ANWAR SADAT AND THE UNCOMLETED ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE

Anwar Sadat was President of Egypt from 1970 to 1979, a relatively short period of time in terms of modern Middle Eastern history. Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since he was assassinated by a young military officer during a review of Egyptian Army troops. Yet perhaps no single figure did more to shape the current Middle Eastern situation, in ways both positive and negative (Baker, 1978; Baker, 1990; Waterbury, 1983).

In the West, and particularly the United States, Anwar Sadat is still somewhat revered more than two decades after his death. Probably no other Arab or Muslim has a more positive image. He is what Americans -- both government officials and ordinary citizens -- wish that more regional leaders might resemble. The intense antipathy toward Saddam Hussein is perhaps based not so much on his quite tenuous ties to terrorism, than on a perception that he is the anti-Sadat of the region, a leader who invaded two neighboring countries in two decades, ultimately dedicated to warmaking rather than peacemaking (Stein, 1999).

Sadat's great reputation in the West is primarily -- perhaps almost exclusively -- based on his efforts toward making peace between Egypt (and by implication the Arab world as a whole) and the state of Israel. Those efforts culminated in the original Camp David accords, which ended the state of cold war between Egypt and Israel, and paved the way for Israeli withdraw

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asser in turn had led Egypt since overthrowing a conservative monarchy in 1952. During much of that period, Nasser was the dominant political figure not only in Egypt but throughout the Arab world. In order to understand the emergence and significance of Anwar Sadat, it is necessary also to outline the career of his predecessor (Waterbury, 1983; Lippman, 1989). Nasser was in background a panArab nationalist, a movement that had risen in response to European colonial rule. While Egypt had gained its formal independence shortly after World War II, it remained under heavy British influence. In 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, triggering a combined BritishFrenchIsraeli response that developed into an ArabIsraeli war, ended only by joint diplomatic intervention by the US and the Soviet Union (Waterbury, 1983). Subsequently, Nasser drew closer to the Soviets, and USEgyptian relations deteriorated. In the American view, he became the badboy strongman of the Arab world, a role subsequently filled by Hafez Assad of Syria, Moammar Kadafi of Libya, and most recently Saddam Hussein of Iraq. At the same time, he made repeated efforts to bring a panArab nationalist ideal into practice. In the 1960s, for example, Egy
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Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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