Close to 9:00 P.M., I talked once more with Zayyat, Egypt’s Foreign Minister. He did not readily embrace my suggestion of a return to the status quo ante; he was even less receptive to my hint that since Israel would start advancing soon, Egypt would stand to benefit from our formula in a few days. He considered my ideas at first “very strange,” and then, as he warmed to the subject, “madness.” And yet Zayyat did not speak like a conqueror. There was no braggadocio, no claim that the Middle East problem could be settled by military means. Egypt’s purpose was limited, he declared. It was to demonstrate to Israel that a defense line along the Suez Canal did not represent real security; that security with a country like Egypt could be based only on mutual respect. I allowed that the point had been made. It was now time to turn to peace. Zayyat agreed. “I don’t care very much for war,” he said. I urged that Egypt and the United States keep in mind, during the passions of a war that found us at least in part on opposite sides, that afterward we would need to cooperate in the making of peace. Zayyat took aboard this odd message. America had a “cool head,” he said. We should make a proposal: “Now is your chance to speak to them both [Egypt and Israel] without the great confidence that Israel had and the great lack of confidence which we had.”
Zayyat had gotten to the heart of the matter. Every war ends in some peace, but too often leaders let military operations dictate their intentions. They ignore Bismarck’s warning of woe to the statesman whose arguments at the end of a war are not as plausible as the day he started it. The problem between Israel and the Arab states, especially Egypt, was to a significant degree psychological. Insecurity ironically pervaded the military overconfidence on one side; a sense of humiliation underlay the superior numbers on the other. The war might narrow the gulf. With care and patience, with restored self-respect on the Arab side and a new Israeli recognition of the need for diplomacy, we might help forge in the crucible of conflict a structure of peace that in the end might do justice to the sacrifice.
October 7: A Sunday of Stalling
THE second day of the war, October 7, was a Sunday. Washington was muggy and mild. Overnight, heavy fighting had continued on both fronts. Egypt seemed to have established an unbroken line about five miles across the Suez Canal; Syria had made inroads on the Golan Heights. Our Defense Attaché in Tel Aviv, Colonel Billy Forsman, whose cables throughout the war were models of precision and insight, wired Washington that Israeli forces remained on the defensive, buying time until mobilization was complete. Moreover, by day’s end Israel admitted to losing thirty-five high-performance aircraft. Some in Washington doubted the figure, suspecting that it was the prelude to a request for replacements. But it was true, and it showed the effectiveness of the Arabs’ Soviet-built surface-to-air missiles, especially on the Egyptian front. Still, there seemed as yet no reason to change our basic estimate of a rapid Israeli victory. Israel’s counterattack was not scheduled to start until the next day. Israel contributed to the general complacency by telling us that it had destroyed nine of eleven bridges across the Canal. (This proved to be hyperbole; they were at most damaged for brief periods.)
At 9:30 Sunday morning, Chargé Shalev delivered a personal message from Golda Meir that reinforced our view. “Our military people estimate,” she wrote, “and I rely on their estimates since they have never deceived themselves or the government before, that we are engaged in heavy battles, but with our reserves of men and equipment the fighting will turn in our favor.” Golda could not resist a dig that would have raised our blood pressure even more than it did had we felt less affection for her and less sympathy for her anguish:
You know the reasons why we took no preemptive action. Our failure to take such action is the reason for our situation now. If I had given the chief of staff authority to preempt, as he had recommended, some hours before the attacks began, there is no doubt that our situation would now be different.
It is true that in years past I had expressed my personal view to Ambassador Simcha Dinitz and his predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, that America’s ability to help Israel in any war would be impaired if Israel struck first. But as this crisis approached, the subject of preemption had not been discussed. How could it have been, since Israel had repeatedly told us that there was no danger of war? The morning the war started, Golda had volunteered to Keating that Israel would not preempt. The decision had been her own, without benefit of recent American advice;11 it confirmed what she had — entirely on her own — asked us to transmit to the Arabs the day before. I remain sure she was right. Had Israel struck first, it would have greatly complicated the prospects of American support. As it was, the majority at the first, early-morning WSAG thought Israel had struck first. Moreover, at that late hour it is doubtful whether a preemptive strike would have made much military difference. Moshe Dayan wrote afterward that the only proposal for preemption before the cabinet was Chief of Staff David Elazar’s scheme to attack the surface-to-air missiles deep inside Syria — a measure that could not have blunted the ground attack that was about to surprise Israel.12
In her current message Golda now asked us to postpone a vote in the Security Council until Wednesday or Thursday (October 10 or 11), by which time Israel expected to be on the offensive on all fronts. “I would not have come to you,” Golda reiterated, “if I did not think the situation would improve in the next few days.” To make success doubly sure, Golda confirmed Israel’s interest in some special military equipment — especially Sidewinder heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles. A Boeing 747 jumbo jet was on the way to New York to pick up what we might make available. Shalev affirmed another request, a speedup of delivery of items routinely approved during the previous weeks as part of the existing supply program. I had no difficulty promising Shalev delay on a Security Council vote, though I thought the wiser tactic was actually to request the Council to meet and then stall by calling for a return to the prewar lines:
If we call for the meeting and put in our resolution, we would be the first to speak and ours would be the first resolution on which there would be a vote.
