Well-known British historian Alistair Horne argued that peace was the most important achievement of the 1973 October War at a recent lecture in Cairo, reports Doaa El-Bey In the course of a recent lecture at the American University in Cairo, famous British historian Sir Alistair Horne provided a detailed description of the 1973 October War between Egypt and Israel, while suggesting that the then Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat's most important achievement in ending the war was in "opting for peace" and saving the region from a larger conflagration. Horne, who is currently working on an authorised biography of the former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, as well as a second volume of his own memoirs, opened his lecture by saying that he intended to express a "personal" as well as a predominantly western point of view on the war that some attending might find it hard to agree with. The lecture, entitled "Kissinger and Crisis Management in the 1973 October War", was organised by the Heikal Foundation for Arab Journalism, and in the discussion that followed there were indeed signs of disagreement from the audience. Horne stated that Sadat had schemed brilliantly in deceiving Israel as to his true intentions before the war, and for this reason Israel had been taken entirely by surprise and had therefore experienced significant military defeats before it launched a counter-attack on 14 October. Sadat's greatest achievement, however, Horne said, did not lie in his actions before the war broke out. Instead, by agreeing to the UN-sponsored ceasefire brokered by Kissinger, he protected the region from a larger war, especially after the US had agreed to supply Israel with weapons and the Soviet Union had threatened to intervene. When asked whether he thought that Sadat had "sold out" in accepting Kissinger's proposals and agreeing to a ceasefire, Horne said that he could not answer the question. "I feel very nervous [about discussing this subject]: it is like entering into a family dispute," he said. However, he did say that the advantage of being a historian, as opposed to a journalist, in considering such events was that a historian had time and distance on his side. He found it very difficult to see what would have happened had there not been a ceasefire, or "what would have happened had Egypt fought back and the Syrians had re-armed, or if Kissinger had not followed his shuttle diplomacy, or if Sadat had said 'we want a return to the pre- 1967 borders and nothing else.'" "This is all known as 'alternative history,'" Horne said. "I wonder whether things would have been worse." Another controversial issue raised in the lecture was whether Sadat had achieved peace in the region by agreeing to a ceasefire. Horne disagreed with some in the audience who expressed the view that Sadat could have brought the Sinai back to Egypt and concluded the Camp David Agreements without "squandering the achievements of the war and sacrificing Egyptian and Arab rights," as they argued, he had in fact done. Sadat had not achieved peace, such audience members said, because the region had become ever more violent and volatile. In reply, Horne reiterated his view that Sadat's greatest achievement had been peace. The region had lived in peace for 35 years since the agreement between Sadat and Israel, and this was a considerable period in history, "in Western terms, the period from the end of World War II to the election of [US president] Ronald Reagan," Horne said. However, Horne agreed that the Middle East was becoming more volatile, particularly because of the greater numbers of weapons in the region. "By weapons, I do not mean nuclear weapons, but weapons of passion and debate," he said. "There are the weapons of the fundamentalists on the one side, and those of the neo-cons on the other. These are mental weapons rather than physical weapons." The US's decision to arm Israel in 1973 was another issue raised in the lecture. Horne said that the US had agreed to provide Israel with weapons in order to give it greater influence in Tel Aviv. Had the US not agreed to arm Israel, then Israel would have stopped listening to the US and the US would have lost its influence. Some members of the audience disagreed, saying that Israel had not listened to the US anyway, and that it had been reluctant to accept the ceasefire. In reply, Horne said that given the fast development of the war and the small size of Israel, the US could not "have taken the risk" of not arming Israel. "However, it seems to me that the war was decided before the US arms had any effect," he added. Horne was born in London in 1925, and he has spent much of his life abroad. His books include A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1961 and The Price of Glory on the Algerian War of Independence. He founded a research fellowship for young historians at St Anthony's College, Oxford University, in 1969, and in 2003 he was knighted. Asked about the lessons to be learned from the October War, Horne pointed to an important one: that every country needs better intelligence. Many of the crises that have happened over the last 50 years have come as a result of poor intelligence, he said. It was extraordinary, Horne said, that world intelligence agencies had not been able to see that Iraq was planning to go to war with Iran in the early 1980s, for example. "I feel a good spy is worth many divisions of troops, because he can prevent a catastrophe such as the October war," he said.
