Article written by Dalal Abu Diab Y12
A tongue-in-cheek article on the constant interference of the CIA in the Middle East since 1950 and the plot holes in US foreign policy.
This article does not reflect the perspectives of the International School of Geneva (Ecolint)
The CIA is like an uninvited acquaintance to the lunch table: awkward, destructive, and somehow always leaving with more than they brought.
On the night of the 29th of March 1949, Omar Bashar fell asleep in a nation still exhaling the breath of its first democratically elected leader—an avid anticolonialist, one who had experienced the hardship of being a refugee, one who had fought tooth and nail to rid his country of pestering western interference. Unfortunately for President Shukri al-Quwatli, those credentials were all the CIA needed to wreak havoc in Syria.
Fueled by intelligence provided by Husni al-Za’im, Stephen J. Meade felt no remorse as the two conspired to destabilise al-Quwatli’s regime—though, in truth, they never do. On March 29th, the U.S. backed Za’im, the Army Chief of Staff, to seize power, effectively ending democratic governance in Syria and paving the way for regimes like Assad’s to surface. Meade had met with Za’im at least six times before the coup. Their discussions were not about fostering Syria’s prosperity or planning another election but centred on the ‘possibility [of an] army-supported dictatorship,’ a vision the CIA was all too eager to entertain. Serving as the CIA’s Damascus station chief during the same period, Copeland is also identified as an architect of the 1949 coup. In his ever-so-wise words “it is true that in many cases that we would sit in the attics of our State Department and say our government does not interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, and we meant that in the bottom of our hearts, but in this case, we have to.” The hypocrisy was glaring: while publicly championing non-interference and sovereignty as pillars of international law, U.S. operatives justified meddling under the guise of necessity. Copeland’s admission is a supreme example of the moral oscillation exercised by the Central Intelligence Agency. For the Syrian people, however, the cost of this ‘necessity’ was the erosion of their fledgling democracy and an era of military dictatorship.
Similarly, by 1953, the CIA, in its infinite wisdom, decided that democracy in Iran was simply too dangerous to be left unchecked. The democratically elected government, led by the audacious reformer Mohammad Mossadegh, had made the grave mistake of nationalising the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951—because, of course, controlling one’s own resources is the ultimate affront to Western sensibilities. Mossadegh’s bold move earned him a fair and democratic rise to power as prime minister, but it also earned him the ire of Britain and the United States, who swiftly orchestrated a ruthless economic blockade to bring the country to its knees. As tensions reached a boiling point, the Communist Party rallied 100,000 people to protest the U.S., the Shah, and their meddling puppeteers. Nine hours of brutal street fighting followed, ultimately snuffing out any remaining resistance to the coup. With the rebellion quelled, the Shah was installed—restoring, in the eyes of the West, the natural order of things: oil in their hands and Iran under their thumb.
Under the gracious rule of the Shah, 1954 would bring the grand restoration of Western control over Iranian oil, with Britain and the US firmly at the helm of the ever-churning petroleum juggernaut–proof that imperialism doesn’t fade, it just rebrands. Popular opposition to this blatant theft forced the Shah, freshly installed and deeply unpopular, to embrace a ruling strategy best described as terror in its purest form. With the enthusiastic backing of the United States, Iran’s military and police forces were transformed into instruments of repression, with the notorious Savak (Secret Police)—trained and funded by the U.S.—leading the charge.
By 1976, Amnesty International would paint a damning picture: Iran held the world’s highest rate of executions, operated without a credible civilian justice system, and maintained a record of torture so horrifying it defied belief. For a country blessed with oil wealth, it seems the Shah had chosen to refine only brutality, delivering what Amnesty called the “worst human rights record in the world”—an achievement that surely made his Western benefactors sleep soundly at night.
In the late fifties, Syria and Egypt dared to entertain the revolutionary dream of uniting against Western imperialism, now known as the United Arab Republic (UAR). A notion so threatening it sent shockwaves across board and war rooms alike. The U.S. responded with its signature flair: guns. By dispatching the Sixth Fleet, a subtle reminder of who truly called the shots was exhibited, that and the flooding of its favourite client regimes with enough weapons to arm the African continent. Meanwhile, Syria and Egypt claimed to have uncovered no fewer than eight conspiracies to derail their merger, assassinate Nasser, or topple one government or the other—because clearly, when revolutionary unity threatens Western interests, plotting coups is practically a reflex. Independent evidence would later confirm that several of these plots weren’t just paranoia, proving once again that the only thing the West despises more than instability is the kind it can’t control.
