Forty years of peace and war

As this column will attest, I continue to revel in my minority status as a comparative optimist about the Middle East. Certainly, I believe that there now is less likelihood of bloodshed between Jew and Arab than at any time in the last 40 years.

Four decades ago, Leonid Brezhnev and Andrei Gromyko correctly predicted imminent Middle Eastern conflict during their June, 1973 visit to President Nixon's home at San Clemente, California. In October, just a few months later, Israel fought off a surprise attack by the combined armies of Egypt and Syria.

After the Yom Kippur War (as it came to be called), Nixon concluded that this was the time to try to impose a Great Power settlement on the region. He learned from the Egyptian government, with which the United States had not had diplomatic relations since the Six days' War of 1967, that they were going to expel the Soviets from their country. This signaled a triumph of Nixon's and Kissinger's diplomacy, as Soviet influence would effectively be confined in the region only to Syria. The United States could drive a strong bargain with the Russians; and between them, they could impose a settlement.

The Palestine Liberation Organization had just recently succeeded to King Hussein of Jordan as the spokesman for the Palestinians. And the more extreme Islamist organizations — Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad (a member of whom would assassinate President Sadat eight years later), and the like — were either embryonic or unformed.

Nixon correctly concluded that Sadat — having won Egypt's military pride back by successfully breeching the Israeli Bar Lev Line and crossing the Suez Canal — was ready for peace. The U.S. president, who had practically supplied Israel with a new air force in the middle of the Yom Kippur war, and had defeated the Soviets in a competition to resupply the respective sides by airlift, made it clear that the United States could not simply withdraw and await another Arab-Israeli war. He was determined to try to move toward a comprehensive negotiated peace.

Meanwhile, Brezhnev was realistic about the deterioration of the Russian position, was amenable to a deal, and had said as much at San Clemente. Two weeks into the Yom Kippur War, Kissinger had visited the Kremlin (the visit coincided with the so-called October 20 Saturday Night Massacre in Washington, when Nixon fired the special Watergate prosecutor and other senior Justice Department officials). His aim was to get a cease-fire in place in the combat zone and an end of the airlift competition — and he succeeded. But in the intense atmosphere of relations between the two powers, and with the crisis in Washington and the war not entirely ended on the ground in Egypt, no full regional peace settlement could be reached.