Long before Operation Epic Fury, Washington was attempting regime change in Iran. In April 1951 the reformist politician Mohammed Mossadegh became the country’s premier, with a mandate to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the British corporate giant that controlled Iran’s oil production. This provoked the ire of both the company, the precursor to British Petroleum, and the cash-strapped British government, raging against the dying of the imperial light. Within months the Royal Navy had imposed an embargo on Iranian oil, and officials were laying plans for a secret invasion. All the while, the US presented itself as an honest broker between London and Tehran. But, increasingly convinced that Mossadegh was an extremist allied with communism, the Eisenhower administration began to plot his ouster. In August 1953, after sponsoring internal destabilization campaigns, the CIA and MI6 recruited a group of army officers to bring down Mossadegh.
The coup sits at the heart of What Really Went Wrong, the first of two recent related books by the prolific Lebanese-born British scholar Fawaz Gerges. Both are attempts to answer the question Gerges poses at the outset of the second of them, The Great Betrayal: “Why has the Middle East reached this seeming low point after a century of state- and nation-building?” Why, in other words, does the region remain a bastion of authoritarian government, prone to conflict and instability, instead of becoming a high-growth, high-income economic success story like the Asian “tigers,” which Gerges holds up as paragons of development?
A professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, Gerges is perhaps best known for his work on radical jihadism, which has made him a regular commentator on Middle Eastern affairs on ABC, CNN, and other media outlets. In books like The Far Enemy (2005) and The Rise and Fall of al-Qaeda (2011), Gerges sought to show that jihadists bent on sacred war against the West were far from representative of broader Arab and Muslim opinion. Instead, he argued in The Far Enemy, they were a minority within a minority, a small schismatic sect within the broad church of political Islam—and what’s more, one riven by infighting and plagued by incompetence.
In The Rise and Fall of al-Qaeda, written in the flush of optimism generated by the 2010–2011 Arab uprisings, Gerges went further, reassuring his readers that “Arabs and Muslims do not hate America and the West but rather admire their democratic institutions, including free elections, peaceful transition of leadership, and separation of powers.” Al-Qaeda was a spent force, a kind of zombie organization kept alive only by the anxieties and interests of the American security state. Instead of radical Islam, a “democratic virus” was spreading through the Middle East, “creating a new language—and a new era—of politics.” With these claims, Gerges sought to unsettle the political consensus that had given rise to the global “war on terror”—the idea that, as Toby Ziegler, The West Wing’s saturnine White House director of communications, put it, there is little else in the vast expanses of the Islamic world but “thousands of madrasas teaching children nothing, nothing, nothing but the Quran, and to hate America.”
More recently Gerges, who began his career as a scholar of superpower intervention in the cold war Middle East, has returned to this period, producing works that seek to understand the region’s ailments as the product of long-standing historical conditions. As the Arab Spring gave way to conflict in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, to renewed autocracy under figures like Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and to the ghoulish apparition of Daesh—the subject of his 2016 book ISIS : A History—Gerges’s tone became bleaker, his outlook more somber.
In Making the Arab World (2018) he cast the region’s current predicament as the result of a decades-long contest between secular nationalists and Islamists for “the state, its power, and its position as custodian of the public sphere.” This struggle began in 1950s Egypt, where Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Free Officers waged a campaign of repression against their erstwhile allies in the Muslim Brotherhood. By the 1970s it had spread across the region, with baleful consequences—for “the long war…between the pan-Arab nationalists and the pan-Islamists” did not just stunt the growth of the postcolonial state, preventing “the normalization of state-society relations and the articulation of a cohesive national identity.” It also drove the rise of jihadist movements, leading to the September 11 attacks; derailed the Arab uprisings; and ignited the new “regional cold war” that began in 2011. So long as Islamists and military nationalists remained locked in their struggle, Gerges suggested, there could be no chance of democratization for the Arab world.
What Really Went Wrong and The Great Betrayal signal still another shift in approach, with Gerges now emphasizing the significance of the external interventions that have curtailed democratic experiments, empowered autocrats, and sustained Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. Though he does not, in The Great Betrayal, entirely discount internal factors, Gerges presents both books as rejoinders to the views of scholars who have glibly dismissed Islam as “incompatible with democracy.”
