In the past, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat has sought to establish a completely unjustified reputation for candour by occasionally airing certain differences with his allies in the Kremlin bureaucracy, So there was nothing very unusual in his mentioning, in the course of a speech it can be said that the officer corps, which has on July 18 to the Central Committee of the Arab Socialist Union (ASU) his most recent disagreements with the Kremlin.
But after enumerating some of these, Sadat not only stunned the ASU leadership, but triggered waves of confused speculation throughout the world. "After receiving Soviet explanations of the Moscow talks with President Nixon", he said. "I felt the need to review the situation calmly and without excitement or convulsions. since our decisions are made here and at the appropriate time. "After fully reviewing the situation in all its aspects and in full appreciation of the huge Soviet aid to us, I found it appropriate to adopt the following measures. *1. Terminate the mission of Soviet advisers and military experts who came at our request as of yesterday (July 17) to be replaced by our sons in the armed forces. *2. All military equipment and installations built after June 1967 are to be manned by the Egyptian armed forces and become the property of Egypt. and "3. Invite a Soviet-Egyptian meeting, at a level to be agreed upon, to hold consultations to decide on the next phase of operation."
EXPULSION At first, the scope of the expulsion order was not clear. By the end of the week, some four thousand Soviet advisers attached to Egyptian units had left the country. Apart from these advisers, there ste an estimated 10.000 to 15.000 regular Soviet troops in Egypt. In addition, there are said to be about 200 Soviet pilots in the country.
By July 23, Western news sources reported that nearly all these troops were packing up and would soon leave Egypt. Sadat's first decision, then, appears to have been a sweeping one. It is now believed that only about 2,000 Soviet personnel, most of than highly specialized technical instructors, will remain. They will function under Egyptian command. The Western press spoke of a Russian "exodus", and while such language may be attributed to initial overex uberance, it seems clear that for once Sadat was not merely mouthing empty rhetoric.
IMPORTANCE MINIMISED The Egyptian and Soviet regimes both appeared to be concerned with minimising the importance of the expulsion The Soviet news agency Tass treated the news routinely, presenting the Egyptian decision as a bilateral one: "After an exchange of views, the sides deemed it expedient to bring back to the Soviet Union the military personnel that had been sent to Egypt for a limited period."
On the Egyptian side, Sadat called attention to the fact that the fifteen-year Soviet-Egyptian friendship pact signed last year would remair in effect, and on July 21 Yenia Abdel Kader, the Egyptian ambassador to Moscow, was given ten minutes of Soviet television time to give a speech hailing the "shining example" of Egyptian-Soviet relations.
It would appear, then, thatS dat has by no means broken definitively with the Kremlin. But he has dealt the Soviet bureaucracy a significant rebuff. A clear bid to the West has been made, and the defensive capability of Egypt has been weakened.
GENERAL STAFF According to most reports, the chief source of anti-Soviet pressure within Egypt was the traditionally anti-communist Egyptian general planning. Past fears about foreign investment staff. Al-Nida, the newspaper of the pro-Moscow Lebanese Communist Party, suggested that Minister of War Mohammed Sadek and Chief of Staff General Saad Hussein el-Shazli had informed Sadat that if Soviet troops were not ordered out of Egypt, "The army would impose the measure by direct interference in the country's political affairs".
The Red Mole 7 August 1972 Page 6 The veracity of this report of a virtual threat of military coup was not accepted by most Arab diplomatic sources, but neither was it rejected out of hand. Whether the general staff went that far cannot be told with certainty but consistently opposed Egypt's close relations with the Soviet Union and which has always favoured reliance on the United States, seized upon the prevailing political conditions to force the first significant break with the Soviet Union since the June 1967 war.
But the nature of the Sadat regime is such that the president must have needed little convincing *It is felt here (Cairo), *the July 22 New York Times reported, "that the discontent expressed here earlier this year by anti-Soviet rightist civilians was not a major element of pressure but, on the contrary, had been used, and to some extent orchestrated by President Sadat." "Sadat's explanation of the expulsion of the Soviet personnel to the Egyptian people was couched in terms of Egyptian nationalism. The left in Egypt has been increasingly hostile to the Soviet bureaucracy's consistent betrayals of the Arab revolution. In expelling the Soviet troops, Sadat tried to play on those feelings by recalling the Kremlin's failure to deliver offensive weapons to the Egyptian armed forces. The expulsion of the Russians was presented as a continuation of "our battle against Israel" and as an assertion, in the tradition of Bandung, of Egyptian national independence.
