Western powers have repeatedly backed or empowered religious extremists when it suited strategic interests, while undermining secular nationalist movements across the Middle East and Central Asia.
The comforting presupposition that the west is always the innocent victim of political violence, but never its perpetrator, has collapsed.
Since 9/11, this argument has been repeated every time a strike – real, thwarted or imaginary – has been launched against the west. The unprovoked and illegal attacks on Iran by the United States and Israel on 28 February put an end to any lingering doubts that the west is a benign force in international politics.
The ‘innocent victim’ illusion also masked a crucial omission that even a cursory study of modern history starkly reveals. The west helped to promote Islamic fundamentalism in many countries where it emerged in violent form by undermining or overthrowing secular nationalist governments.
The internal threats to governments across the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere from local religious extremists have been matched by external attacks led by the United States, Israel and their allies.
These began in the 1950s and 1960s when secular nationalism was ascendant across Arabia. At the height of the Cold War, Britain and the United States opposed Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who had repressed religious extremists such as the Muslim Brotherhood, because he was an economic nationalist with ties to the Soviet Union.
The policies of the west towards religious fundamentalism have taken two distinct forms – support of extremists and opposition to modernity, and overthrowing secularists. These are diametrically opposite to what governments have always told their populations.
Saudi Arabia has been one of the world’s most extreme fundamentalist states. It produced most of the 9/11 hijackers, has financed religious extremism in Pakistani schools and was a primary recruiting ground for Al Qaeda in Iraq. It is the least democratic and most repressive state in the region, makes Iran look distinctly modern by comparison, but remains Washington’s oldest ally in the Middle East.
Together with President Muhammad Zia-Ul-Haq in Pakistan, the Saudis and the US financed and trained the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists they could recruit to oppose the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s. These anti-communist proxies were a successful antidote to communism in Central Asia. However, one consequence of their success was the Islamisation of politics in Islamabad; another was the destruction of modernising influences in Afghanistan and the rise to power of the Taliban.
In 1953, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and restored the Shah to power. The coup thwarted attempts to nationalise British-Iranian Oil and enabled US oil companies to help themselves to 40 per cent of the industry. It also destroyed a secular, modernising government, ushered in 25 years of repression and corruption, and paved the way for Islamic fundamentalism to become the dominant form of political opposition in the country. This ‘blowback’ culminated in the revolution of January 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Tehran.
Ten years later the Prime Minister of Iraq Abdul-Karim Qassem, a secular nationalist opposed to British and US oil interests, was overthrown by Ba’athists including Saddam Hussein, backed by the CIA. Four decades on, the US and its allies removed the Ba’athists from power when they became greedy and disobedient, turning Iraq into a charnel house of violence, misery and anti-Western instability.
Washington’s closest ally in the region, Israel, has also helped to spawn Islamic extremists. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon was an attempt to destroy the secular PLO, whose leadership had fled there. It failed to achieve this objective and instead turned Hezbollah into a militant religious and political organisation it still fights in Beirut and southern Lebanon today.
Similarly in the occupied territories, Israel’s opposition to the increasingly popular PLO resulted in financial and infrastructure support for Hamas (sometimes via Qatar), which emerged in 1987 and soon became the most popular political movement in Gaza. In 2006 it won free and fair elections in the strip.
Later, when Hamas refused to take orders from the Israelis, the bags of money they had received were replaced by periodic slaughters (Israel’s ‘mowing the lawn’; Operations Cast Lead, 2008-9; Pillar of Defence, 2012; Protective Edge, 2014, etc.) and in 2023, after a breakout from what even Israelis described as a ‘concentration camp’, a genocidal slaughter conducted with drones, aircraft, remote-controlled missiles and infantry.
After 7 October 2023, international law, including the crucial distinction between civilians and combatants, was entirely erased.
With Iran’s help but not simply as its proxies, both Hezbollah and Hamas became movements which led the resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation of Arab lands. Meanwhile the PLO descended into collaboration on Israel’s dime, becoming increasingly corrupt, irrelevant and hated by Palestinians.
If Newton’s Third Law of Motion – for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction – has an application to international politics, it is to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
This is also the context for claims made in Washington, London, Tel Aviv and Canberra about the threat posed by religious extremism, especially in Iran. The west’s support for Islamic fundamentalism has been unprincipled and opportunistic. When it has suited their interests, Western governments have backed the people they now brand terrorists and opposed those who stood in their way. The reverse is also true.
In 2012, while serving as a senior advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan (later to become Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor) admitted in an email that “Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria”. Radical Islamist Abu Mohammad al-Jolani was an ISIS leader and featured on ‘most wanted’ posters in the United States for terrorist crimes. He is now President of Syria, replacing the secularist Bashar al-Assad. Al-Jolani has become a welcome guest in the Oval Office.
Which new groups, perhaps even more anti-western, will appear as a consequence of Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Lebanon and genocide in Gaza? If the mullahs eventually fall in Tehran, will they be replaced by people less cautious and conservative in their dealings with the region? They are likely to be less obedient and more defiant. For the US that’s an unforgivable crime, which usually results in attempted coups, leadership decapitations and never-ending wars.
Dr Scott Burchill is Honorary Fellow in International Relations at Deakin University. He is the author of The National Interest in International Relations Theory (Palgrave Macmillan 2005), Misunderstanding International Relations (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and co-author and editor of Theories of International Relations (5th ed Palgrave Macmillan 2013). He has also taught at Monash University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Tasmania.
He is a regular commentator on ABC Radio and TV.