Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– More than three years have passed since US troops left Afghanistan in August 2021, putting an end to an occupation that lasted two decades. With the Taliban back in power, the rights of women and girls have suffered a severe setback. Under the Taliban’s rule, they are no longer allowed to attend public secondary schools and universities. Last September, the fundamentalist group issued a religious code banning women from raising their voices or reciting the Quran in public.

Political and media freedoms have also been severely restricted, and poverty and unemployment have increased amid a massive withdrawal of foreign aid. The war’s end has brought public security and access to rural areas has improved, but these benefits are often denied to the female half of society. Women are forbidden to travel long distances without a male chaperone.

Amin Saikal, an emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University (ANU), is the author of “How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan”. The US, explains Saikal, had traditionally paid limited attention to Afghanistan. This changed with the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, after which the Carter administration approached Afghanistan as having ‘strategic importance’. Under Carter’s successor, Reagan, the US lavished Pakistan and the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets with military and financial assistance.

The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 gave way to a period of profound internal strife that culminated with the Taliban’s takeover of the country in 1996. Saikal defines the Clinton administration’s approach to the Taliban as “full of ambiguity.”[1] On the one hand, it maintained informal contact with the group. On the other hand, it feared the Taliban’s alliance with Al-Qaeda, founded by former mujahidin Osama bin Laden. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, organized by bin Laden’s terrorist organization, would put an end to this era of ambiguity.

According to Saikal, the Bush administration’s decision to invade Afghanistan following 9/11 assumed that the Taliban and al-Qaeda could be defeated, and Afghanistan changed, with limited combat and economic investment. The ‘light footprint’ approach, however, soon morphed into a ‘heavy footprint’ one. Saikal lists several reasons for this. First, the US underestimated the complexity of intervening in Afghanistan. Second, the failure to capture or kill bin Laden at the beginning of the war led to an obsession with finding him. Third, the Bush administration greatly expanded its priorities in Afghanistan, where it now wanted to engage in ‘democracy promotion’ and a ‘war on terror.’

Reflecting on two decades of war in Afghanistan, former Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt noted that after the Taliban were overthrown, there would have been a theoretical possibility for a political settlement including the fundamentalist group. But the US would not have accepted this, nor the Northern Alliance armed groups the US had supported to depose the Taliban, remarks Bildt.

It is highly doubtful that the US ever had a real chance at achieving its declared objectives in Afghanistan. Saikal, however, believes this was possible. According to him, a key problem was that “Afghanistan’s conditions required from the outset a much larger appropriate military and reconstruction involvement than what unfolded.”[2] The invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to an opposite trend, as the US transferred resources to the new war theater.

Amin Saikal, How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan< (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024). Click Here to Buy.

Saikal considers that the constitutional structure adopted by Afghanistan in 2004 had profound flaws because it created a system of government that was too centralized. The strong presidency established in the constitution led to the domination of the executive over the legislative and judicial powers. It was also responsible for a winner-takes-all mentality that left many strongmen with little formal power but the capacity to spoil the country’s politics and security. Saikal spares no criticism for the two men who presided over Afghanistan during this period, Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani.

About Karzai, Saikal writes that he “invoked the constitution and stressed the importance of the rule of law only when they suited his political and power needs.”[3] The emeritus professor describes Karzai’s government as highly corrupt, dysfunctional, and lacking a clear ideological project. Initially lauded in Western capitals, Afghanistan’s Western partners were only too happy to see Karzai leave his position in 2014. His successor, Ashraf Ghani, was elected after a voting process that saw even more fraud than the previous presidential election in 2009.

Secretary of State John Kerry engaged in a mediation effort between Ghani, the official winner of the 2014 election, and his opponent Abdullah Abdullah, who also claimed to have won the vote. The impasse was resolved in favor of Ghani, who had better connections in Western countries after having spent more than a decade of his life in the US. Ghani, explains Saikal, sought to present himself as a traditional Muslim and Afghan but “ultimately could not be the man of the people.”[4]

The new president also generated resentment among other ethnic groups when he surrounded himself with fellow Pashtuns. Ghani presided over a continuous loss of territories to the Taliban. Although he had promised never to leave the country, he abandoned Kabul as the Taliban were completing its conquest of Afghanistan in August 2021.  

In his balance of twenty years of US presence in Afghanistan, Saikal notes that the country’s economy remained dependent on foreign aid, opium cultivation, and the black-market sector. Infrastructural projects and investments in the health and education sectors significantly improved the overall situation in the country. Still, the improvements bore no proportion with the money spent — $36 billion was allocated to governance and development, with smaller amounts for humanitarian aid, in a figure that does not include contributions by US allies.

US funds were misappropriated by both Americans and Afghans, while mismanagement, wastage, and corruption resulted in Afghanistan seeing “only artificial, not structural, economic development.”[5] The area where improvements were more significant, especially in comparison to the periods that preceded and followed the US intervention, was women’s rights. Even so, the gains were too often restricted to urban areas.

The 2020 Doha Agreement between the US and the Taliban was the prelude to the US exit from Afghanistan. The negotiations, handled on behalf of the Trump administration by Zalmay Khalilzad (who had played a major role in Bush’s Afghanistan policy), were “disastrous”, in Saikal’s words.[6] The emeritus professor argues that Khalilzad, under Trump’s imperative, was so concerned about reaching a quick agreement that he made too many concessions considering that the Taliban did not have control over many areas of Afghanistan at that time.

Under the terms of the Doha Agreement, the US promised to withdraw from Afghanistan in fourteen months whereas the Taliban committed themselves not to attack US and allied troops. The Taliban also agreed not to allow terrorist groups to operate from Afghanistan after the US withdrawal. That they were not ready to keep this promise became evident when a US drone strike killed al-Qaida’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in central Kabul one year after US troops had left Afghanistan.

“How to Lose a War” is the result of Saikal’s decades-long study of Afghanistan’s history and politics. He had access to some of the most prominent politicians and military men, both Afghan and foreign, who shaped Afghanistan during the last two decades. Saikal combines these insider sources with a clear analytical mind in a text that will prove a fruitful read not only for experts but also for those who have been following international politics less closely.

It would be a positive development if the book contributed to renewing the current conversation on Afghanistan, which has moved to the background since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza. One of the current discussions concerning Afghanistan is how foreign governments, NGOs, and multilateral institutions should engage with the Taliban-led country. Saikal pays little attention to the topic in his book, but this is a debate that is likely to stay with us for a long time since there is no realistic chance of the Taliban losing power in the short term.

In his book “The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left”, Hassan Abbas argues that it is vital “to acknowledge the difference between engagement and endorsement”.[7] Abbas sees engagement as a way to better understand the interests and actions of the other side, in this case, the Taliban. Endorsement, on the contrary, would mean supporting the Taliban’s worldview. Whereas endorsement arises from affinity, engagement is born out of pragmatism. Abbas is convinced that engagement with the Taliban is possible and much-needed, even if the gains to be made are limited.

Graeme Smith, the Afghanistan Senior Analyst for the International Crisis Group, makes a similar argument. He notes that, when engaging the Taliban diplomatically, the rights of women and girls cannot be dropped from the conversation. At the same time, however, the international sanctions regime imposed on Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover has counter-productive results as they “do not have much effect on the Taliban, but they do drive up rates of malnutrition among children and disease among vulnerable families, especially female-headed households that often struggle in a patriarchal society.”

Smith reports that some European countries that publicly chastise the Taliban have sent discreet delegations to Afghanistan to confer about security issues. Calling the Taliban out for their transgressions while seeking to ease the suffering of the Afghan population and limiting the danger of international terrorism emerging from Afghanistan is a very complicated endeavor. It does not need to be hypocritical, though.

 Notes

[1] Amin Saikal, “How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 61.

[2] Ibid., p. 201.

[3] Ibid., p. 107.

[4] Ibid., p. 129.

[5] Ibid, p. 169.

[6] Ibid., p. 214.

[7] Hassan Abbas, “The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023), p. 210.

Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– Yemen goes through a civil war that does not end, frequent cholera outbreaks, and acute malnutrition among children. These days, however, the southern Arabian country appears on the news mostly in connection to the rebel Houthi movement’s attacks against Israel and ships transiting the Red Sea. The Houthis, led by Abdulmalik Al-Houthi, have their origins in the border areas with Saudi Arabia but now control most of northwestern Yemen, where the majority of the population lives.

The rebel group has grown increasingly close to Iran during the decade that has passed since the beginning of the civil war in Yemen. The Houthis are now considered to belong to Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”, which also includes Syria, the pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas killed 1,139 people in Israel and took about 250 hostages. Israel responded by waging war on Gaza, and at least 42,603 people have been killed and 99,795 injured in Gaza (the total number of direct and indirect deaths is likely to be much higher, with a group of US doctors who served in Gaza estimating 120,000 Gazans have died).

Soon after October 7, the Houthis started to attack ships in the Red Sea, driving up global shipping costs and forcing a steep decline in the number of vessels transiting the area. At the same time, and despite the over 2,000km (1,300 miles) that separate Yemen’s capital Sana’a from Tel Aviv, the Houthis have carried out direct attacks against Israel.

