Nu’man Abd al-Wahid Source: Al Mayadeen English
Nu’man Abd al-Wahid examines the historical roots of US involvement in West Asia, arguing that abandoning Britain’s imperial framework is essential to ending America’s cycle of regional wars.
Unlike Netanyahu, Trump has also disappointed and enraged his domestic political base, the so-called Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, which had wanted no more foreign policy entanglements or ‘forever wars’ and for him to implement ‘America First’ policies. One of the earliest signs that the United States-Zionist War on Iran was proving unwinnable came when the media began peddling the notion of an “off-ramp” to end the war. In effect, the search was on for a symbolic event which could be proudly marketed to the Western populace as evidence that the entire criminal operation had been a success for the global Epsteinian-Zionist ruling order, even though the said objective of regime change was far from achieved.
This essay aims to show that the origins of the ‘ramp’ or quagmire, in which the United States is now entangled, have their roots in the United States taking its lead from its former imperial master, Britain. It further argues that the beginning of a viable and permanent “off-ramp” for the United States lies in acknowledging this historical reality and rejecting the twentieth-century British imperialist initiatives that helped create it.
The origins of the current war on Iran can easily be traced back to the 1953 American-British coup in Iran, which overthrew the democratically elected Iranian leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh had earned the wrath of British imperialism in the early 1950s by having the audacity and ambition to nationalise the Iranian oil industry. This caused immense pain to the then imperialist thugs ruling Britain, headed by the “socialist” Clement Atlee and his Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, who naturally believed such an industry should be under the auspices of British imperialism. As such, this duo immediately produced devising plans to remove Mosaddegh, with a view to restoring the profits of Iranian oil to what they considered its rightful owners: Britain, and more specifically the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later renamed British Petroleum (BP).
Atlee’s government informed Washington DC about their conspiracy in the hope of enlisting American support for their connivance. The United States at this point, in the Cold War, informed the British imperialists they were not interested. In the words of Dr. Stephen Dorril, an academic specialist in the history of British intelligence, “When Atlee informed [President] Truman of the military contingency plan, under American pressure, the Cabinet [Government’s decision makers] was forced to back down…”. After Winston Churchill returned to power in Britain in 1951, the conspiracy was revived and executed in 1953.
Churchill had succeeded in convincing the Americans to join the conspiracy for three reasons. Firstly, there was a change in the American leadership. General Ike Eisenhower, who had led Western forces in the liberation of Western Europe in 1944-5, had come to power. So, he had worked with Churchill before. Secondly, the British informed the Americans that Iran was on the verge of being taken over by the United States’ Cold War nemeses, Soviet Union-backed Communists which would then have ripple effects across the developing world. Thirdly, the British cut the Americans in on future Iranian oil profits. Britain forsake 40% of Iranian oil profits to the Americans, while it retained 40% or to paraphrase the words of the gangster in the Godfather film, Don Fanucci, the Americans were allowed to “dip their peak” in Iranian oil profits if they assisted in overthrowing Mosaddegh.
On this basis, the Americans were roped in by British imperialist gangsterism to destroy Iranian democracy and economic sovereignty in August 1953. Mosaddegh was ousted and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, otherwise known as the “Shah” further cemeted his rule. Thereafter, the United States took the lead in upholding Iranian despotism for Western imperialism as it supplied the Shah with the tools of repression to crush Iranian dissent and opposition for the next three and half decades until the 1979 Iranian revolution overthrew him. Since the revolution, the United States has taken a hostile approach to Iran that has now culminated in a failed attempted regime change war.
Of course, it wasn’t only in Iran that the United States adopted British strategy which it was then held solely responsible for. A few years after the Iranian coup of 1953, Britain hatched another conspiracy aimed at regime change in the Middle East. This time it chose France and its own colonial offspring, the Zionist entity, “Israel”, as partners to provide assistance in a murderous campaign to unseat the independent Egyptian Arab leader Gamal Abdul-Nasser in 1956. An Egyptian exercise in economic sovereignty had propelled Britain to launch another conspiracy. Like Mosaddegh, Nasser earned the wrath of the British by virtue of nationalising a vital economic resource, the Suez Canal, which runs through Egyptian territory. More so, Nasser represented a vision of Arab unity which diametrically opposed the British divide and rule order established with the Sykes-Picot agreement in the wake of World War I. Nasser’s vision, in theory, would’ve moulded the Arab region into one political and economic force whereby oil profits were prioritised for the people of the region instead of Britain’s economy.
Another aspect of this conspiracy was that Britain and France concealed their plans from the United States a mere eleven years after the latter had led the liberation of western Europe from German Nazis. Unlike in Iran in 1953, the United States wasn’t enamoured, put their foot down and refused to indulge the British and French-led conspiratorial regime change operation in October 1956. Although this episode caused a temporary fracture among major Western nations, it wasn’t long-lasting. Then President Eisenhower soon realised that Nasser and what he represented needed to be contained in order for Western Europe, specifically Britain, to economically prosper in the post-World War II era.
