By Ibrahim Nafie The October War cannot be characterised as being a simple military operation intended to liberate territories occupied by Israel during the course of an earlier conflict. The war was much more than that and, as a consequence, its results extended far beyond the restoration of Sinai to Egypt. The October War, as envisaged by Egypt's political leadership, was to be a limited conflict with a number of clearly defined strategic objectives. The recourse to military power, after all, is never an aim in itself and there is a great difference between using force to impose a settlement to a conflict and using it to promote a reformulation of the possible shape any such settlement might take. This notion of a limited war, which underpinned the strategies adopted for the October War, represents a breakthrough for Egypt's strategic and military planners. Before 1973 the dominant conception of war rested on the notion of a comprehensive, full-scale conflict involving the deployment of a full range of military hardware and aimed at securing a wide-range of military objectives. In light of the regional balance of power in the early seventies such a war was hardly an option, particularly given the Arabs' inability to obtain the kind of advanced offensive weaponry necessary to wage such a war. The alternatives for effective action were, accordingly, severely limited. We could have waited until Egypt or some other Arab state had achieved a strategic balance with Israel or secured a technological military advantage. Then we might have been able to wage a comprehensive offensive and liberate all the Arab territories occupied in 1967. But then again, we might have been waiting forever. While Israel was granted ready access by the US to practically every item of equipment for which it asked, Egypt's position with the former Soviet Union was entirely different. For while it is true that the Soviet Union had helped to rebuild the Egyptian armed forces following the June 1967 war it had imposed a clear ceiling on the quantity and the type of weaponry it was prepared to provide. As a consequence, by continuing to entertain the notion of a comprehensive war that would liberate all occupied territories the Arabs were, in reality, ensuring that there would be no such war. We had little alternative, then, but to plan a major military operation that took into account the limits of our available military capacities, an operation that would be co-ordinated at the Arab level so as to provide Egypt and Syria with far better strategic advantages than either possessed independently. The focus of such an operation would be to achieve clearly defined military objectives that could create a new reality on the ground and in doing so ensure circumstances conducive to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, a course of action rendered necessary by the manner in which the Arab-Israeli conflict had, as a result of the US-Soviet détente, stagnated into an on-going state of no war-no peace. It was in accordance with this novel, realistic and carefully calculated approach to conflict management that the October War would achieve the tactical objectives that Egypt had set and, in doing so, would be guaranteed a place in history as an unprecedented victory. The Arab armies achieved the all important element of surprise when they opened a war against Israel on two fronts simultaneously. The Egyptian forces succeeded in crossing one of the most difficult water barriers in the world and in destroying the fortifications of one of the most formidable lines of defence constructed in the history of warfare -- the Bar Lev line -- and then, advancing further into the Sinai, accomplished the other tactical assignments they had set themselves. The operation went ahead with astonishing speed, with minimum loss of life and of materials, and was characterised by the highest levels of professionalism from all the branches of the Egyptian armed forces. And as the conflict unravelled it became increasingly clear that the October War represented a new kind of military conflict, that it was, indeed, a new departure in the history of armed confrontation, certainly in the way war had been experienced in the post Second World War period. It is sufficient, in this regard, to cite T Dubois, an American military analyst whose writings frequently reflect the Israeli point of view. "Skillful and thoroughly precise planning," he wrote, "total secrecy, complete surprise in addition to the adept implementation of carefully drawn up plans accounted for the success of the Egyptian crossing of the water barrier which will go down in the annals of history as a feat that no other army could have performed better, either in terms of planning or execution. According to Egyptian reports, Egyptian forces sustained less than 200 deaths on the first day of fighting, a figure that was far better than even the Egyptians themselves had hoped." Dubois was not exaggerating. The October War represented a complete success on all levels. It had achieved all the tactical objectives it had set out to accomplish and it imposed a new reality that constituted the foundation on which all future political gains would be based. The military victory, in short, was to result in a redrawing of regional balances of power. In the words of Clausewitz, the October War was an "extension of politics by other means." The form of the military confrontation was not only intrinsically bound to the political context but determined by that context, a factor that manifested itself before and during the war in three ways. First, the conflict constituted Egypt's only possible means to resolve its problems with Israel. Since assuming power at the beginning of the seventies President Sadat had explored a number of alternative scenarios and had on several occasions sounded out the