Word: canally
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...most troublesome question, of course, is what role the Russian servicemen in Egypt would play. Most observers figure that Russian advisers and technicians would pull back to avoid incidents if Egypt decided to mount any kind of cross-canal raid. Less certain, however, is the status of the Russian pilots who are flying the most advanced jets that Moscow has shipped to Egypt. If the Israelis began sending their planes over the Egyptian interior, the Soviet pilots would almost certainly challenge them. But what if the Israelis avoided "deep penetration" raids, yet were giving the Egyptians such a beating that...
...payment for aid, Sadat could have a difficult time escaping the bear's hug. Nonetheless, he considers the newly arrived planes, tanks, guns and missiles to be essential elements in a defensive line, established with Russian advice, that runs all the way along the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal and up the Nile Valley...
...knows how many unexploded bombs and shells lie beneath the azure waters of the Suez Canal to threaten dredging operations-even if the Egyptians and Israelis should come to terms on reopening the waterway. The known obstacles, however, are relatively few: the sister passenger steamers Mecca and Ismailia, scuttled on orders of Egypt's late President Nasser at the start of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; part of a pontoon bridge; two small tugs sunk downstream from the city of Ismailia; and the wreckage of a barge twelve miles north of Suez. The Egyptians calculate that they could reopen...
Dredging would not be much of a problem. The silting normally caused by the propellers of passing ships has been considerably slowed, since hardly anything has moved on the canal in nearly four years. The 14 vessels trapped in Great Bitter Lake when the shooting started-four of them British, two Swedish, two West German, two Polish, one American, one French, one Bulgarian and one Czechoslovak-are still there. So is the American freighter Observer, isolated farther upstream. The British ships were abandoned last year after London underwriters paid out a total of $24 million in claims. The skeleton crews...
Restoring the once bustling commercial life along the western bank of the canal would be another matter. The city of Suez, once home to 268,000 people, now has 10,000. In Ismailia, nearly every building has been shattered by bombs or pocked by shell holes, and the city's 100,000 former citizens have joined 400,000 other onetime canalside residents as squatters in Cairo and Alexandria. Port Tewfik, at the southern end, needs virtually to be rebuilt. Aside from a few peasants tilling the land, the only population on the Egyptian side is military, including as many...