51吃瓜

What will the costs of the latest round of illegal, ill-fated US military adventurism in the Middle East amount to? Some of the toll is already clear. Washington has of dollars on a reckless war of against Iran. A merciless campaign of aerial bombardment has driven millions from their . American and Israeli airstrikes have destruction on civilian sites and already killed more than people in Iran and Lebanon. Among the dead are more than 200 children, many killed in a US on a girls鈥� school 鈥� this war crime evokes the grim precedent of such past American atrocities as the 1968 My Lai in Vietnam or the 1991 Amiriyah shelter in Iraq.

The latest war has also dealt a potentially fatal blow to our already battered democratic institutions. It鈥檚 a war neither by Congress nor by the public. Instead, it was launched by a president who refuses to submit to the law or heed the will of the people, claiming in true authoritarian fashion that he is the law, and that he alone embodies the popular will.

Such has, however, been decades in the making, a predictable result of longstanding imperial impunity. Yet we may rapidly be approaching a point of no return. Even US President George W. Bush, in launching his catastrophic of choice in the region, sought to manufacture consent and the case before the United Nations. Today, there is neither the pretense of legality nor of legitimacy.

The costs associated with this latest criminal war, measured in human lives; the misappropriation of national resources and the erosion of the rule of law will only continue to mount. Yet there is also a less visible, less immediate price tag for such wars. If the history of in the region offers any guide, the full bill will likely not become apparent for months, years or even decades. When it finally arrives, however, it will carry a familiar name: blowback.

For that reason, it鈥檚 important at this moment to recall the lessons Washington appears determined to forget. From Afghanistan to Iran, Iraq to , the record is unmistakable. Yet as long as the that grips this country鈥檚 political establishment remains unchallenged, the same cycles of escalation and reprisal will undoubtedly persist in the years to come, threatening to once again draw the United States (and much of the world) ever deeper into the abyss of forever war.

Oil and the engine of empire

While the post-September 11 鈥渨ar on terror鈥� is often invoked as the starting point of US militarism in the Middle East, the roots of conflict there stretch back nearly a century. The violence and instability unleashed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented less a rupture with the past than a continuation of long-established patterns of US policy. The seeds of the forever wars had, in fact, been planted decades earlier in the oil-rich soil of the region.

Direct American involvement began in the previous century, during the years between World War I and World War II. By that point, petroleum had become not merely a valuable commodity but a for sustaining a modern industrial economy. The vast oil reserves discovered in the US had propelled the American economy to global prominence and played a decisive role in fueling the Allied during World War I. Yet policymakers in Washington understood that domestic reserves were finite. As petroleum became synonymous with power, economically, militarily and politically, the US increasingly turned abroad to secure new sources.

The Middle East emerged as a critical frontier in that search, drawing the region ever more tightly into the orbit of an expanding American empire. In 1933, Company of California secured an exploratory concession with the conservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia. The agreement created the Arabian American Oil Company, laying the for the 1945 US鈥揝audi oil-for-security that would become central to Washington鈥檚 future influence over the region鈥檚 geopolitical order.

Over the years, the insatiable thirst for oil only drew the US ever deeper into the region. By 1953, American intervention assumed more overtly coercive forms. That year, in coordination with British intelligence, the CIA orchestrated the of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran鈥檚 popular prime minister, who had committed a cardinal sin in the emerging Cold War years. In 1951, he presided over the nationalization of his country鈥檚 oil industry in an effort to return sovereign control of its resources to the Iranian people by wresting them from the exploitative grip of the Anglo-Iranian Oil , the precursor to .

Despite his rather than communist credentials, a fact understood in Tehran, London and Washington, Mossadegh would then be cast as, at worst, a dangerous proxy of the Soviet Union and, at best, a threat to regional stability (as in, American hegemony). The coup that followed ended Iran鈥檚 fragile democratic experiment, secured to Iranian oil for Western companies, and restored the Shah of Iran to power. His regime would then be sustained by a steady outward flow of oil and a nearly endless of US weaponry. With CIA backing, his secret police, , would terrorize and torture a generation of Iranians.

