Patrick Tyler provides a misguided excuse for America’s ongoing role in the catastrophe that is the Middle East, says Charles Glass
Many Americans who voted for Barack Hussein Obama are hoping that his administration will at last break with America’s traditional, and invariably harmful, behaviour in the Middle East.
That would mean letting American oil companies fend for themselves in the free-for-all to control Mideast oil, leaving Israel’s colonists on the West Bank to pay their own way and abandoning the dictatorships in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to face the wrath of their populations without protection from American weapons and spies. And that is as likely as President Obama naming Ralph Nader to head the Securities and Exchange Commission and Patrick Fitzgerald, the US Attorney now prosecuting Obama’s Democratic Party comrades in Illinois, to be Attorney General.
Obama has improved the rhetoric, but no one who asked Hillary (“annihilate Iran”) Clinton to preside over the State Department or the failed Clinton-era hatchet man Dennis Ross to advise on Palestine has any intention of making the Middle East safe for democracy.
America’s right to intervene is too deeply ingrained a concept in the American body politic to be overturned by a president who needs funds to run again in four years. The modern history of American interference in the Middle East weighs heavily.
And it does not matter that the policies show every appearance of failure: no peace from an interminable “peace process” between Palestinians and Israelis; a declining standard of living in the region that pre-dated world economic recession by a generation; the lack of accountability, transparency and honesty in regimes that the US has fought to maintain in power; and the abundant hatred of American policy even among middle classes who otherwise would welcome trade and cooperation with the western world.
These apparent failures are viewed as the “price worth paying” for Israel to intensify its occupation of the West Bank, for US corporations to have easy access to Arab oil and for American weapons companies to recycle the petro-dollars with arms sales that cripple local economies and cost thousands of lives.
The White House – so long as the person presiding in the Oval Office comes from the Republican or Democratic Parties – won’t change. Nor, therefore, will the Middle East. (Read John R MacArthur’s just published You Can’t Be President (Melville House, New York) to understand how presidential politics work.)
The priorities remain the same for Obama as for his predecessors: oil comes first, and tied for second are the dual support structures for local dictators to punish their people and for Israel to do whatever it likes to the native population its settlers are gradually displacing.
From the time Franklin Roosevelt met Saudi King Abdel Aziz on board an American cruiser in the Suez Canal in 1944, the United States has lined up local strongmen to keep the natives quiet. Since 1967, the White House’s incumbents have paid with money extorted from the American taxpayer for the Israeli army to dominate its neighbours and to colonise the West Bank.
Obama promises “continuity” in foreign policy. How could he, without bringing inconsistency to sixty years of policy, abandon Standard Oil, the Israeli settlers and the Saudi royal family to the vagaries of the free market, open elections and the judgement of the World Court? His silent approval of Israel’s vicious assault over the past week on the 1.5m inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, most of them descendants of people expelled by Israel in 1947 and 1948, is indicative of the approach the world should expect.
Convincing American voters that nothing will change (and that things should change) will be hard. The propaganda that American presidents always try to do the best for the world, even when they haven’t, goes deep. Even the normally perceptive journalist Patrick Tyler, in his new book, A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East (Portobello Books, £9.99), perpetuates the myth of good intentions marred only by “miscalculations”.
Tyler excuses the catastrophe that is the modern Middle East, not in terms of American purpose, but as the result of mistakes by a series of well-intentioned presidents. He praises Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, “who laid foundation stones of American policy based on self-interest, a strong sense of justice, and a magnanimous American spirit”.
Self-interest, as perceived by the oil and Israeli lobbies, certainly applies. But the “strong sense of justice” and “magnanimous American spirit” are missing, despite Tyler’s rosy portrayal of America in the Middle East. A case in point is his rehearsal of the Anglo-American coup d’etat that overthrew Iran’s elected prime minister, Dr Mohammed Mossadegh, from office in 1953. Tyler perpetuates the Cold War excuse that the coup was necessary to counter the Soviet threat in Iran. In fact, it was suppressed a wave of nationalist sentiment that sought to recover natural resources for each country’s inhabitants.
The same CIA that overthrew Mossadegh disposed of another elected government, that of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, a year later to protect America’s United Fruit Company from losing its unused acreage to local farmers (with compensation). Property, not freedom, was the reason for both instances of regime change from elected to appointed governments. (Read the books on Guatemala and Iran by Tyler’s New York Times colleague, Steven Kinzer.)
“The [second] world war had brought Europe and America closer,” Tyler writes, “but the Middle East remained a region of Oriental complexity whose leaders felt a deep nostalgia for a triumphal Islamic past.”
He comes to this conclusion in a chapter about Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was nearly assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists and whose Muslim opponents were sponsored by the United States. In those days, the CIA thought good Muslims could save the region from socialism.
Is it really “Oriental complexity” that fed the resistance to American domination of Arab and Iranian societies or the natural desire of people to govern themselves and be treated as equals in the community of nations? Was it Oriental complexity that compelled thousands of Iraqis to resist American occupation after 2003 as they had occupation by the British after 1920?
One yearns for complexity in Washington to accommodate the wish of Middle Easterners to rule themselves, but history as chronicled by Tyler and put into play by presidents from Roosevelt to Obama points to simplicity. And, of course, consistency.