Although the Israeli air defense system has normally intercepted the missiles and drones launched from Yemen, last July a drone slammed into an apartment building in Tel Aviv killing one person and leaving ten others wounded. The Houthis have announced they will stop their attacks if there is a ceasefire in Gaza. With no end to the war on Gaza in sight, there is no way of saying whether the Houthis are bluffing.

The Houthis’ increasingly assertive military activities have led to an unprecedented presence of the US Navy in the Red Sea, both protecting ships and targeting positions in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. Together with the UK, the US has conducted 200 airstrikes in Yemen since January 2024, with 74 civilian casualties reported as of September 2024.

Ironically enough, in the early 2010s, then-US President Barack Obama’s so-called “Yemen Model” was supposed to represent a new and lighter-footprint approach to the Middle East. Alexandra Stark, an associate policy researcher at RAND, greatly contributes to our understanding of the self-deceptive Yemen Model in her recently published book “The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East.”

Steven Simon, one of Obama’s Middle East advisors, spoke about the Yemen model as an “intelligence-driven, dynamic targeting” to disrupt terrorist activities by using drones. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) became a top national security priority for the Obama administration after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a terrorist connected to AQAP, failed to detonate a bomb aboard a commercial plane en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on December 25, 2009.

AQAP had a strong presence in Yemen, but according to the Obama White House, it could be neutralized by partnering with the Yemeni government and launching remotely directed drone strikes. This approach had the advantage of avoiding the boots on the ground that had made the Afghanistan and Iraq wars so unpopular at home. Stark argues that, at the beginning, some limited successes were achieved, but the Yemen model soon faced two critical problems.

First, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was so interested in the US funds newly available to his regime (connected to Washington’s counter-terrorism efforts) that he had little incentive to do his part in combating AQAP.  A US success against AQAP would have been a failure for Saleh. It would have led to a loss of the funds that oiled the wheels of his patronage system. Second, and equally important, was the mistake of approaching Yemen through the extremely narrow lenses of counterterrorism. Washington thought it could react to AQAP’s activities in Yemen as if taking place in a vacuum, “while largely ignoring or deprioritizing questions around governance, the allocation of political power, and economic development.”[1]

Alexandra Stark, The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024). To Buy, Click Here.

Because of this narrow-minded approach, the US did not see (or did not want to see) how the US-Saleh partnership de-legitimatized the Yemeni leader in front of his population. The same applies to Saleh’s diversion of US counter-terrorism funds to pay for his military campaign against the Houthis in northern Yemen, which had been going on since 2004.

Although Saleh would be forced to resign in early 2012 following the Arab Spring protests, the US kept a similar counterterrorism partnership with Saleh’s vice-president and successor, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. During Obama’s two terms as president, an estimate of between 1,094 to 1,394 people were killed by US drone strikes, with around 100 of them being civilians, according to New America.

Leaving aside the horrible assumption that a drone operator is entitled to decide who lives and who dies, the drone campaign was most likely also a failure in purely utilitarian terms. As Stark notes, there is no systematic evidence of how the drone campaign was perceived by Yemenis, but more general research on counterterrorism points out that the death of non-combatants tends to swell the ranks of terrorist organizations. The US continues to strike AQAP targets until today, and the terrorist group is estimated to have between 3,000 and 4,000 members.

The US military never developed a transparent system to account for all the civilian deaths in Yemen as a result of US drone strikes. Even so, when in March 2015 a Saudi-led coalition intervened in the Yemen civil war to roll back the Houthis’ territorial advances, the US did not only equip the Saudis with the necessary weapons for the military operation. It also provided the Saudi armed forces with advice that would supposedly reduce civilian casualties. The almost 9,000 civilian deaths as a result of targeting by the Saudi-led coalition, as estimated by the Yemen Data Project, speak for themselves.

Obama’s decision to greenlight the Saudi intervention in the Yemen civil war (with a more secondary role for the UAE) was strongly connected to the broader context in the region at that moment. Obama sought to reassure Washington’s main security partners in the Gulf at a time when the US was about to sign the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, providing sanctions relief in exchange for significant restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. Whereas US President Donald Trump would unilaterally abandon the JCPOA in May 2018, Saudi airstrikes on Yemen continued until April 2022.

Analyzing the seven years of Saudi airstrikes on Yemen, Stark identifies only two episodes in which the US appears to have used some of the leverage over Riyadh that came with Washington’s military and diplomatic support for the Saudi-led campaign. The first moment came in October 2016, when a Saudi airstrike on a funeral killed 140 civilians and wounded 600 more. In response to this, the Obama administration reduced the number of US personnel assisting the Saudis in their airstrikes and temporarily froze a $350 million weapons deal. The number of Saudi airstrikes temporarily decreased after the US decision.

The second limited use of US leverage over Saudi Arabia took place in December 2017, when the Trump administration called the Saudi coalition to stop the blockade of the key Yemeni port of Hodeidah. The Saudis did so and allowed the arrival of four new cranes to the port donated by USAID. These two moments of US pressure on Saudi Arabia were too half-hearted and inconsistent to yield sustainable results. Still, they give us a glimpse of what could have happened had US leaders cared enough about Yemen.

Not everyone in the US was willing to forget Yemen, however. Stark devotes a chapter of her book to the Yemen advocacy coalition, a diverse alliance ranging from humanitarian NGOs such as Oxfam to libertarian-minded groups such as Defense Priorities. They were united by the desire to stop US support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen and asked the US Congress to apply pressure to that effect on President Trump. The Yemen advocacy coalition organized a long-running campaign to inform the broader public of the US’s role in the Yemen war and lobby politicians on Capitol Hill.

In early 2019, the House of Representatives and the Senate approved legislation relating to the War Powers Resolution, which restricts the involvement of US forces abroad without congressional authorization. Trump used his veto power to stop the legislation in its tracks. However, Stark credits the campaign with having “an effect both on the Trump administration and the behavior of the Saudi-led coalition.”[2] Stark argues that one of its most significant successes was raising the reputational costs of being engaged in the war for Saudi Arabia and the UAE. She notes this played a role in the Emirates’ decision to withdraw most of its forces from Yemen in July 2019.

“The Yemen Model” concludes with some general lessons from Washington’s approach to Yemen during the last decade and a half. First, prioritizing short-term stability at the expense of addressing the root causes of conflict, as the Obama administration did when partnering with Saleh against AQAP, is ultimately counterproductive. Second, the US democratic system, as shown by the Yemen advocacy coalition, offers opportunities to demand accountability from political leaders even in the usually secluded realm of foreign policy. Third, the US cannot shape the world alone but the leverage it can exert over its security partners is very strong.

Stark’s book does not discuss the war on Gaza, but her concluding thoughts on the Yemen model are extremely relevant. A former official quoted in a 2017 article explained that the Obama administration became “very frustrated” with how the Saudi-led forces were carrying out the war in Yemen but believed US support was having a positive impact. If this sounds familiar, it is because we are now witnessing a similar dynamic, only on a probably even deadlier scale.

In January 2024, US President Joseph Biden was reportedly “running out” of patience with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. In March 2024, we were told he was “extremely frustrated” with the Israeli leader. Examples of such reports could go on and on. If we did not know that the Biden administration has contributed $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023, or that the US shields Israel diplomatically at every international venue, we could be forgiven to think that Biden is simply powerless. But the billions in military aid and the US key diplomatic support equal enormous leverage. A leverage the US actively decides not to use.  Even if the cost is tens of thousands of lives in a war that can already be defined as regional and now risks expanding to Iran, gaining an even more dangerous dimension.

[1] Alexandra Stark, The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 31.

[2] Ibid., p. 161.

Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– How did Ottoman Damascus descend into violence and looting in July 1860? Why did the Damascene masses fall upon the Christians, leaving around 5,000 of them dead? These are some of the questions that Eugene Rogan seeks to answer in his book “The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” Rogan, a Professor at the University of Oxford, has written some of the go-to books for students and scholars of the Middle East, such as “The Arabs: A History.”

His latest book is motivated by a finding he made more than three decades ago when researching for another project in the National Archives, in Washington, DC. While exploring the archives, Rogan discovered the consular dispatches of Mikhayil Mishaka, the US consul in Damascus when the 1860 Massacre shocked the Ottoman Empire.

In “The Damascus Events”, Rogan contextualizes Mishaka’s first-hand account, as well as other contemporary sources, in the broader historical setting. The result is a gripping and vivid portrait of one of the worst episodes of intercommunal violence in the Ottoman Empire.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the once mighty Ottoman Empire was severely weakened. The empire had initially granted, from a position of strength, extraterritorial rights to foreigners to facilitate trade with Europe. This set of rights, detailed in what was known as the Capitulations, allowed protected foreigners to enjoy preferential terms of trade and taxation and the right to be judged by their consuls.

