Carved into artificial states after the first world war, it's been bombed and occupied – by the US, Israel, Britain and France – and locked down with US bases and western-backed tyrannies. As the Palestinian blogger Lina Al-Sharif tweeted on Armistice Day this year, the "reason World War One isn't over yet is because we in the Middle East are still living the consequences".
The Arab uprisings that erupted in Tunisia a year ago have focused on corruption, poverty and lack of freedom, rather than western domination or Israeli occupation. But the fact that they kicked off against western-backed dictatorships meant they posed an immediate threat to the strategic order.
Since the day Hosni Mubarak fell in Egypt, there has been a relentless counter-drive by the western powers and their Gulf allies to buy off, crush or hijack the Arab revolutions. And they've got a deep well of experience to draw on: every centre of the Arab uprisings, from Egypt to Yemen, has lived through decades of imperial domination. All the main Nato states that bombed Libya, for example – the US, Britain, France and Italy – have had troops occupying the country well within living memory.
If the Arab revolutions are going to take control of their future, then, they'll need to have to keep an eye on their recent past. So here are seven lessons from the history of western Middle East meddling, courtesy of the archive of Pathé News, colonial-era voice of Perfidious Albion itself.
1. The west never gives up its drive to control the Middle East, whatever the setbacks
Take the last time Arab states started dropping out of the western orbit – in the 1950s, under the influence of Nasser's pan-Arabism. In July 1958, radical Iraqi nationalist army officers overthrew a corrupt and repressive western-backed regime (sounds familiar?), garrisoned by British forces.
But within a few days – compared with the couple of months it took them to intervene in Libya this year – Britain and the US had moved thousands of troops into Jordan and Lebanon to protect two other client regimes from Nasserite revolt. Or, as Pathé News put it in its next report, to "stop the rot in the Middle East"
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Fast forward to 2003, and the US and Britain had invaded and occupied the entire country. Iraq was finally back under full western control – at the cost of savage bloodletting and destruction. It was the strength of the Iraqi resistance that ultimately led to this week's American withdrawal – but even after the pullout, 16,000 security contractors, trainers and others will remain under US command. In Iraq, as in the rest of the region, they never leave unless they're forced to.
2. Imperial powers can usually be relied on to delude themselves about what Arabs actually think
No hint from the newsreel that a third of the population of Libya had died under the brutality of Italian colonial rule, or of the heroic Libyan resistance movement led by Omar Mukhtar, hanged in an Italian concentration camp. But then the "mask of imperialism" the voiceover describes Mussolini as wearing fitted British politicians of the time just as well.
Qahtan Al-Shaebi and lord Shakilton signing South Yemen Independace agreement on Nov 7,1967 |
A British soldier seizes a demonstrator in Aden's Crater district in 1967. Photograph: Terry Fincher/Getty |
The neocons famously expected a cakewalk in Iraq and early US and British coverage of the invasion still had Iraqis throwing flowers at invading troops when armed resistance was already in full flow. And UK TV reports of British troops "protecting the local population" from the Taliban in Afghanistan can be strikingly reminiscent of 1950s newsreels from Aden and Suez.
Even during this year's uprisings in Egypt and Libya, western media have often seen what they wanted to see in the crowds in Tahrir Square or Benghazi – only to be surprised, say, when Islamists end up calling the shots or winning elections. Whatever happens next, they're likely not to get it.
3. The Big Powers are old hands at prettifying client regimes to keep the oil flowing
When it comes to the reactionary Gulf autocracies, to be fair, they don't really bother. But before the anti-imperialist wave of the 1950s did for a slew of them, the British, French and Americans worked hard to dress up the stooge regimes of the time as forward-looking constitutional democracies.
Sometimes that effort came rapidly unstuck, as this breezy report on Libya's "first major test of democracy" under the US-British puppet king Idris makes no effort to conceal.
Elections were also rigged and thousands of political prisoners tortured in 1950s Iraq. But so far as British officialdom – entrenched as "advisers" in Baghdad and their military base at Habbaniya – and the newsreels shown in British cinemas at the time were concerned, Faisal's Iraq was a benign and "go-ahead" democracy.
In fact that would only happen when oil was nationalised – and six years later Said was killed on the streets of Baghdad as he tried to escape dressed as a woman. Half a century on and the British were back in control of Basra, while today Iraqis are battling to prevent a new takeover of their oil in a devastated country US and British politicians again like to insist is a democracy.
Any "Arab spring" state that ditches self-determination for the west's embrace can of course expect a similar makeover – just as client regimes that never left its orbit, such as the corrupt police state of Jordan, have always been hailed as islands of good government and "moderation".
