/lit/ - Literature

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So an American Secretary of State can on a Monday deliver a stirring address about the sanctity of human rights in “the developing world” and on a Tuesday declare that the local dictator is a close personal friend of the family and must remain in power to ensure the stability of the region. So the United States can funnel covert funding and training to jihadist guerrilla forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to use them as catspaws against the Soviets, without sparing much concern for the fact that the jihadis in question hated America as fervently as they hated the Russians – without, in other words, even trying to envision blowback that might involve one of those jihadi guerrilla fighters, Osama bin Laden, going on to strike at his American benefactors. Even when the warning signs are tragically explicit, they often go unheeded, as Davidson chronicles in theaters of operation stretching from West Africa to Central Asia.

The pattern holds firm everywhere from Syria to Qatar to Yemen to Libya to Somalia to Nigeria: Great Britain or France or the United States will pick some "partner" in a volatile region like Iraq, bet all the markers on that partner being a willing agent of democratic reform even though that partner is very visibly a power-bloated monster, and then, years down the line, express pious horror when that partner turns out to be a power-bloated monster.

In the mass of historical and geopolitical information Davidson assembles in these pages, some notes sound again and again. One of these of course is the so-called “Arab Spring” of 2011, in which enormous and almost entirely peaceful popular protests swept through the Arab world. Since the movement posed a direct threat to the status quo, it predictably received tepid response from those holding power in the region – most certainly including the United States.

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