As the balance of power between the Ottoman Empire and Europe shifted to the latter’s benefit, and Europe gained a stronger economic presence in Ottoman lands, the Capitulations became increasingly problematic. Foreign diplomats and merchants in the Ottoman Empire enrolled in their service a growing number of local Christians and Jews, who in turn profited from the same extraterritorial benefits. Mishaka’s case represented a step further. He was not a foreigner, but an Ottoman Christian born in Lebanon. Even so, he worked as a diplomat for a foreign country, the US.

The Damascus Events have their roots in the destabilization of Greater Syria (which roughly included present-day Palestine, Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon) in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1831, the armies of Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali rolled into Greater Syria. The Ottomans could not repel the occupation forces by themselves, and it was thanks to the European powers’ military help that Egypt’s presence in Greater Syria came to an end in 1840. This display of weakness opened new avenues for European powers to intervene economically and politically in the Ottoman Empire.

In 1843, the Ottoman Empire and the European powers established a new system of rule in Mount Lebanon that undermined the privileges of the local elites by giving more power to local councils. Commoners in Mount Lebanon all suffered under the quasi-feudal rule of the region’s notables but were divided along religious lines, mainly between Christian Maronites and Druzes. The Druzes profess a faith that originated as a schism of Shia Islam but became a distinct religious tradition.

The local elites in Mount Lebanon, intent on stopping their loss of power, succeeded in thwarting inter-religious cooperation. Resentments were largely articulated along sectarian lines instead of class. Intercommunal tensions grew increasingly violent, with both Maronites and Druzes establishing armed groups.

The Druzes, being numerically inferior and lacking the kind of foreign patron the Maronites had in France, went on the offensive in May 1860. They burnt down Christian villages and killed the men who crossed their path, before moving to mixed towns and villages. It is estimated that eleven thousand Christians died and around one hundred thousand became homeless.

After the Mount Lebanon massacres, large flows of Christian refugees moved to Damascus and the areas surrounding the city. Tensions were high in the Syrian capital. Local Christians feared they would be killed like their Mount Lebanon co-religionists. Meanwhile, Damascene Muslims were worried that the local Christians, together with the newly arrived Christian refugees, would seek revenge for the massacres they had suffered at the hands of the Druzes. It was tragically unfortunate that Damascus happened to have a deeply incompetent Ottoman governor, Ahmad Pasha, at a time of major crisis. In front of the governor’s erratic behavior, writes Rogan, “Muslims and Christians, notables and commoners alike, were left perplexed.”[1]

Around the Feast of the Sacrifice, when Muslims traditionally assemble in the mosques, there were unfounded rumors that Christians would use the festive opportunity to attack Muslims. The governor sent soldiers to protect the mosques but the faithful, afraid of the Christians, did not turn up – neither did the governor himself. Later on, young Muslim men went through the Christian quarters of Damascus drawing crosses on the floor and upsetting the neighbors, who did not want to step on the symbol of their faith.

Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2024). Click here to Buy .

Ahmad Pasha overreacted once again. He arrested young Muslim men suspected of having drawn the crosses and put them in chains. He then forced the men to sweep the streets for everyone to see them. Muslims perceived the governor’s measure as a great humiliation and relatives of the young men shattered their chains.

Soon, false news of Christians having killed a group of Muslims spread. A perfect storm had gathered. Damascene Muslims had long resented the Christians’ growing economic prosperity, facilitated by Europe’s interference in the Ottoman Empire. The massacres in Mount Lebanon had put everyone on edge, and the Ottoman governor had increased the fears of both Christians and Muslims.

When the storm broke, it did so with unprecedented violence and went on for a week. Groups of armed Muslims attacked the Christian neighborhoods, killing and looting. Men were forced to convert, although this did not necessarily save their lives, or directly killed. Women were generally not murdered, but there were many cases of rape.

When US consul Mishaqa realized what was happening, he understood his life, as well as his family’s, were on the line. He decided to abandon his house, located in a Muslim quarter. According to his account, Mishaqa twice had to throw coins at marauders to escape before and he and his family came across a heavily armed mob. The mob spared the rest of the family but severely injured Mishaqa. Only by paying the mob a fortune did he save his life.

Mishaqa and his family would eventually find refuge in the house of Emir Abd al-Qadir, a former Algerian revolutionary. Al-Qadir, who had fought against France’s occupation of Algeria, was forced into exile after being captured by the French in 1847. He had finally settled in Damascus with fellow Algerian veterans, making up more than one thousand armed men. During the Damascus Events, Al-Qadir and his men saved the lives of many Christians. They looked for those who were hiding from the mob and rescued them. Once Al-Qadir’s house was full, they accompanied the Christians to the Damascus Citadel, where they suffered hunger and deprivation but were safe from the attacks.

The Damascus governor, and the small contingent of soldiers he commanded, did not intervene. The pleas of the British consul, the only diplomat who continued to enjoy freedom of movement during the massacre, were in vain. According to Mishaqa’s estimates, around 5,000 Christians had been killed during a week of uncontrolled violence in Damascus.

Rogan notes that “the Damascus massacre was a genocidal moment, but it was not a genocide.”[2] He substantiates this claim by noting that outside the Damascus city walls, Christians had been protected by their Muslim neighbors and no violent events had occurred. Within the walls, not only Al-Qadir and his men but also a small group of influential Muslim notables had prevented even larger carnage.

As the violence subsided and the Sultan was informed of the events in Damascus, the Ottoman ruler knew that he had to act decisively. The priority was to recover the trust of his Christian population and avoid a military intervention of the European powers in Syria under the guise of protecting the Christians. Fuad Pasha, a former foreign minister, was chosen by the Sultan to restore order. The contrast between Fuad Pasha and Ahmad Pasha, whose incompetence as a governor had proven deadly during the Damascus Events, was striking.

Fuad Pasha first traveled to Beirut, where he negotiated a truce between the Maronite Christians and the Druzes and consulted with European diplomats. He promised them that those responsible for the Damascus Massacre would be severely punished. He marched into Damascus with a strong military detachment and visited the survivors of the massacre. A group of fifty-seven Muslim notables who had stood by during the killing, or even incited it, were hung after a rushed trial. More than one hundred irregular soldiers and policemen, negligent at best and complicit at worst, were killed by a firing squad. Former governor Ahmad Pasha was also executed.

Fuad Pasha had to balance competing interests. On the one hand, he had to reassure the Damascene Christians that they were safe and convince the European powers that the Ottomans had the situation under control. On the other hand, Fuad Pasha could not alienate the majority Muslim population to the point that they would rise against him or return to violence against Christians. The situation was further complicated by the need to provide temporal accommodation to the Christians who had lost their homes while beginning the construction of new houses and providing compensation for the lost goods.

The budgetary crisis of the Ottoman Empire hardly allowed this. Fuad Pasha forced some Muslims to vacate their houses to make room for Christians and imposed a new tax to collect money for reparations. Only a fraction of what was owed to the Christians was finally paid, but Christians with fewer possessions were prioritized. Mishaqa complained for years that he had not been properly compensated, but this had much to do with his wealth, far above the average.

Fuad Pasha’s reaction would be alien to any current notion of the rule of law or human rights. Still, it was overall effective. Re-construction is always far more complicated than destruction, but Damascus progressively recovered both socially and economically from the 1860 massacre.

The Damascus Events are far removed from our times, but they have more modern echoes. Some of these are found in Syria, where the civil war that started in 2011 has left many episodes of killing along religious lines (most clearly, but not only, by the so-called Islamic State). Still, the potential for false rumors to circulate and de-generate in violence that we observe in the Damascus Events is universal.

After three young girls were mortally stabbed in the English town of Southport, online misinformation spread that the attacker was a Muslim migrant who had recently arrived in England. This resulted in thousands of right-wing extremists flooding the streets of different towns and cities across the United Kingdom, attacking those they perceived to be foreign and engaging in looting.

In the English town of Rotherham, for instance, a hotel hosting asylum seekers was surrounded by 400 people and set on fire before the flames could be put down. “The Damascus Events” is a story of how a society breaks apart and the long and complicated way to societal recovery. In this sense, it is also a story about our present day.

[1] Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2024), p. 129.

[2] Ibid., p. 163.

Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– The impact of US military aid on Palestine is there for everyone to see. For decades, Israel has been the largest recipient of US military aid. The list of military items Washington has shipped to Israel since October 7, 2023, is almost never-ending. 14,000 MK-84 bombs for bomber aircraft, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, or 3,000 precision-guided Hellfire missiles are only some examples. Israel’s war on Gaza would not have resulted in the death of at least 40,000 Gazans absent US support.

Military aid to Israel is by no means the only channel through which the US leaves a major imprint in Palestine. In the form of humanitarian and development aid, the US also shapes the lives of Palestinians in ways that are far more diffuse than bombs and guns but not less consequential. This is what Lisa Bhungalia, an Assistant Professor of Geography at Kent State University, brilliantly explores in her book “Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine.”

Bhungalia’s core thesis is that the US operates like an empire by applying strongly securitized conditions on the development assistance and humanitarian aid it provides in Palestine. Although significant steps in that direction were already taken by Clinton’s White House in the 1990s, the 9/11 attacks represented a watershed moment in the securitization of aid.

