Contents · LRB 12 September 2013

That the Egyptian army commanders had reason to resent Sadat is clear from Kandil’s account of the 1973 October war, when the generals were beside themselves at Sadat’s failure to press the advantage they had gained by crossing the Suez Canal. His refusal to seize the main passes in Sinai enabled the Israelis to turn the tables. This resentment was aggravated by the terms to which Sadat agreed at Camp David, another tortuous episode Kandil explores in depth. In effect, Amer lost Sinai and Sadat made no serious attempt to regain it; together they created Egypt’s Sinai problem, which Mubarak was content to manage rather than resolve and which is now exploding.

It is in this episode, in the way Sadat prostrated himself and his country before the Americans, that we can discern both the origins of the army’s eventual refusal to rescue Mubarak, Sadat’s faithful successor, and the origins of the convergence Owen describes between Arab ‘republics’ and monarchies. While the syndrome of presidents for life was not pioneered by Egypt – it was Bourguiba who started it and who also pioneered the infitah that was to become central to Sadat’s economic policy – it was Sadat who pioneered the distinctively monarchical presidency, modelling himself on the shah of Iran and aping his flamboyance. As Kandil describes it, Sadat’s strategy for retaining power was essentially to make himself dependent on and indispensable to Washington, in his eyes the only foreign power that mattered, reducing Egypt to a client state – or even a servant state – while making the US the external guarantor of his rule.