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After Iraq, What Next? America Faces a Dangerous World

Iraq and the Middle East:
A Century of Turmoil Continues

What has led up to the current crisis in Iraq? How did the United States find itself in this deadly and seemingly insoluble quagmire?

by Melvin Rhodes

The world has changed dramatically in the last 100 years-and nowhere more so than in the Middle East. Not one of the nations of the Middle East has the same borders or governmental system that it had a century ago. Whereas Britain and the United States have enjoyed long periods of political stability, nations of the Middle East, a region at the crossroads of three continents, have seen little but turmoil and violence throughout the last century.

A hundred years ago, most of the region was within the Turkish Ottoman Empire, once a major power but by 1900 very much in decline. It fell apart during and immediately after World War I, replaced by new nations like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf States, all under direct or indirect European control, mostly British and French.

Further change came after the Second World War. Arab nationalists were incensed when the United Nations divided the British Mandate territory of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian areas. The Jewish state of Israel came into existence on May 15, 1948-and was immediately attacked by five Arab armies, all determined to crush the small country of 500,000 people before it could get off the ground.

The consequences of this division of Palestine are with us to this day. Most Palestinian Arabs, many of whom had settled in Palestine in previous decades, fled the new territory of Israel and have been living as refugees ever since. But the creation of the nation of Israel affected not only the Palestinians.

Rising tide of Arab nationalism

Four years after the 1948 war, radical Arab nationalists, set on victory over Israel and determined to end the continuing British occupation of their country, rose up and overthrew King Farouk of Egypt in 1952. Another four years later, the new nationalist government seized the Suez Canal from Britain and France. War followed. Egypt was defeated by the combined powers of Great Britain, France and Israel, but international pressure forced them out of Egypt and Cairo assumed control of the canal.

Read the full article at www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn45/mideast.htm


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