Middle East: new ambiance - new U.S. policy?

• Author: Jones, Curtis F.

By the early 1800's, the Safavid Empire in Persia had collapsed, and the Ottoman Empire was losing the control it had exercised over the rest of the Middle East - leaving a vacuum of power across the region. As Baruch Spinoza noted in the 1600's, nature abhors a vacuum. The logical successor to the Ottoman Sultans was their mutinous representative in Egypt, Muhammad 'Ali, who by 1839 had defeated an Ottoman force in southern Turkey.

By this time, however, the Middle East was falling under the dominion of a still stronger force - European imperialism. Unable to resolve their own power struggle, the European powers had fallen victim to the illusion that conquests overseas would generate power at home. United in this belief, they reached agreement that weak Ottoman rule was preferable to strong Egyptian rule, so they forced Muhammad 'Ali to bring his forces home. If they couldn't have the Middle East, no one could.

By the end of World War I, Britain, France, and Russia had carved up the Middle East into possessions, protectorates, "colonies", and "mandates" - one of the euphemisms politicians find essential. The exception was Turkey; having expelled Allied and Greek forces, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk began the long process of secularizing Turkey and establishing the first truly independent post-imperialist state in the region.

After World War II, their second civil war in thirty years, the exhausted European imperialists entered a new era of sanity - facing up to the reality that Europeans needed to stop shooting each other, and to abandon their fantasies of world empire.

Not having learned this crucial lesson, the Americans took Europe's place in the imperialist trap. Activated by exaggerated fears about access to oil and the hobgoblin of "world communism", and sublimely oblivious to the traumatic implications of Zionism, Washington began its fateful intrusion into the savage politics of the Middle East by issuing a blanket guarantee of the frontiers of Saudi Arabia, and presiding over the insertion of a Jewish state into the endemic battleground that was the Fertile Crescent.

In 1956 Britain and France made one last effort to resuscitate European imperialism by colluding with Israel in the Suez War. Their scheme was so infantile and clumsy that it infuriated Eisenhower, who expelled the British and French invaders from the Suez Canal Zone. He also expelled the Israeli forces from Sinai and the Gaza Strip - thereby taking the first step in the...