CogniPresent
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To understand where the region stands today, one must begin not in 2001, nor in 1979, nor even in 1948—but in the dying chambers of an empire that the West decided it could not afford to let live.
The Controlled Demolition of the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire was not destroyed by its own incompetence, though its weaknesses were real. It was targeted—methodically, over decades—because its existence was structurally inconvenient for European imperial ambition. The empire sat atop the land bridge between Europe, Asia, and Africa. It controlled the eastern Mediterranean, the Bosphorus, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Persian Gulf. For Britain, France, and Russia, the question was never whether the empire should fall, but who would profit most from the wreckage.
The strategy took several forms. European banks extended loans at punishing rates, then leveraged debt default to install foreign financial control—the Ottoman Public Debt Administration of 1881 effectively transferred Ottoman fiscal sovereignty to European creditors, making the empire a debtor colony in all but name. European powers sponsored nationalist separatist movements—Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Arabs—not out of any principled commitment to self-determination, but as instruments of territorial fragmentation. The Tanzimat reforms, intended to modernize the empire and demonstrate its compatibility with European norms, were consistently used against it: Ottoman modernization was cited as insufficient; Ottoman resistance to modernization was cited as barbarism. The game was rigged on both ends.
The First World War was the killing blow—but it was preceded by decades of calculated weakening. Britain, in particular, ran a dual game: negotiating with Ottoman officials while simultaneously funding and organizing Arab revolts against Ottoman rule. The Sharif Hussein of Mecca was promised an independent Arab kingdom in exchange for rebellion. That promise, embedded in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence of 1915–1916, was never intended to be honored. It was a wartime instrument, not a covenant. When the war ended, the promise was quietly interred—and the Sharif’s sons were handed consolation prizes: artificially constructed thrones in kingdoms that did not yet exist.
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The Map as Weapon: Sykes-Picot and the Architecture of Permanent Conflict
In May 1916, a British diplomat named Mark Sykes and a French diplomat named François Georges-Picot signed a secret agreement to divide the Arab world between their two empires. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, modified and partially implemented through the subsequent San Remo conference and League of Nations mandates, imposed borders on the Middle East that corresponded not to ethnic communities, geographic logic, tribal confederacies, or historical polities—but to European strategic convenience.
The lines were drawn to divide, not to unite. Kurdish populations were split between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Persia—ensuring that no Kurdish state could threaten British or French interests. Shia and Sunni populations were deliberately jumbled into single states—Iraq being the canonical example—creating sectarian tensions that could be exploited to justify continued foreign management. Lebanon was carved out of Greater Syria with a Christian Maronite plurality engineered through selective boundary drawing, producing a demographic time bomb that would eventually detonate in fifteen years of civil war. Palestine was placed under British mandate with a deliberately ambiguous promise—the Balfour Declaration—embedded within it, creating a structural conflict between its Arab majority and a growing Jewish settler population that Britain neither wanted to resolve nor could afford to abandon.
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Crucially, these borders were also drawn to sever historically organic connections between populations and their economic hinterlands. Pastoral communities found their seasonal migration routes bisected by international frontiers. Agricultural zones were split from the ports they had long supplied. Kurdish and Bedouin confederacies that had maintained order across vast territories found themselves reclassified as minorities in states that regarded them as security threats. The violence that followed was not an expression of primordial tribalism. It was the predictable consequence of imposing artificial state structures on populations that had no reason to regard them as legitimate.
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The Wells of Resentment: Resource Extraction as Colonial Policy
The Middle East sits atop the largest proven conventional oil reserves on earth. This fact, which would become decisive in the twentieth century, was understood by British imperial planners well before most of the region’s populations had any conception of what petroleum would mean for global power. Winston Churchill’s decision in 1913 to convert the Royal Navy from coal to oil—combined with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s operations in what is now Iran—established the template: Middle Eastern resources would serve Western strategic needs, and the political arrangements of the region would be organized to protect that access.
The mechanisms of extraction were multiple and mutually reinforcing. Concessionary agreements, signed with compliant rulers or imposed on governments too weak to refuse, transferred resource rights to foreign corporations at royalty rates designed to maximize extraction and minimize local benefit. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company—later BP—operated its Iranian concession under terms so exploitative that when the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized the company in 1951, he was acting on the straightforward logic that Iranian oil should benefit Iranians. The British response was to impose a naval blockade, organize a global boycott of Iranian oil, and—in partnership with the newly formed CIA—engineer a coup in 1953 that overthrew Mosaddegh and reinstalled the Shah.
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The resource dimension also explains patterns that might otherwise seem puzzling. Why did Western powers consistently support authoritarian rulers over democratic reformers? Because authoritarian rulers were more reliable guarantors of concessionary arrangements. Why did they oppose land reform, labor organizing, and nationalist economic policy? Because these threatened the structures through which resources were extracted.
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Permanent Interference: The Foreign Hand in Middle Eastern Politics
By the mid-twentieth century, Western intervention in Middle Eastern politics had become so routine as to be structurally constitutive of the region’s political life. This is the point that tends to be most aggressively obscured in mainstream Western accounts, which prefer to treat each intervention as a discrete, reactive response to a specific local crisis. In reality, the interventions were continuous, proactive, and deeply networked—involving intelligence services, client political parties, funded media operations, armed militias, and the patient cultivation of compliant elites over decades.