US in an attempt to arrive at a formula that would stimulate diplomatic activity. Yet nothing he tried worked, for the simple reason that the other parties believed, erroneously as it turned out, that Egypt had no real options. It became imperative, therefore, for Egypt to display that it did, indeed, possess other options, that it was capable of taking the necessary action to regain its land, a necessity that the Egyptian leadership early grasped. Secondly, the political as well as the military aims of the October War were clearly defined from the outset. The October War was conducted in order to secure the strategic development necessary to kick start a process that might result in moving towards a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some momentous action had obviously to be taken if only to shake-up the regional and strategic balances that, at the time, seemed sufficiently entrenched as to be capable of ensuring the state of no war-no peace would continue in perpetuity. That momentous action was the October War, a war whose lasting achievement was to ultimately force Israel and the US to take a fresh look at the situation in the Middle East. Finally, the progress of military operations as the conflict unfolded was inextricably linked to the political management of the war. The memoirs of Egyptian wartime commanders reveal that Cairo contacted Washington indirectly in order to clarify Egypt's conception of the scope of operations. As a result of these contacts, Nixon and Kissinger reformulated not only their assessments of how to manage the crisis but of how to conduct the disengagement negotiations that would follow the war. The war had one important ramification, of a very particular nature, something that would trigger a major shift in perceptions of the Middle East conflict and which would form the basis for future developments in the region. The October War shattered the myth of the invincibility of the Israeli army, a myth that, for generations, had convinced Israel's leaders that the Arabs could never successfully resort to the military option and, as a consequence, that Israel had carte blanche to impose its own terms for any settlement of the Middle East conflict. The October War exposed the limits of Israel's military and, in doing so, underlined the fact that any solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict would have to take into consideration the demands of both sides. Balance of power, it suddenly became apparent, is not the ultimate determinant of events. For the Arabs, the October War had a profound psychological impact. It gave an enormous boost to Arab confidence in our ability to act under adverse circumstances, a very welcome development given the crisis of confidence provoked by the pummeling we received in the war of 1967. The war also illustrated that the Arabs possessed not only the capacity to perform militarily to the highest standards, had not only alternative courses of action but also the ability to take the initiative. Internationally, the image of the Arabs was better than it had been for decades, a fact that made it possible, after the war, for international powers to take the views of the Arabs on the future of the Middle East conflict seriously. The October War, in short, constituted a successful attempt to break away from the future of our region as charted by others. This future, after all, was necessarily dependent on the erroneous notion that the Arabs were little more than a lifeless corpse, a body politic whose inability to act would mean, ultimately, that they would have no choice but to bow to the dictates of the other side. Given this backdrop the surprise of the October War rests not only on the fact that Egypt and Syria managed to coordinate their plans and wage an assault without arousing the slightest suspicion of the Israeli intelligence but on the revelation that the Arabs could undertake a momentous action and create new realities that would form the basis for future actions and events. The October War was the first, essential step towards an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty that would guarantee that Egypt would regain the Sinai without a single Israeli settlement or base remaining, a treaty that would also bring into effect joint technical and military security arrangements formulated in light of the realisation that the situation in the region had been irrevocably changed. The October War acted as the alarm, waking-up the key players in the region to a realisation of the limits of simply relying on the use of force to settle a conflict as complex as that in the Middle East. When the situation began to stagnate again in 1977 President Sadat shocked the world with his initiative to visit Jerusalem. A second surprise, and one that, like the October War, would generate another set of new realities. After two years of fierce negotiations the acknowledgment of these realities resulted in the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979. From the beginning, the Egyptian peace initiative incorporated parallel proposals aimed at solving the Palestinian problem and during the Camp David negotiations Egypt succeeded in securing recognition for a "framework for peace". Although the provisions had little immediate effect they began to manifest themselves gradually in the 1980s and to bear fruit in the comprehensive settlement process for the Arab-Israeli struggle initiated in Madrid in 1991. This week, as we celebrate the silver jubilee of the October War, we should take time out to assess the strategic dimensions of the war and the role of those actions, taken quarter of a century ago, in shaping our current reality. And having done so we will realise, I believe, that the October War was incontestably a war pursued primarily to secure peace, and the liberation of occupied territories.
