From Sadat to Saddam: The Decline of American Diplomacy in the Middle East
280
From Sadat to Saddam: The Decline of American Diplomacy in the Middle East
280Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781640121577 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Potomac Books |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2019 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
Cairo
Drinking from the Nile
Once you drink from the Nile, you are destined to return.
— Egyptian proverb
I had been in Cairo six months when a confrontation on a Nile bridge sparked an epiphany about Egypt and the Middle East. It was late 1981 and I was returning home from a day spent with my family at the farm of a prosperous Egyptian businessman. I was driving our Volvo, my wife, Sandy, was in the passenger seat, and my son, Greg, and daughter, Tina, both six-graders, were in the backseat. As happens so often in Egypt, the hospitality of our hosts led to us staying longer than we had intended. The rural roads were teeming with people and animals, horses, camels, goats, and gamousas (water buffalos). I was tired and tense from driving defensively on poorly lit roads and my knuckles were white by the time I got back to the west side of the Nile.
Crossing the bridge in heavy traffic, I knew I had to get into the right lane to take the route south to Ma'adi, the suburb where we and many other members of the foreign community lived. Just as I spotted an opening, a young Egyptian in a pickup bounced over the sidewalk and cut me off. I let loose a stream of curses in English (my Arabic was too basic for the task). The driver looked at me wide-eyed for a second and then took off his baseball cap and tipped it at me while flashing a wide smile. My anger evaporated, and I started to laugh. From that day forward, I felt at home in Cairo.
Cairo was my first Middle East assignment even though I was already fifteen years into a Foreign Service career. My job was to run Embassy Cairo's economic section. I had just completed nine years in the United States, mainly in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs (EB) working on trade and finance issues. My last eighteen months in Washington I had been detailed to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), with the pretentious title of deputy assistant USTR. It was time to fish or cut bait. I either had to leave the Foreign Service or accept a foreign assignment. I had earlier served in Quito, Ecuador, and still had ties in the Latin American bureau. The job of economic counselor in Brasilia was mine for the taking.
When I relayed this great news to Sandy, her reaction surprised me. She didn't want to go to Brasilia — it would be boring. I had visited Brasilia some years earlier to explain an obscure part of the proposed legislation that became the Trade Act of 1974. I liked Brasilia's climate and concluded that while it wasn't Rio, with a million Brazilians living there it couldn't be all bad. Sandy urged me to go back to the State Department and see what else was available. I agreed to check and found that a similar job in Cairo was open. Cairo's reputation as a dirty, dusty, noisy, and crowded city was well known. Apparently no other qualified senior officers were interested. I dutifully reported the opening to Sandy, assured in my own mind that she wouldn't want any part of it. To my shock, she thought Cairo was a great idea. She had lived in Tehran as a high school student while her father worked for the international oil consortium and had retained some nostalgia for the Middle East.
The next day I sought out my friend Arnie Raphel, then working in the Bureau of Near East and South Asian Affairs (NEA), to tell him I just might be interested in the Cairo job. Arnie and I had joined the Foreign Service at the same time in 1966 and we shared a carpool from our northern Virginia homes to Rosslyn, where we received our basic training. Arnie went on to be ambassador to Pakistan and tragically died in a plane crash there in August 1988. My word to Arnie led within hours to a meeting with then–Deputy Assistant Secretary Maury Draper. Draper had been actively involved in the Camp David negotiations between Israel and Egypt and was nearing the end of a distinguished career. I was a little intimidated by his reputation and clumsily shook his thumb instead of his whole hand while trying to make eye contact. Our meeting was brief, as Draper promptly concluded that I was the warm body he had been looking for to fill the vacancy in Cairo. I was signed up to go to Egypt before I fully realized what was happening.
With Cairo now in my future, I still had to go to work every day at USTR. It might have made sense to assign me to a few weeks of basic Arabic training and maybe a few days of area studies, but I remained at USTR until the Friday before our family of four boarded a plane bound for Cairo, with both a golden and a Labrador retriever in the cargo hold. When we disembarked at the Cairo airport, the waiting area teemed with people, who parted like the Red Sea when they saw us leading the large dogs toward them. Egyptians, like most Muslims, are taught that dogs are unclean.
My first week in Cairo set the tone for all those years to come, living and working in the Middle East. Israel, on Sunday, June 7, 1981, staged a secret attack on a nuclear power plant under construction near Baghdad. This was an embarrassment for Egypt, which had signed a peace treaty with Israel two years earlier and was working hard to restore relations with other Arab countries who objected. It was also my introduction to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some years before, I had jokingly told one of my colleagues in the State Department, a rabid hockey fan, that there were three things I wanted nothing to do with: hockey, arms control and disarmament, and the Middle East peace process. Both arms control and Middle East peace process negotiations had seemed from afar to be insanely complicated and at times counterintuitive. Now I was in Cairo, feeling as if I had been dropped into the deep end of the Middle East peace process pool and told to swim.
