Word: nasser
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There had been student demonstrations protesting Sadat's inaction and the unreliability of his Soviet allies. Old army colleagues who, with Sadat, had helped Gamal Abdel Nasser seize revolutionary power 20 years ago this week sent Sadat a secret memo about extravagant dependence on the Soviet devil. The contents were so sensitive that Sadat refused to make them public (a copy was eventually shaken free in Paris...
Haim Bar-Lev, the present Minister of Commerce and Industry but until recently chief of staff of the armed forces (and deputy chief during the war), has stated that "the entrance of the Egyptians into Sinai was not a casus belli." If Gamal Abdel Nasser had not insisted on barring the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, Bar-Lev insists, the war would not have occurred, at least not at that time...
Gaddafi is a dedicated pan-Arab in the Nasser tradition, but where Nasser swayed the Arab masses with his personality, Gaddafi supplies cash. Libya's annual oil income is $2.4 billion; the money comes in almost faster than Gaddafi can spend it, but no one can accuse him of not trying. In impulsive, mysterious ways, Gaddafi hands it out to some of the political visitors who are understandably streaming into the Libyan capital nowadays...
...display of frugality, the colonel tools about Tripoli in a Volvo or Land Rover, but he recently publicly chided a slumdweller earning $2.80 a day for not building his family a better house. Gaddafi was married in 1969 to the daughter of an army officer, with Nasser as witness. He later divorced her and married a nurse he met while hospitalized with appendicitis; he has never seen a son by that first marriage. One reason for his impulsiveness and eccentricity, apparently, is that the handsome, introspective Libyan soldier sees the world through the tunnel vision of a True Believer...
Overseas, his punshots have gone wilder. While in Cairo before going on to Russia last year, he asked to visit the mosque containing Nasser's burial place. "After all," he said, "we're on our way to Mosque-Cow, aren't we?" At the tomb, when a member of his party removed his shoes according to Islamic custom and revealed a hole in his sock, Muskie shrugged: "We're in a holy place, aren't we?" When he learned that the Russians were being difficult and might not issue visas to his press entourage...