Whatever balance there was would be changed utterly
by World War I and the consequent partitioning of the
former Ottoman Empire. Western intervention reshaped
the Middle East, often in what seems astonishingly
cavalier fashion. The British enabled the Wahhabi-Saudi
takeover of Arabia, installed a foreign Sunni king over
Shia majority Iraq, and shored up the Nazi sympathizer
Reza Khan as Shah of Iran. After World War II, the
United States took over as prime mover. Motivated by
Cold War ideology, it helped engineer a coup d’état
against Iran’s newly elected prime minister Muhammad
Mossadegh and reinstated the autocratic regime of Reza
Khan’s son, Shah Reza Pahlavi, under whom Iran ɹrst
aspired to nuclear power—with American
encouragement. Successive U.S. administrations backed
the Wahhabi-dominated kingdom of Saudi Arabia not
only for access to its oil but also as a bulwark against
Nasser’s pro-Soviet regime across the Red Sea in Egypt.
In the 1980s the United States joined forces with Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan to fund the anti-Soviet mujahidin
—literally jihad ɹghters, or as Ronald Reagan preferred
to call them, freedom ɹghters—in Afghanistan, and in a
rather stunning example of unintended consequences,
these troops later formed the basis of the Taliban. In that
same decade, the United States found itself arming both
sides in the Iran-Iraq War, supporting Saddam Hussein
in order to counter the ɹerce anti-Americanism of
postrevolutionary Iran, while also supplying Iran in the
nora
(Nora)
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