The first few weeks did little to reassure me about Cairo. June was hot, and Cairo was indeed dirty, dusty, and noisy. Happily, on the job side I had two experienced Middle East hands to show me the ropes. Roy Atherton, the ambassador, had been assistant secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs and actively involved in the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations that led to the 1979 peace agreement. His kindness, his energy, and his ability were legendary. I never forgot watching him work cocktail parties and other social events. He would manage to make everyone present think that he was interested in what they had to say and still be gone in twenty minutes, off to the next event. Attending three social events in an evening was not unusual for him. I was more than twenty years younger and felt wiped out by an evening like that.
The deputy chief of mission (DCM) was Henry Precht. Henry hailed from Savannah, Georgia, and he worked hard to retain his Savannah accent. The Iranian hostage crisis had ended less than two years earlier. Henry had served in Iran and, as director of Iranian affairs in Washington during the crisis, he had become a lightning rod for congressional discontent. He was nominated but never confirmed as ambassador to Mauritania and had to settle for the job as DCM in Cairo.
Henry, who would be a constant in my life for the next four years, undertook to educate me on the realities of what could and could not be accomplished both in Egypt and with respect to influencing policy in Washington affecting Egypt. He listened patiently to my frustration with the difficulty of getting things done in Egypt, and he kept me in check when my ambitions to push Egypt harder on economic reform clashed with our political and security interests. He correctly diagnosed my tendency to smolder over perceived slights and encouraged me to be a little more open and sympathetic to those with whom I disagreed. I listened carefully and took his guidance with me to subsequent assignments, along with what I learned from watching him dealing with the diverse power centers of the large country team in Egypt.
I had a third mentor, although I considered him a competitor at the time. Don Brown was the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) mission. The largest U.S. aid mission anywhere in the world, Cairo employed more than one hundred Americans. Part of my job as chief of the economic section, as I understood it, was to be an independent advisor to the ambassador on our aid program. Don was in his sixth year in the job and near the end of a thirty-year career in USAID. I knew I would face a daunting challenge having to go toe-to-toe with one of USAID's most senior officials.
While still in Washington, encouraged by my colleagues at USTR, I successfully persuaded the Department of State to change the diplomatic title of the job from economic counselor to economic minister-counselor. Reflecting on this years later, the initiative seems both audacious and somewhat reckless. My future bosses in Embassy Cairo pushed back with serious reservations about the need for the change. Henry, who also held the diplomatic title minister-counselor, was no doubt skeptical, and I am confident that neither my predecessor in Embassy Cairo's economic section nor the head of the political section with whom I would have to work were thrilled. Had the personalities awaiting me in Cairo been pricklier, I could have faced a very rocky start to my tour. Bob Hormats had been my boss for two years at the Department of State and then, as deputy U.S. trade representative when I moved over to USTR, my boss for another year and a half. A few weeks before my departure to Cairo, Bob, in the process of returning to State as assistant secretary of economic and business affairs, wrote a friendly but persuasive letter to Roy Atherton, and the reclassification took place. This upgrade in diplomatic rank made it easier for me to coordinate the agricultural, commercial, and science officers, all of whom bore the title of counselor. I doubt that Don Brown paid much attention to the drama of my title reclassification. He was remarkably tolerant of this young amateur looking over his shoulder at the work USAID was doing.
I had obviously found myself on a championship team. Roughly a half dozen of the Foreign Service Officers I worked with in Cairo went on to become U.S. ambassadors. The USAID mission also boasted some real talent; several went on to be USAID mission directors. Frances Cook, our consul general in Alexandria, replaced me as U.S. ambassador in Muscat when I retired.
The USAID administrator at the time was Peter McPherson. Peter had been general counsel for the Reagan transition team and he ran USAID for the entire six years that I worked on Egypt. He was a hard charger and, since Egypt was his most important program, we saw a great deal of him. For reasons I never understood, McPherson seemed to schedule his visits during the Christmas holidays, which led to some grumbling from me and my USAID colleagues. His first visit during my tour, however, was in early September 1981. I was invited to accompany, as notetaker, Ambassador Atherton, McPherson, and Don Brown to a meeting with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at his "palace" in Alexandria.
Sadat was enormously popular in the United States. He was masterful in interviews with the news anchors of the time, such as Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, and Peter Jennings. My first impression was Sadat's booming voice as he walked down the stairs in his residence. He greeted Ambassador Atherton as "Roy." I was also taken by his firm handshake and direct eye contact, conveying the sense that he was truly interested in meeting me. The meeting began with a brief discussion of the political situation in the Middle East. Israel had yet to formally withdraw from the eastern half of the Sinai Peninsula, and talks between Egypt and Israel about Palestinian autonomy were going nowhere. Sadat spoke with the passion of a Shakespearean actor as he outlined Egypt's concerns. When McPherson introduced his agenda of economic assistance issues, Sadat's eyes seemed to glaze over a little and his responses became far less theatrical.
