World War 1 and the Middle-East

70June 2015

F Colonel Gadaﬃ were still running

Libya there would not be mass

migration across the Mediterra-

nean, with thousands drowned because

of unscrupulous traﬃckers. Gadaﬃ was

guilty of the sin of all those secular dic-

tators. He was too independent of ‘the

West’. Britain and France, backed by

America, bombed him out of existence.

Their excuse was that he intended

assaulting civilians in a provincial town.

They got the cover of a UN Security

Council resolution, which a weak Russia

failed to veto. Now Libya is a failed state

racked by civil war.

Where do these Mediterranean

migrants come from? Many are from

Syria, another state aﬄicted by civil war

encouraged by the West. Since  the

Syrian rebels against the Assad regime

have been covertly ﬁnanced and armed

by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, with

the CIA and Israeli intelligence oversee-

ing the details.

Recall the House of Commons vote

which denied Tory Premier David Cam-

eron permission to bomb Syria by 

votes to  in . Encouraged by

the US, Cameron and France’s Hollande

wanted to repeat in Syria the regime-

change they had brought about in Libya

two years before. It was surely Ed Mili-

band’s ﬁnest moment as Labour leader

that he refused to go along.  Tories

and nine Lib Dems voted against Cam-

eron too. This House of Commons No in

turn gave the US Congress the impetus

to stop Obama’s impending assault on

Assad.

In Syria the pretext was to be that

Assad used chemical weapons against

his foreign-ﬁnanced rebels. If these

rebels succeed in overthrowing the

Assad regime, the country’s Christians,

Alawites and many Shia Muslims are

likely to have their throats cut.

The paradox now is that support for

the Assad regime in Syria and its Shia-

backed counterpart in Iraq looks like

being the best hope of holding back the

ISIS monster which these ‘rebel’ groups

with their dubious sources of arms and

ﬁnance have spawned. America needs

Iran and its clients as allies, not oppo-

nents, in the region.

Najibiullah in Afghanistan, at the

time of the Russian intervention there,

was the ﬁrst of the secular dictators

America sought to overthrow by back-

ing the mujahideen fundamentalists

against him. Osama Bin Laden was on

the US payroll then. Najibullah was exe-

cuted by the Taliban in .

Saddam Hussein was the second,

overthrown by Bush and Blair in their

 invasion of Iraq. When Saddam

ruled Iraq, Sunni, Shia and Christians

lived peaceably side by side. Now Iraq

too is well on the way to being a failed

state, racked by the Shia-Sunni conﬂict

which America encouraged until the

tormented politics of the region

spawned ISIS. Najibullah, Saddam Hus-

sein, Gadaﬃ and Assad were certainly

dictators but the West did not realise

that worse could follow.

Since Bush invaded Iraq the USA has

become self-suﬃcient in oil because of

the fracking revolution. America no

longer needs Saudi oil as it once did.

This is the basis of Obama’s turn

towards Iran, which in turn causes con-

sternation among the Saudis and

Israelis. The Saudi-Israeli response is to

try to up Sunni-Shia antagonism fur-

ther, building on what the Americans

had started, seeking thereby to under-

mine Iran’s clients in the Iraqi and

Syrian governments and in the Leba-

nese Hezbollah, in the hope of stymying

a US-Iran deal.

A seminal book on the historical

Western imperialism stitched up

the area, but it is unravelling.

By Anthony Coughlan

World War 1 and

the Middle-East

INTERNATIONAL Middle-East