Less than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Bush signed Executive Order 13224, which introduced major changes regarding those groups designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). Previously, only individuals belonging to FTOs could be prosecuted by the US. In the era of the so-called ‘War on Terror’, individuals “that support or otherwise associate with these foreign terrorists” could also be subjected to financial sanctions.

The (probably purposely) ill-defined concept of “otherwise associated” was accompanied by a new and ever-expanding list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Meanwhile, Executive Order 13224 prevented organizations receiving US funds from providing humanitarian and development aid where FTOs, or “otherwise associated” entities and individuals, could benefit.

Executive Order 13224 could have put USAID, the US agency responsible for foreign aid and development assistance, in a tough spot. It had been tasked with providing aid while ensuring that no entity or individual blacklisted by the US was at the receiving end. However, USAID quickly found a way out of this complicated situation. It outsourced risk assessment, and the severe legal consequences of failing to comply with Executive Order 13224, to the international NGOs and contractors receiving USAID funds.

In the West Bank and Gaza, an administrative policy document known as Mission Order 21 institutionalized the responsibility of NGOs relying on US money for vetting aid recipients. The new US policy soon had consequences on the ground. After the 2005 municipal elections in Palestine, Hamas held a majority of the municipal council seats in the Gaza Strip. With Hamas designated as an FTO, the Gaza Strip was almost completely excluded from US monies. In the West Bank, Fatah had come out on top in the municipal elections. Even so, Hamas, together with Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLF) — two other designated FTOs — also won seats in the municipal councils. Consequently, the West Bank experienced a dual reality regarding the arrival of aid funds from the US.

Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine by Lisa Bhungalia. Stanford University Press, 2023. Click here to Buy.

As explained by a contractor to Bhungalia, depending on the parties sitting in the municipal councils, municipalities were classified as either “derogatory or non-derogatory.” For instance, the municipalities of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour, surrounding Bethlehem, received US funds for infrastructure, recreational spaces, and city services. Meanwhile, Bethlehem, where Hamas and other FTOs were politically represented, was known in the aid community as a ‘derog’ area and received no funds. In 2012, Hamas and the PFLF boycotted the local elections — with claims that reconciliation between the different Palestinian factions had to precede any election — and US funds finally reached Bethlehem.

Bhungalia discusses the securitization of aid from the perspective of the US and the NGOs on the ground. It would have been interesting to know more about how Palestinians experience the effects of Washington’s aid policies. For instance, did most citizens in Bethlehem know that their city was being disadvantaged because of the composition of the city council, and if so, what did they think about it?

The blacklists put forward by the US are not restricted to organizations but also include persons. The net is cast so wide that it includes relatives of people tied to FTOs or those who have spent time in Israeli jails without necessarily having been charged with any crime. This practice, known as administrative detention, has become even more common after October 7. Equally problematic, there is no clear legal path to challenge one’s inclusion in these lists. Once on the list, people will be excluded from aid projects depending on US funds.

The effects of the anti-terrorist clauses are often ridiculous. A Palestinian humanitarian worker in a US-funded health program explained to Bhungalia that if he organized a “training”, all the participants had to be vetted. Meanwhile, if he set up a “workshop”, as long as it lasted less than four days, he could avoid the cumbersome vetting process.

In the early years following Executive Order 13224, many Palestinian NGOs decided to boycott USAID projects. These Palestinian aid workers felt they were being asked to police their compatriots on behalf of the US. Bhungalia writes that the boycott of USAID aimed at “consolidating a united Palestinian position against the imposition of the US security state through the mechanism of aid.”[1] The effects, however, were not the intended ones. Faced with the boycott, new NGOs from the US were founded in Palestine to absorb USAID money. In front of this, the boycott by the Palestinian NGOs progressively weakened.

Also decisive in the boycott’s failure, explains Bhungalia, was that other Western donors (most of them European) started to adopt anti-terrorism clauses similar to the ones first put forward by the US. This is not surprising. European countries have often followed Washington’s steps in the Middle East when it comes to anti-terrorist legislation and sanctions policy, as can be observed in the case of sanctions against Iran.

One can think of at least two factors to understand this European alignment behind the US. On the one hand, there is a tendency in Europe to mimic (almost by default) many of Washington’s foreign policy steps. Even if, as in the case of aid for Palestine or sanctions on Iran, these US policies result in collective punishment. On the other hand, the long jurisdictional arm of the US in applying its sanctions policy, together with the power of US banks and the dollar as a global currency, also plays an important role. Risk-averse European states and companies fear running afoul of US directives and opt for preemptive self-policing. When an EU directive regarding counterterrorism and aid in Palestine was finally adopted in 2019, it was harsher than that previously followed by individual European countries, explains Bhungalia.

The US’ “Elastic Empire” in Palestine was traditionally predicated on a mixture of hard and soft power that solidified the Israeli occupation while seeking to mitigate some of its most extreme effects. After coming to power in 2017, “the Trump administration ended this veneer”, writes Bhungalia.[2] Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in late 2017 against any notion of international law and followed by cutting all US funding to UNRWA, the agency responsible for Palestinian refugees.

One of the key messages coming from the Biden administration after the 2020 election victory was that “the adults are back in charge.” Whatever this meant, it did not entail a full reversal of Trump’s measures vis-a-vis Palestine. The status quo ante was distressing, but still preferable to Trump’s turbo-charged pro-occupation policies. However, under Biden the volume of US funds for UNRWA did not fully return to the pre-Trump levels. Washington’s economic contribution to UNRWA is now halted after accusations surfaced that UNRWA personnel had participated in the October 7 terrorist attack against Israel.

In October 2021, Israel outlawed six Palestinian NGOs arguing they were controlled by the PFLP. Among them were organizations such as Al-Haq or Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P). The Israeli government underestimated the strong connections between these six NGOs and large international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which stood up for the Palestinian NGOs. Key European countries also continued to work with the NGOs targeted by Israel. A staffer at the NGO Al-Haq told Bhungalia that “Israel did not expect this outcome.”[3]

Israel miscalculated the effects of the move against the Palestinian NGOs. This, Bhungalia argues, has much to do with Israel’s nervousness over the ongoing investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for possible Israeli war crimes. The targeted NGOs had been providing evidence to the ICC to document the case.

Israel moved against the six Palestinian NGOs soon after it became known that they had been targeted with Pegasus, the spying malware developed by the Israeli company NSO Group. For Israel, one of the goals for banning the NGOs was to retroactively justify the espionage they had suffered. Since The Guardian’s revelations two months ago, we also know now that Israeli intelligence agencies have been spying on the ICC for nine years.

The decision by the ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan on May 2024 to seek arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, his Defence Minister, has been one of the few bright spots for Palestinians over the last months. Although the future trajectory of the ICC case is uncertain, and any decision would come too late for many Palestinians, the possibility of Israeli leaders having to account for war crimes is now a bit less distant.

Washington’s military and diplomatic support for Israel has understandably been the main reason for outrage among campus protesters across the US in the context of the ongoing war on Gaza. In the book “Elastic Empire”, we learn about more subtle forms of violence. It is not only with weapons and vetoes at the UN Security Council, but also through aid, that the US inscribes its imperial influence on Palestine.

Notes

[1] Lisa Bhungalia, “Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), p. 94.

[2] Ibid., p. 109.

[3] Ibid., p. 160.

Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– The title of Christopher Phillips’ latest book, “Battleground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East”, might scare off some potential readers. Here comes another Western man, in the worst tradition of arch-Orientalist Bernard Lewis, writing about the Middle East as a region of “perennial conflict”, beset by “ancient hatreds” and always on the verge of violence, some might think. But they would be wrong. Phillips, a Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, presents in “Battleground” a balanced study of the current Middle East. Although the focus is on ten different conflicts, each of them discussed in a different chapter, “Battleground” also has space for societal and economic dynamics that are not necessarily conflictual.

Phillips’ commendable balance has much to do with his commitment to multicausal explanations for conflict, avoiding all-too-common simplistic explanations. Although the chapters are relatively short, he does not sacrifice complexity for the sake of concision. Yes, he would argue, the legacy of Western imperialism and the ongoing intervention of non-regional actors such as the United States or Russia in the Middle East have created much havoc. But so have interventions from Middle Eastern countries into each other’s politics, or the poor performance of domestic political elites, too often focused on self-enrichment. And yes, religious and ethnic identities can be a source of conflict, but they only become truly destructive when instrumentalized by external powers or internal political elites. Frequently, they just take a back seat to economic interests and political ideologies.

As the subtitle of the book suggests, Phillips seeks to explain what he calls “the New Middle East.” Although many of the pre-Arab Spring dynamics have continued to dominate the region, Phillips argues that considerable changes after 2011 justify the notion of a “New Middle East.” Two of these recent developments are Washington’s limited withdrawal from the region, partly due to the US’s growing energy independence, and the increasing importance of non-state actors.

