Cementing Sadat to the West

In 1966 Anwar Sadat, who was then Speaker of the Egyptian Parliament, made his first visit to the U.S. He was worried about how an Egyptian would be treated. This week, returning as President of Egypt on an eleven-day trip, he knows exactly what his reception will be. Although there may be some picketing by Jewish Defense League activists, Sadat will be feted at the White House, address a joint session of Congress, and travel to cities including Williamsburg, Houston and Chicago. Says a high White House official: "We hope to cement Sadat to us and lay the groundwork for a new relationship between Egypt and Israel."

Sadat has a somewhat similar goal. Ever since the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser he has been working to end Egypt's dependence on the Soviet Union and bring it closer to the West. He tried to cooperate with former Secretary of State William Rogers in Rogers' abortive peace efforts of 1971, and he went so far as to kick the Russian advisers out of Egypt in 1972. His acceptance of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's interim agreement in the Sinai has, in effect, wedded him to the notion of eventual peace with Israel.

The reason is not Sadat's good relationship with "my friend Henry," as he calls the Secretary of State, but Egypt's own pressing needs. With 37 million people--and a high birth rate --the country is desperately poor. Despite a cash transfusion of $1.2 billion this year from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, Egypt will probably end 1975 with a $500 million deficit, raising the possibility that the country might default on its debts. The Saudi moneymen, moreover, are not happy--or think it impolitic to seem happy--about Egypt's signing of the Sinai accord, and they are likely to be less generous in the future.

Sadat will this week present Administration officials with a long, detailed list of what Egypt is asking to maintain economic stability and provide its own defense. "What is badly needed is one or two major American investments here in the next year or 18 months," says an American businessman in Cairo. "That would give confidence to others, including the Saudis, to come in on a major scale."

New Hotels. Some interesting deals are in the making. The Ford Motor Co. has been considering construction of a $60 million diesel-engine plant in Egypt, and eleven foreign companies, seven of them American, have been talking about some kind of partnership with Nasr, Egypt's No. 1 automaker. No fewer than 26 foreign oil companies are exploring the country; Cairo officials hope that Egypt will be producing a million barrels a day by 1980.

Tourism is as valuable as wells, and 50 new hotels are now either being built or are under consideration. Egyptian officials also expect the reopened Suez Canal to eventually bring in $450 million a year in foreign exchange. Traffic through the canal has picked up steadily since it was reopened last June--though it is still below the 1967 level--and Japan recently granted a $100 million loan to widen and deepen it. "We are in a transition period and we have serious problems," says Sayed Marei, President of the Egyptian Parliament and one of Sadat's top advisers. "But I predict that by 1978 our economy will be strong again. If the U.S. could provide us with food--wheat, corn and vegetable oils--during this three-year transition period, we could pour our foreign exchange into economic development."

On the military side, the Egyptian President knows that he cannot realistically expect the massive aid Washington has been giving Israel--especially as the U.S. approaches an election year. Sadat would, nonetheless, like sophisticated defensive weapons: patrol boats for the Mediterranean coastline and the Suez Canal, the F-5E "defensive" jet fighter, and the TOW wire-guided antitank missile, which Israel used effectively in 1973 against Egyptian tanks in the Sinai. He will not ask Washington to stop aid to Israel, but he will reiterate a request that it not heat up the arms race by giving Jerusalem advanced weapons like the Pershing missile.

The Ford Administration knows that it will have to work hard to get congressional approval of even modest Egyptian requests, and it is happy to have the articulate and personable Sadat on hand to sell himself. The President, in fact, is bringing his whole family--his wife, four children, and the husbands and fiance of his three daughters--to present an attractive picture on American television sets.

Even as the Sadats were packing their bags, tensions continued in the Middle East. At U.N. Post 512 in the Sinai, a joint Israeli-Egyptian commission held its first meeting to work out details of the Israeli withdrawal from an area including the Ras Sudr oilfields; that move is now scheduled to be completed by mid-November. Almost simultaneously, Syrian and Israeli troops clashed on the Golan Heights. It was the first such incident since the Syrian-Israeli disengagement in May 1974. The Syrian strategy seemed clearly designed to discredit Sadat in the Arab world on the eve of his departure to Washington. Damascus apparently intends to raise tension on the Golan to draw world attention to this unsolved problem, and President Hafez Assad has warned that Syria may not renew the U.N. force mandate, which expires on Nov. 30. By contrast, the peacekeeping-force mandate for the Sinai was approved last week by the Security Council by a vote of 13 to 0, with two abstentions.

Sadat has rarely been more popular at home, and he has never been so unpopular among other Arabs as he has been since he accepted the Sinai agreement. He feels that he has taken a big gamble to win peace in the Middle East, and he now expects the U.S. to help him reduce the odds. "We hope that the American President will understand that Sadat's policy gives Israel at last the hope of peace and security," says Sayed Marei. "We are cured of the old idea of throwing Israel into the sea."

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