October 9, 1978. Protestors demonstrate against the Shah in Tehran, Iran.
The American journalist Chris Hedges once warned that imperialistic policies in the Muslim world would lead to a situation in which “those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the language we speak to them—violence.” Recent history, however, often treats the rise of Islamic extremism as an unprovoked, isolated surge of religious fanaticism. That is far from the case. The West has repeatedly meddled in the affairs of the oil-rich Middle East—whether in the name of containing communism or promoting democracy—thus fostering hatred towards the West and creating fertile conditions for Islamic fundamentalism to take root. Coups and invasions and widespread destruction have destabilized many regions in the Middle East and left political vacuums that Islamic radicalism has rushed to fill. Islamic fundamentalism is, in no small part, a Western export.
The Overthrow of the Shah
The discovery of oil in Iran in 1908 marked the beginning of Western imperialism in the Middle East. Starting from the early years of the twentieth century, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which was owned mainly by the British government, gained the rights to Iran’s vast petroleum reserves. The AIOC enjoyed a lucrative monopoly on the production and sale of Iranian oil, which helped maintain Britain’s status as a major global power. This newfound status, however, came at the expense of the widespread impoverishment of the Iranian people. Iran was only receiving 16 percent of its own oil wealth—perhaps even less given that the Iranian government was not allowed to audit the AIOC’s books. The Iranian people were indignant at their country’s economic subjection to foreign power. In 1951, Prime Minister Mossadegh, stirred by the anger of Iranians towards the AIOC, nationalized the AIOC and reclaimed the country’s oil sector. The Iranian people cheered as they took back control of the company’s massive refinery at Abadan on the Persian Gulf. The moderate, secular, and democratically-elected Mossadegh had dismantled the system of foreign exploitation of Iran. In an address to the National Security Council in 1951, Mossadegh justified nationalization by highlighting the economic condition of Iranian citizens: “Their standard of living is probably one of the lowest in the world. Our greatest natural asset is oil…As at present organized, however, the petroleum industry has contributed practically nothing to the prosperity of the people.”
The British were outraged and accused Mossadegh of stealing their property. In response, Winston Churchill, per imperial tradition, decided to orchestrate a coup that would depose Mossadegh. Britain convinced America to participate in the coup by presenting Mossadegh as a Communist threat. The CIA and MI6 overthrew Mossadegh through bribes and manufactured riots. Once Mossadegh was ousted, America and Britain installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, a reliably pro-Western dictator who would welcome back Western companies and reverse Iran’s progression towards economic sovereignty. To ensure his control of the population, the Shah brutalized the Iranian people with his secret police force, the SAVAK, which suppressed dissent towards the regime. The United States provided funding and training for the SAVAK, as well as enormous amounts of aid to the Shah. Furthermore, under the Shah, Tehran became a hub for un-Islamic activities like alcohol consumption, gambling, and prostitution. And while the wealth that flowed under Iran’s soil filled the bank accounts of foreigners and the Shah and his cronies, most Iranians lived in poverty. Unsurprisingly, Islamic fundamentalism began to gain traction as a national force, propagating the narrative that Western culture and imperialism were deleterious for both Islam and the Iranian people. This narrative resonated with many impoverished Iranians who had formerly been relatively moderate. Finally, in 1979, in a stunning political collapse, a popular revolution overthrew the Shah and established a theocratic Islamic Republic.
The fundamentalist clerics of the 1980s imposed a form of religious fascism in Iran. Iran’s current devotion to radical Islam and its fierce anti-Western sentiment is unquestionably a result of America and Britain’s decision to overthrow the democratically-elected and secular Mossadegh and prop up a Western-backed dictatorship in Iran—all in the name of oil. Iran is now a center for the propagation of terror abroad, financing and arming Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Middle Eastern terrorist groups. In his book All the Shah’s Men, Stephen Kinzer writes, “It is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax [CIA-orchestrated coup] through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York.” The CIA actually coined a term for this phenomenon in an internal debrief after the overthrow of Mossadegh: “blowback.” Blowback is defined as the unintended consequences of covert operations that actually come back to harm the country that conducted them. Having invented the concept, the CIA went on to demonstrate a remarkable proficiency in producing it. The West has a long history of creating the very breeding grounds for Islamic extremism that soon come back to haunt it.
Funding the Muhajideen
In 1979, the very same year as the Islamic Revolution, the USSR invaded Afghanistan to defend the existing communist, pro-Soviet puppet regime. The Afghan Marxist regime was highly unpopular and faced the growing threat of insurgency. The mujahideen rebels, a group of Islamic revolutionaries, sought to oust the Soviet-backed government from power in Afghanistan. The Soviet invasion in 1979 bolstered the mujahideen’s ranks as recruits flocked from all over the Islamic world to help liberate the country from the atheist communists. Tens of thousands of recruits came from Saudi Arabia, lending to the Wahhabist fundamentalist movement. Wahhabism, once a fringe sect of Islam that existed primarily in Saudi Arabia, soon became a major religious force in the Sunni Islamic world.
