Before invading Iraq in 2003, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld didn’t know the difference between the Sunni and Shi’a branches of Islam, much less why it would matter and turn out badly once they ousted Saddam Hussein. So a brief history of Islam in order before delving deeper into U.S. interventions in the Middle East. First, a disclaimer. I am not an authority on Islam, but I have traveled extensively in the Muslim world: India (1986, 1991), Egypt (1986, 1994), Bosnia (three times 1992 – 1994), Turkey (2015), Morocco (2018), Jordan (2022), and Palestine (1991,…

First the demographics. Of the 1.6 Billion or so Muslims in the world, roughly 85%, 1.35 Billion, are Sunni, the rest, 15%, 240 million, Shi’a. Westerners who tend to hyperfocus on Islam in the Arab world likely do not know that only 20% of all Muslims live in the Middle East and North Africa. Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, and there are substantial Muslim populations in Malaysia, southern Thailand, India, Pakistan and sub-Saharan Africa, e.g., Nigeria, Senegal, Mali and Chad, the vast majority of them Sunni.  In the Middle East, Sunni and…

Even before World War 1 was over, two colonial administrators, Mark Sykes for Great Britain and François Georges-Picot for France, aristocrats both, carved up the defunct Ottoman Empire into colonial spheres of influence based on lines drawn quite literally in the sand, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq for Great Britain, Syria and Lebanon for France.  Sykes and Picot did all this dicing and slicing in secret, breaking the promises of self-determination the British made to the Arabs during World War I to encourage an “Arab revolt” against the Ottomans, who had unwisely aligned with the Axis Powers.…

[Featured image: Patrick Baz / AFP / Getty Images] In the late 1800’s, Theodore Herzl and other Jewish leaders in Europe began pushing for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then under Ottoman control. After World War I, Palestine was governed under Sykes-Picot by the British, and there was growing Zionist pressure to carry out the Balfour Declaration, a 1917 letter from Lord Balfour, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, to Baron Rothschild, a leader of the Jewish community in London, in which Balfour promised “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, . . .…

Syria was created as a French mandate after World War I as the Arab Kingdom of Syria,  but in 1946, with King Faisal as its nominal head, Syria became an independent, democratic, self-governing country. Or so Syrians were led to believe. Shukri al-Quwatli was elected as independent Syria’s first president. Scion of a wealthy Damascus merchant family, Muslim but Jesuit-educated, he had been a long-time activist in the campaign for Syrian independence, first from the Ottomans and after Sykes-Picot from the French, and along the way both jailed him.  As President, Quwatli blocked the construction of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, shorthand Tapline,…

[Featured Image: Amirani Media] In 1953, the CIA deposed Mohammed Mosaddegh, the Prime Minister of Iran, and replaced him with Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the man we call “the Shah,” whose autocratic rule led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and 40 years of enmity between Iran and America.  How did we get there? In 1905-06, widespread protests compelled Mozaffar ad-Din Shah of the Qajar Dynasty, until then the absolute monarch of Persia, to permit the adoption of Iran’s first constitution, indeed the very first in the Middle East, with a constitutional monarchy and an elected parliament, the Majlis. In 1935,…

A chronology of U.S. policy in the Middle East would be incomplete without the Suez Crisis, the 1956 invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel after Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.  In 1952, Nasser and other nationalistic Egyptian Army junior officers, the previously clandestine Free Officers Movement, forced the abdication of King Farouk, widely despised for his self-indulgent lifestyle – the CIA dubbed him the “fat fucker” – and his corrupt relationship with the British, who still controlled and operated the Suez Canal that runs through the heart of Egypt. Nasser, a naturally charismatic…

Featured Image: For a Perfect Holiday – Visit Egypt [AFP] Following the partition of Palestine and the establishment of Israel in 1948, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of the Sinai eight years later during the 1956 Suez Crisis, only a most tenuous ceasefire had existed between Israel and its Arab neighbors. On June 3, 1967, it ended. Israel attacked Egyptian airfields, destroying virtually its entire air force on the ground, simultaneously launching an armor offensive across the Bar Lev line into the Gaza strip and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, routing the stunned defenders. Two days later, Israel did…

After restoring the monarchy in 1953, the Shah, to his credit, continued the progressive reforms started by Mossadegh. As part of his White Revolution, the Shah broke up large estates and gave land to small farmers, started a school meal program for poor children, built new universities, gave women the vote, and modernized Iran’s infrastructure and military, all paid for with oil revenues that increased six-fold during his reign. At the same time, the Shah had a huge ego and sense of entitlement. In 1967, he crowned himself Shāhanshāh, the “Emperor,” and in 1971 celebrated year 2500 of…

[Featured Image: Karim Sahib / Getty] Iraq, from the Arabic “araqa,” meaning “deeply rooted, well-watered,” did not come into being until the end of World War I, courtesy of Sykes – Picot, which created the British Mandate of Mesopotamia. But truth be told, Iraq should not even be a country, and making it one would, along with CIA meddling and two U.S. wars, eventually cause misery for millions. Mesopotamia, Greek for “the land between the rivers,” the Tigris and Euphrates, is often called the “cradle of civilization,” the birthplace of Bronze Age settlements dating back to 10,000…