Before we commit ourselves to station American technicians to guard the shaky Sinai peace between the Israeli and Egyptian armies, we should have a clear picture of why we are involved.
Two years ago, the Israelis were perfectly able to secure their own borders without any help from us. Shortly after the Yorn Kippur War began, Israeli tank commanders, by a brilliant maneuver, sliced through and behind the Egyptian army on the east side of the Suez Canal, and had it completely trapped and cut off from supplies.
Then Henry Kissinger entered from stage left and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. He ordered a truce and forced the Israelis to release the trapped Egyptians.
At that time, it was unclear to many people why Dr. Kissinger insisted on a course of action so highly disadvantageous to Israel. Now we know why — because Brezhnev ordered him to. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt recently revealed what Henry Kissinger had concealed since October 1973.
According to Admiral Zumwalt, Brezhnev sent a “savage” ultimatum to President Nixon ordering him to pull back the Israeli forces or else Russian troops would rescue the Egyptians. “The United States had to back down in the face of a Soviet ultimatum,” Zumwalt said, because the Russians had our ships outnumbered in the Mediterranean by 98 to 65, and they could have attacked U.S. carriers and other warships with airplanes flying in from four directions. Soviet planes had bases in Egypt, Syria, the Crimea, and Yugoslavia, while “we didn’t have a single land base in the area.”
Thus Henry Kissinger used the power and influence of the United States to pressure the Israelis to release the Egyptian army, as demanded by the Soviets, and the Israelis did.
“If Kissinger had given the American people an accurate report of the situation at that time,” Admiral Zumwalt added, “it would have indicated that detente was working very poorly.
On Labor Day, George Meany again reminded us that, “in the era of detente, as defined and presided over by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, we have witnessed an unmistakable shift in the world balance of power away from the United States and toward the Soviet Union.”
The Israeli-Egyptian confrontation is a good example of how, because Brezhnev has more ships and missiles than we have, he can call the shots, dictate the terms, issue orders to Dr. Kissinger to force our friends to retreat, and then charge the financial cost to the U.S. taxpayers.
One of Dr. Kissinger’s oft-repeated fallacies is that nuclear power is not “useable.” In the Israeli-Arab confrontation in October 1973, the Soviets proved that their superior nuclear umbrella was very useable, indeed.