Yet Washington celebrated this new arrangement, claiming that Iran had been transformed into an 鈥� of stability,鈥� and a cornerstone of the 鈥� strategy,鈥� in which Washington would outsource regional Cold War policing to compliant authoritarian allies in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Such subversion of nationalist movements and support for despotic monarchies, as well as the increasingly unequivocal of Israel, would generate intense backlash. Among the most visible early expressions of that was the oil crisis, demonstrating how US policy in the Middle East could reverberate domestically.

But the first unmistakable case of blowback arrived in 1979 with the . In that country, discontent had been simmering beneath the seemingly stable fa莽ade of the Shah鈥檚 rule for years. When the monarchy collapsed after months of protests and repression, the Islamic Republic would fill the political vacuum, drawing on the theological language of and the political rhetoric of to the Shah, the US and Israel.

In the US, those developments were largely stripped of their historical context. Americans were instead cast as the innocent of irrational fanaticism. Why do they hate us? was the refrain that echoed across the Western media and the answers offered rarely confronted the long history of intervention and exploitation. Instead, they defaulted to a supposed with Islam, which was portrayed as inherently antagonistic to 鈥淲estern values.鈥�

Such explanations obscured an uncomfortable reality 鈥� that the US had repeatedly undermined democracy across the region (as well as in of the world) to advance its own interests. As a Pentagon commission report in 2004 , the problem was not that people 鈥渉ate our freedoms,鈥� as Bush had reductively , but that many 鈥渉ate our policies.鈥� In other words, the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington were the ultimate, if deeply disturbing, expression of blowback.

Revolution and counterrevolution in the Persian Gulf

Those widely resented policies from Washington were reinforced by its overreaction to the 1979 upheaval in Iran. That country鈥檚 new leader, , sought not only to transform Iranian society internally but envisioned the Islamic Republic as the opening move in a broader anti-imperialist struggle across the Middle East. For Washington and its reactionary regional allies, the specter of such potential revolutionary contagion posed a profound threat.

In January 1980, in an attempt to contain the Iranian regime, US President Jimmy Carter articulated a new foreign policy position that placed the US on a collision course in the region. The declared the Persian Gulf a 鈥溾�� of the US, warning that any attempt by an outside power to gain control would be repelled by 鈥渁ny means necessary, including military force.鈥� In that fashion, Washington asserted an explicit claim to a protectorate thousands of miles from its shores. The US, Carter made clear, was prepared to send soldiers there to ensure uninterrupted access to oil.

The strategic reorientation that followed proved violent and far-reaching, while marking a shift away from and as the principal theaters of Cold War conflict. As historian Andrew Bacevich observed in his , America鈥檚 War for the Greater Middle East if you were to measure US involvement by the number of troops killed in action, the transformation was striking. From the end of World War II to 1980, almost no American soldiers were killed in the region. Since 1990, however, virtually none have been killed anywhere except in what Bacevich termed the 鈥淕reater Middle East.鈥�

Measured in American lives alone, the subsequent costs would number in the thousands. Measured in civilians killed across the region, the toll would be . Over the past several decades US-led or -backed wars have contributed to the deaths of of people and the displacement of of millions more, producing one of the most devastating population catastrophes since the end of World War II.

Proxy wars and the escalation trap

The American shift toward the Middle East ensured that the US would become deeply entwined in a cascade of conflicts. As regional actors moved either to defend a fragile status quo or exploit the upheavals that followed, Washington began instigating new conflicts in the region.

In the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein the new government in Tehran on ideological and strategic grounds. The emergence of a revolutionary Shi鈥檃 state next door threatened his Sunni-dominated regime that ruled over a Shi鈥檃 majority in Iraq. At the same time, Saddam sought to what he perceived to be Iranian weakness, pressing longstanding revanchist claims to the oil-rich borderlands of southwestern Iran.