The United States viewed the Soviet occupation through a Cold War lens. The CIA began providing weapons and training to the holy warriors of Afghanistan who were fighting the 110,00-man Soviet army of occupation. The CIA’s $700-million-a-year Afghan operation represented around 80 percent of the overseas budget of the clandestine service. Washington supplied the mujahideen with four billion dollars worth of arms in the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan frequently referred to the mujahideen fundamentalists as “freedom fighters.” One of the beneficiaries of US aid was a Saudi Arabian named Osama Bin Laden.
In 1989, the mujahideen won their holy war as the Soviet Union withdrew its forces. The Soviets had officially left, and with them, so did the CIA. Having achieved its primary objective of ending Soviet occupation, the US did not task itself with figuring out what would become of the militant Islamic army that had just defeated the Soviet invaders. As Tim Weiner writes in Legacy of Ashes, “The CIA simply decided: ‘there’ll be Afghan democracy.’ And it won’t be pretty.” The last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan on February 19, 1989. Within a year, white-robed Saudis started to appear in the provincial capitals and ruined villages of the unstable, post-war Afghanistan. They declared themselves emirs, and bought the loyalties of village leaders and began to build little empires. They were emissaries of a new force abroad in the world that we now know as al-Qaeda.
America’s virtual abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal not only facilitated the environment for al-Qaeda to rise, but also for another Islamic fundamentalist group. In 1996, after years of civil war between factions of the mujahideen, the Taliban would reign victorious and establish a fundamentalist government in Afghanistan. Reflecting on America’s decision to virtually forsake involvement in Afghanistan after 1989, the director of the CIA at the time, William Webster, said eerily, “We walked away from it. We should not have walked away.”
2003 Invasion of Iraq
In March 2003, George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to invade Iraq without authorization from the UN Security Council and in violation of international law. The Bush administration had exploited al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, to justify ousting Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Bush launched a propaganda campaign designed to mislead the American public into thinking that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks and linked to al-Qaeda. Hussein was a brutal dictator but unconnected to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. Bush also alleged that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that pre-emptive action was necessary to prevent terrorist access to WMDs. This was not true, and was based on faulty intelligence. Iraq’s chemical or biological weapons had all been destroyed after the first Gulf War in1991 in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions.
Vice-President Dick Cheney, four days before the war, proclaimed, “From the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” One year later, however, a nationwide poll showed that 71% of Iraqis viewed U.S. troops as “occupiers” rather than “liberators.” The results of the poll were hardly surprising given that around 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the war.
There were no Islamic extremist groups operating in the country prior to the U.S. invasion. The military occupation, however, gave rise to an insurgency within the country that worked to oust the American troops. The emergence of this insurgency, as well as the power vacuum that was created by dismantling Saddam Hussein’s military and institutions, allowed al-Qaeda to enter Iraq. The Islamic fundamentalist group capitalized on the chaos and instability that the American invasion of Iraq generated. It did not stop with al-Qaeda, though. Many unemployed former officers of Saddam Hussein’s army joined a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda in 2006 to form the fundamentalist Islamic State (commonly referred to as ISIS). The extremist Sunni jihadist group endeavored to establish an Islamic caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria. This chain of events did not go unnoticed, as U.S. intelligence assessments directly linked the Iraq War to a surge in global jihadist activity. A National Intelligence Estimate from 2006 stated: “The Iraq conflict has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”
In 2011, the Syrian civil war allowed ISIS to gain traction in Syria and consolidate control over territories. In 2014, ISIS was able to defeat the US-trained Iraqi army and solidify its position in northern Iraq. At the same time, Libya had become a failed state after the Western-backed overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. Libya’s fractured state allowed the Islamic militants of ISIS to gain a foothold in that section of North Africa.
Unfortunately, ISIS has successfully recruited Muslims from around the world to join its jihad and carry out terrorist attacks across the world. Reflecting on the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris in which ISIS militants killed 130 people, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair remarked, “Of course, you can’t say those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.”
The American political philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, a fierce critic of American foreign policy, once said: “Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.” While the absolutism of this statement risks oversimplification, Chomsky provides a reasonable argument regarding the origins of terrorism. It is critical to reckon with the long history of intervention that has produced Islamic extremism in our world today. To claim that Western interference in the Middle East is the only factor regarding Islamic fundamentalism would be simplistic. However, there is an undeniable truth in the fact that there is widespread resentment towards the West for its imperialist policies in the Middle East. And, unsurprisingly, many Muslims in the region have resorted to extreme tactics.
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