The new British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, also acknowledged that British prosperity was dependent on the Persian Gulf's oil profits. He had privately claimed the British economy would “collapse” and, without the oil profits from the Persian Gulf, the UK would not be able to survive. Macmillan wasn’t exaggerating. In the 19th century, the British elite had plundered and pillaged continental India (today’s India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) to the tune of billions of pounds sterling, some say trillions, in order to grant its people some prosperity. Therefore, the Americans needed to maintain the British division of the Arab region right through the Cold War in order for Britain to become a viable economic entity and military partner to meet the challenge of the Soviet Union.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait, a former region of the southern Iraqi city of Basra (before Britain clefted it away to prevent a proposed Berlin to Baghdad railway line extending to the Gulf), in early August 1990, Britain was at hand to push the United States into a military solution. The then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in the United States at the time of the invasion and goaded George Bush that “this is no time to go wobbly”. Naturally, she would later write in her autobiography that during the ensuing war, she had wanted the Americans to continue the war into Baghdad and depose Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The failure, she wrote, “to follow through the victory so that he [Saddam Hussain] was publicly humiliated in the eyes of his subjects and Islamic neighbours was a mistake which stemmed from excessive emphasis placed right from the start on international consensus”, Thatcher predates the Neoconservatism’s (the Western political cult most associated with contemporary regime change operations) contempt for international norms as represented by the United Nations or as she says, the “opinion of the UN counted for too much”.
The immediate overthrow of Hussain, to the sorrow of Thatcher, didn’t materialise. But the Iraq war of 1991 kept the United States entangled in Iraq, by virtue of imposing stringent economic sanctions and intermittent bombing campaigns right through the 1990s, until the 9/11 Islamist terror attacks helped to provide George W. Bush (the son) with a false pretext to invade Iraq and belatedly fulfill Thatcher’s dream of deposing Hussain and humiliating him in front of, not only his Islamic neighbours, but the entire world. The American-British illegal invasion of Iraq proved immensely costly for the Americans, but more so for the Iraqis, with up to a million killed, murderous sectarianism unleashed, and their country destroyed.
By all rational accounts, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were born out of a Western strategy to use extremist movements as a counterweight against Third World independence movements among Muslim-majority nations. In the particular case of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Americans led a campaign to destabilise the communist government by inviting indoctrinated Muslims from all over the world to overthrow the communist rulers of Afghanistan. Yet, once again, this strategy of using what today is referred to as ‘Islamists’ to support Western interests, did not initiate with the United States. Britain had initiated and prompted this strategy in the early part of the 20th century well before the United States became a global hegemon. The two major Islamic trends that lay behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks were the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi-Wahhabi ideology. Britain was pivotal in the emergence and early growth of both these political trends.
Firstly, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Cairo in 1920s by Hasan al-Banna during his teaching stint in Ismaliyya, a town generously populated by employees of the British-owned Suez Canal Company, in 1928. One of al-Banna’s admirers was a certain Mr. James Heyworth-Dunne, an employee of the British Embassy in Cairo. His admiration, even hero-worship, of al-Banna is contained in the first book (in the English language) on the Muslim Brotherhood, “Religious and Political Trends in Modern Egypt”. This book is considered by one authoritative account as a primary source of information on the origins of the group.
Heyworth-Dunne was a participant in some of the early history of the Muslim Brotherhood, but implies his acquaintance with the group was purely as an observer, rather than a participant. As an employee of the British Empire, Heyworth-Dunne was enthusiastic about using Islam as represented by al-Banna, because he saw it as a battering ram to defend British imperialist interests in Egypt. As he writes in his book, before the arrival of al-Banna, Egyptian political violence was focused on the imperialist occupier, but with the arrival of al-Banna, Heyworth-Dunne notes, the violence became “Egyptian against Egyptian”. Al-Banna’s movement, with its prime focus on supposedly ‘defending Islam’ because it is ‘under threat’, was a gift to British imperialism because it took the focus away from the British occupation of Egypt and refocused it on other Egyptians.
Secondly, the Saudi-Wahhabi clan was an isolated and exiled group in Kuwait in the late 1890s. After the British armed the Wahhabis, they re-established themselves in Riyadh in 1902. After World War I, in co-ordination with British imperialist interests in the wider Arab region, specifically in Palestine, they expanded across the Arabian peninsula. The British named the Saudi-Wahhabi territorial expansion “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”. In the post-World War II era, these two Islamic trends were initially brought geo-politically together to fend off anti-Western 3rd World nationalism and communism. This duo’s initial target was the aforementioned Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser. A few decades later, they coalesced once again after the Soviet Union military intervened in Afghanistan. As Professor Jamsheed Choksy wrote in World Affairs journal, the Saudi weaponisation of ideology was “tactfully useful in the West’s struggle against the Soviet Union”. As such, the Saudis poured billions in the promotion of its brand of Wahhabi Islam to the point where they no longer needed the Muslim Brotherhood. This strategy of utilising extremists to defend Western interests was recently corroborated by the current Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman in an interview with The Washington Post. He stated that the United States and Britain instructed the Saudis to use lavish funds to spread Wahhabism to counter the Soviet Union and communism during the Cold War. It should be no surprise that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers of airplanes on 9/11 were Saudi nationals. The al-Qaeda group, headed by Saudi veteran of the 1980s Afghanistan war, Osama bin Laden, was held responsible for the terrorist atrocity.
Whether it is the challenges posed by the current war on Iran, the War on Iraq or Islamist terrorism, all can be shown to have historically originated by the United States needlessly following in the footsteps of British imperialism’s strategy. Quite conclusively, the United States mounted the “ramp” in historical stages. First in Iran in 1953, then after 1956 by adopting the British divide and rule order in West Asia i.e Sykes-Picot agreement. On the back of this adoption, the United States utilised another British strategy i.e utilising ‘Islamists’ to fight off Third World independence, which threatened the Sykes-Picot division. Ultimately, if the United States is to ever find a permanent “off-ramp”, it first and foremost must acknowledge that its blood-soaked and destructive entanglements in West Asia have their roots entirely due to following the lead of its former imperial master. After the failure of Trump’s MAGA, any future ‘America First’ strategy must inevitably acknowledge and contend with the British imperialist roots of all the ‘forever wars’ in West Asia.
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