The Den of Arabism

From: Washington's Long War on Syria

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The constitution of the Ba’ath Party made a proclamation in its very first line which Washington could have only regarded with deep hostility: “The Arabs are one nation which has its natural right to live under one state.” This was a vision for a very different world from the one which existed in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, and was different from the Arab world which Britain and France created out of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Rather than being divided into twenty-two small, weak, and oft-times squabbling states, the Ba’athists envisaged the roughly 400 million Arabic-speakers who occupied a territory stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf—the world’s second largest pan-ethnicity after the Han Chinese—uniting as a single bloc into one unified state. And what’s more, the Ba’athists believed that an Arab super-state should be truly independent, free from foreign political and economic interference. That meant an end to the string of U.S. (and other foreign) military bases that dotted the Persian Gulf and North Africa. And significantly, it meant that Arabs as a whole would take control of the region’s vast petroleum reserves, rather than the resources being monopolized by kings, emirs and sultans installed in petro-kingdoms by the British and kept in power by the United States. Equally alarming to Washington, the Ba’athists proposed to build their independent, united Arab state through public ownership and planning—that is, via socialism, a concept which stirred deep antipathy on Wall Street and therefore at the U.S. State Department, where Wall Street’s influence was strong.

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