After WWI, how America systematically subverted the Middle East
Exactly a century ago, the Middle East began to unravel. In 1918, fresh from victory in World War I, the United States, Britain and France carved out the region among themselves using a combination of military force, deceit and co-option.
As dozens of world leaders gathered amidst a drizzle in Paris on Sunday, November 11, 2018 to commemorate the end of World War I, that thought must have entered more than a few of their minds.
Iraq (the former Mesopotamia) was occupied by Britain under a mandate after WWI. So were Palestine and Transjordan. Syria and Lebanon went to France, also under a mandate. Much of the rest was subsumed by Saudi Arabia, soon to fall under American protection.
The al-Saud family had captured large areas of the Ottoman empire, defeated in WWI. In 1932, the al-Sauds named the new country the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
World War 2 further altered the geography of the Middle East but not the West's control. Oil had been struck. The deserts of Saudi Arabia and the former Persian Empire (Iran) as well as Mesopotamia (Iraq) promised an oil and gas bonanza.
America's grip now tightened. Imperial Britain and France, weakened by WW2, began a gradual political withdrawal from the Middle East but not from its oil wells. Their petroleum companies ran the region's new oil fields.
The bargain was simple: US military protection in exchange for oil and geostrategic assets as the Cold War with the Soviet Union loomed in the late-1940s.
Iran and Iraq presented a particularly difficult problem. Washington approached it in a way that resonates today 70 years later.
The Shah of Iran (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) had succeeded his father Reza Shah Pahlavi, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, in 1941. Reza Shah Pahlavi had been forced to abdicate following the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Imperial Iran.
The young Mohammad Shah Pahlavi (he was 22 when he took over as monarch during WW2) would soon become Washington's proxy. Iran was America's most favoured nation in the Middle East — till 1979.
Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution that year changed the political dynamic in the Middle East more than any other single event. Overnight, Iran became America's most reviled enemy, a status that, 39 years later, remains unchanged.
Meanwhile, America's relationship with its other puppet regime of the time, Iraq, was being handled more covertly. Saddam Hussein, under the watchful gaze of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), played a leading role in toppling the Iraqi government in a coup in 1968, bringing the Ba'ath party back to power. He was initially as much America's man in the Middle East as the Shah of Iran had been till he was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini.
In 1979, Iraq was still a secular country. Women walked to work in skirts. Saddam, a Sunni, ruled his 60 per cent Shia majority nation with an iron fist but gave Shias reasonable opportunities in government and the bureaucracy.
To its east though, Iran was in ferment under the Ayatollah. Iran's descent into Islamic fundamentalism, the US feared, could spread like a virus across the Middle East. The Shah had meanwhile fled to Egypt after the Iranian revolution. He died there aged 60 in 1980.
In 1980 too, the US instigated a devastating eight-year war between Iraq and Iran. The CIA covertly ran the war. Over 5,00,000 Iraqi and Iranian soldiers died in a battle of attrition that ended in stalemate in 1988.
America's objective was to use Saddam's regime to overthrow Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Two great civilisations, Mesopotamian and Persian, were thus made to fight each other in a brutal war that left half-a-million Arabs and Persians dead.
Saddam, frustrated by the war and increasingly unhappy at America's interference in Iraq, made a fatal mistake in 1990 by invading Kuwait, another oil-rich American protectorate, on the grounds that it had historically been part of Iraq and would on amalgamation give Iraq access to the waters of the Persian Gulf.
Overnight, Saddam became America's enemy number one. Iraq was invaded, Kuwait "liberated" in the Gulf war in 1991 and debilitating decade-long sanctions imposed on Iraq.
No-fly zones over Iraq prevented vital medicines and food reaching Iraq. Thousands of Iraqi children died as a result. Saddam himself was hunted down and killed in 2006.
Fast-forward to today. Iraq is a shadow of its former self. Iran is under harsh new US sanctions. Saudi Arabia, silent witness to the economic destruction of rival states around it, has funded Islamist terrorists and become the region's most toxic country.
It retains a staunch friend though in America. President Donald Trump has coddled the Saudi regime. His son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has backed 33-year-old Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, widely regarded as having ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
The US-Saudi relationship has been the most self-serving and damaging alliance in the Middle East. The US has destroyed a once-secular country, Iraq, and is attempting to destroy another once-secular country, Iran. Tehran may have fundamentalist rulers but nothing justifies the devastating sanctions America has imposed on it.
While its partner-of-choice Saudi Arabia runs the region's most brutal regime, America, as it has done for nearly a century, continues to back it with arms and technology. Washington shouldn't forget that 15 of the 19 attackers who hijacked four jetliners in the 9/11 carnage in New York and at the Pentagon were Saudi nationals.
When it comes, the backlash against America's subversive Middle East policy will be fierce. World leaders in Paris on Sunday commemorating the end of WWI would do well to be mindful of the lessons of history.
Also read: Why India hasn't yet honoured its troops who died fighting in WWI