To the Editor:

Theodore Draper’s basic thesis in his provocative article [“From 1967 to 1973: The Arab-Israeli Wars,” December 1973] is that Egypt’s political decision to go to war in October 1973 goes back two years, that the Soviet Union was implicated in this decision and was “up to its neck in this war,” and that the “Soviets prepared this war under cover of the détente.”

Mr. Draper’s detailed reconstruction of the events which culminated in the 1967 war is particularly valuable, providing significant insights into what he terms the legend of “Israeli aggression” in that war. But the account of the developments leading to the 1973 war falls short of providing a full understanding of the complex forces at work in the period preceding the war, given the information available at the time of writing at the end of October. Nor does the article offer an adequate framework for analyzing the new realities which clearly emerged soon after the war, above all, the growing Arab oil power. If the Yom Kippur War has taught us any lesson, it is that one must constantly re-evaluate the shifting web of forces at play in the Middle East in a balanced, thorough, and openminded manner to discern emerging trends and new realities.

The Egyptian-Syrian decision to launch the coordinated attack can be explained in terms of three major interrelated factors: 1) assurance of Soviet military and political support; 2) mounting domestic pressures for renewed fighting, mainly from field military commanders, on President Sadat, whose political position had been weakened in the year preceding the war; and 3) the newly formed alliance between the oil-producing countries and the frontline Arab states. This entente, particularly between the leading nations in each group (Saudi Arabia and Egypt), unleashed the use of oil as a political weapon and opened the treasuries of the oil-rich states to Egypt and Syria.

While Mr. Draper presents a forceful exposition of the majority, though still disputed, view that Moscow was involved in a substantial way in planning the Egyptian-Syrian war, he has nothing to say about the internal power struggle in Egypt and the challenges to Sadat’s precarious domestic political position from the army and to a lesser extent from Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi as factors inducing the Egyptian leader to go to war. But still more serious is the total absence—except for a casual and oversimplified statement that Saudi Arabia’s Faisal is paying Egypt not only to fight Israel but to spend energies that might be directed against him—of any analysis of Arab oil power as an increasingly important dimension in the Arab-Israel conflict. This is all the more surprising in view of the author’s own assertion that “the inter-Arab aspect of every Arab-Israeli war should not be neglected or underrated.”

Mr. Draper is at his best in shattering the illusions about the Soviet-American détente. But he neglects to observe that as the euphoria of détente was spreading in the U.S., two other major dramas were unfolding: an unmistakable shift of power from the oil-consuming to the oil-producing countries and the forging of new inter-Arab relationships. The rise in Arab oil power has been fairly clear since the Teheran agreement of February 1971 (which resulted in major increases in posted prices of crude oil); its threatened use in the Arab-Israeli conflict was abundantly clear for six months prior to October.

The two key developments in the more recent period were Saudi Arabia’s well coordinated campaign, starting in April 1973, to use oil as a political weapon and King Faisal’s pledge of more than $1 billion to strengthen Egypt’s armed forces. The threatened use of oil as a weapon represented a sharp reversal of Faisal’s longstanding policy that oil and politics do not mix; its ostensible intent has been to pressure the U.S. to compel Israel to meet the standard Arab demands on withdrawal from all occupied territories and restoration of the rights of the Palestine refugees. The financial commitment assured Egypt it could pay for new massive shipments of Soviet arms which have been made available to the Arabs on the basis of cash sales or barter arrangements.

The motives behind Faisal’s new role and his alliance with Sadat are too varied and complex to develop here; they involve economic and political considerations on personal, domestic, and inter-Arab levels for both Faisal and Sadat. But the basic rationale for the new relationship was that for the first time the political interests of the “confrontation” countries coincided with the economic interests of the oil-producing states. These economic interests include a growing concern over the conservation of their exhaustible resources at a time when surpluses of oil revenues are depreciating in value due to inflation and devaluations as well as the desire for greater control over production, export, and pricing of their indigenous resources.

The Arab-Israeli conflict afforded the Arab oil states a useful pretext for taking measures essentially based on these economic interests, attempting to derive political fringe benefits for the Arab cause at the same time. The October War presented a well-timed opportunity to increase Arab oil power further by using all the weapons available to the oil states—selective embargoes, overall output cutbacks, nationalizations, and sharply increased prices. The potentially damaging effect of the oil weapon had been realized by certain experts for some time, but its awesome power came to be fully recognized only after the war when it was used with considerable skill and daring by the Arab states, acting in a unified fashion and at a time of tightened world supply. The successful use of the oil weapon in the wake of the 1973 war sharply contrasts with its totally ineffective use in the 1967 war, another factor overlooked by Mr. Draper in his comparison of the two wars.

