Why did Egypts President Anwar Sadat launch the war of 1973?
Morris: Sadat gambled correctly; he wanted to dislodge the logjam. He wasn’t going to get Sinai back unless he did something hard and he decided a war would do it and he was right. It broke the logjam, he got Sinai back within nine years. So his calculation was correct. How did the war affect the philosophy of Pan-Arabism? The war eventually resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, which disunited the Arab world in various ways because a rupture between Sadat and [Syrian President Hafiz]al-Assad formed immediately at the end of the war. But the disintegration [of Pan-Arabism] began in 1920, it didn’t begin in 1973. It began when different Arab national movements demanded their own sovereign territory as the Arab World supposedly was emerging as an independent entity which would have been unified according to the promises supposedly made by Britain to Hussein Ibn Ali [Sherrif of Mecca]. As soon as World War I ended, separate national movements began in the Arab world, each o