4. People in the Middle East don't forget their history – even when the US and Europe does
The gap could hardly be wider. When Nasser's former information minister and veteran journalist Mohamed Heikal recently warned that the Arab uprisings were being used to impose a new
"Sykes-Picot agreement" – the first world war carve-up of the Arab east between Britain and France – Arabs and others in the Middle East naturally knew exactly what he was talking about.
It has shaped the entire region and its relations with the west ever since. But to most non-specialists in Britain and France, Sykes-Picot might as well be an obscure brand of electric cheese-grater.
The same goes for more than a century of Anglo-American interference, occupation and anti-democratic subversion against Iran. British media expressed bafflement at popular Iranian hostility to Britain when the embassy in Tehran was trashed by demonstrators last month. But if you know the historical record, what could be less surprising?
Mossadegh, Iran's ousted prime minister, during his trial in the wake of the CIA-MI6 orchestrated coup that overthrew his elected government in 1953. Photograph: AFP |
Pro-Mossadegh demonstrators are portrayed as violent and destructive, while the violent CIA-MI6 organised coup that ousted him in favour of the Shah is welcomed as a popular and "dramatic turn of events". The newsreel damns as a "virtual dictator" the elected Mossadegh, who at his subsequent treason trial expressed the hope that his fate would serve as an example in "breaking the chains of colonial servitude". The real dictator, the western-backed Shah whose brutal autocracy paved the way for the Iranian revolution and the Islamic Republic 26 years later, is hailed as the people's sovereign.
So when western politicians rail against Iranian authoritarianism or claim to champion democratic rights while continuing to prop up a string of Gulf dictatorships, there won't be many in the Middle East who take them too seriously.
5. The west has always presented Arabs who insist on running their own affairs as fanatics
The revolutionary upheaval that began last December in Sidi Bouzid is far from being the first popular uprising against oppressive rule in Tunisia. In the 1950s the movement against French colonial rule was naturally denounced by colonial governments and their supporters as "extremist" and "terrorist".
Pathé News certainly had no truck with their campaign for independence. In 1952, it blamed an attack on a police station on a "burst of nationalist agitation" across North Africa. And as colonial police conduct a "vigorous search for terrorists" – though the bewildered men being dragged from their homes at gunpoint look more like Captain Renault's "usual suspects" in Casablanca – the presenter complains that "once again fanatics intervene and make matters worse".
6. Foreign military intervention in the Middle East brings death, destruction and divide and rule
It's scarcely necessary to dig into the archives to work that out. The experience of the last decade is clear enough. Whether it's a full-scale invasion and occupation, such as Iraq, where hundreds of thousands have been killed, or aerial bombardment for regime change under the banner of "protecting civilians" in Libya, where tens of thousands have died, the human and social costs have been catastrophic.
And that's been true throughout the baleful history of western involvement in the Middle East. Pathé's silent film of the devastation of Damascus by French colonial forces during the Syrian revolt of 1925 might as well be of Falluja in 2004 or Sirte this autumn – if you ignore the fezzes and pith helmets.
And now the religious sectarianism and ethnic divisions fostered under the US-British occupation of Iraq have been mobilised by the west's Gulf allies to head off or divert the challenge of the Arab awakening: in the crushing of the Bahrain uprising, the isolation of Shia unrest in Saudi Arabia and the increasingly sectarian conflict in Syria – where foreign intervention could only escalate the killing and deny Syrians control of their own country.
7. Western sponsorship of Palestine's colonisation is a permanent block on normal relations with the Arab world
Israel could not have been created without Britain's 30-year imperial rule in Palestine and its sponsorship of large-scale European Jewish colonisation under the banner of the Balfour declaration of 1917. An independent Palestine, with an overwhelming Palestinian Arab majority, would clearly never have accepted it.
That reality is driven home in this Pathé News clip from the time of the Arab revolt against the British mandate in the late 1930s, showing British soldiers rounding up Palestinian "terrorists" in the occupied West Bank towns of Nablus and Tulkarm – just as their Israeli successors do today.
Britain's colonial reflex, in Palestine as elsewhere, was always to present itself as "guardian of law and order" against the "threat of rebellion" and "master of the situation" – as in this delusional 1938 newsreel from Jerusalem.
The unconditional nature of that alliance, which remains the pivot of US policy in the Middle East, is one reason why democratically elected Arab governments are likely to find it harder to play patsy to US power than the dictatorial Mubaraks and Gulf monarchs. The Palestinian cause is embedded in Arab and Islamic political culture. Like Britain before it, the US may struggle to remain "master of the situation" in the Middle East.
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