Thirty years of Middle East lies just keep coming back to bite us

The West’s 'war on terror' was built on a series of deceptions to persuade us that our leaders were crushing Islamist extremism. In truth, they were nourishing it

The story: Did you believe it 30 years ago when they told you that the Oslo Accords would bring peace to the Middle East? That Israel would finally withdraw from the Palestinian territories it had illegally occupied for decades, end its brutal repression of the Palestinian people, and allow a Palestinian state to be created there? That the longest runing sore for the Arab and Muslim worlds would finally be brought to an end?

The reality: In fact, during the Oslo period, Israel stole more Palestinian land and expanded the building of illegal Jewish settlements at the fastest rate ever. Israel became even more repressive, building prison walls around Gaza and the West Bank while continuing to aggressively occupy both. Ehud Barak, Israeli prime minister of the time, “blew up” – in the words of one of his own main advisers – the US-backed negotiations at Camp David in 2000.

Weeks later, with the occupied Palestinian territories seething, opposition leader Ariel Sharon, backed by 1,000 armed Israeli troops, invaded occupied Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque – one of the holiest places for Muslims in the world. It was the final straw, triggering an uprising by Palestinians that Israel would crush with devastating military force and thereby tip the scales of popular support from the secular Fatah leadership to the Islamic resistance group Hamas.

Further afield, Israel’s ever-more abusive treatment of the Palestinians and its gradual takeover of al-Aqsa – backed by the West – served only to further radicalise the jihadist group al-Qaeda, providing the public rationale for attacking New York’s Twin Towers in 2001.

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The story: Did you believe it in 2001, after the 9/11 attack, when they told you that the only way to stop the Taliban harbouring al-Qaeda in Afghanistan would be for the US and UK to invade and “smoke them out” of their caves? And that in the process the West would save Afghanistan’s girls and women from oppression?

The reality: As soon as the first US bombs fell, the Taliban expressed readiness to surrender power to the US puppet Hamid Karzai, stay out of Afghan politics and hand Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s leader, over to an agreed third country.

The US invaded anyway, occupying Afghanistan for 20 years, killing at least 240,000 Afghans, most of them civilians, and spending some $2 trillion on propping up its detested occupation there. The Taliban grew stronger than ever, and in 2021 forced the US army out.

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The story: Did you believe it in 2003 when they told you that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that could destroy Europe in minutes? That Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, was the new Hitler, and that he had allied with al-Qaeda to destroy the Twin Towers? And that for those reasons the US and UK had no choice but to invade Iraq pre-emptively, even if the United Nations refused to authorise the attack.

The reality: For years, Iraq had been under severe sanctions following Saddam Hussein’s foolhardy decision to invade Kuwait, and upset the regional order in the Gulf designed to keep the oil flowing to the West. The US responded with its own show of military force, decimating the Iraqi army. The policy through the 1990s had been one of containment, including a sanctions regime estimated to have killed at least half a million Iraqi children – a price the then-US secretary of state Madeline Albright famously said was “worth it”.

Saddam Hussein had also to submit to a programme of rolling weapons inspections by UN experts. The inspectors had concluded with a high degree of certainty that there were no usable WMD in Iraq. The report that Saddam Hussein could fire on Europe, hitting it in 30 minutes, was a hoax, it eventually emerged, cooked up by the UK intelligence services. And the claim that Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda not only lacked any evidence but was patently nonsensical. Saddam’s highly secular, if brutal, regime was deeply opposed to, and feared, the religious zealotry of al-Qaeda.

The US-UK invasion and occupation, and the vicious sectarian civil war it unleashed between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, would kill – on the best estimates – more than 1 million Iraqis and drive from their homes a further 4 million. Iraq became a recruiting ground for Islamic extremism and led to the formation of a new, far more nihilistic, Sunni competitor to al-Qaeda called Islamic State. It also bolstered the power of the Shi’a majority in Iraq, who took power from the Sunnis and forged a closer alliance with Iran.

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The story: Did you believe it in 2011 when they told you that the West was backing the Arab Spring to bring democracy to the Middle East, and that Egypt – the largest Arab state – was at the vanguard of change in removing its authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak?

The reality: Mubarak had been propped up by the West as Egypt’s tyrant for three decades, and received billions in “foreign aid” each year from Washington – effectively a bribe to abandon the Palestinians and maintain peace with Israel under the terms of the 1979 Camp David agreement. But the US reluctantly turned its back on Mubarak after assessing that he could not withstand mounting protests sweeping the country from revolutionary forces released by the Arab Spring – a mix of secular liberals and Islamic groups led by the Muslim Brotherhood. With the army holding back, the protesters emerged victorious. The Brotherhood won elections to run the new democratic government.

Behind the scenes, however, the Pentagon was tightening ties to the remnants of Mubarak’s old regime and a new aspirant to the crown, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Reassured that there was no danger of US reprisals, el-Sisi finally launched a coup to return Egypt to military dictatorship in 2013. Israel lobbied to make sure el-Sisi’s military dictatorship would continue to receive its billions in annual US aid. In power, Sisi instituted the same repressive powers as Mubarak, ruthlessly crushed the Brotherhood and joined Israel in choking Gaza with a blockade to isolate Hamas, Palestine’s own version of the Brotherhood. In doing so, he gave a further shot in the arm to Islamic extremism, with the Islamic State establishing a presence in Sinai. Meanwhile, the US further confirmed that its commitment to the Arab Spring and democratic movements in the Middle East was non-existent.

