Posted on 05/10/2024 5:25:04 PM PDT by daniel1212
[Excerpts of excerpt of over 2700 word article]
in the first days of the Yom Kippur War, when Golda Meir descended into her darkest hour,...the problem of resupply weighed on her mind, she called her ambassador to the U.S. at three in the morning and told him to wake up Kissinger and Nixon to get things flowing. In her memoirs she explained her behavior. “I knew that President Nixon had promised to help us, and I knew from my past experience with him that he would not let us down,” she writes. “Let me, at this point, repeat something that I have said often before (usually to the extreme annoyance of many of my American friends),” she continues. “However history judges Richard Nixon—and it is probable that the verdict will be very harsh—it must also be put on the record forever that he did not break a single one of the promises he made to us.”
The fate of the Jewish state, Meir tacitly admitted afterward, rested in the hands of America, and specifically those of President Richard Nixon, whom no one had ever accused of nurturing a boundless love for the Jewish people.
When Meir turned to Washington for aid, the Nixon administration agreed to help but, for reasons that are still debated, moved slowly; nearly a week passed before Nixon ordered a massive resupply. On October 14, the same day that the American airlift began, the tide of war shifted in Israel’s favor.
To understand the initial success of the Arab coalition, one must begin with the extraordinary political and military vision of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat,
Sadat’s plan was brilliantly simple. He would place a huge number of state-of-the-art Soviet SAMs on the west bank of the Suez Canal, so many as to create an impregnable umbrella
Between 1967 and 1973, Egyptian officers had gone to school on IDF doctrine....Like the Egyptians, the Syrian soldiers of 1973 were much better trained than those of 1967.
Sadat and his generals hoodwinked Ze’ira by staging a series of elaborate and sophisticated ruses that desensitized the Israelis to the preparations for war. Between 1972 and 1973, for example, the Egyptian army mobilized 22 times—approximately once a month. These exercises lulled the Israelis to sleep
it was military intelligence, whose job it was to analyze and interpret that information, that was to blame.
In early January 1970, Nasser secretly traveled to Moscow, where he made an emotional appeal for better weapons. Leonid Brezhnev,the Soviet premier, responded by launching Operation Kavkaz, which delivered to Egypt a large number of state-of-the-art SAMs and MiG fighter jets. Moscow also provided men. Soviet pilots flew the MiGs and Soviet soldiers manned the SAMs. At its peak, the number of Soviet soldiers directly involved in the fighting probably reached over 15,000 men on the ground, and possibly as many as 150 pilots in the air.
To keep the Arabs in the Western camp, the United States must distance itself from Israel and, more specifically, demonstrate to them it was not building up Israel militarily....
...The Israeli record of the conversation captures a side of Kissinger that rarely appears in American documents: Kissinger, the friend of Israel, coaching the Israelis on how to protect themselves from the American bureaucrats who seek to roll Israel back from the territories occupied in 1967—exactly as Eisenhower had rolled them back in 1957.
“The situation you confront today is that everybody in the U.S. government wants to impose a settlement on you at least along the Rogers lines. Get that into your heads,” Kissinger explained. Alon asked Kissinger whether Israel, in the eyes of the State Department, is a “liability.” “Yes!” Kissinger answered emphatically. “Most of the Arabists,” he continued, “are colonialists who remember the Arabs in their pre-war image and long for those days again. And the State Department is not the worst of the lot! You have today a totally united government against you. You have never been in such a position here before.”
Kissinger emphasized that Nixon was the only person in the American system who could counterbalance the State Department. “You Israelis don’t seem to understand that you have only one single hope—the president.”
“The president,” Kissinger said, “is very good on big strategic issues. He has no particular love for Jews. He does not give a damn for Israel in the abstract. It interests him only within the strategic context of the Middle East.
When, on Yom Kippur morning 1973, Kissinger was awakened in his hotel and received the commitment from Golda Meir that Israel would not launch a preemptive strike, he immediately called the Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin to inform him that the Israelis wanted the Soviets to know that they had no intention to attack—but also that the United States was “warning against a precipitous move.”...
if Israel attacks first, we would take a very serious view of the situation and have told him on behalf of the United States that Israel must not attack, no matter what they think the provocation is.”
We can only imagine the joy Sadat and Brezhnev felt when they learned that Kissinger bent over backwards to inform them that he was restraining Israel...Whereas Moscow armed its allies to the teeth and then stepped out of their way, Washington was tying the hands of its ally as it was about to be assaulted. Kissinger’s policy therefore invites precisely the same critique that, time and again, he had leveled against William Rogers in Nixon’s first term: it rewarded Soviet and Egyptian aggression.
But giving Egypt and Syria a major advantage over Israel was never Kissinger’s goal....he pursued the same strategy that he and Nixon had formulated at the end of the War of Attrition in 1970, namely, to use Israel as a lever to pry Egypt away from the Soviet Union.
In a sharp break with traditional American thinking on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Nixon and Kissinger concluded that Israel’s military power was an asset to the United States. Watching Israel stand up not just to Egypt but also to the Soviet Union, they calculated that the Jewish state could help to shift the balance of power in the Middle East. It could even serve as a fulcrum for flipping Cairo from the Soviet to the American camp. To regain its lost territory and reopen the Suez Canal, Nixon and Kissinger reasoned, Egypt must be compelled to negotiate directly with Israel. The Soviets could help Cairo make war, but only the United States could help it make peace. Washington could deliver the Israelis and broker a lasting settlement—but only if Sadat, who by this time had replaced Nasser, would first agree to abandon Moscow. In the meantime, the United States would build up Israel militarily.
I remember seeing many planes flying out of Dobbins AFB in October 73.
I was an A1C at Pope when Nixon ordered the support to Israel and remember working long hours/days helping to launch/recover C-141s and C5s.
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