Chief among these scholars was the British-born, Princeton-based Orientalist Bernard Lewis. (What Really Went Wrong’s title is, of course, an allusion to What Went Wrong?, Lewis’s brisk 2002 history of the Middle East’s flawed, incomplete modernization.) Over the course of a long career, Lewis acquired a unique position within American academic life as a consigliere, offering facile insights on the Middle East to news anchors, congressional committees, and presidential administrations. His influence reached its apex in the early 2000s, when What Went Wrong?, published shortly after the September 11 attacks, became a kind of neoconservative dummies’ guide to the Middle East. Once chary of intervention in the region—his 1990 Atlantic essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage” warned against interfering in the war of ideas between Islamic fundamentalists and moderates, “for these are issues that Muslims must decide among themselves”—Lewis now became an advocate, in former vice-president Dick Cheney’s words, of “a strong, firm US response to terror.” As the former Bush administration official Brent Scowcroft remembered in 2005,
It’s that idea that we’ve got to hit somebody hard…. And Bernard Lewis says, “I believe that one of the things you’ve got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power.”
To admirers like Cheney, Lewis was a “wise man,” a speaker of necessary truths. “No one [offers] sounder analysis,” the vice-president declared in 2006. Yet to critics like Edward Said, Lewis was a practitioner of the dark arts of polemic who used his guise as a “learned Orientalist” to present “aggressively ideological” claims as “objective scholarship.” Lewis, Said charged publicly in 1986, had contributed to shaping the “deeply flawed, deeply antagonistic, deeply uninformed” view of Middle Eastern society that prevailed in the US, one built around pernicious “motifs” that painted the region as the site of “violent and incomprehensible” events born of ancestral antagonisms of race and religion.
This was angry invective but not far off the mark. Beneath a veneer of English reasonableness, Lewis offered an unremittingly dyspeptic account of the Middle East. Western ideas of freedom, citizenship, secularism, and democracy, he had long argued, could not take hold in Middle Eastern society. Even allegiance to one’s country, the most basic building block of civic life, could not be taken for granted—undercut as it was, across the region, by primordial communal ties and the resilient appeal of religion.
These themes were distilled into What Went Wrong? Inward-looking and largely disdainful of Christendom, the early modern Ottoman Empire and Persia failed, Lewis argued, to grasp the West’s growing political, military, and economic might until it was too late. Yet, he continued, the belated realization that they had fallen behind led only to a reluctant and highly selective borrowing of military and bureaucratic models. Far from ensuring freedom and progress, this left a corrosive legacy of autocracy. By the twentieth century the Middle East had become “poor, weak, and ignorant,” and its people were living under the thumb of a “string of shabby tyrannies, ranging from traditional autocracies to new-style dictatorships, modern only in their apparatus of repression and indoctrination.”
“To a Western observer,” Lewis wrote in the book’s conclusion,
it is precisely the lack of freedom—freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination…freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny—that underlies so many of the troubles of the Muslim world.
Instead of rolling up their sleeves and sorting out their issues, Muslims had given themselves over to “hate and spite…grievance and victimhood,” blaming others for their plight. Lewis issued an ominous warning: should they “continue on their present path… there will be no escape from a downward spiral…culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination.”
Against this, Gerges suggests at the outset of What Really Went Wrong that the people of the Middle East have long striven for “freedom, justice, and dignity.” If they have not achieved these aims, and if the region is not “more prosperous, stable, and democratic,” it is because of repeated intervention by “outside powers” determined to protect their own interests. As Gerges writes:
The countries of the Middle East have not been able to chart their own course because of factors such as imperialism, the West’s coveting of the region’s petroleum, the global Cold War, and interrelated geostrategic rivalries and conflicts.
From Sykes–Picot, the secret 1916 Anglo-French agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces into spheres of influence, to Eisenhower’s scheming against Nasser and Mossadegh, Western interference has created what Gerges calls a “toxic legacy” of authoritarianism, perforated sovereignty, and “disillusionment, despair…and distrust of politics.”
Invoking Said, Gerges urges us to move beyond representations of the region as the preserve of “strongmen and extremists,” defined by atavistic hatreds and instability. Instead of “othering…Arabs and Muslims,” we should see the “havoc wreaked” on the Middle East as a “modern phenomenon, incited and fueled by the Great Powers and their local authoritarian clients.” This is a welcome corrective to depictions of the Middle East as a Hobbesian realm of violent disorder—if one that jars somewhat with Gerges’s own focus, in Making the Arab World, on the vicious struggle between Arab nationalists and Islamists as the driving force of the region’s postcolonial history.