Sadat was less popular in Egypt. Conventional wisdom is that he was not liked because he had betrayed other Arabs by signing a peace deal with Israel that got the Sinai back but did nothing for the Palestinians. My impression is that his lack of popularity had more to do with his lavish lifestyle and failure to improve the lives of average Egyptians. The Reagan administration was in its first year and hadn't demonstrated much interest in working with Egypt to build on the 1978 Camp David achievement. Sadat had little to show his people for the risks he took with Israel, and he began to turn up the pressure on his domestic opposition, particularly the Islamic opposition. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB), operating in Egypt ever since it was founded in 1928, was a relatively moderate force. Members were not allowed to run in Peoples' Assembly (parliamentary) elections as MB members, but several of their members were elected as independents. There was also a more radical Islamic opposition, which became the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
Anwar Sadat was assassinated on October 6, 1981, during a military parade commemorating Egypt's initially successful attack on Israeli positions across the Suez Canal eight years earlier. Ambassador Atherton attended, as did our defense attaché and other military members of the embassy. The assassins, affiliated with the militant Islamic opposition and armed with grenades and AK-47s, sprayed bullets at the VIP grandstand, mortally wounding Sadat, lightly wounding Vice President Mubarak, and killing ten others, including an Omani general.
I was at my home in Ma'adi because the embassy and all government offices were closed for the Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) holidays. Henry Precht called me, along with several other embassy officers, and asked us to come to the embassy. Driving there, I had an eerie feeling because the usual cacophonous traffic was not present and there were few pedestrians. At the embassy, Ambassador Atherton arrived looking shaken but determined to take charge. He reported that he had talked with Defense Minister Abu Ghazala, who told him that Sadat would survive. It turned out that Abu Ghazala knew better and, after several hours, press reports confirmed Sadat's death. Henry asked that some of us at the embassy drive past key government buildings to see if there was any activity. Two of us drove north along the Nile past the Ministry of Information but saw nothing worth reporting.
By the time I returned to Ma'adi in the evening, several of our neighbors who worked at the embassy had gathered at our house. Defense attaché (Navy) captain David Sperling and his wife, Judy, our neighbors across the street, were there. They had attended the parade, and David still had spots of blood on his dress uniform. None of us knew what to expect. Was this part of a broader coup? In the days to follow, still part of the Muslim holiday, the streets of Cairo remained relatively empty and calm. Experienced Middle East hands recalled that the city streets had been full of mourners when Gamal Abdel Nasser had died eleven years earlier.
We had little time to reflect because the mother of all funeral parties was about to descend on us from Washington. The delegation included Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, former presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon, U.S. Ambassador to theUN Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, Senators Thurmond, Percy, and Pell, House Speaker Jim Wright, Stevie Wonder, and Walter Cronkite.
Ambassador Atherton appointed Henry as overall control officer, with me as his deputy. Each delegation member was assigned a member of the embassy or USAIDstaff as an individual control officer. On the night of the funeral, October 11, the embassy organized an informal dinner just for the delegation and the team of control officers. A seating chart had former Secretary of State Kissinger sitting next to Sam Brown, a teenager who Sadat had met by chance in the United States and invited to visit Egypt as his guest. It was a heartwarming story, but Kissinger was unimpressed, declaring that he hadn't traveled several thousand miles to sit next to a bleeping kid. Sam, dressed in a white t-shirt, was moved to another table, where he sat alongside friendlier embassy staff members and enjoyed a cheeseburger. Kissinger was happy and so was Sam.
Each of the former presidents gave a speech. As I remember it, Carter led off with a very moving tribute to Sadat and what he had done for Middle East peace. Ford followed with a speech that I thought appropriate but not otherwise memorable. Nixon concluded with what he meant to be a tribute to all the support he had received from embassy staffs over the years. It rang a little hollow to me given his emphasis on logistical support rather than policy support. I didn't think we needed to hear that Foreign Service Officers always made sure that his luggage got to his room in a timely manner.
After a few days, Vice President Hosni Mubarak assumed the presidency. He was a former air force pilot and a colorless figure as vice president. He went out of his way to demonstrate that he would not live ostentatiously, as Sadat had. He remained in the same residence he lived in as vice president, although alterationsupgraded its security. Egyptians joked that Nasser had changed the course of Egyptian society, Sadat had changed the course of Egyptian foreign policy, and Mubarak had changed the course of the streetcar line that ran near his home. Most Egyptians were relieved that the country remained relatively stable. The new president placed Egypt under a "state of emergency" that was not lifted until more than thirty years later, after Mubarak had departed the scene.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "From Sadat to Saddam"
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Copyright © 2019 David J. Dunford.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
List of Abbreviations
1. Cairo: Drinking from the Nile
2. Washington: Egypt and Crisis Management
3. Riyadh: Chinese Missiles
4. Riyadh: Desert Shield and Desert Storm
5. Muscat: Leading an Embassy
6. Cairo: Banking on Peace
7. Baghdad: Wait, What? We’re Invading Iraq?
8. Tucson: Working with the Troops
Conclusion: Toward an Effective U.S. Diplomacy
Notes
Index