Word: nasserism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sadat let slip some rare criticism of his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Egyptian army had not been properly trained under Nasser to fight an offensive war, Sadat declared-and it had also become too political. "The Egyptian army should have been converted to a fighting army after the 1956 Suez war," Sadat told al Hawadess. Egypt at that point had suffered a military setback, "but we turned it into a political victory" (when President Eisenhower forced Britain, France and Israel to desist in their combined attack on Egypt...
Nothing was done about improving the Egyptian army's fighting ability. For that, Sadat blamed Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, the commander who committed suicide after his troops were defeated again in 1967. Egypt's Revolutionary Council had tried to force Amer out in 1961, Sadat indicated, but Nasser allowed Amer to remain at the army's head because the two men were close friends. "I knew there had been mistakes-and grave ones at that," said Sadat of that era, "but I could not renounce Abdel Nasser...
...Nasser also had difficulty getting weapons from the Soviets, Sadat revealed. On his last visit to Moscow before his death two years ago, he attempted to persuade them to improve Egypt's offensive capability. Nasser returned to Cairo to report that the situation was "a hopeless case." He even used the English words, recalled Sadat: there was nothing in Arabic to sum up his frustration so succinctly...
...Gaddafi's idea was that, with the Russians out of Egypt, the two Arab nations could finally consummate "a full and complete revolutionary merger" and presumably launch a jihad, or holy war, against Israel. Sadat wants neither another losing war nor competition for power from a would-be Nasser like Gaddafi; he shrewdly persuaded Gaddafi to establish for now a "unified political command" which will spend at least 13 months studying the military, monetary, judicial and economic problems involved in the proposed merger. Chances are that the union itself will never take place...
Best of all, Hone provides a portrait of Nasser's Cairo that occasionally reads like updated Lawrence Durrell -a city of dusty cricket fields and sweet coffee and the khamsin rustling the jacaranda trees, a city in which the revolutionary press censor plays badminton on the roof of his apartment house and keeps a suffragi downstairs to retrieve the stray shuttlecocks from the streets below.-Otto Friedrich