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In Syria, American and British intelligence services were involved in multiple coup attempts from the late 1940s onward, funding political parties, arming dissident military officers, and pressuring neighboring governments to provide staging grounds for destabilization operations. Syria’s repeated coups in the 1950s and 1960s were not simply the product of Syrian political dysfunction—they were produced, at least in part, by external manipulation of a political system that was trying, imperfectly, to find its footing. The same dynamic played out in Iraq, Jordan, Libya, and Lebanon, each with its own specific texture but the same structural logic: local politics were treated as a domain for external management, and any government that attempted genuine independence faced organized subversion.
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Divide and Immiserate: Manufacturing Civil War
Perhaps the most consequential and least acknowledged dimension of Western Middle East policy is the deliberate cultivation of intra-regional conflict. If the cartographic phase created the conditions for division, the operational phase activated those conditions—funding rival factions, arming both sides of conflicts, and arranging for regional powers to exhaust themselves fighting one another rather than developing the capacity for independent political action.
The Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988 is the most naked example. When Saddam Hussein—with American encouragement and intelligence support—invaded Iran in September 1980, the United States was not simply backing a regional ally. It was managing a conflict designed to bleed both combatants. Donald Rumsfeld’s famous 1983 visit to Baghdad—shaking hands with Saddam while American intelligence knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iranian forces—encapsulates the moral mathematics of the policy. The war killed somewhere between five hundred thousand and one million people. It destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, exhausted Iran’s revolutionary energy, and left both countries too damaged to project influence or challenge the regional order. This was, from a certain strategic perspective, the point.
What is less well known is that Israel was simultaneously supplying arms to Iran during the same conflict—the “arms for hostages” dimension of the Iran-Contra affair being only the most visible thread of a more sustained arrangement. The logic was not ideological but structural: keeping both Iran and Iraq engaged in mutual destruction prevented either from consolidating regional hegemony. That this calculation required selling weapons to a revolutionary Islamic government that had taken American hostages and declared the United States the Great Satan—while simultaneously supporting the Ba’athist government that was gassing its own Kurdish population—tells you everything about the moral framework within which these decisions were made. There was no framework. There was only strategic calculus, and the populations of the region were the raw material on which the calculus operated.
Lebanon is another study in manufactured catastrophe. The sectarian power-sharing arrangement imposed by the French mandatory authorities—which allocated political positions by religious community on the basis of a 1932 census—was always a recipe for crisis, and French planners likely understood this. When Lebanon’s demographic realities shifted—as the Muslim population grew relative to the Christian one—the system had no legitimate mechanism for adjustment. The result was a civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990, killed approximately 150,000 people, and saw the country used as a proxy theater by Syria, Israel, the PLO, Iran, and the United States simultaneously. At various points in the conflict, American forces were fighting alongside the Phalangists; Israel was occupying southern Lebanon while sponsoring the South Lebanon Army; Syria was managing the PLO’s political positioning while opposing its military independence; and Iran was funding the nascent Hezbollah as a vehicle for Shia political organization. None of these external actors wanted Lebanon to stabilize—because a stable Lebanon would have reduced their leverage.
Afghanistan deserves mention here even though it sits at the eastern edge of the conventional Middle East. The American decision in the late 1970s to arm, fund, and organize the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet-backed Afghan government—Operation Cyclone, the most expensive CIA covert program in history—was made with full awareness that it would empower Islamist militants whose worldview was antithetical to every value the United States claimed to represent. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who authorized the program, later acknowledged that the Carter administration began funding the mujahideen before the Soviet invasion, precisely to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam. When asked whether he regretted having “supported Islamic fundamentalism” and “given arms and advice to future terrorists,” Brzezinski replied: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe?” The “stirred-up Moslems” would kill three thousand Americans on September 11, 2001—and the Taliban would be in power in Kabul for decades. The regret is nowhere in evidence.
The Rules Were Never for Everyone: Double Standards and the Demonization of Resistance
Perhaps the deepest wound inflicted on the Middle East by Western policy is not material but epistemic: the systematic construction of a moral framework in which Western actions—however violent, however illegal, however destructive—were exempt from the standards applied to the region’s own populations.
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Empowering the Extremists: The Frankenstein Policy
The most consequential irony of Western Middle East policy is that its most destructive long-term effects came not from opposing Islamist radicalism but from deliberately cultivating it—selectively, tactically, as a weapon against enemies deemed more immediately threatening.
The most documented case is Hamas. The Israeli government, under the logic that a divided Palestinian political landscape would be easier to manage than a unified one, facilitated the growth of the Islamic Resistance Movement in the late 1970s and 1980s as a counterweight to the secular PLO.
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The United States also, at various points, backed Islamist movements in Libya, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia—again, as tactical instruments against immediate adversaries, with little sustained analysis of what would happen when the tactical moment passed and the weapons and networks and ideologies remained.
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The Legitimation of the Jihadist Worldview
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The Most Revolutionary Act 