Presidents are just overgrown boys

This gem is from a 1977 copy of TIME magazine: "I could not hold back my armed forces!" shouted President Anwar Sadat on Egyptian TV, furiously pounding a desk for emphasis. "Yesterday and today, they gave him a lesson he will never forget."

The "he" in question was Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, and the lesson Sadat was talking about involved Egypt’s awesome army and air force pummeling Libya’s "small" 30,000-man army. Cairo sent tanks and mechanised infantry from two divisions of the First Egyptian Army and beat the daylights out of Tripoli’s two brigades as its commando and paratrooper battalions dropped behind enemy lines and the air force bombed Libyan cities and military bases to cinder.

Playing with fire

So why were they fighting?

"That very strange person (Gaddafi, of course) ordered his forces to make border raids near Sallum (most likely some dry piece of rock no different from Migingo) and took 14 prisoners. He felt proud of himself but he was playing with fire!"

But according to Tripoli, Sadat was talking hogwash. It was Egyptians who had been raiding across the border, they insisted. But it gets better. Gaddafi’s forces boasted that they had downed eight Egyptian warplanes, a boast that Cairo dismissed as "imaginary".

You still want to know why the two boys fought? Well, Gaddafi was annoyed that Egypt was becoming a friend of its enemy, Chad. Sadat, on the other hand, was incensed by Libyan propaganda that mocked him and his wife as "Antony and Cleopatra", living in presidential splendor while poor Egyptians starved.

Now you know what happens when you pick overgrown boys and make them commander-in-chief of national armies.