Commentary
The dangerous ‘liberators’ of the Middle East
The theorists of a “new order” in the Middle East have a highly disappointing track record to say the least. It is baffling to hear Netanyahu, whose mental and ideological outlook is defined by violence and war, promise to liberate the Iranians.
Every once in a while, in the course of history, someone pops up who wants to change the Middle East and claims to want to “liberate” the peoples of the region. Now, as we await Israel's response against Tehran's rain of rockets, Benyamin Netanyahu has taken up that mantle. After his government dubbed the killing of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah and the ongoing offensive in Lebanon as “Operation New Order,” the Israeli premier showed a surprising amount of nerve and went even further than that.
Addressing the people of Iran (whom he called “the Persian people”), he said: “When Iran is finally free — and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think — everything will be different. Our two ancient peoples, the Jewish people and the Persian people, will finally be at peace.” All the while, the two countries are coming dangerously close to a direct clash that threatens to engulf the whole region in a war which would draw in the great powers as well.
It is certainly baffling to hear Netanyahu, whose mental and ideological outlook is defined by violence and war, promise to liberate the Iranians, after he decided to keep the Palestinians under an apartheid regime and isn’t even willing to consider the possibility of a Palestinian state. But we don’t need to go back to the Anglo-French partitions to find similar examples of arrogance: in more recent years, there have been others who have put themselves forward as “liberators.”
Their resounding failures have become emblematic of the tragedies that befell the Middle East. And if we look at how these ideas first arose and how they developed, this will tell us how such an attempt is likely to end.
In recent decades, the person who devoted the most intellectual effort to the project of “remaking” the Middle East was Bernard Lewis, one of the world's leading scholars on the region and professor emeritus at Princeton University. In 1978, Lewis drafted a paper recommending that the US should support the radical Islamist movements, the Muslim Brotherhood and that of Khomeini, with the intention of promoting the balkanization of the Middle East along tribal and religious lines. Lewis argued that the West should encourage independence-seeking groups such as the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, and the Turks of Azerbaijan. The unrest would result in what the professor called an “arc of crisis,” which he thought would spread to the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union as well.
His notion of an “arc of crisis” wound up being extraordinarily successful. Unfortunately for the Carter administration, Iran turned out to be more of a problem for the U.S. than for Moscow, but the Red Army's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 gave an extraordinary boost to Lewis's theory: the U.S., with the military support of Pakistan and the financial backing of Saudi Arabia, armed thousands of mujahideen who pinned the Russians down in a “holy war” until their withdrawal in 1989. When the Americans invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, they thought they would have greater success than the Soviets, but it all ended as we know, with the country being handed back to the Taliban and a shameful flight from Kabul.
But the true “masterpiece” of Lewis and the would-be “liberators” was Iraq. In 2002, he convinced President Bush Jr. and VP Cheney to attack Saddam Hussein, and wrote: “if we succeed in overthrowing the regimes of [Iran and Iraq], the scenes of rejoicing in their cities would even exceed those that followed the liberation of Kabul.” But there was little to be seen of the joyous demonstrations imagined by the professor, in Baghdad as in Kabul.
Iraq, occupied in 2003 after the lie about weapons of mass destruction that were never found, ended up engulfed by new wars, Al-Qaeda terrorism and then torn to pieces by the Caliphate: hundreds of thousands were killed and millions were displaced, just as happened in Syria. And it seems we have already forgotten that it was not the U.S., but the Iranian Pasdaran and Hezbollah, led by General Soleimani – later killed by the Americans in January 2021 – who managed to stop ISIS just 40 kilometers from Baghdad, after the Iraqi army had completely disbanded at that point.
After the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon had outlined plans to attack seven Middle Eastern countries in five years after Afghanistan: Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. We all know how that turned out: an ongoing disaster whose aftermath we are still dealing with. Afterwards, the Obama administration rode the wave of the “Arab springs” of 2011, which were supposed to bring democracy, but ended up with autocratic regimes.
The theorists of a “new order” in the Middle East, while highly educated and offering erudite-sounding analysis, have a highly disappointing track record (to say the least) when put to the test of reality. The problem is that they’re out in the media discussing topics they don’t know about and places they have never seen, and shaping Western public opinion with their positions. Instead of turning to grand conspiracy theories to explain this string of failures – theories that are usually only put together after the events – we should pay more attention to everyday disinformation.
Now we are back to talking about a “new order” in Lebanon, where Israel already failed to impose such an order in 2006. Back then, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice likewise welcomed the war as the beginning of the birth of “a new Middle East.” The fact is that every time, the new “liberators” left behind even worse chaos than the previous ones. But that seems to be the overarching intention: perpetual destabilization, not peace.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/i-pericolosi-liberatori-del-medio-oriente on 2024-10-03