At the same time, the post-2011 Middle East has a broader range of regional powers, and they interact in a larger geographical area, Phillips notes. The Horn of Africa, covered in one of the book’s chapters, is a paradigmatic example of these dynamics. The Horn has seen a struggle for influence between Turkey, Iran, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, not to mention extra-regional actors. Phillips writes that “while not being in the Middle East itself, the Horn has become a new arena for competition for that region’s battling powers.”[1]

Phillips’ book does not cover Northern Africa beyond the case of Egypt. If he had done so, detailing the moderate democratic advances in Tunisia before Kais Saied’s coup in 2021, the overall image of the Arab Spring’s legacy would have been somewhat less negative. Still, it is difficult to be optimistic when one sets the hopes in many Arab countries at the beginning of 2011 against the current reality. About Egypt, for instance, Phillips remarks that “Sisi has constructed a far more fearsome police state than Mubarak, arguably more so even that Nasser, making the consequences of rebelling far greater.”[2]

Meanwhile, Muammar Gaddafi was killed by rebels in October 2011, but the institutionally poor country he left behind greatly complicated the prospects of a democratic transition. The long-time dictator “had hollowed out most national institutions and there was no national army or police force to fold them into.”[3] The new interim government could not control or disarm the militias that had fought Gaddafi. Moreover, the exclusion of former regime officials from the new system, however understandable it was considering their complicity in Gaddafi’s terror state, resulted in powerful grievances within a group that retained considerable influence.

Every chapter in the book provides a historical perspective of each of the conflicts as well as an exploration of the most recent developments. When reading the different cases, the seismic changes during the last decades in the configuration of power between the states in the Middle East are certainly striking. Turkey and Iran, despite their profound internal changes, have not lost influence since the height of the Cold War. But Iraq and Egypt are two former regional powers whose sway in the region has steadily declined.

In the case of Iraq, the main reason was Saddam Hussein’s successive invasions of Iran and Kuwait and the decade of sanctions that followed, culminating in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The case of Egypt is more complicated. Phillips argues that the country’s internal decline had much to do with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s failed socialist policies, followed by an equally unsuccessful new approach by his successor Anwar Sadat, who liberalized the economy. Be that as it may, what is clear is that Egypt was once “the pre-eminent Arab power in the Middle East” but is now “dependent on neighbors and allies further afield -like the US- for economic support.”[4]

Christopher Phillips, Battleground: 10 Conflicts That Explain the New Middle East. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024). Click here to buy.

For Egypt, two of these powerful neighbors are Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which together with Qatar have greatly expanded their regional influence during the last decades thanks to their wealth in natural resources. Sisi’s coup in 2013 against the democratically elected government of Mohamed Morsi cannot be understood without considering the economic and political support Sisi received from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

A country that showcases the multiplicity of root causes and actors that need to be considered when studying conflict in the Middle East (or for that matter, anywhere else in the world) is Lebanon. With borders that made little historical sense, separating groups that used to live together, Lebanon was established by the victors of the First World War after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The newly established territory was ruled by France as a mandate of the League of Nations. When independence was declared in 1943, Lebanon emerged as a country with a very diverse population. There are Sunni and Shia Muslims, Alawites, Druze, Orthodox, and Maronite Christians, alongside smaller communities. Lebanon has managed this diversity with a sectarian political system that distributes high offices and parliamentary seats on a confessional basis.

The system, initially established in the 1943 National Pact, underwent some changes in the 1989 Taif Agreement but remained essentially sectarian. Both agreements were negotiated by political elites and later imposed in a top-down approach. The 1989 Taif Agreement, although deeply flawed, presaged the end of the civil war that devastated Lebanon between 1975 and 1990 and killed at least 100,000 people. Israel, Syria, and Palestinian militias heavily intervened in Lebanese politics, while the occupation of southern Lebanon by Israel opened the door to Iran through the creation of Hezbollah.

At the same time, Lebanon has never lacked a fair number of national elites eager to interact with foreign forces for their self-serving purposes. As Phillips puts it succinctly, in the 1990s the national elites transformed themselves “from warlords into businessmen.” The end of the war led to a turbo-charged neoliberalism that multiplied Lebanon’s GDP per capita fourfold between 1990 and 2000 and, once again, between 2000 and 2010.

However, per capita figures obfuscate how broad sectors of society were left behind. A UNDP study from 2017 showed that, in the private sector, the earnings of the top 2 percent were almost as high as those of the bottom 60 percent. While the popular sectors barely benefited from the growth years, the collapse of the banking system starting in 2019 hit them the hardest. The overall poverty rate moved from 30%–35% in 2019 to 85%–90% at the end of 2021.

What does the near future have in store for the Middle East and its ongoing conflicts? The threat posed by the so-called Islamic State has not disappeared, but it is far smaller after they lost their territorial base in Iraq and Syria in 2017. Meanwhile, the rivalries within the Gulf Cooperation Council appear to be relatively contained since January 2021, when the blockade imposed on Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the UAE came to an end. Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran continue to be high but at least there is a direct communication line between Riyadh and Tehran after the restoration of diplomatic relations in 2023.

The civil war in Libya was halted in 2020 and the conflicts in Yemen and Syria have lost intensity. Still, reductions in the level of open fighting very often do not translate into significant improvements in the lives of the civilian population, and this is what we see in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. And last, but certainly not least, there appears to be no end in sight for the Gaza War. At least 38,193 people have died in Gaza as a result of Israeli military operations following Hamas’ attack against Israel on October 7.

In the long run, however, the ongoing denial of humanitarian aid to the population of Gaza will probably prove even deadlier than the bombs. A study recently published by The Lancet suggests this has already happened. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have no hurry to conclude the military operations in Gaza and ease the siege on the civilian population. In case Biden had not been pliant enough to Netanyahu’s wishes, the Israeli premier might find an even more receptive ear in the White House after the November election.

[1] Christopher Phillips, Battleground: 10 Conflicts That Explain the New Middle East (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 242.

[2]  Ibid., p. 164.

[3] Ibid., p. 47.

[4] Ibid., p. 142.

But the comfortable majority of the center has experienced significant changes. Firstly, it has shrunk by around 20 parliamentarians out of the 720 that make up the parliament. Secondly, it has moved to the right. The Social Democrats experienced limited losses, Renew lost more than a fourth of its members, and the European People’s Party (EPP) won 13 seats. And thirdly, and more importantly, the idea that these three parties represent a solid center that will not reach agreements with the far-right belongs to the past.

On the campaign trail, Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President and main candidate of the EPP, announced that she would accept the votes of the far-right party Brothers of Italy to be re-elected in her position by the European Parliament, which cannot propose candidates but can turn them down. Brothers of Italy is the party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Both von der Leyen and the leader of the EPP, her fellow countryman Manfred Weber, have been engaged in a long-running campaign to portray Meloni as a moderate leader. They have been relatively successful, partly because the EPP’s movement to the right has bridged the gap with the far-right. Before the European elections, the EPP approved a manifesto calling for tripling the staff of Frontex, the European border agency accused of multiple human rights violations. In a proposal that echoes Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Plan, the EPP also announced it wants to transfer asylum seekers in the EU to so-called “third safe countries”, where their asylum claims would be processed.  

Hans Kundnani, the author of the book “Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project” (a very recommendable work reviewed here for Informed Comment), provides a sharp analysis of this change. As he explains, “to understand the influence of the hard right on the EU, it is necessary to go beyond the raw numbers and to look at the way that it is shaping the agenda of the centre right. There has always been a way that the hard right could win without winning.”[1]

Two main reasons have turned Meloni’s Brothers of Italy into an attractive partner for the center-right, and none of them is related to the party’s supposed moderation. The first is that Brothers of Italy is the strongest political force in Italy, and Meloni’s 24 parliamentarians in Brussels will hold considerable leverage in a context where comfortable majorities will be difficult to assemble.

The second is that Meloni, contrary to other far-right leaders such as the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, subscribes to trans-Atlanticism and the continuation of military support for Ukraine. The recent publication of a video by an undercover journalist in which some leading members of Meloni’s party give fascist salutes should belie Meloni’s moderation, in case the politician’s self-declared admiration for Mussolini in her youth years was not sufficient.  But in an EU that is becoming increasingly militarized, support for NATO turns far-right politicians into moderate conservatives. This helps explain why von der Leyen’s European Commission is delaying the publication of a report on eroding press freedom in Italy.

Von der Leyen might eventually not need Brothers of Italy’s votes to stay as Commission President, especially if she convinces the European Greens to vote for her. But a new damn has been broken in the normalization of the far-right in Europe, and we can expect the EPP to vote more often together with the far-right in the coming parliament. At the same time, the EPP might use the threat of reaching out to the far-right to tone down proposals coming from its left on topics such as combating climate change.

In the European Parliament, the far-right is divided into two groups. The Conservatives and Reformists faction includes Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, the Spanish party Vox, and the Polish Law and Justice, which was voted out of office in 2023 after causing major damage to the rule of law. Meanwhile, the Identity and Democracy faction includes Le Pen’s National Rally or Salvini’s Lega, the other far-right party in Italy’s ruling coalition.