The oil wealth has endowed the Arab states with immense economic and political power which has significantly shifted the balance of overall power between them and Israel. Contrary to Mr. Draper’s assessment, which excludes the oil factor, time is indeed working in the Arabs’ favor. Despite the resurgence of Arab disunities, oil has also altered the balance of power between the Arab world and the rest of the world, including the superpowers. Oil power has given the Arab world as a whole, or groups of Arab states, greater leverage and maneuverability in international affairs. This leverage has enabled the Arab world to buy advanced weapons from both East and West, to dictate the diplomatic positions of Japan and Western Europe on the Arab-Israeli issue while continuing to count on the unrestrained backing of the Communist bloc, to drive a wedge between the U.S. and most of its allies, to compel or persuade most African nations to break off diplomatic ties with Israel, and to dominate more firmly than before voting patterns at the UN.

The great irony about the current display of Arab oil power—and its major potential weakness other than the possible reappearance of debilitating rivalries—is that it poses serious dangers not only to Israel’s existence but to the economic growth and financial stability of Western Europe, Japan, and the Third World. The threat to the American economy is far less severe because of its relatively lesser dependence on Arab oil. Only a unified effort on the part of the West can effectively counter the already detrimental impact and future abuses of this power.

Oded Remba
Department of Economics
Staten Island Community College
New York City

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To the Editor:

Theodore Draper tells us how the myth that gave us Hitler’s war, the “stab-in-the-back” myth, is now generating World War III in the Middle East. We expect warmongers to be obsessed by myths . . . but the outlook would not be so grim if our peacemakers were not just as susceptible to their own varieties of myth. Alas, we find that statesmen and journalists are no better than the men of war when it comes to myths. They seem to have learned nothing since Neville Chamberlain’s day. It might be worthwhile, therefore, to generalize a bit on this myth-making tendency. For I am as convinced as Mr. Draper is that both kinds of myth lead to wars.

The trouble seems to start with “simplification,” the very human desire to avoid conflicting emotions. We would rather have all the signs pointing the same way. . . . The peacemakers as well as the warmongers are driven by the need for simplification. When you have no alternative to peace, it is unthinkable that there might be valid (even though inadequate) reasons to fight. So the peacemakers refuse to recognize the existence of dangerous aggressors who cannot be stopped short of war. . . .

If the aggressors get into a fight with anyone else, particularly if there seem to be indications that we ought to participate for one reason or another, we have to prove that the aggressors aren’t really aggressors, that there was some sort of justification for their behavior, that the victims somehow deserved what they got, even that the people who argue for our intervention are doing it for some sinister reason. The result is that in such a dilemma the “bad guys” prove to be whichever side is safe to frustrate—i.e., least likely to start or widen a war if they cannot get what they want. . . .

A remarkable amount of 20th-century history can be fitted into this generalization. In the late 1930’s the U.S. had little sympathy for Hitler; it remained for Britain, whose peace was most directly menaced by Germany, to find justifications for the German dictator and to sneer loftily at the importunate Czechs (cf. Saigon in more recent times). As Hitler’s successes became a serious challenge to the U.S., talk spread through this country about the conniving British who always find somebody else to fight their wars for them.

After the war, “atomic stalemate” was hailed as the force that would bring permanent peace to erring mankind. Yet even an atomic monopoly in the hands of its chief enemy did not stop Soviet expansion into Europe and Asia. By contrast, with the first suggestion that “stalemate” might be at hand, first Europe and later the U.S. became committed to the “no-alternative-to-peace policy.”. . .

Each example described here shows the pressure that works on the peace-committed to exonerate the most dangerous players and put the blame on everyone else. For if no reasons can be considered sufficient to make us fight, sooner or later we must sacrifice something that isn’t trivial. . . .

Alfred B. Mason
Huntington Beach, California

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To the Editor:

Once again, Theodore Draper has enlightened and doubtless annoyed many experts by exposing fuzzy illusions to the cold hard light of historical fact. Also, he has raised two points which have a validity far beyond the subject matter of the article. First, as a retired professional diplomatist with more than twenty-five years’ experience, I note with particular interest his emphasis on the relative predictive value of a regime’s overt communications to its own people as against its covert communications to foreign governments or even its overt communications to foreign peoples.

I know of no diplomatic service in the world which subjects the first category listed above to regular, careful, and scientific analysis. Most governments, including that of the U.S., do not even record the radio and press COMMENTARY of foreign governments directed to their own peoples. Off-the-record interviews with famous journalists and cozy tête-à-têtes with foreign ambassadors are subject to the most minute scrutiny as probably predictive of the behavior of, say, Nasser’s Egypt, but his propaganda to his own people is often not even noticed or translated into English.