Two weeks after Syria and Egypt merged to form the United Arab Republic (UAR), the U.S. scrambled to counteract this unprecedented assertion of Arab self-determination. Their response? The Baghdad Pact—a coalition of monarchies and Western-backed regimes designed to suffocate the rise of Nasserism and curb Soviet influence. It worked about as well as you’d expect. Mass riots erupted across the region, and Iraq’s troops, instead of crushing unrest in Jordan as ordered, mutinied and stormed the royal palace. By dawn, the King, Crown Prince, and Prime Minister were dangling from lampposts.
The very next day, the U.S. deployed 14,000 Marines to Lebanon while Britain rushed troops into Jordan. The Lebanese government, an unpopular CIA-backed regime led by President Camille Chamoun, faced off against an armed insurrection that quickly escalated into near-civil war. Months of urban warfare followed, with U.S. firepower ensuring that Chamoun remained in power. Eisenhower later mourned this “somber turn of events,” insisting that a “vigorous response” was needed to safeguard Western influence in the Middle East—because, evidently, the blood of those who resisted was just another line item in the cost of doing imperial business.
If at first you don’t succeed, arm a more ruthless faction. That was the CIA’s approach in Iraq after a failed assassination attempt on Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassim. In 1963, the right wing of the Ba’ath Party took power with full U.S. backing, and the CIA handed them a list of Communist Party members to execute. Thousands were slaughtered. The corpses piled up, the rivers ran red, and Washington looked on with satisfaction, its fingerprints wiped clean by local executioners.
By 1968, a counter-coup—steered, in part, by a then-unknown Saddam Hussein—cemented Ba’athist rule in Iraq. Four years later, the nationalization of Iraqi oil in 1972 made one thing clear: despite the CIA’s best efforts, the West’s grip on the region was slipping. The empire was fraying, and Washington was growing restless. It had propped up the Shah in 1953, only to watch as his reign of terror turned Iran into a tinderbox of revolutionary rage. When that rage finally ignited in 1979, the U.S. lost a vital oil-rich ally in a matter of days.
Desperation breeds recklessness. Unwilling to let Iran slip beyond its reach, Washington turned to a familiar name: Saddam Hussein. It armed him, bankrolled him, and whispered in his ear—go, bleed Iran dry. And so he did. Eight years of slaughter followed, a million lives fed into the furnace of war. Nothing was won, nothing was resolved—except, of course, the security of foreign oil interests, quietly insulated from the carnage.
A coup in 1978 brought Afghanistan under socialist rule, prompting the U.S. to dust off its Cold War playbook. The CIA funnelled over $3 billion in weapons and training to Islamic fundamentalists, including a young Osama bin Laden, and heavily backed the faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose “followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.” Six months later, the Soviet Union sent in troops to prop up the Afghan government. The Mujahideen, armed with U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles and war strategies, waged a brutal insurgency while Reagan hailed them as “freedom fighters.” The result? Over a million dead, five million refugees, and a nation primed for the rise of the Taliban. But that was just a prologue to the decades of carnage that followed. The American hand that fed these militants would later justify military invasions in their name.
The Pentagon, never one to let an opportunity slip, spent the next decades bouncing between invasion and counter-invasion, always finding new pretexts to occupy, bomb, and plunder. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya—each fell in succession, each left in ruins, each abandoned when it no longer served Washington’s designs.
Of course, that’s the beauty of American foreign policy—it never cleans up the mess, just shifts to the next target. The strategy is always the same: crush, co-opt, or corrupt any movement that dares to claim independence from Washington’s orbit. In Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, the same pattern plays out. Leaders who dare to defy Western hegemony are assassinated or overthrown. Puppet regimes are installed, armed, and shielded from accountability. When those puppets fall or turn against their masters, they become the next justification for military intervention.
And when that intervention breeds chaos? Washington dusts off an old script: “The United States does not negotiate with terrorists.” Except when it does—through backchannel deals, arms-for-hostages trades, or by bankrolling militant groups that later turn their weapons on American forces. Yesterday’s “freedom fighters” become today’s existential threat, the cycle repeating itself under the same righteous banner.
Mosquitoes are inherently parasitic creatures.
Amazing. Best Article here