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For all of Egypt's numerical might, the Suez Canal "might as well be the Atlantic Ocean," as a realistic Egyptian officer put it last week. Military experts judge that Nasser could put no more than a company across the canal—and it would be slaughtered. The reason is that the Russians, anxious to avert a fourth round of the war, have carefully not supplied Nasser with the wherewithal for an offensive strike: the amphibious transports, armored personnel carriers and four-wheel-drive trucks that he would need in order to cross the Sinai. Underscoring their concern that the artillery battles might get out of hand, the Soviets last week dispatched a note to Cairo declaring that the cease-fire should be "strictly carried out."
Despite the well-founded Russian caution and his own recent admission in private that any strike across the canal would be "suicidal," Nasser has steadily stepped up the level of violence to a point where he might not be able to back down easily. After he was received in February with unprecedented coolness and even rudeness by Egyptian soldiers at the Suez front, who wanted to know when they could fight, Nasser authorized them to mount heavy artillery barrages against the Israelis. The move was intended to raise military morale. It did, for a time, but soon there were fresh demands for action. So, last month Nasser sent Egyptian commandos on raids across the canal.
As a result of such escalation, Cairenes talk increasingly of the inevitability of full-scale war sometime in the indeterminate future. Next time, they say, a surprise Israeli blitz will not succeed, because Israel is already at the limits of its natural military frontiers. If the Israelis cross the Suez, the Egyptians plan to take advantage of Israel's overextended supply lines by forcing a prolonged campaign inside Egypt—in Nasser's words, an "inch-by-inch war." It is historically such a Russian concept of defense by attrition that he just possibly did not think of it himself. Says Nasser's confidant, Al Ahram Editor Mohammed Hasanein Heikal: "If the Israelis want to take Cairo, Damascus or Amman—and I pray to God they will try to do one or all of these things —they will simply be absorbed. They are overextended now. The fourth round, if and when it comes, will be a Six-Year and not a Six-Day War. It won't be ended by anyone's coup de grâce. They can't win this kind of war again." That is probably wishful thinking.
It is Nasser's predicament that he must continually talk of war and show himself in action against Israel in order to retain the confidence of militant Arabs and, more crucially, of his own army. At the same time, it is doubtful whether he could long remain in power if he led the Arabs into another round and lost. He no longer shares power in Egypt with General Abdel Hakim Amer, who committed suicide—or so the government said—after the 1967 war, and so Nasser could not again place the blame for defeat on the army. Since 1967, he has had personal control of Egypt's military, and now he is alone at the top, without a scapegoat.
The leadership of the Arabs is probably the world's most precarious perch. "The presidency is a painful position to hold in present circumstances," he says. "Even now my wife is against my