Throughout human history, empires have emerged, while others have disappeared. Many empires have often been unable to assimilate valuable lessons without first suffering a major humiliation. Today, and in this sense, the United States, the United Kingdom and certain Western countries cannot understand that occupying territories or bombing countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan or Yemen will have the opposite effect to that intended. After all, the U.S. should have learned, from its various Middle Eastern wars, from Israel’s wars, and from the Ukraine War, that there are limits to what technology and aviation can achieve. But this does not seem to register with American leaders and their British followers. Strangely, their hubris has only grown since Iraq and Afghanistan.
There has been an Anglosphere-Sunni Muslim alliance since the mid-1800s, when Britain first partnered with the Ottoman Empire against French and Russian influence. After World War I, this alliance morphed from Ottoman–British to Saudi–British, and then to Saudi–American. That partnership delivered the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, helping to win the Cold War. It also prevented the Arab world from revolting against its humiliation by Israel, ensuring that Arab resources would be controlled by “moderates”, that is, states not committed to the Islamic-Jewish conflict in Palestine.
The British drew the borders of the Middle East, from the Gulf to Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. The British and the Jews imposed the state of Israel on the Arabs. This led to the series of wars — 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973; the Lebanon wars of 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006; and the endless Gaza wars. The wars from 1948 to 1982 ended in decisive Israeli military victories. This discredited traditional, meek Arab monarchies such as those in Egypt, Libya and Iraq, leading to their replacement with secular strongmen. Eventually, after Israel’s lightning invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which successfully expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Arab secular governments and movements were also discredited. Only the Gulf monarchies aligned with the U.S. thrived. The wars fought by the Shi’a in Lebanon and their Sunni allies in Gaza, on the other hand — the wars fought from 1982 onwards — were wars in which Israel failed to achieve its objectives. These wars involved movements, not states, which had a different strategy. Rather than promising victories, they sought to impose a high cost on Israel while working towards steadily building greater capabilities and a believing, religiously committed society, convinced that was the key to victory.
This strategy’s success is most evident in Lebanon. Israel’s forced withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 was historic. Israel abandoned land that it would have otherwise settled, and it did so without any security assurances. Israel’s withdrawal allowed Hezbollah to grow further. Now, Hezbollah is helping lead the confrontation with the U.S. in Yemen, Iraq and Syria. The spiritual awakening that Hezbollah led among Lebanese Shi’a has had obvious material effects, shown in Hezbollah’s ability to deter Israel, despite conducting attacks against it for three months.
Read more on December 1st, 2024.