Historians can change their views, of course. But it is striking that even in What Really Went Wrong and The Great Betrayal, Gerges cannot quite make up his mind about the causes of the Middle East’s maladies. Published just a year apart, the two books are presumably intended as companion pieces. Yet they offer contrasting accounts of the relationship between internal and external factors. Is the Middle East’s dire predicament fundamentally the outcome of ill-judged Western intervention, which “arrested…political development…and led the region down the wrong path to authoritarianism, militarism, and…pan-Islamism,” as What Really Went Wrong suggests? Or must American and British policymakers be seen, as Gerges writes in The Great Betrayal, as just one half of a “partnership between local autocrats and foreign patrons”?
This is not the only difference between the two books. While The Great Betrayal ranges widely across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, What Really Went Wrong focuses on the Eisenhower administration’s cold war dealings with Egypt and Iran. This is much-traversed ground. Scholars of American foreign relations, including Irene Gendzier, Salim Yaqub, Nathan Citino, and Ray Takeyh, have dissected Eisenhower’s Middle East policies, while historians such as Ervand Abrahamian and, most recently, Afshin Matin-Asgari have told the tale of the CIA’s coup in Tehran.*
What Really Went Wrong’s distinguishing feature—and perhaps its biggest flaw—is its reexamination of this period through the lens of counterfactual history. The thesis is attractively simple. Had the cold warriors of the Eisenhower administration not conspired to topple Mossadegh after he nationalized Iran’s oil in 1951, and had they not plotted to weaken Nasser, denying him the financial assistance he needed to build the Aswan Dam, the Middle East’s recent history might have been very different indeed. If Mossadegh had remained in office, the Shah would not have consolidated his autocratic rule with American support, the 1979 Iranian Revolution would not have happened, and Ayatollah Khomeini would not have come to power. “A democratic Iran,” Gerges writes, “could have been at peace with itself as well as an example for neighboring states.” And had Nasser’s relationship with Washington remained intact, he would not have embarked on his ruinous 1967 war with Israel, a defeat that fatally undermined Arab nationalism and paved the way for political Islam’s ascent. Egypt and Iran might have thrived, becoming in time high-income countries with functioning democratic institutions—Middle Eastern tigers akin to South Korea and Taiwan. Instead, the Eisenhower administration’s actions led to decades of rancor and enmity. There is a straight line, Gerges suggests, from the Aswan Dam to the Twin Towers.
Though counterfactuals have often been dismissed as a mere “parlour game with the might-have-beens,” as the British historian E.H. Carr put it, they can be powerful analytical tools, reminding us that behind what the Australian scholar Sean Scalmer calls “the smug certainty of hindsight”—the sense that things could not possibly have turned out any other way—there is always instability and contingency. Yet to be plausible, Scalmer reminds us, counterfactuals have to observe basic operational rules, among them the need to make “minimal” assumptions about what might have been different, to keep within what the evidence suggests, and to establish a firm causal connection between one event and the next.
Gerges’s “radically reconstructed” account of the postcolonial Middle East in What Really Went Wrong forgets these rules at its peril, leaving the entire history of Egypt, Iran, and the Middle East to balance on isolated events. The assumption that the Six-Day War would likely not have happened “if the United States had not decided to cut Nasser’s wings and fully sided with Israel and anti-Nasser Muslim fundamentalists like the Saudi rulers,” for instance, smacks of overdetermination. Leapfrogging straight from 1956 to 1967, the book allows neither for the twists and turns of contingency nor for the construction of firm causal links.
Would Egypt have become the “peaceful, prosperous…cornerstone” of an Arab order built on democracy if Washington had funded the Aswan Dam? Perhaps. But grand infrastructural schemes have not always yielded economic growth, let alone political liberalization. Iran’s Karaj Dam, built with American assistance after the coup against Mossadegh, comes to mind. Though welcomed by ordinary citizens eager for electricity, it hardly produced a golden era for Iranian democracy. And in what scenario would Nasser have gone from being a fierce critic of parliamentary government, dismissing it as an instrument of elite interests, to a liberal democrat? The mix of pious certainties and counterfactual speculation here can make for strange, disconcerting reading.
So, too, does The Great Betrayal, with its attempts to combine chronological narrative and thematic overview with policy prescription. The book begins conventionally enough, with the “original sin” of World War I—perfidious Albion’s double-dealing and the colonial partition of Ottoman Syria and Iraq—before racing through the heyday of European colonialism in the region and into the era of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. Here it stops to focus for two chapters on Arab nationalism, whose promise of unity, emancipation, and progress was left unrealized by Arab leaders driven by “blind political ambition, greed, and petty geopolitical rivalries.”