The combination of the two far-right groups has increased its presence in the European Parliament by 23 seats. This figure, however, fails to capture the magnitude of their rise. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) finished second in a German-wide election for the first time in history and is sending 15 parliamentarians to Brussels. The AfD won the elections in eastern Germany and received the second most votes in the south of the country.

During the 2019-2024 period, the AfD parliamentarians belonged to the Identity and Democracy group until they were expelled shortly before the European elections. Le Pen had long sought to dissociate herself from the AfD because the German party hurt her efforts to present a supposedly moderated image. The trigger for the AfD’s expulsion was an interview by the AfD main candidate in the European elections, Maximilian Krah, with the newspaper La Repubblica. In the interview, Krah said that not all members of the SS, the Nazi elite group responsible for the concentration camps, could be considered criminals.

One of the biggest winners in the European elections was a party whose leader, Herbert Kickl, made very similar statements about the SS in 2010. Kickl leads the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), for which the European elections represented their first win in an Austria-wide election. They collected 25.4% of the votes, closely followed by the main center-right and center-left parties. Austria will celebrate national elections at the end of September, and the FPÖ is currently leading the polls.

Journalist Paul Lendvai’s recently published book “Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945” provides valuable insights to understand Austria’s recent history, and why the far-right might be able to appoint a chancellor in the Alpine country before the end of 2024. The FPÖ, founded in 1956, was first led by Anton Reinthaller and then, until 1978, by Friedrich Peter. They were both former SS officers.

It was under the leadership of Jörg Haider in the 1990s that the FPÖ consolidated its results in successive parliamentary elections over the 20% mark. About Haider, Lendvai writes that he “catered to the shrinking group of old Nazis and the steadily growing group of radical xenophobes.”[2] In the Austrian parliament, for instance, Haider referred to Nazi extermination camps as “punishment camps”. In 1999, the FPÖ finished second in an election to the Austrian parliament for the first (and until now, only) time and entered the government as the junior partner of the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). Haider stayed away from government positions to minimize the international anger against the new coalition. This did not prevent the EU from imposing temporary sanctions on Austria.

Such a strong response might have been counter-productive, as it contributed to the FPÖ self-portrayal as political outsiders, argues Lendvai. What is clear is that the irate EU reaction from 2000 was not repeated when the ÖVP and the FPÖ established a new coalition government in 2017. Under the coalition agreement, “the FPÖ succeeded in winning, among other things, such key portfolios as the interior, foreign and defence ministries, control over all secret services and the post of governor of the National Bank.”[3] The coalition collapsed after a corruption scandal was revealed in 2019 involving Heinz-Christian Strache, the FPÖ leader. This notwithstanding, a new coalition between the center-right and the far-right is a very real likelihood after this year’s election, and this time the FPÖ could be in the leading role.

The recent elections to the European Parliament, as well as the Austrian case, show that the far-right is not in a position to reach absolute majorities in proportional representation systems. This might be different in the French parliamentary elections that will start this weekend, where the two-round system in 577 constituencies could facilitate the achievement of a parliamentary majority for Le Pen’s National Rally.

The far-right has been increasingly normalized both discursively and in the coalition politics of center-right European parties. The EU sanctions against Austria in 2000 after the entry of the FPÖ into the Austrian government were perhaps a strategic mistake in the long-term, as Lendvai argues. Still, they were a manifestation of the feeling that an Austrian government including the FPÖ needed to be treated differently, that a red line should be drawn. When Meloni became Prime Minister of Italy in 2022, or when, last month, Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) managed to form a coalition government in the Netherlands, the red line drawn in 2000 was nowhere to be seen.

[1] Hans Kundnani, “Confronting the New Europe.” The New Statesman, June 11, 2024. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2024/06/confronting-the-new-europe.

[2] Paul Lendvai, “Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945” (London: Hurst & Co., 2023), p. 62.

[3] Ibid., p. 73.

—

Featured image by Marc Martorell Junyent.

The Pegasus Project was a working group of international investigative journalists that incorporated 17 media organizations. The project included publications such as the Belgian Le Soir, the Indian The Wire, and the Mexican Proceso alongside bigger media organizations such as The Guardian, Die Zeit, or The Washington Post. Starting on publication day, the 17 media partners released in a synchronized way their reporting on the use of Pegasus to hack into the mobile phones of human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, and politicians across the globe.

The Pegasus Project ended up involving around 800 journalists. However, it would never have been possible without an initial, individual decision. The one taken by a source whose identity, to this day, is only known by a very few. The source leaked a list of 50,000 phone numbers that had been targeted for hacking through Pegasus.

Before the Pegasus Project became a reality, there was a core group of only four people. The team consisted of two Amnesty International cybersecurity experts, Claudio Guarneri and Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, and two journalists, Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, the founder and editor, respectively, of the non-profit media organization Forbidden Stories, based in Paris. It was Forbidden Stories that received the list with 50,000 phone numbers targeted by Pegasus. Richard and Rigaud explain the story of the Pegasus Project in their book “Pegasus: The Secret Technology That Threatens the End of Privacy and Democracy.”

In the beginning, the reporters’ main task was to corroborate, thanks to the technical expertise of Guarneri and Ó Cearbhaill, that the list they had received truly included targeted people. They initially did so by matching some phone numbers in the leaked list with journalists who had collaborated with Forbidden Stories in the past and were on the reporters’ phone contact lists.

Richard and Rigaud reached out to the journalists suspected of having been attacked, asking whether they would agree to have their mobile phones remotely scanned by the Amnesty International cybersecurity experts. Some of them also sent their mobile phones for forensic analysis.

Guarneri and Ó Cearbhaill started to discover signs of attempted or successful infection in the devices. Those who turned out their mobile phones at this early stage, brave people such as the Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova, spied on by her own government, were fundamental for the success of the investigation.

The investigative effort had to be carried out in the utmost secrecy. This required obvious measures such as keeping mobile phones away from work-related conversations or continuous scans to guarantee that the mobile phones of those involved in the investigation had not been compromised. But it also implied very complicated equilibria, such as approaching suspected targets and convincing them to hand over their mobile phones while sharing little information about the ongoing journalistic investigation.

Previous personal acquaintances helped create the relationships of trust needed for the targeted people to feel confident enough to depart from their mobile phones and the personal information contained there. Here, the success of Forbidden Stories and the partners it later incorporated was all the more impressive against the background of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which limited international travel and face-to-face interactions.

After consulting with the German journalist Bastian Obermayer, who, together with Frederik Obermaier, had been responsible for the Panama Papers investigation, Richard and Rigaud carefully expanded the circle of people involved in the Pegasus reporting. Forbidden Stories embarked four partner media organizations on the project – Le Monde, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and The Washington Post.

With this decision, the risk of NSO getting wind of the investigation and introducing changes in its Pegasus attacks – something that would have greatly complicated the work of the Amnesty International forensic team – expanded exponentially. But so did the capacity to establish the names behind the 50,000 phone numbers on the list and gain access to new targeted mobile phones for further analysis. After a period of successful cooperation with these four media organizations, and as the intended publication day approached, the Pegasus Project grew to the final 17 partners.

Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2024. Click here to buy.

With the help of these partner media organizations, the Amnesty International cybersecurity experts received a constant flow of mobile phones that helped them better understand how Pegasus operated. Guarneri and Ó Cearbhaill progressively developed their own forensic tools to detect Pegasus infections with growing accuracy and detail. In the book, Richard and Rigaud succeed in making understandable the highly complex procedures involved in hacking a mobile phone as well as in detecting these infections.

What the Amnesty International forensic investigation showed was that WhatsApp and SMS messages were two of the easiest and most common avenues to get access to the targeted mobile phones, but not the only ones. The NSO had developed so-called “zero-click” attacks that did not need the targeted person to click on a fake message for the hacking to be successful. Once inside the mobile phone, the attackers using Pegasus had access to any information contained in the device. The mobile phone’s microphone and camera could also be activated to capture everything within their range.

As the investigation would reveal, Pegasus was at the hands of governmental agencies in dictatorships such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, or Azerbaijan, as well as illiberal democracies such as Hungary and India. The most proliferous user was Mexico, where Pegasus was deployed against drug traffickers and critical journalists alike. Among the victims of Pegasus were the closest entourage of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, or the French President Emmanuel Macron, a target of Morocco.

But these famous names were only the tip of the iceberg, with at least hundreds of human rights advocates, journalists, and lawyers being targeted. The Pegasus Project investigation directly contradicted NSO’s long-standing claim that their cyber surveillance star product, Pegasus, was being deployed by trusted governmental agencies only to prosecute criminals and terrorists and guarantee global security. Before the Pegasus Project revelations, NSO had defended that misuse of Pegasus immediately led to the violator agency losing access to it. The magnitude of the Pegasus Project revelations put this lie to rest.

In their book, Richard and Rigaud provide an interesting portrait of Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, who, together with Niv Karmi – the “N” in NSO Group – founded the self-styled cybersecurity company in 2010. Niv Karmi would leave NSO only one month after its foundation. In “Pegasus”, Hulio and Lavie emerge as perfect examples of the dangers inherent in letting profit maximization trump any ethical concern.

