by TARIQ ALI
To the victors, the spoils. A hundred years ago, after the conclusion of the First World War, the British Empire and its French ally broke up the old Ottoman-dominated Arab world and created new countries (Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia), principalities and outposts (the Gulf States, southern Yemen) and puppet states (Egypt, Iran), as well as laying the foundations on which Israel would be built, after the Second World War.
To the victors, the spoils. A hundred or so years later, after the collapse of the Communist world, the triumphant United States moved rapidly to balkanize the Arab world and remove all real and imagined threats to its hegemony. A tally of the 21st-century wars that have wrecked the Middle East provides a horrific balance sheet, by any standard. How is the situation they created viewed by the imperial strategists in Washington? ‘Freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are even more remote than they were under the authoritarian-nationalist Arab dictatorships. Even the most cynical occupants of the White House and the Pentagon find it difficult to justify in public the mess they have created.
Over the past year alone, the occupied Palestinian segment of the Arab world has been subjected to the most savage assault by the West, acting through its ever-loyal relay, Israel. The medieval Crusades were brutal, but the lack of technical superiority in weapons on either side gave the Arabs, fighting on their own lands, an advantage. This time Israel and its Western allies have been starving and killing Palestinians. Images of infant bodies being devoured by dogs wandering through deserted streets are a chilling symbol of the full-spectrum nature of this destruction. The British Prime Minister now wants to convince Trump to change the definition of genocide, to avoid future legal embarrassment. Western civilization/barbarism at play. Curiously enough, Trump, judging by his own remarks, may be less keen on killing than the leader of the British Labour Party.
On the face of it, American hegemony in the region is virtually complete. The us embarked on a global policy of divide, occupy, buy and rule. What started in earnest with the Yugoslav civil war has now become a regular feature of us strategy supported by Britain and most of the eu. The gains made by the West in the world’s richest energy zone since the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945 have been breathtaking. A brief survey of the region can help to highlight what has been lost and signal the direction in which it is heading.
Saudi Arabia
The first foreign call made by Trump after his 2025 inauguration was to the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman (mbs). Few were surprised. True, mbs had ordered the execution and dismemberment of a critic, Jamal Khashoggi, who backed another faction in the royal family and wrote regularly for the us press, criticizing mbs for ultra-liberalism and involvement in the Yemen war. Khashoggi’s family had been lampooned in Cities of Salt, the celebrated tetralogy by the exiled Saudi novelist, Abdurrahman Munif.footnote1 Khashoggi’s uncle was the personal doctor of the founding monarch, Ibn Saud, and became a rich and influential businessman. This proximity to Saudi and Jordanian royals led Jamal to imagine that he was untouchable, an error of judgement that cost him his life. He traipsed along happily to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to collect an official document. Captured by an mbs assassination team, or firqat el-nemr (‘leopard squad’), he was shot dead and dismembered, his body parts packed neatly in separate parcels. The Turkish secret police filmed the whole business, since the Consulate was naturally under surveillance. They prevented Khashoggi’s remains from leaving the country and Erdo?an exposed the Leopard Prince to global scrutiny. American colleagues professed themselves shocked and Khashoggi was granted a Time cover and matching obituary; but mbs was secure. The fuss soon died down. With the Israelis killing over two hundred Palestinian journalists in Gaza, a solitary Saudi, despite the victim’s high-society contacts in Riyadh and Washington, seems a bagatelle.
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