If we are forced, in the first instance, to veto a simple cease-fire resolution, it will not be understood.
We would intend to move slowly; we are in no hurry to get to a vote. Surely if there is a debate others will be called on to speak, including Foreign Minister Eban. I am confident that he could speak for at least two hours without getting through his introduction. I think this is the best way to go. We would tell our man in New York to go slowly as well.
With respect to military supply, attitudes within our own government were sharply divided. They have also been the subject of much controversy. The cardinal fact was that all agencies, the State Department included, expected a repetition of the Six Day War of 1967. No senior official of any department believed, at that stage, that any significant resupply could reach Israel before the war had ended — limited quantities of specialized equipment excepted. The general view was that anything else we sent would arrive too late to affect the battle.
By the time of the very first WSAG meeting early on October 6, held in my absence, the Israelis had made a preliminary request for hardware. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense James H. Noyes argued that “they don’t really need the equipment.” No one present disputed that judgment. By the second WSAG meeting later that day, a request for specialized equipment had been received. Defense Secretary Schlesinger suggested delay on the Israeli arms list since “shipping any stuff into Israel blows any image we may have of an honest broker.” And Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Rush volunteered that “they have no real shortages.”
I was the sole dissenter, for foreign policy, not military, reasons. I did not then doubt that Israel would win before any major aid could reach it. But I favored some arms aid to Israel unless the Soviets cooperated at the UN to bring about a rapid end of the war. If we refused aid, Israel would have no incentive to heed our views in the postwar diplomacy. If on the other hand Israel realized that in an extremity it
would not stand alone, this would affect and perhaps moderate its territorial claims in the negotiations I was certain would follow the war. I was not, of course, insensitive to the threat of Arab displeasure. But in my view the outcome of the war would determine postwar relationships, not whether we supplied arms. If the Arabs won with Soviet support, Moscow would emerge as the dominant power; the radical course — the military option — would appear vindicated, and moderate Arabs would be in an even weaker position. Then the United States would lose influence no matter how restrained we had been during the war. If our arms aid blocked an Arab victory, then our central role would be confirmed. The time to show understanding for the Arab position was after the war, when the peace process started.
This is why on the morning of October 6 I had told Haig that if the Soviet answer for cooperative action at the UN was negative, we ought to give Israel some limited arms. And I had told Shalev that day that “we will almost certainly approve tomorrow the military equipment within reason that you may need; especially if the Soviets line up with the Arabs, then we will certainly do it.”
Now on the morning of October 7, right after my meeting with Shalev, I reported to Haig for Nixon: “. . . if the Arabs win they will be impossible and there will be no negotiations.” Haig agreed: “We’ll have to provide the stuff to which we have been committed unless they can stabilize this thing — quickly — two or three days.” That settled our basic supply policy. At the middle levels of the Defense Department, there was undoubtedly some lack of urgency. Officials were convinced that we were risking the goodwill of moderate Arabs and the supply of oil for essentially unnecessary gestures. But even that foot-dragging resulted, ironically, from an expectation of immediate Israeli victory, not from an intention to complicate its conduct of the battle.
At 10:15 A.M. Dobrynin provided the pretext for the diplomatic procrastination that both Israel and we considered in the common interest. He telephoned that a message from the Soviet leadership was expected but not for two hours. I immediately informed Nixon and urged that we postpone any formal announcement calling for a Security Council session. As it turned out, waiting for the Soviet message consumed the better part of the day — which suited our strategy of waiting for the completion of Israeli mobilization.
In the meantime we had heard contradictory reports of Sadat’s attitude. Sadat allegedly had told one West European ambassador that he wanted no Security Council meeting and would accept no cease-fire until Egyptian forces had recovered all territories captured by Israel in 1967. This, if true, would doom any cease-fire initiative; it also seemed inconsistent with the behavior of the Egyptian army, which remained stationary on the line it had now reached a few miles from the Canal. By contrast, according to another European ambassador in Cairo, Sadat’s position was that he would not ask for a Security Council meeting but might comply with a cease-fire resolution passed at the request of others. But a simple cease-fire resolution at that point would ratify the gains of the attack — exactly what we wished to avoid.