Thereafter the book again moves in quick succession from cold war polarization and its effects on the region to chapters on the causes of the 2010–2011 Arab uprisings; on the Middle East’s wider structural issues, from demographic growth and gender inequality to poor educational standards; and on the strained relationship between secular and religious belonging, and between state sovereignty, foreign intervention, and “subnational” allegiances of tribe and confession. From there it circles back to the Arab Spring and its repression, before a final chapter on America’s imperial presence in the region.
The Great Betrayal’s prescriptive tone can make it feel, at times, more like an extended op-ed, or a Beltway think tank report, than a work of history. This is most palpable in the book’s conclusion, with its vague talk of “empowering change from the bottom up” by “nurtur[ing] resilience in civil society.” Other parts of the book, too, lean into the ineffectual World Bank jargon of good governance. Portentously titled “How and Why Did the Middle East Fail to Achieve Its Potential?,” chapter 8 criticizes the region’s postcolonial leaders for a lack of “transparency, accountability…[and] inclusive economic growth.” These conclusions are not entirely wrong: institutional opacity, economic inequality, and undemocratic government have been facts of life for many ordinary Arabs. But they are also only half right, overlooking the gains of the early postcolonial decades, from full employment to increased access to education and health care.
The book ultimately leaves unresolved the tension between Gerges’s stress on grassroots agency and his sobering conclusion that “civil society in the Arab world does not have the organizational and institutional capacity to operationalize its demands.” If this were true, then how exactly would the “new social contract…based on the rule of law, freedom, social justice, and representation” that Gerges insists will emerge from the current regional turmoil come about? As precedent he cites Bashar al-Assad’s fall from power in December 2024, when the Syrian people “roared to life…and reclaimed their nation from the dictator-for-life.” But is Syria—where a military coalition led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda member backed by Turkey, captured Damascus—really the best example of people power Gerges can find?
What’s more, Gerges’s arguments can jar with his stated desire to break down familiar depictions of the Middle East. At times he seems closer to Lewis, the expert explicating the region to outside audiences, than to Said, the “oppositional” intellectual, forever “out of place” and against the grain. Of the “new populism that swept” the postcolonial Middle East, for instance, Gerges writes, “The sole leader became the voice of the masses. He disinvested citizens of independent human agency and acted as their agent and guardian, going as far as to set himself up as a surrogate father figure.” How different are such grand generalities from the political theorist Hisham Sharabi’s essentialist claim that in Arab states, just as in Arab families, “the paternal will is the absolute will”? Absent here, to be sure, is Sharabi’s cultural determinism, but one still wants to ask: When and where did this happen? And with what effects?
The sense of distance is only reinforced by some of Gerges’s sourcing. Though he insists “there is no substitute for firsthand knowledge of everyday people in the Middle East,” he is happy enough, in chapter 8, to fall back on statistics from the UN’s Arab Human Development Report, the World Bank, and the ILO. When an Arab does finally speak toward the end of the chapter, it is not to Gerges but to a New York Times reporter. Despite his professed concern for “the agency of everyday people,” Gerges can at times feel very far away from the ordinary men and women he so valorizes.
The issue is not just that talk of agency tends, as the scholar of plantation slavery Walter Johnson has pointed out, toward the banal, flattening out historical experience and obscuring the “specific political and cultural contexts” in which people lived in favor of restating their shared humanity. More than this, one simply does not learn much from these books about “everyday” people’s political subjectivities, thoughts, or desires—about why, say, Egyptian peasants revolted against British rule in 1919 or what drove unemployed young men and wizened trade unionists to protest in the Tunisian mining basin in 2008.
Toward the beginning of The Great Betrayal, Gerges quotes Tolstoy’s injunction that to grasp history’s workings we must abandon the study of monarchs and generals and seek out the “uniform, infinitesimal elements that govern the masses.” He returns to this theme in the book’s concluding sentences, where he writes that the Middle East’s future “will ultimately be determined by society below, not by the kings, emirs, and strongmen above.” Yet readers looking for evidence of this hopeful claim will struggle to find what Said once called “small histories”—intimate, up-close portraits of people acting and being acted upon, complex subjects full of tumbling, sometimes contradictory feelings. Those who know their Russian novels may well think not of War and Peace but of the words relayed by Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov: “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.”
English (US) · 