Iran, a new chapter in the eternal war of the Middle East

Robert Fisk (1946-2020) was, for three decades, the most influential, well-informed, and criticized foreign correspondent in the Middle East. He covered every war in a region perpetually at war. In 2005 he published The great war for civilizationThese voluminous memoirs (1,511 pages in the Spanish edition) contained, in their penultimate paragraph, a melancholic phrase: "In the Middle East, people relive their past history over and over again, every day."

Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and the brief Franco-British colonization, which includes the creation of Israel (1948), this hinge between East and West has remained in turmoil. It was a battleground during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and has continued to be so afterward, due to the stubbornness of Americans and Israelis in redrawing the regional map. Their political regimes, without exception, are among the most abominable on the planet.

Each war sparks heated debates among those who observe from afar. Europeans, for example. Each war is forgotten as soon as another begins. How many people even knew that the US invasion of Iraq lasted until last year? It doesn't matter. You could say that all wars are just one endless war.

Let's take the thread from the Iranian end. In 1901, British financier William D'Arcy obtained a concession to exploit Iran's oil. In 1914, D'Arcy's company was bought out by the British government. In 1933, the oil concession was renewed for 60 years under draconian conditions for the Iranians. In 1951, the Tehran Parliament ended the Shah's absolute monarchy and elected Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister, who nationalized the oil.

London and Washington then orchestrated a coup that overthrew Mossadegh and restored both the absolute monarchy and the dominance of Western oil companies. Resistance to colonialism took refuge in religion.

In 1979, an Islamist revolution, directed from Paris by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and initially disguised as progressivism, ended the Shah's reign and the oil concessions. Washington then pushed one of its regional puppets, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, to invade Iran. The war lasted eight years and caused half a million deaths. Saddam made extensive use of sarin gas (a weapon of mass destruction) supplied to him by the United States. Fifteen years later, the United States invaded Iraq, supposedly to destroy its weapons of mass destruction.

The hundred-year (or longer) war in the Middle East currently has only one winner: Israel. The Palestinians have no hope left. Syria has been freed from an atrocious dictatorship at the cost of a devastating civil war. Iraq, after the invasion and subsequent civil war, no longer suffers under Saddam but remains in ruin. Lebanon has plunged into the abyss. Fierce Islamist movements have emerged time and again, sometimes created by the United States (Al Qaeda in Afghanistan), sometimes by Israel (Hamas), and sometimes by political and social collapse (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria). Robert Fisk witnessed this chain of disasters. He interviewed Osama Bin Laden three times. He grew increasingly skeptical. I highly doubt he would applaud the new war between the United States and Israel. He would be pessimistic, I suppose. Donald Trump himself acknowledges that after the attack and the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, the Tehran regime could descend into "something worse."

Only one thing is certain: when the cries of "no to war" or "yes to war" cease in Europe and the United States, and the political debate shifts to oil prices or inflation, the Middle East will still be ablaze, suffering "its past history over and over again, every single day."