Overview of Modern Middle East

The development of the modern Middle East after World War Two was shaped by European Imperialism, the Holocaust during World War Two and demand for oil by the developed industrial countries around the world. After World War One, Britain and France took control of large parts of the Middle East because the Versailles Treaty gave them control of the large parts of the Ottoman Empire. The British and French claimed that they would prepare these regions for self-government, but in reality they treated these regions as colonies. World War Two had a significant impact on the Middle East because it weakened both Britain and France, and these countries were forced to give up their control over the region following the war. In addition, the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish population in Europe during the war convinced many people that it was important to create a Jewish national homeland in the Middle East.

The creation of the nation of Israel as a Jewish national homeland in the British controlled region of Palestine in 1948 created an ongoing conflict in the Middle East that continues to this day. The newly created United Nations was put in charge of creating two countries in the British territory of Palestine. One country was to be the Jewish national homeland of Israel and the other was to be a Palestinian state for the Arab-Palestinian population that lived in the region. The Arab nations of the Middle East opposed the creation of Israel because they felt was imperialistic since it was organized by the European dominated United Nations and a large part of the population of Israel were Jewish people from Europe - including a large number of Holocaust survivors. However, because the Arab nations had little influence at the United Nations, their objection to the creation of Israel was not recognized and was ignored. As a result, the Arab nations responded to the creation of Israel by declaring war on it as soon as it came into existence in 1948. The Arab-Israeli war in 1948 was a brutal conflict that ended with Israel defeating the Arab armies and capturing the land of Palestine. The big losers in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war were the Palestinian people who were left stateless and living in refugee camps in various Arab nations.

The survival of Israel against the full weight of the combined Arab militaries shocked many Arabs and revealed a deep weakness in the Arab nations that went beyond military power to the way these countries were governed and how their economies worked. This realization sparked a movement to build modern Arab nations that has been described as Arab Nationalism. The Arab Nationalist leaders, particularly in Syria and Egypt, sought to build modern nations by rejecting many traditional parts of Arab culture, including the role of Islam in government and society. Instead they turned to more modern authoritarian and socialistic ideas to develop their countries. These leaders generally rejected western ideas like democracy and capitalism, which were viewed as imperialist. The interest in socialistic ideas brought the Cold War into the region of the Middle East as the Soviet Union began to directly support these Arab countries. The Soviet Union supported these counties with aid to build up their economies and with weapons to modernize their military. The United States responded to Soviet action in the Middle East by announcing the Eisenhower Doctrine that pledged support to any country resisting Soviet expansion. It was during this time, in 1953, that the United States helped overthrow the government of Iran because it was viewed as being pro-Soviet and replaced it with an authoritarian pro-American leader.

The Cold War involvement of the United States and the Soviet Union in the Middle East resulted in two Arab-Israeli Wars. Like many Cold War conflicts, these wars were a result of the Super Powers using local conflicts as proxy wars in the larger Cold War. The first war was the 1967 Six Day War in which the Israelis launched a surprise attack on the Arab countries of the region before the Arab countries could launch their carefully prepared attack on Israel. The Arab nations had carefully prepared for war by using Soviet military aid to build modern armies which they planned to use in a combined attack to destroy Israel. However, before the Arab countries could do this, Israel launched a preemptive attack and defeated all of the Arab armies in six days and captured significant parts of Jordan, Syria and Egypt in the process. The war only ended when the Soviets threatened to send soldiers to fight alongside the Arab armies. The Arab nations were humiliated by their defeat in the Six Day War and again used Soviet military aide to rebuild their armies with plans for another war against Israel. They launched this second war in 1973 with a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish religion. The Arab attack that started the Yom Kippur War was devastating to the Israeli army. However, the United States came to the support of Israel and gave it the military equipment needed turn back the Arab attack and, in the end, defeat the Arab armies. Once again, the war ended after the Soviets threatened to directly intervene with soldiers. After this, the Egyptian government broke its relations with the Soviet Union and became an ally of the United States. Under the influence of the United States, Egypt and Israel signed a long lasting peace agreement, called the Camp David Accords in 1978.

