
5. The Separate Peace . . 146
6. The End of Arab Nationalism . . 186
7. The Rise of the Islamists . . 212
8. The Tarnished Legacy . . 245
Notes . . 281
Bibliography . . 299
Index . . 303

Acknowledgments
This book would have been much more difficult to write,
and would have taken far longer, had it not been for the prodigious
work of Jonathan Bertman, my research assistant for this project at
the Middle East Institute in Washington. I am deeply grateful to him,
and to the Institute for making him available.
The relentless researchers of the National Security Archive at George
Washington University deserve the gratitude of every author, journalist,
and historian whose work benefits from the vast troves of previously
classified U.S. government documents that they have unearthed and
catalogued. I am grateful to them, and in particular to my daughter-
in- law, Autumn Kladder, for their prompt responses to my requests.
I greatly appreciated the help of my wife, Sidney, and my agent,
Janet Reid, who read the manuscript and saved me from embarrass-
ing mistakes and omissions. What errors remain are my own.
And finally, I am grateful to the editors of the Washington Post,
who sent me to Cairo as the newspaper’s resident regional correspon-
dent for four crucial years and dispatched me back to the Middle East
innumerable times afterward to report on people and events there.
They enabled me to roam the Arab world from Morocco to Oman
and to talk to Arabs of every school of political and religious thought.

A Note on Arabic Words and Names
There is no universally accepted standard for the translit-
eration of Arabic words and names into English. The Arabic alpha-
bet contains letters for which there is no English equivalent. The way
a particular word or name is written in the Roman alphabet some-
times depends on whether the original transliterator wrote in Eng-
lish or French. In spoken Arabic, the article al- or el- is elided before
some consonants, as in An- Nahar, a Lebanese newspaper, or Majlis
ash- Shura, the Saudi consultative assembly, and is sometimes trans-
literated that way, sometimes not.
In this book I have used the transliteration style that has become
standard in American print media, with no attempt to reproduce
the no- equivalent consonants or glottal stops of the original through
orthographic markers, as is done in academic texts. Where an individ-
ual’s preferred transliteration of his or her name is known, or where
an individual’s transliterated name is well known in the West, I have
deferred to that form, as in Gamal Abdel Nasser. Many men named
for the Prophet of Islam transliterate the name as Muhammad, which
has become the English standard, but others use different versions.
When these are known, I have used them, as in Mohamed Heikal.
In quotations from the writings of others, I have retained the style
of the original. Thus, Jeddah may sometimes appear as Jidda, Assad
as Asad, Abdul as Abdel, and sharia— or Islamic law— as shariah.
Names of individual men usually consist of a given name, a mid-
dle name (sometimes a patronymic such as ‘bin Abdullah,’ or son