Source: Boiling Frogs PostAndrew Gavin Marshall
Empire in the Arab World
Taking a look at the historical realities of Western imperialism in
the Middle East and North Africa following World War II allows us to
place current conflicts in a wider context and understanding. Briefly
looking at the coup in Iran in 1953, the Egyptian Suez Crisis in 1956,
the Syrian Crisis in 1957, and the independence struggles in North
Africa against the French during the same period, we are able to see a
recurring focus on the same major states as to this very day being
strategically important for Western interests in a region of vast import
for the United States. As one key U.S. adviser in the State Department
acknowledged in 1945, Middle Eastern oil is “a stupendous source of
strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world
history.”
With research drawing from declassified State Department, Pentagon,
CIA, National Security Council and White House documents from the era,
the American Empire following World War II sought to define for itself a
more pragmatic strategy aimed at domination, which simultaneously
sought to separate itself from the formal colonial empires of France and
Britain, while still serving their interests, and in supporting
“moderate” and pro-Western Arab nationalists in the region in order to
undermine the “extremist nationalists” like Nasser in Egypt,
acknowledging that national liberation was a force of history through
which the United States would have to navigate if it had any hope of
maintaining itself as an imperial power.
