Academic literature on the topic 'Easter Offensive, 1972'

Soviet-Egyptian preparations for an offensive continued through 1971, including plans against an Israeli system for flooding the Suez Canal with fuel and igniting it. Recent disclosures confirmed that Soviet advisers initiated the shootdown in September ’71 of an Israeli surveillance aircraft east of the canal, and they successfully countered an Israeli retaliation against the SAM array with US-supplied Shrike missiles. Shortly after this show of force, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko proposed to US President Nixon to withdraw Soviet troops (but not advisers) from Egypt as part of a settlement in terms similar to Sadat’s earlier offer. This remained under discussion until the Moscow summit in May 1972. Meanwhile, MiG-25 overflights of Sinai and Israel went on unimpeded, and Primakov’s continuing contacts with Israeli officials took on a threatening tone.

The sub-chapter summarises military and political developments in the eastern Mediterranean in 1920–1922, beginning with the decision to formally occupy Istanbul, which expanded Allied responsibilities while leading to the emergence of a rival Turkish national assembly in Ankara. It assesses Greece’s successive offensives into Anatolia, which ended in defeat and the loss of Izmir to Turkish national forces in September 1922. It further examines the impact of the Bolshevik victory in the Russian civil war on Britain’s position in the Caucasus and Istanbul, and the changing relationship between the Allies and Greece following the Royalist victory there. The chapter shows how Britain took unilateral action to redefine its position in Egypt after failed negotiations with nationalist representatives. Finally, it shows how confrontation with Greece and nationalist Turkey in the vicinity of Istanbul forced the British government to accept a revision of the peace treaty they had forced on the region.

Through the spring of 1972, US adviser Henry Kissinger and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin continued “back channel” discussion of the Soviet offer to withdraw regular forces from Egypt as part of and interim settlement with Israel. Meanwhile, Egyptian crews completed training for operation of the SAM array that the Soviet personnel had manned, which enabled beginning a handover that would ease political difficulties caused for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by these troops’ presence. Around a visit by Sadat to Moscow in April and a subsequent one to Egypt by Soviet Defense Minister Andrey Grechko, reports were spread about discord due to Soviet denial of Egyptian demands for offensive weapons. In fact, cooperation continued, including MiG-25 flights over Sinai to provide intelligence for a future offensive; renewed Israeli attempts to intercept them failed.

At the Moscow Summit of May 1972, the Middle Eastern issue was the last obstacle to be overcome for completion of a broad declaration of principles for détente. Subsequently accessible documentation disproves the assertion that US statesman Henry Kissinger inculcated by early publication of his memoirs, whereby the summit ended with an anodyne statement on this contentious issue that was understood by Egypt as abandonment by its superpower patron. Actually, in order to ensure other aspects of his global détente policy, Kissinger secured the withdrawal of Soviet regulars (but not of advisers, as both Egyptian President Sadat and Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko had stipulated) in return for considerable concessions on the terms of an Egyptian-Israeli settlement – which were kept secret for US political considerations and not communicated to Israel. The resulting announcement by Sadat on 18 July that the Soviets’ mission in Egypt was ending had to be camouflaged as an expulsion of advisers due to a fictitious Egyptian-Soviet rift because of Moscow’s refusal, as part of détente, to provide offensive weapons.

In 1969 the New York Young Lords—a primarily Puerto Rican revolutionary group fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico and creation of a socialist society—occupied the First Spanish United Methodist Church in East Harlem. Following weeks of failed negotiations with the pastor and church board, for eleven days the Young Lords occupied the church and established a breakfast program for children, clothing drive, day care center, medical care, and liberation school. The First Spanish Church, founded in 1922, was a historic Puerto Rican church whose members, after years of fighting for their own building, had ceased to engage community programming as they once had. This chapter explores what came to be known as the New York Young Lords’ First People’s Church Offensive by centering the history of the church and the ways religious language, ideas, and notions of the sacred were central to this rupture in East Harlem, New York City.

In 1968, a protracted War of Attrition between Egypt and Israel began along the Suez Canal. In March 1970 this culminated in an unprecedented Soviet military intervention to protect Egypt against Israeli deep penetration raids. This dramatic geo-political shift forced analysts to question Egypt’s commitment to peace and independence and Soviet willingness to escalate the Cold War. The literature published on this issue thus far suggests that analysts ‘failed’ to predict the Soviet intervention. This chapter reveals that contrary to our conventional understanding, British analysts warned that Arab ‘honour’ would never accept Israeli use of the east bank of the Suez Canal and that attacks on Egypt’s heartland would provoke an intervention by the Soviet Union. The documentary record makes it clear that policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic ignored or dismissed the assessments of their analysts. In the aftermath of the intervention, intelligence analysis played a key role in quelling the fears of policy makers, arguing that the Soviet Union felt obliged to react to the Israeli offensive and was not seeking to escalate the Cold War. Nor, analysts argued, could Egypt be regarded as a Soviet client state, as the expulsion of the Russian advisors only two years later would aptly demonstrate.

In the 1990s, stalking emerged as a new category of criminal offense and a distinct type of disordered behavior. A substantial fraction of stalkers suffer from delusional disorders or other severe mental illnesses, and many persons charged criminally with stalking adduce irrational beliefs to explain and justify their conduct. Such beliefs pose special challenges for mental health professionals who assess or help restore an accused stalker’s competence to stand trial, or who evaluate an accused stalker’s criminal responsibility. This chapter explores the clinical and forensic problems that arise when severe psychiatric symptoms—in particular, disruptions in reality testing (e.g., erotomanic delusions)—affect legal determinations concerning competence to stand trial, mens rea, and insanity. The term “stalking” unites under a single rubric behavioral patterns that until recently might have been regarded variously as manifestations of erotomanic delusions (Esquirol, 1845/1976), harassment (Jason, Reicher, Easton, Neal, & Wilson, 1984), or quaint expressions of courtly love (Singer, 1987). Beginning in the early 1990s, a confluence of social trends and news events—including heightened fears of stranger violence, increasing fragility of interpersonal relationships, and the stalking and murder of actress Rebecca Shaeffer—led the English-speaking world to construe stalking as a major mental health problem and a new category of criminal offense (Mullen, Pathé, & Purcell, 2001a). In turn, the existence of stalking as a distinct offense led to increased public recognition of the problem and, in some jurisdictions, to the filing of an unexpectedly large number of criminal stalking charges (Nadkarni & Grubin, 2000). The acts that constitute stalking bear a superficial similarity to common (if annoying) behaviors in which “normal” people engage and that may have roots in human evolution (Brüne, 2003). Familiar examples include awkward attempts to start a dating relationship, persistent and insistent requests for attention or services, and unwanted pursuit by a former lover who hopes to rekindle a relationship (Mullen, Pathé, Purcell, & Stuart, 1999; Mullen et al., 2001a). By contrast, the types of persistent stalking toward which antistalking laws are directed involve approaches and intrusions repeated over weeks, months, or even years, in which the victim reasonably experiences fear and psychological distress.