Saudi Arabia viewed these developments with . In the Saudi capital of Riyadh, policymakers feared that revolutionary 厂丑颈鈥檌蝉尘 might threaten the of the kingdom鈥檚 Sunni Wahhabi monarchy. The call for a Shi鈥檃 revolution also raised concerns about unrest in its oil-rich Eastern Province, where Shi鈥檃 workers faced economic and near colonial conditions. Similar anxieties reverberated across the other Gulf monarchies.

The US responded by doubling down on support for the remaining pillars of its regional order, Saudi Arabia and Israel, while seeking to contain and roll back the perceived threat posed by Iran. Still interpreting regional upheaval through the prism of the Cold War, US policymakers also expanded their involvement elsewhere. In Afghanistan, the CIA launched the largest covert operation in its history, channeling weapons and to the Afghan mujahideen resisting the Soviet Union鈥檚 occupation of that country that began in December 1979.

The Soviet intervention itself was shaped by the shockwaves of the Iranian Revolution. Leaders in Moscow feared a militant Islam on their southern flank that might embolden within Muslim-majority regions of the Soviet Union.

In Iraq, the US publicly tilted toward Saddam Hussein while simultaneously engaging in illegal weapons sales to Iran, with the funds received being rerouted to bankroll another American-backed in Nicaragua. Meanwhile, the Lebanese Civil War, worsened by Israel鈥檚 1982 of Lebanon, created the conditions for the rise of , which presented itself as a defender of marginalized Shi鈥檃 communities against Israeli military aggression and .

By 1986, after escalating regional violence and spill-over, US President Ronald Reagan took a step that paved the way for what would, in the next century, become Washington鈥檚 鈥淲ar on Terror.鈥� In April of that year, Reagan launched in the dense heart of the Libyan capital of Tripoli on the home of Libyan leader , holding him responsible for acts of non-state terrorism abroad, including support for from the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Irish Republican .

That operation marked a significant escalation in the region and its justification would later be formalized as the : the claim that Washington could wage preemptive war anywhere against any state accused of supporting terrorism inside its country or outside its borders. That doctrine was no less illegitimate, illegal or dangerous in the 1980s than it would become two decades later. As political activist Daniel Ellsberg then 鈥� a point he would continue to press throughout his life, including after President Barack Obama ordered on Libya in 2011 鈥� it seemed that the US had 鈥渁dopted a public policy of responding to state-sponsored terrorism with U.S. state-sponsored terrorism.鈥�

In each instance, deeper involvement in the region produced deeper backlash. The US-backed Afghan jihad helped give rise to in 1988 and paved the way for the Taliban鈥檚 of power in 1996 and the 20-year American war in Afghanistan. The of the 1980s set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the of 1991, which laid the groundwork for the criminal 2003 US of Iraq. The instability that followed not only expanded Iran鈥檚 but contributed to the emergence of the . In Lebanon, the power vacuum that Hezbollah came to fill resulted in the 1983 barracks in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, the deadliest day for US Marines since Iwo Jima in World War II.

The lesson not learned

The pattern is difficult to ignore, despite our government鈥檚 persistent efforts to do so. Many of the actors Washington came to identify as its principal adversaries emerged either in direct response to US policies or had themselves once been cultivated by Washington in pursuit of short-sighted strategic aims. In case after case, conflicts initiated or intensified by the US appeared to subside, only to reemerge in new, more volatile forms. Intervention produced instability; instability served to justify further interventions; and the cycle only repeated itself thereafter.

There is little reason to believe that US President Donald Trump鈥檚 war against Iran will prove any different. By now, the historical record should make that clear, which is why we must oppose the violence being carried out in our name, as it is wrong, criminal and immoral. We must oppose it for our common humanity, but also for our own sake.

After all, history tells us one thing: When we wage unjust wars that terrorize distant populations in far-off lands, the violence rarely remains confined there. Sooner or later, in one form or another, it returns. Violence begets violence, and imperial war has a way of back upon those who initiate it. We reap what we sow; the chickens, in time, invariably come home to roost.

[ first published this piece.]

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The views expressed in this article are the author鈥檚 own and do not necessarily reflect 51吃瓜鈥檚 editorial policy.