Intervention In The Middle East

Two big things happened in the Middle East last week. Obama announced that the United States would send weapons to the rebel side of the civil war in Syria. The next day, a “moderate” “reformist” won Iran’s presidential election.

The first event was the latest chapter in a long history of US intervention in the Middle East. The second event was a reminder of how history is full of those interventions going wrong.

Four years ago, there were enough dissidents of the hardline Iranian Islamist regime to spark major protests (the “Green Revolution”) when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a contested second presidential term. This time, the reformers were strong enough to win a decisive election. There are plenty of arguments that this won’t result in any actual moderating from the real power figure Ayatollah Khomeini, though the signals of popular discontent are clearly strong.

But even this tiny glimmer of hope for a freer, less dangerous, less radical Iran is a reminder of how long the repercussions of botched US intervention can last. Khomeini’s regime, though thankfully and finally beginning to lose support these days, has been in power for over three decades, and was originally swept into massively popular power as he overthrew the US-backed Shah who preceded him.

The CIA helped overthrow Iran’s democratically elected government in the 50’s. At the time, we must have thought that guy was less bad than the other guy. But if that hadn’t happened, perhaps the Shah wouldn’t have been there to foster the anti-US sentiment that led to Khomeini’s rise in the 70’s.

Maybe Khomeini would have created his authoritative regime anyway. Maybe something worse would have happened. Like most history, it’s complicated enough that, combined with my own ignorance (reading Wiki articles doesn’t count for that much), I hesitate to take too strong of a stance.

But it sure feels like US meddling to prevent a “bad” regime in the 50’s quite possibly led to an even worse regime in the 70’s that has been handicapping the lives of millions of Iranians, and scaring international leaders around the world, for decades – a situation that we are only now even hinting at the possibility of eventually resolving.

And it is under all of this context that we learn about the United States sending arms to Syrian rebels. That situation is complicated, too. This development is only the latest in a long line of tip toes closer to the rebels that has already included medical supplies and who knows what else.

But haven’t we seen this game before? We sent weapons to Afghans in the 80’s because we considered them “less bad” than the Soviets who were attacking them, and two decades later many of those weapons ended up in the hands of the Taliban. It doesn’t take too many reports about al-Qaeda connections to Syrian rebels to wonder if we are practically begging history to repeat itself!

No doubt people like Obama and John McCain have more information about the conflict than I do (though I’m not sure how much you can learn from a photo op). I think it’s extremely likely that they only have enough information to think they know more than they do – just enough to convince themselves that “this time it’s different” and we really can tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys… even though we “may be arming Islamic rebels who may well be killing Christians,” all without doing much of anything to end the tragic civil war.