Bahrain Mirror: In an interview with the reader in Middle East politics Christopher Davidson, published on the openDemocracy website, in light of his new book Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East, Davidson discusses the West's often covert counter-revolutionary activities in the region.

Asked about the US and UK's broad aims in the Middle East since World War Two, Davidson said that after WWII, with repeated uprisings and national liberation movements chipping away at overseas possessions, and with increasing heavy resource demand from their remaining colonies and protectorates, counter-revolutionary efforts by the British had to become much more focused on what was now the greatest threat of all: economic nationalism. He further noted that by the 1950s, a potent pan-Arab movement was threatening to unseat remaining British client rulers in the region and jeopardize lucrative trade arrangements and control over valuable resources.

He explained that by the mid-1950s US planners, advancing into the void left by Britain's retreat, acknowledged that securing the Middle East, and especially the Persian Gulf region, was going to be vital to the future prosperity of Western industries. "As it was in the rest of the world, the extraction of natural resources was an obvious priority, so all indigenous attempts to nationalize economic assets - regardless of any progressive, liberal, or even democratic agendas - needed to be intimidated or destroyed by the US."

He highlighted that due to the deepening of US dependency on crude oil imports, by 1950 the US was importing a million barrels per day, and by the 1960s more than a third of the US energy demands were being met by such imports, mostly from the Shah's Iran and the Gulf monarchies.

The interviewer further asked the author of the best-seller After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies about some of the common strategies and tactics the West has used to achieve their aims in the Middle East. Davidson stated that the first ‘wave' of activity, led by the US and Britain's fast-growing intelligence agencies, mostly comprised of assassination attempts, false flag operations, and efforts to destabilize uncooperative governments by sponsoring street protests and public political violence. "Our best case studies from this period of course include the multiple attempts to kill off Gamal Abdel Nasser, the efforts to unseat Iran's Mohammed Mosaddegh, who sought to part-nationalize his country's oil industry, and the steps taken to undermine various Syrian, Iraqi, and Jordanian administrations," he noted.

He stressed that with other, more paramilitary threats, such as the challenges to Britain's control over Yemen, such strategies needed to be supplemented by ‘shadow wars' in which British forces were secretly deployed to assist the troops of their local clients or ‘proxy' regional allies. "In Yemen, for example, Saudi Arabia was conducting airstrikes with considerable British assistance and was sponsoring ‘tribal irregulars' to fight against a new nationalist regime that had unseated a British-backed imam who had been ruling autocratically over the northern part of the country."

Davidson underlined that by the latter part of the twentieth century, a much darker strategy started to form in which US and British officials sought to cultivate an ultra-conservative pan-Islamic movement capable of countering secular, progressive or potentially Soviet-aligned national liberation movements, or even simply nationalist governments. He further stated that "by the 1980s the strategy was bearing great fruit as a CIA and Saudi-funded international jihad had already facilitated the arrival of thousands of foreign fighters in Afghanistan and helped forge a hardline Islamic state. By the end of the decade Al-Qaeda had emerged."

"In the 1990s such Islamic fighting forces remained a strategic, but volatile asset for the US and British intelligence agencies," Davidson added.

He highlighted that more recently, the nationwide revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt led to the discomforting overthrow of dictators who had opened up their economies to Western investment and had satisfactorily played the game of the post-9/11 'War on Terror', adding that "by March 2011 a parallel campaign had also been launched to help re-direct the 'Arab Spring' to states such as Libya and Syria that remained antagonistic to Western interests. Wilfully fostering, funding, and weaponizing localized uprisings in an effort to create fresh nationwide revolutions, key US and British allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE all played major roles in destabilizing these long targeted Arab states, under the banner of the Arab Spring."