EPILOGUEadvance—which coincides with Sadat’s prior call on Assad in Damascus. Grinevsky
asserts that the Syrian president tricked Sadat by encouraging him to call Israel’s bluff.
Actually, Assad foresaw, correctly, the isolation of Sadat and Eg ypt by his separate-
peace initiative—and considered, less accurately, that it would elevate Syria to a
leadership position in the Arab world. It did leave Syria as the main base for Soviet,
and then Russian, military and intelligence operations in the region. This would be
endangered only by the uprising against Assad’s son and heir Bashar in 2011, which
at its peak triggered Putin’s direct military intervention in 2015 that displayed
marked similarities to Brezhnev’s forty-odd years before. But following Eg ypt’s defec-
tion, Moscow’s policy of maintaining “no war, no peace” as enunciated by Gromyko
put an increasing emphasis on the Palestinians.
It was at this point, following Sadat’s peace initiative, that the Soviet ideologues
Suslov and Ponomarev began to demonize him as a counterrevolutionary, and the
KGB to characterize him as “a braggart, a poseur, inexperienced in any field essential
for national politics,” who from his accession “began to signal the Americans: you
hold the key to a Middle Eastern settlement”—as Primakov and others had charged
before but were overruled. As Grinevsky describes it with a measure of apologetics,
[Israeli Prime Minister Menahem] Begin and Sadat got the peace train moving without
the United States or the USSR, but the crafty Americans jumped onto it when it was
already in motion. Common sense dictated that we should do the same, but Gromyko
knew his Politburo colleagues too well. The only remaining option was to poke spokes in
the wheels, but would that stop the train?Gromyko dictated that
our course must be to prevent any separate accord. ... We must get the entire Arab world
from Syria to Saudi Arabia up on its hind legs. The only unifying factor in the Arab world
is not Sinai or the Golan Heights, but the Palestinian problem, and it should be the focus
of our attention.Grinevsky still concludes that “we did right to condemn the nascent Eg yptian–
Israeli connection, otherwise our Arab friends would have felt that we betrayed them
like the Americans.”^12 Both before and after the Eg yptian–Israeli peace treaty was
signed in March 1979, Soviet propaganda denounced it as an American ploy to gain
“deeper military and political influence” and “to safeguard American interests in the
Middle East after the Iranian revolution.”^13
Soviet invective against Eg ypt in general and Sadat in particular reached heights
never seen during the supposed rift of July 1972—thus demonstrating in hindsight that
it hadn’t taken place. “Angry criticisms” in the Soviet media accused him of “a sellout,
blackmail, ‘a plot behind the back of the Arabs,’ a fake peace.” TASS news agency
charged him with “capitulation to Israeli demands,” although the treaty regained every