Thus on the second day of a major war the United Nations Security Council, the institution specifically designed to deal with breaches of the peace, was paralyzed by obstruction from all sides. The Soviets were stalling; Egypt, depending on which ambassador to believe, was either stalling or preparing for a cease-fire in place; Israel wanted time to complete its mobilization; Syria had not been heard from. Only the United States was prepared to go to the Security Council, but our preferred resolution amounted only to a sophisticated delaying tactic because no other Council member was likely to support us. Since everyone wanted time and we wanted to keep the issue out of the General Assembly, we had decided to call for a formal Security Council meeting toward evening, to postpone the debate until the next day, and to aim for a vote by Tuesday or Wednesday. By then, if our intelligence estimates were to be believed, Israel would have restored at least the original lines. Everyone might then be prepared to accept a cease-fire in place.
By 1:00 P.M. the message from Brezhnev, promised for an hour earlier, still had not arrived. I pressed Dobrynin, telling him that we had held up doing anything with the UN until we heard from Moscow. There is never any harm in establishing a claim by ascribing to consideration for the other party what fits in with one’s preferred strategy. In the absence of Soviet cooperation to end the war, we decided to get ready to undertake a limited arms supply to Israel. At 1:30 P.M. I told Schlesinger that he should make arrangements for ammunition and other high-technology equipment — especially Sidewinder missiles — to be picked up at an out-of-the-way naval base in Virginia by Israeli El Al commercial planes with markings painted out. He would receive the final go-ahead after I had one more discussion with the President. Schlesinger speculated that the apparent absence of a strong Israeli counteroffensive, especially in the south, might be intended to show that they had made themselves vulnerable by not preempting, thereby to establish a claim for American assistance. I expressed my doubt: “I think they were really surprised this time.”
At 3:10 P.M., still not having heard from Dobrynin, I told Haig that we should move ahead on some Israeli requests for both psychological and military reasons. The Soviets would have to learn that the position of their clients could not be improved through procrastination; the Arabs must not win with Soviet weapons or they would become intractable. Haig agreed and told me that the President held the same view. At 3:45 P.M. I told Schlesinger to proceed.
This was all the easier to decide because in the meantime, close to 3:30 P.M., we received Brezhnev’s reply: It turned out to be essentially another stall. Either Moscow was genuinely baffled as to what to do or it was operating on a different estimate from ours. If Arab prospects were as grim as we believed, the Soviet leaders should have welcomed the idea of a return to the status quo ante; it would have given them a formula to arrest further Israeli advances deep into Arab territory. But instead Brezhnev’s letter to Nixon avoided any reference to joint action at the Security Council. It dealt not with how to terminate the war but with Brezhnev’s favorite Mideast theme: joint US–Soviet diplomacy to impose a Mideast peace on Arab terms, based on the familiar total Israeli withdrawal in return for security guarantees that were not spelled out. Pending that, Brezhnev wrote, it would be “very important” for Israel to indicate “without any reservations” its willingness to withdraw from all Arab territories. Brezhnev implied that this would speed the end of the war but indicated no firm reciprocal Arab step. We were generously given the task of obtaining Israel’s acquiescence by using our “influence.” Clearly, the Soviets wanted to let the war run its course a little longer or else they did not have as much influence with their Arab friends as we had thought.
Sadat Gets in Touch
SHORTLY afterward we had our first direct word from Cairo. (In contrast, we never had a single direct communication from Syria during the war.) Its tone was friendly; its substance reflected a mood, not a policy. In a message addressed to me through intelligence channels, Sadat’s security adviser Hafiz Ismail informed us of Egypt’s terms for ending the war. They were identical with what had been put forward in May and had not become more realistic with the passage of time: Israel had to withdraw from all occupied territories; only after this withdrawal could a peace conference discuss other matters, such as freedom of navigation in the Strait of Tiran guaranteed by a temporary international presence at Sharm el-Sheikh. The message explicitly rejected partial or interim agreements.
These terms were clearly only an opening position. From his earlier contacts with us, Sadat was well aware that we considered such conditions unattainable. I did not think that he was at this stage seeking agreement; he was looking for a dialogue. Communicating with us was risky enough. He could not compound the risk of alienating Syria and perhaps the Soviet Union — whose support was essential for the conduct of the war — by immediately offering concessions that might drive Syria to abandon the common struggle or the Soviet Union to reduce its supplies.
What was significant was the fact of the message, not its content. Sadat was inviting us to participate in, if not take charge of, the peace process, despite the fact that at the UN we were advocating that he give up territory that he considered his own and that his armies had just captured. The message included an avowal that showed Sadat knew very well the limits of what was attainable: “We do not intend to deepen the engagements or widen the confrontation.” If that phrase had any meaning, it was that Egypt did not propose to pursue offensive operations with Israel beyond the territory already gained or to use America as a whipping boy — as Nasser had done in 1967. But if we understood Sadat and the war correctly, a gap would inevitably develop between Egypt’s military dispositions and its political objectives; this must sooner or later lead to a political negotiation.
Years of Upheaval Page 71