[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Anwar Sadat and the Camp David Accords
Sadat enhanced his popularity by displaying and following an intuitive sense of what the masses wanted. He was doing what they wanted when he cut back the powers of the hated secret police, when he ousted the Soviet military experts and when he prepared for war with Israel even though Golda Meir, Israel's shrewd prime minister when he took office, correctly appraised him, she later wrote, as a ''reasonable man who might soberly consider the benefits'' of ending the confrontation with Israel. Early in 1973, when Sadat decided to go to war against Israel, he was being criticized by students an others as an ineffective leader. He concluded that it was necessary to break the Egyptian-Israeli deadlock. ''If we don't take our case into our own hands, there will be no movement,'' he said in an interview. ''The time has come for a shock. The resumption of the battle is now inevitable.
After Moscow approved a limited invasion of Sinai and after more Soviet arms arrived, Sadat ordered the attack on Oct. 6. Egyptian troops surged across the canal and Syrian troops struck Israel from their side. In the fighting that followed, the Syrians were thrown back and the Israelis counterattacked fiercely, encircling Suez and carving out a broad bridgehead west of the canal.
Despite Israel's strong showing, Sadat, in his memoirs, maintained that ''the Egyptian military performance was a landmark in world military history'' and that ''if the United States hadn't intervened in the war and fully supported Israel, the situation could have been far different.'' The war spurred Washington to work to ease tensions in the Middle East; Sadat was sadob/inc. Sadat enhanced his popularity by displaying and following an intuitive sense of what the masses wanted. He was doing what they wanted when he cut back the powers of the hated secret police, when he ousted the Soviet military experts......