The Israeli victories in the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars made it clear that the Arabs would not be able to destroy Israel and this reality set in motion actions that would create long lasting conflict within the Arab and Islamic countries of the Middle East. After the Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil producing counties significantly raised the price of oil to strike back at the western countries for their support of Israel. The sharp rise in the price of oil caused economic problems for the United States, Europe and Japan that lasted for several years, but did not lessen their support for Israel. The high price of oil also resulted in a massive transfer of wealth to the oil producing Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait, while did little to benefit other Arab countries, like Egypt and Syria. This growing economic inequality in the Arab countries created political resentment as the poor with little political power saw the rich with all the political power take the oil wealth. The authoritarian governments of the Arab nations (either dictatorships or monarchies) suppressed popular anger caused by economic frustration through brutal political repression of their own people. This political repression created a situation where the only safe and acceptable way to criticize the governments in these countries was from the perspective of religion - to call the government "un-Islamic". This put Islam at the center of the political, economic and social conflict within many countries in the Middle East. This conflict drove the 1979 Iranian Revolution in which the people of Iran overthrew the American supported leader of Iran. The Iranian Revolution is also called “The Islamic Revolution” because the new government of Iran turned Iran into an Islamic Republic in which Islamic religious ideas would be central to how the country would be governed and how society would operate.

The ideas of the Islamic Revolution spread from Iran to other parts of the Middle East and created conflicts within countries over the role that Islam should have in government and society, and whether Islam can co-exist with the modern ideas of freedom and democracy. A central part of this conflict is over what constitutes "Islam". Islam is a large and diverse religion and the form of Islam practiced by the supporters of the Islamic Revolution is only one interpretation of the religion - one that is rejected by many, if not most, Muslims. The governments of Arab and Islamic countries across the wider region of the Middle East, from democratic Turkey to authoritarian Egypt and socialistic Algeria, found themselves challenged by radical Islamic groups that wanted to transform the region along the ideas of the Islamic Revolution. Some countries, such as Egypt and Algeria, viciously suppressed these groups. Others, like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, tried to buy-off these groups by using their oil wealth to support Islamic groups in other parts of the world, specifically in regions where Islamic groups were in conflict with non-Islamic groups.

The Islamic Revolution also directly led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that would result in decades long conflicts that would create more instability in the Middle East. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to try and prevent the Islamic Revolution from spreading to the Soviet Union, which had a large Muslim population. The United States viewed this as an expansion of communism and responded by giving military support to anti-Soviet Afghan groups, making the war in Afghanistan a proxy war in the Cold War. However, the war in Afghanistan did become part of the part of the Islamic Revolution as many Islamically inspired young men from other parts of the Middle East went to Afghanistan to fight in a jihad or “holy war” against the Soviets. In 1989, an exhausted and collapsing Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and United States withdrew its support leaving Afghanistan a poor and broken country. At this point, Afghanistan fell into civil war as different regional warlords, using drug money to finance their armies, fought for control of the country. In 1996, an Islamically inspired group called the Taliban took over Afghanistan and declared it to be an Islamic Republic and proceeded to govern it based on a strict interpretation of Islamic ideas. The Taliban government allowed the global terrorist group Al-Qaeda to use the country as a base to plan attacks – which resulted in the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States. In response, the United States invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban government. Since then the United States has been trying to rebuild Afghanistan into a functioning country.

The Islamic Revolution prompted Iraq to attack Iran in 1980 as a way of taking advantage of the chaos to the Iranian Revolution to take land on along the Persian Gulf. Instead of a quick war, the Iran-Iraq War turned into a bloody eight-year conflict that exhausted both countries. The United States supported Iraq in this war as a way of hurting the Islamic government of Iran. After the war ended, the government of Iraq wanted to have the Arab oil producing countries raise the global price of oil to help with its recovery from the war. However, Kuwait refused to do this, which prompted Iraq to invade and take over the country in 1990. In response to the Iraqi attack, the United States attacked Iraq and liberated Kuwait, but chose not to invade Iraqi because this could destabilize the Middle East and drag the United States into a decade long occupation of the country. Instead, the United States moved to weaken Iraq through economic sanctions and to dismantle Iraq's programs for building weapons of mass destruction (Iraq had a large chemical weapons program and had done basic research into building nuclear weapons). It was in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attack on the United States that the American government said that it had evidence that the Iraqi government still had an active program for building weapons of mass destruction and that it was working with terrorist groups that might use these weapons in attacks on the United States and Europe (this evidence has since been shown to be false and there is a great deal of controversy over whether the American government deliberately mislead world about this information). The American government used this evidence to get the United Nations to sanction an American lead attack on Iraq. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, overthrew the Iraqi government and began a process of rebuilding Iraq. The American occupation and rebuilding of Iraq was a costly activity because many groups within Iraq violently opposed American rule and used the opportunity for different religious groups to fight against each other. In addition, radical Islamic groups, like Al-Qaeda began to operate in Iraq. After a long and violent occupation of Iraq, in 2007 the United States began to withdraw its forces from Iraq claiming the country had been stabilized under a new government – the full withdrawal was complete in 2011. After the United States pulled out of the country, Iraq has continued to be a very unstable country in which the Iraqi government only fully controls some parts of the country. Many parts of the country are effectively controlled by different ethnic groups, such as the Kurds or the Sunni tribes, which govern their own regions with their own military forces.

