Rationality and war

"Until this message," Kissinger would write, "I had not taken Sadat seriously."  …Kissinger would come to understand that Sadat’s objective was to shock Israel into greater flexibility and restore Egypt’s self-respect so that he, Sadat, could be more flexible as well in order to achieve an agreement.  "Our definition of rationality did not take seriously the notion of starting an unwinnable war to restore self-respect," Kissinger would write.

That is from Abraham Rabinovich’s gripping The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East.