REAL SITUATION The real situation is otherwise. As usual, it was left to Sadat's lesser aides to spell out the meaning of the master's gibberish. On July 22. Mohammed Hassan el-Zayyat minister of state for information, held a news conference-in English for the foreign press. Explaining that the government had become exasperated with the state of no-war, no-peace that has existed in the Arab East since the 1970 cease-fire went President Sadat into effect, he noted that Egypt, because of Soviet failure to provide sufficient weaponry. was not in a position to make war. "We desire peace and friendship with all", he said. Logicians can draw the inference.
El-Zayyat's news conference, the New York Times noted with its usual incisiveness, "strengthened the impression among foreign observers here that Mr. Sadat and his army commanders had excluded war as a feasible policy and were looking for a way to renew the search for a negotiated settlement in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Also on July 22, wide coverage was given in the Egyptian press to a statement by Ismail Sabry Abdullah the minister of state for in Egypt, he said, were no longer valid; the Egyptian economy could only benefit from the implanatation of foreign capital. He advocated loosening restrictions on foreign investment. By making a further leap in the two-year-long rightward plunge of the Egyptian government, by demonstrating to the West that fears of Soviet attendant repression needed to enforce those domination of Egypt are unfounded, Sadat is aiming at re-establishing contact with the United States and inducing Nixon, or his successor, to bring pressure to bear on Israel to make some significant territorial concessions as part of a new peace agreement.
BROADER TREND The Egyptian move is part of a broader diplomatic trend. At the beginning of July the Republic of Yemen (North) re-established diplomatic relations with the United States. Two weeks later, Sudanese President Gafaar el-Nimeiry announced that his country would follow suit. Both Nimeiry and Muammar el-Qad dafi, the notoriously anti-communist Libyan strong man, enthusiastically praised Sadat's expulsion of the Russians.
The elimination of the Palestinian fedayeen from the political scene, which seems to have been decisively achieved by the Israeli invasions of Lebanon in June and the subsequent suspension of fedayeen actions against Israel, has increased Sadat's freedom of action to deal directly with U.S. imperialism instead of relying on the Soviet bureaucracy as an intermediary. Sadat has learned the lessons of the year of the summit -the Kremlin is not an ally to be trusted, even for limited objectives; and the U.S. ruling class is not especially averse to exchanging a smaller ally for a larger one, as Chiang Kai-shek has discovered.
Sadat has offered Nixon a partial and very tentative break with the Soviet Union. It is now Nixon's move. Will he rashly press the advantage by demanding thorough Egyptian capitulation to Israeli territorial claims, or will he force his Zionist ally to be conciliatory, threatening to dump Israel for Egypt if Tel Aviv resists?
Sadat's policy clearly aims at the latter possibility. For Egypt, this is a serious and dangerous gamble. The Israeli regime has shown no sign of willingness to part with the Sinai peninsula. It is difficult to see what interest Nixon would have in putting any serious pressure on Israel to đo so. In the long run, U.S. imperialism will discard its Zionist ally only if it is definitively demonstrated that the Arab regimes can be more effective than the Zionist state in quashing the development of the Arab revolutionary movement.
Accomplishing that task will require much more than a partial split with the Soviet bureaucrats and much more than a few trial balloons about Egypt's desire for foreign capital. It will require a new counter-revolutionary offensive that the Egyptian workers and students are not likely to accept without massive resistance.
FIRST BIG STEP Sadat has taken the first big step down this road. He has done so cautiously, leaving himself room to retreat, to resolidify his Soviet alliance. If a favourable response to the first step is forthcoming from the U.S. government, he can be expected to press on. In that case, the Palestinian people can expect further Israell-Egyptian deals to be made at their expense, and the Egyptian people can expect the deals. - ICP