Sadat and Bhutto

I was in college in 1981 when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. A war hero, Sadat had been marked for death by a fatwah for making peace with Israel and he died as he watched a military parade. As he saluted the parade, his assassins, who were in the procession turned on him with rifles and grenades. Eleven others were killed.

Life is circular. So is death. The issuer of the fatwah was Omar Abdel-Rahman, later convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing and is now serving a life sentence at the Supermax prison in Colorado. The case was prosecuted by Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, who recently won the conviction of Conrad Black and who pursued me with a subpoena in the CIA leak case.

I remember the feeling of utter dread the day of the Sadat assassination. For Americans at that time, Sadat was a hero for having rejected Araby's massive resistance to Israel's existence and for having rejected his own history as a Nasser protege. When he died, there was tremendous fear that the madmen would take over. Fortunately for the world, Egypt kept the peace with Israel. But among those rounded up in the Sadat killing was Ayman Muhammad Rabaie al-Zawahir, a pharmacologist who eschewed violent sports as a youth but became a Jihadist. His conviction of dealing weapons led to three years in prison and eventually a journey to Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Afghanistan where he became the viceroy of Al Qaeda.

It's sickening to think that Al Zawahir might have been involved in the assassination of both Bhutto and Sadat, that one person consumed by hatred could have wreaked such havoc from New York to Cairo to Rawalpindi. That's perhaps too distopian. Bhutto could easily have been slain by a political rival or another Jihadist. No one knows, yet, of course who killed the woman in the Hermes Hajab. But the feelings I have are worse than that day in 1981.

Bhutto was in many ways a lesser figure than Sadat. She had two shots at being Prime Minister and blew it. Her legacy was her unfulfilled promise, the idea that she might reclaim power and get it right this time--a Harvard grad leading Pakistan into modernity and moderation, our ambassador to Islam, theirs to us.

Unlike Sadat, she didn't have to turn her back on her past to become who she was. She came from an educated and worldly elite. When she died in Rawalpindi, a few yards from where her father hung, it was like some grand perversion of dynastic politics. Instead of touch football at Hyannisport or horseshoes at Kennebunkport we get bombs and nooses in Rawalpindi. It was in the Bhuttoblood to bleed for Pakistan. Sadat, on the other hand, had to reject all of the pan Arab world and the Egypt that Nasser had forged. But if Sadat was, perhaps, the greater leader his death proved less eventful than most Americans and I feared. Another stongman, the more anodyne Hosni Mubarak, kept the peace with Israel. Bhutto might have done so much more, might have really taken the fight to Al Qaeda and helped lead an western reconciliation with Islam. Now we'll never know. And it's impossibly depressing.