What the book leaves relatively unexplored are the strong ties between the Israeli government and NSO. As an Israeli company, NSO’s technology exports have to be approved by the Israeli government. This is something common to many other countries with a powerful weapons industry, which similarly have little compunction about selling their technology to serial human rights violators.

But the connections between the Israeli government and NSO go further than this. As Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti from The New York Times documented, “sales of Pegasus played an unseen but critical role in securing the support of Arab nations in Israel’s campaign against Iran and even in negotiating the Abraham Accords.”[1] After the agreement in September 2020, Israel established diplomatic relations with the UAE and Bahrain.

In his acclaimed 2023 book “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World”, journalist Antony Loewenstein explains how both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have served as a display room for the effects of Israeli weapons. These weapons are then exported worldwide securing significant revenue and influence for Israel.

Despite the efforts to keep up the appearance of a clear-cut division between the public and the private realms, Israeli cyber-arms firms, as well as traditional weapons companies, “act as an extension of Israel’s foreign policy agenda, supporting its goals and pro-occupation ideology.”[2]

In his book, Lowenstein explains that in 2020 Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman called the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after his defence ministry had decided to suspend the licensing of Pegasus to the Saudi kingdom. Around that time, reports had emerged connecting Pegasus with the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, which shed a bad light on NSO and the Israeli government. Netanyahu, for whom the new Saudi-Israeli geopolitical alignment against Iran weighed more heavily than PR concerns, made sure Saudi Arabia regained access to Pegasus.

Back to Richard and Rigaud, it is no overstatement to say that their book is an incomparable opportunity to understand what serious journalism is about. If this is the case, it is not so much because of the findings the book reveals. These, after all, are accessible through the reporting of the 17 partners in the Pegasus Project and the follow-up stories by hundreds of other media organizations. The genius in “Pegasus” is to be found in the impressive description of an even more impressive process. That is, how a single leak developed into a major-scale international investigation up to the highest journalistic standards, all the while staying below the NSO’s powerful radar.

Right before publication, when the company was approached for comment about the impending revelations, NSO’s PR armor collapsed under the weight and scope of the Pegasus Project findings. Failing to engage with the content of the allegations, NSO threatened defamation lawsuits and attempted a divide-and-rule approach toward the different Pegasus Project partners. This last-ditch effort failed to prevent the 17 media organizations from pressing the publish button when the day arrived.

The revelations by the Pegasus Project had significant consequences, such as the Biden administration’s blacklisting of NSO in November 2021. NSO has kept fighting, though. After the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, NSO attempted to have its blacklist status in the US reversed citing the threat of Hamas and the role the Israeli company could play against it. The lobbying efforts did not succeed.

In February 2024, NSO suffered a significant defeat when it was forced to hand its code to WhatsApp as a result of a lawsuit dating back to 2019 over NSO’s hacking using WhatsApp messages. These successes notwithstanding, the lack of a global regulatory framework on the use of cyber-surveillance methods is a strong reason to remain concerned. As Richard and Rigaud themselves note in the epilogue to their book, “NSO might be crippled, but the technology it engineered is not.”[3]

[1] Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, “The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon,” The New York Times, January 28, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/magazine/nso-group-israel-spyware.html.

[2] Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World (London and New York: Verso, 2023), p. 59.

[3] Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, Pegasus: The Secret Technology That Threatens the End of Privacy and Democracy (London: Pan Macmillan, 2023), p. 301.

Outside the court, at most twenty people could be counted as being there to support Höcke at some point during the morning. In their conversations, they complained that the procedure against Höcke was politically motivated. This had been Höcke’s message from the very beginning. Meanwhile, around 600 demonstrators had protested against the radical right politician earlier on the morning, before the start of the judicial process. There will be hearings until mid-May, but it is already clear that the most severe punishment for Höcke would be the payment of a fine. 

Höcke, who rivals Donald Trump in his mastery of self-victimization, failed to explain in his initial “X” post why he had to appear before a court in Halle. The AfD politician, who can be openly described as a fascist according to a German court, had to answer for his use, on at least two occasions, of the slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (Everything for Germany). The phrase was employed by the paramilitary National Socialist group SA (“Sturmabteilung”, or Storm Division). Using National Socialist slogans and symbols is a punishable crime in Germany. 

Höcke, a former history teacher, promised he did not know the origins of the slogan. His repeated use of expressions with strong National Socialist connotations, such as “entartet” (degenerate) or “Volkstod” (death of the nation) in public speeches and his 2018 book, belie this claim. Furthermore, the German sociologist Andreas Kemper has long established that there are striking parallels between Höcke’s public statements and different articles that appeared under the pseudonym Landolf Ladig in neo-Nazi publications more than a decade ago. One of these articles argued that Germany had been forced into a “preventive war” in 1939. 

The lack of open support for Höcke in front of the court in Halle was all the more embarrassing because the radical right politician had been given an incredibly powerful loudspeaker by Elon Musk, the billionaire and owner of Twitter/ “X”  since October 2022. Musk reacted to Höcke’s “X” post denouncing what in his eyes was a restriction on freedom of speech and asked him, “What did you say?”. After Höcke explained he had said “Everything for Germany”, Musk asked why the phrase was illegal. “Because every patriot in Germany is defamed as a Nazi, as Germany has legal texts in its criminal code not found in any other democracy,” replied Höcke. He forgot to add that no other democracy is the successor state of a regime that killed 6 million Jewish people and set the European continent on fire, with up to 20 million deaths in six years in Europe alone. 

Al Jazeera English Video: “German far-right politician on trial for alleged use of banned Nazi slogan”

Höcke has made abundantly clear in public statements how he understands Germany’s National Socialist past. He has referred to the monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and said that history is not black-and-white when asked to comment about Nazism. Elon Musk’s apparent support for Höcke should not come as a surprise given their shared antisemitic and Islamophobic views. The South African businessman has launched antisemitic tropes against Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist George Soros. According to Musk, Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” The AfD, like so many other far-right movements around the world, has also targeted Soros. Furthermore, Musk recently espoused the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.” Musk’s Islamophobia does certainly not lag behind. The “X” owner agreed with a far-right blogger who said France has been conquered by Islam. Again, Musk’s Islamophobia is a perfect fit for the AfD. The party was accurately described as having “a manifestly anti-Muslim program” by an independent commission established after a right-wing terrorist killed nine people, who had originally come as migrants, in Hanau in February 2020. 

Musk and the AfD have supported each other in the past. In September 2023, the billionaire criticized the German government’s funding of NGOs rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean and called people to vote for the AfD. Three months later, the co-leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, said Musk’s takeover of Twitter was good for “freedom of opinion in Germany.” One of the deputy leaders of the AfD group in the German parliament, Beatrix von Storch, has supported Musk in his ongoing confrontation with the Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The judge is demanding that “X” close accounts spreading fake news in Brazil. Since then, Musk has become a hero for the Brazilian far-right backing former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. 

The mutual sympathies between Musk and German-speaking far-right radicals also extend to the Austrian political scene. According to Harald Vilimsky, a member of the European Parliament for the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), Musk’s overtake of Twitter represented an end to censorship. The FPÖ, founded in 1955, has a far longer history than the AfD, established in 2013. Their political programs, however, defend similar far-right positions and both parties are members of the Identity and Democracy Party group in the European Parliament, one of the two far-right groups at the European level.

Meanwhile, in March 2024, Martin Sellner, the leader of the radical right group Identitarian Movement in Austria, was interrupted by the local police while delivering one of his racist speeches in the small Swiss municipality of Tegerfelden, close to Germany. When Sellner posted about the police action against him, Musk replied by asking whether this was legal. Sellner, taking a page from Höcke’s self-victimization, said that “challenging illegal immigration is becoming increasingly riskier than immigrating illegally.” The local police were simply enforcing a legal provision that allows them to force people out of the region if they “behave in a prohibited manner.” Sadly enough, Sellner is used to spreading his racist propaganda with impunity.

Martin Sellner and the Identitarian Movement’s hatred against migrants knows no limits. This transnational group of radicals hired a ship in 2017 to prevent NGOs in the Mediterranean from assisting boats in distress. Once they ran into technical problems, the Identitarians were helped by Sea Eye, a German NGO that normally rescues migrants instead of radical racists. The Identitarians have directly benefited from Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. After Musk bought the company, Sellner’s account on the social platform, and also that of his Identitarian Movement, were reinstated. Twitter had blocked the accounts in 2020 as they violated the rules to prevent the promotion of terrorism and violent extremism that the social platform had in place back then. In his first post after his Twitter account was reinstated, Sellner explicitly thanked Musk for “making the platform more open again.” Sellner was denied entry to the United States in 2019 because he had a $1,700 donation from the right-wing terrorist who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, also in 2019. 

In January 2024, the independent German investigative platform Correctiv reported that Sellner had presented his proposals for the deportation of millions of migrants with foreign citizenship and Germans with a migration background in a secret meeting in November 2023. The encounter in Potsdam, organized by two German businessmen, counted with the participation of Roland Hartwig (who at the time was the personal aide of the AfD co-leader Alice Weidel) and Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD parliamentary leader in Saxony-Anhalt. Some members of the “Werteunion” (Values Union), an ultra-conservative group within the center-right CDU, were also in attendance. The findings by Correctiv finally led the CDU to cut its ties to the “Werteunion”. 