The on-going Arab-Israeli conflict has been a continuing point of conflict in the Middle East, with many Arab countries refusing to recognize Israel as long as it occupies lands claimed by the Palestinians. The failure of the Arabs in their wars with Israel has resulted in the Palestinian people being left “stateless” and living in refugee camps across the regions or in areas like the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which are militarily occupied by Israel. Since the 1960’s, the Palestinians, with support from the other Arab countries, have used terrorist attacks on Israel and Israelis in other parts of the world to fight back against Israeli occupation. While these attacks were gained attention for the Palestinian cause, they had little effect on the Israeli occupation due to the overwhelming power of the Israeli army. In 1987, the Palestinians changed tactics and launched the Intifada, in which Palestinian youth protested against the Israeli military occupation in a way that changed the global perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – making the Israelis look like they were oppressing the Palestinians. After the end of the Gulf War in 1991 (and the end of the Cold War), the United States sought to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by brokering the Oslo Accords in 1993 in which Israel agreed to give the Palestinians control of their land in return for a guarantee of peace. As a result of the Oslo Accords, in 1995, the Palestinians established two self-governing regions (West Bank and Gaza Strip) within the area controlled by Israel. However, a combination of corruption on the part of the Palestinian government, radial groups of Palestinians who refuse to recognize Israel and the hostility of many Israelis to making peace with the Palestinians, has resulted in on-going conflicts that have flared up into short wars between Palestinian controlled regions and Israel. These wars have only increased distrust and made it harder to reach a permanent peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

The combination of repressive authoritarian governments and massive economic inequality in the Arab world caused wave of revolutionary change to sweep across the Middle East in 2011 that has been called “The Arab Spring”. These revolts began in Tunisia in which young people frustrated with living under an oppressive government that gave them little economic opportunity used their cell phones and the internet to organize protests that spun into a revolution that overthrew the government. Young people in other Arab countries, such as Egypt, Syria and Libya, used the model of the Tunisian Revolution to challenge their own governments. In Egypt, mass political protest resulted in the military intervening in the government to remove the authoritarian president from power and the holding of democratic elections. These elections brought an Islamic party called the Muslim Brotherhood to power. This created a conflict within Egypt over the role of Islam in government that threatened to become violent. In 2013, the military overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood government and since then has ruled the country by violently crushing any opposition to its rule.

While the “Arab Spring” did result in a democratic government being established in Tunisia, it also resulted in on-going civil wars in Libya and Syria. The ideas of the Arab Spring caused a revolution in Libya that violently overthrew the authoritarian dictator who had ruled the country for several decades. Unfortunately, the new revolutionary government has not been able to hold the country together and Libya is now fractured between two rival governments that are fighting against each other for control of the country. Since then, radical Islamic groups have based themselves in Libya and use it as a base to support attacks countries in central and western Africa. In Syria, the government's brutal repression of "Arab Spring" protests led to a brutal multi-sided civil war in which the government, western oriented rebels and radical Islamic groups are all fighting each other. The Islamic groups in Syria linked up with Islamic groups in Iraq to establish the Islamic State in 2013 which now controls a large swath of land from northern and eastern Syria to central Iraq. The Islamic State is an extreme Islamist group that considers itself at war with anyone who does not accept it version of Islam – it includes other Muslims in its list of enemies. The Islamic States has created an unofficial country in the center of the Middle East and actively recruits Muslims from around the world to join it or carry out terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.