El Opinador Compulsivo

Se cumplen 40 años de la Guerra de los Seis Días. Algo había leído sobre el tema y estaba al tanto de la intervención soviética en la zona con armas, fondos y personal pero no sabía que casi había causado una guerra nuclear con EEUU:

"Eshkol knew and feared the Russians," noted Michael Oren. "War with Syria [and Egypt] was risky enough; with the USSR, it would be suicidal." But Eskhol calculated that without U.S. support, the Soviets would find themselves compelled to get involved directly. Moscow had, after all, "invested massively in the Middle East, about $2 billion in military aid alone�1,700 tanks, 2,400 artillery pieces, 500 jets, and 1,400 advisers�since 1956, some 43 percent of it to Egypt."

Sure enough, as the Israelis demolished the forces of the Arab coalition over the next three days and captured the Sinai, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights, reunified the holy city of Jerusalem, and began an offensive against Damascus itself, Moscow saw itself staring into the face of a geopolitical disaster. Those were, after all, Soviet-trained soldiers being defeated. Those were Soviet-made arms being seized or destroyed. Those were billions of dollars in Soviet funding to their Arab client states being poured down the drain. And�it would later be learned by U.S. and Israeli intelligence�the Egyptian war plan itself (code-named, "Operation Conqueror") had actually been written in 1966 by the Soviets. As a result, the Soviets feared their prestige was quickly unraveling.

U.S. intelligence was already picking up signs of this fear in the Kremlin. In the President's daily brief on June 9, for example, the CIA informed President Johnson that "the Soviets are finding it hard to conceal their shock over the rapid Egyptian military collapse. A Soviet official [identity still classified] could not understand 'how our intelligence could have been so wrong.' He asked despairingly, 'How could we have gotten into such a mess?'"

(Link enviado por Liberty Bell Dayan, el sobrino nieto de Moshe)