Murder of a Man Of Peace

By LANCE MORROW

"Do you know what astounds me most about the world?" Napoleon asked in his later days. "It is the impotence of force to establish anything . . . In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind."

This time, in the suburbs of Cairo, the mind lost to the sword, to grenades and automatic rifles and the fleet precision of fanaticism making one of its abrupt, savagely familiar hits upon the world's hope for something better.

So one parade yielded to another. The one that ended in fatal chaos produced, four days later, a nervous, solemn pageant of much of the world's leadership (fetching back three Administrations in the U.S. case). The procession of power on display was pharaonic. It was a complicated homage: there was Prince Charles, to represent the British, whom Sadat once plotted violently to evict. And there, of course, was Menachem Begin, something of an ex-terrorist himself, who enjoyed an immeasurably complex relationship and history with the deceased.

The air around the assassination of Anwar Sadat was dense with fatal ironies. In martial finery, the Nobel Peace prizewinner sat admiring his nation's annual celebration of force; it was the anniversary of the 1973 day when Egypt plunged across the Suez Canal to break Israel's Bar Lev Line. Now death jumped out of his beloved army's line of march.

The scene came to the world in that stricken electronic burst that has now, after much experience, become a sort of art form, a genre of the politics of terror and risk and awful surprise: television verite abruptly pouring bulletins into the global village, the images of anchormen nervously fighting for a grip on things. The mind behaved like the hand-held television cameras that reeled wildly from sky to earth and then zoomed in on that Guernica of tumbled chairs and shot bodies and blood smears.

First came a violent, momentary loss of equilibrium. Commentators talked about a Middle Eastern Sarajevo, the single death-by-terror that unhinges everything. Then a stabilizing weariness set in, and even, about this one, a sense of inevitability.

Sadat's assassination was not a lovelorn nut-case fluke like the attack on Ronald Reagan in March, nor was it the almost metaphysically surprising outrage committed six weeks later in St. Peter's Square.

Sadat knew as well as anyone the furies he had stirred in the Arab world when he went to Jerusalem on his "sacred mission" in 1977, when he signed the Camp David agreements and embraced the Prime Minister of Israel. At the news of his death, while others recoiled and wept, great throngs in many Arab countries turned out rejoicing; they waved flags and fired rifles in the air. They hated Sadat. They wanted him dead; they had their reasons. But they were dancing upon the assassinated corpse of one of the world's last great men. It did not leave a good impression.

Sadat was a visionary with a talent for astonishing; he had a Clausewitzian instinct ("For great aims, we must dare great things"). He was also a profound, serene fatalist--which may have been the secret of his equilibrium. Such fatalism might serve others well now. Since 1970, 22 heads of state or government have been assassinated. As Theologian Paul Tillich remarked: "Death has become powerful in our time." --By Lance Morrow

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