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The story: Did you believe it when, also in 2011, they told you that Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi posed a terrible threat to his own population and had even given his soldiers Viagra to commit mass rape? That the only way to protect ordinary Libyans was for Nato, led by the US, UK and France, to bomb the country, and directly aid opposition groups to overthrow Gaddafi?

The reality: The claims against Gadaffi, as against Saddam Hussein, lacked any evidence, as a UK parliamentary investigation concluded five years later, in 2016. But the West needed a pretext to remove the Libyan leader, who was seen as a threat to western geopolitical interests. A release by Wikileaks of US diplomatic cables showed Washington’s alarm at Gadaffi’s efforts to create a United States of Africa to control the continent’s resources and develop an independent foreign policy. Libya, with Africa’s largest oil reserves, had been setting a dangerous precedent, offering Russia and China new oil exploration contracts and renegotiating existing contracts with western oil companies on less favourable terms. Gadaffi was also cultivating closer military and economic ties to Russia and China.

Nato’s bombing of Libya was never intended to protect its population. The country was immediately abandoned after Gadaffi’s overthrow and became a failed state of warlords and slave markets. Parts of Libya became a stronghold for Islamic State. Western weapons supplied to “rebels” ended up strengthening Islamic State and fuelling the sectarian bloodbaths in Syria and Iraq.

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The story: Did you believe it when, again from 2011 onwards, they told you that democratic forces were lined up to overthrow Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad, and that the country was on the verge of an Arab Spring-style revolution that would liberate its people?

The reality: There’s no doubt that Assad’s rule – combined with drought and crop failures brought on by climate change – led to growing unrest in parts of Syria by 2011. And it was also true that, like other secular Arab regimes based on the rule of a minority sect, Assad’s government depended on brutal authoritarianism to maintain its power over other, larger sects. But that is not why Syria ended up being plunged into a bloody civil war for 13 years that dragged in actors from Iran and Russia to Israel, Turkey, al-Qaeda and ISIS. That was largely down to Washington and Israel pursuing their geostrategic interests once again.

The real problem for Washington was not Assad’s authoritarianism – the US’s strongest allies in the region were all authoritarian – it was two other critical factors.

First, Assad belonged to the Alawite minority, a sect of Shi’a Islam that had a centuries-long, theological and sectarian feud with a dominant Sunni Islam in the region. Iran was also Shi’a. Iraq’s Shi’a majority had come to power after Washington eviscerated the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003. And finally, the Lebanese militia Hizbullah was Shi’a. Together, these comprised what Washington increasingly described as an “Axis of Evil”.

Second, Syria shared a long border with Israel and, pivotally, was the main geographic corridor connecting Iran and Iraq to Hizbullah guerrilla forces north of Israel, in Lebanon. Over decades, Iran had smuggled tens of thousands of increasingly powerful rockets and missiles into southern Lebanon, close to Israel’s northern border. That arsenal served during most of that time as a defensive umbrella, the main deterrence preventing Israel from invading and occupying Lebanon,as it had done for many years until Hizbullah fighters forced it to withdraw in 2000. But it also served to deter Israel from invading Syria and attacking Iran.

Days after 9/11, a senior US general, Wesley Clarke, was shown a paper by an official in the Pentagon setting out the US response to the toppling of the Twin Towers. The US was going to “take down” seven countries in five years. Notably, the bulk of the targets were the Middle East’s Shi’a strongholds: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. (The 9/11 culprits, let us note, were Sunni – mostly from Saudi Arabia.) Iran and its allies had resisted Washington’s moves – backed increasingly openly by the Sunni states, especially those in the oil-rich Gulf – to impose Israel as the regional hegemon and allow it to erase unopposed the Palestinians as a people.

Israel and Washington, we might note, are actively seeking to achieve these very goals right at this moment. And Syria was always critically important to realising their plan. Which is why, as part of Operation Timber Sycamore, the US secretly pumped huge sums of money into training its erstwhile enemies of al-Qaeda into creating an anti-Assad militia that drew in Sunni jihadist fighters from around the region, as well as arms from failed states like Libya. The plan was backed financially by the Gulf states, with military and assistance and intelligence from Turkey, Israel and the UK.

By late 2024 Assad’s main allies were in troubles of their own: Russia was pinned down by a Nato-led proxy war in Ukraine, while Tehran was increasingly on the back foot from Israeli strikes on Lebanon, Syria and Iran itself. It was at this moment that HTS – a rebranded al-Qaeda outfit – seized Damascus at lightning speed, forcing Assad to flee to Moscow.

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If you believed all of these stories, and still believe that the West is doing its best to bring to heel Islamic extremism and a supposed Russian imperialism in Ukraine, then you presumably also believe that Israel levelled Gaza, destroyed all its hospitals and starved its entire population of 2.3 million simply to “eliminate Hamas”, even though Hamas has not been eliminated.

You presumably believe that the International Court of Justice was wrong nearly a year ago to put Israel on trial for committing a genocide in Gaza. You presumably believe that even the most cautious Israeli Holocaust experts were wrong back in May to conclude that Israel had indisputably moved into a genocidal stage when it destroyed the “safe zone” of Rafah, where it had herded most of Gaza’s population. And you presumably believe that all the major human rights groups were wrong to conclude late last year, after lengthy research to protect themselves from smears from Israel and its apologists, that Israel’s devastation of Gaza has all the hallmarks of a genocide.

You will doubtless also believe that Washington’s long-held plan for “global full-spectrum dominance” is benign, and that Israel and the US don’t have Iran and China in their sights next.

If so, you will keep believing whatever they tell you – even as we hurtle, lemming-like, over the cliff edge, sure that, this time, it will all turn out differently.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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