It is a basic rule of politics that no regime can for long act deliberately in a way contrary to the way it has declared it will act. To do so at other than rare intervals will simply destroy the foundation of any regime—its legitimacy. The professional raison d’être of an ambassador or other high official or famous journalist, however, requires that he regard privileged conversations or exchanges of letters with foreign leaders as containing the ultimate clues to the future behavior of those leaders. The official or journalist who has been flattered and elevated by the honor of exchanging information and opinions confidentially with a “great man” will tend to act to some extent as an advocate for his eminent confidant, and to dismiss the analysis of public communications as “rhetoric” of interest only to groundlings. It is therefore probable that the magnificent analytical tools represented by the newest techniques of computer-based content analysis will, if and when they are used, be used on the wrong targets: privileged communications.

Mr. Draper has also spotted a long-festering problem of peace-mongering in the era of the United Nations, the possibility of a small-state regime resorting to arms but escaping the risks which normally inhibit a resort to arms. The biggest inhibiting risk is, naturally, defeat. In the present age of UN cease-fires it is all too common for a defeated tactical aggressor (the wise man will lay aside the identification of the strategic aggressor in any conflict as a question fit for the judgment of the Supreme Arbiter only) not only to escape military countermeasures by his victim but to persuade his own people that his arms were victorious and that any deprivation of the fruits of victory was the result of trickery, machinations of conspirators, and the intervention of malevolent superpowers.

Unfortunately, while all this is most welcome to the regime which starts a war and proceeds to lose it, it evolves quickly into a political and military time-bomb which practically guarantees another war. Having “proven” his military superiority to his own people, our hero, whether he be a Nasser or an Ayub Khan or a Kim Il Sung, cannot arrive at a diplomatic compromise which takes account of his military inferiority. To do so would put him under intolerable pressure from rival leaders who could prove by his own words that the proffered compromise is a sellout; persistence on his part would result in his removal from power. He or his successor will eventually be forced to renew the war, unless by virtue of some outside political force, the military victors could be forced to accept a peace of the defeated. The only other course of action would be suicidal for our protagonist—he would have to confess to his own populace, or to large and important segments of it, that he deliberately lied about the military results of the conflict.

There is a certain stability in a raw power-politics world. That stability lies in rational calculations of ultimate military capacity, limiting the current objectives of a state. The situation described above changes a positive feedback into a negative one and destabilizes the system. Sadly, the United States has habitually and in the name of peace and stability not only condoned but actually stimulated the syndrome to save the faces and skins of various “good ole boys” of the Third World. A recent horrible example lies in the behavior of Ayub Khan after his 1965 attack on Kashmir and the military defeat which followed it. His own fall and the imbecile exposure of his successor in Bengal were inevitable once he was allowed to get away with disguising defeat as victory. Just as the United States helped Ayub to sustain his pitiful illusion, the United States and the UN will help the military losers in the Middle East. If the Indian army had ignored cease-fires and superpower pressures and advanced on into the Punjab so far that every Pakistani would have had to acknowledge defeat and a corresponding limitation in national objective, the appalling slaughter in Bangladesh would have been alleviated. A military clash may end in a draw, but it cannot end with two victors and no vanquished.

I was once told by an old European diplomatist that a preliminary indicator of how any big negotiation is going lies in whose terminology is being used in public discussions. To the extent that this is true, things look black for the Israelis. “Egyptian territory,” or “annexed Jerusalem” or “1948 emigrants” are simply not being used even by the public media in America. Instead, we solemnly discuss the disposition of something called “Arab lands” and “the Palestinians.” One recalls an analogous creeping infiltration of North Vietnamese propaganda terms into discussion of factors and alternatives in Southeast Asia.

John W. Bowling
Troy State University,
Troy, Alabama

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Theodore Draper writes:

Oded Remba is right. My article did not, and did not intend to, provide “a full understanding of the complex forces” that led to the October 1973 war. I tried to develop two or three aspects at some length, to touch on others, while ignoring quite a few. I was, after all, writing an article, not a book, and I do not consider myself competent to deal with some of the subjects that interest Mr. Remba.

Alfred B. Mason seems to be flirting with the idea that “the importunate Czechs” of 1938-39 can be equated with the “Saigon” side of the Vietnam war. I doubt whether the relationship of Britain to Czechoslovakia before World War II is any kind of model for the relationship of the United States and South Vietnam three decades later.

John W. Bowling has apparently had some rich diplomatic experiences, the full story of which remains to be told and deserves far more than a letter.