The lack of open displays of support for Höcke in Halle last week was comforting. Even more positive were the mass protests against the far-right politician and the AfD in front of the court. However, recent polls in both Germany and Austria are reason for great concern. The AfD would currently receive around 18% of the votes and finish second in an election to the German parliament. Meanwhile, its Austrian counterpart, the FPÖ, would be close to 30% of the national vote and emerge as the strongest party. Austria will vote this autumn, whereas elections in Germany should take place at the end of 2025. 

In both Germany and Austria, as well as in other countries such as the United States and Brazil, the far-right is benefiting from Musk’s support and open-door policy to radicals on “X.” Needless to say, though, Musk is just offering a new platform to very old ideas. The far-right’s threat would hardly be less serious if the billionaire had a sudden political conversion. What to do, then? One of the banners at the demonstration against Höcke in Halle pointed to the holistic approach that will be needed to counter the far-right. The banner read “AfD Stoppen! Juristisch, Politisch, Gesellschaftlich.” In English: “Stopping AfD! Judicially, Politically, Socially.” 

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The figure of Mohammad Mosaddeq, Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953, is an uncomfortable one for both sides of the US-Iran rivalry. For the US, Mosaddeq is a constant reminder that the dictatorial reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after 1953 came into being with a US intervention to overthrow the constitutionally elected Mosaddeq. The US would provide strong support for the Shah in the coming decades. Mosaddeq is someone who challenged Western powers to defend Iranian national interests. This alone should, a priori, afford him a place of honor in the Islamic Republic established by Ruhollah Khomeini after his return from exile in 1979. However, Mosaddeq’s nationalism was grounded on democratic secularist convictions that are at odds with the ideology of the Islamic Republic, which in recent years has shut down its already limited avenues of democratic participation within the system.

In their book “The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954”, David S. Painter and Gregory Brew revisit Mosaddeq’s nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, the ensuing tensions with the US and the UK, and the Western powers’ final decision to remove Mosaddeq. As the title of the book already suggests, the oil dispute was the obvious point of contention but the early 1950s events in Iran would not have unfolded as they did absent the weight of much larger conflicts.

Among them was the desire of many Third World nations to manage their natural resources. In the age of decolonization, newly independent countries found themselves in a paradoxical situation. For the first time, they enjoyed political sovereignty but were tied to their former metropoles by long-term contracts to exploit their natural resources. Iran was never formally colonized. Still, the original oil concession Britain obtained in 1901, with very disadvantageous terms for the Persian state, had much to do with Persia’s internal weakness at the time. This fragility had been exacerbated by imperial competition between Russia and Britain for influence over Persia.

The oil dispute in Iran in the early 1950s took place against the background of an increasingly intense Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. In a time of strong ideological polarization, there was little place for a leader such as Mohammad Mosaddeq, who followed a policy he called “negative equilibrium” as he did not want to align Iran with either of the two blocs.

Mosaddeq became prime minister in 1951 after the Majles (the Iranian parliament) decided not to ratify the so-called Supplemental Agreement negotiated by the Iranian government and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The British company, founded in 1909, had been exploiting Iran’s oil for four decades. The Supplemental Agreement fell short of what most Iranians demanded. The Majles appointed Mosaddeq as prime minister after his proposal to nationalize the Iranian oil industry was unanimously approved by the parliament.

When nationalization was implemented, British leaders became convinced that Mosaddeq would have to go for the oil dispute to be settled in terms favorable to London. In October 1951, after Iranian troops took over the Abadan oil refinery in southern Iran, the last AIOC personnel departed the country. Mossadegh had Iran’s oil infrastructure in his hands but faced the major challenge of keeping the oil industry running without foreign technicians. Finding export markets for the oil products was even more complicated as Britain imposed an oil boycott and sanctions on Iran.

Diverging from the British position at this point, Washington “sought a solution that would restart the oil industry and preserve Iran from communist control while not endangering U.S. interests in the region”, write Painter and Brew.[1] At the same time, the Shah did not dare make a move against Mosaddeq since both his political figure and the cause of nationalization were widely popular in Iran. US officials acted as mediators between Mosaddeq on the one hand, and the AIOC and Britain on the other. There was no common ground to be found, however. Mosaddeq argued that Iranian oil belonged to the country after nationalization. Consequently, he wanted international companies to buy Iranian oil at a price higher than that offered to other developing countries where Western companies controlled the oil industry.

David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954. Click here to buy.

Mosaddeq was open to international companies returning to Iran to help operate the oil infrastructure as long as it was under Iranian control. British diplomats in Tehran sought to destabilize the Mosaddeq government and have it replaced with a new one that would be more amenable to British interests. The crisis escalated in October 1952, when Mosaddeq ordered the British embassy to close and its citizens to leave the country.

By the end of 1952, the US presented to Mosaddeq the so-called ‘package proposal’, which would have recognized Iran’s ownership of the oil industry but still envisaged Iran selling most of its oil to a consortium of international oil companies. The thorniest issue was compensation payments to the AIOC for Iran’s oil nationalization. As the authors note, the US and the UK insisted that “payment could not be limited to physical assets but also had to cover lost future profits.”[2] Mosaddeq rejected the ‘package proposal’. The reason was not that the Iranian prime minister failed to understand the specifics of the oil trade, as it has often been suggested. Rather, Painter and Brew argue, Mosaddeq understood very well the risks of being trapped in continuous compensation payments to AIOC if it agreed to the terms of the deal. Iran would have been in nominal control of its oil industry but, in truth, once again dependent on the British company’s compensation wishes.

Painter and Brew situate the US decision to consider the forceful removal of Mosaddeq around April 1953. With the British forced out of the country, the US operatives in Iran stepped in to mobilize the Iranian clerical and political groups that opposed Mosaddeq as well as the military. Bribes were a common means to achieve the desired result. Although there was no love lost between the Shah and Mosaddeq, the monarch had to be talked into the coup by his Western backers as he feared a failed move against Mosaddeq could backfire. The Shah finally signed two firmans (royal decrees): one dismissing Mosaddeq and the other one appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as the new prime minister. While street mobilizations headed by bribed local gang leaders took place in Tehran, significant sectors of the army carried out an operation against Mosaddeq on August 16, 1953.

The prime minister had been alerted of the impending coup and loyalist troops defended his residence and the army headquarters. After the failed coup attempt and the Shah’s departure from Iran, the Tudeh Party took to the streets and used the opportunity to call for a republic. The US ambassador to Iran convinced Mosaddeq to order the police and the army to repress the Tudeh protests. As Painter and Brew remark, “ironically, Mosaddeq’s decision to crack down on the Tudeh, which illustrated his anti-communism and his desire for U.S. support, helped seal his fate.”[3] On August 19, 1953, with the streets empty of Tudeh demonstrators, the army moved once again to overthrow Mosaddeq, who was not prepared for a second coup attempt. Soldiers took the ministerial offices and Radio Tehran, while Mosaddeq was finally captured. The former prime minister was later sentenced to three years of prison and would die under house arrest in 1967.

Although the Shah returned from his short exile and General Zahedi was installed as prime minister, the removal of Mosaddeq did not immediately solve the oil dispute. Nationalization was a popular cause in Iran, and Mosaddeq’s forced departure from the scene did not change this. Negotiations dragged on until late 1954 when the Iranian government agreed to pay limited compensations and retain a largely symbolic control of its oil industry. The US sweetened the deal with a military and economic aid package of $120 million.

“The Struggle for Iran” partly draws on documents about the US role in the coup first released in 2017 and is particularly strong in covering the economic dimension of the conflict. Painter and Brew’s work helps debunk some of the most common myths about the coup. Although anti-communism and opposition to nationalization were strongly connected, the authors explain Washington viewed nationalization as the biggest threat. Successful nationalization in Iran could have resulted in other Third World nations following the same path.

Painter and Brew also note that it is unfair to portray Mosaddeq as an irrational and stubborn leader who was unwilling to compromise. Orientalist tropes were rife in contemporary assessments of Mosaddeq by British and American leaders. Mosaddeq was described as “incapable of rational thought”, “dominated by emotions and prejudices,” or a “reckless fanatic”, among many other condescending and offensive remarks.

Painter and Brew argue that the British were never interested in finding a negotiated solution to the conflict and “used talks as a stalling tactic to buy time”[4] for Iran to experience the negative economic impact of Britain’s oil boycott and allow covert actions against Mosaddeq to run their course. In “The Struggle for Iran”, Painter and Brew importantly reflect how the tragedy of the coup was not only that the US and Britain removed a constitutional leader in a foreign country, but also that the intervention “halted the progress Iran had been making toward representative government. Autocracy was the outcome.”[5]

[1] David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, “The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954,” (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023), p. 64.

[2] Ibid., p. 129.

[3] Ibid., p. 170.

[4] Ibid., p. 208.

[5] Ibid, p. 212.