What has been the history of western military interventions in the Middle East and have any of the been considered a "success"?

by RuminatorNZ
CptBuck

That depends a lot on what time scale you're looking at and what you mean by success. I suppose it also depends on what you mean by intervention.

Was the British Middle Eastern campaign against the Ottoman Empire an "intervention," for instance? If so, this campaign certainly succeeded in its initial goals of defeating the Ottomans and helping to win the Great War, despite major setbacks at Gallipoli and the Siege of Kut.

But the British and French also stipulated additional war aims, including the creation of Hashemite-ruled independent Arab kingdoms, not to mention their own imperial ambitions, that had mixed results. The Hashemites are still in power in Jordan, but were deposed in Iraq about 30 years after the British left.

Was British "intervention" in Iraq therefore a failure based on later political, social, military and other developments? As I said above I think that depends a lot on what you mean. I personally find it difficult to conclude that certain measures "failed" based on developments ascribed to those measures decades later. For instance, if the Hashemite dynasty were to eventually be deposed or replaced with democratic rule in Jordan would that be a "failure" of the British Sharifian policies in WWI? I personally would find that be a pretty stretched argument. Whether those initial measures were wise in the first place is a separate question.

Another example that certainly became a more direct kind of "intervention" was British policy in Palestine before the independence of Israel in 1948. The Balfour Declaration promises "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" that will not "prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

Israel exists, so they certainly succeeded in the "national home" bit, but, as things transpired, that was impossible to do without damaging the civil rights of existing communities, and certainly resulted in damage to the rights of Jews in virtually every country in the region.

So a mixed bag.

Did you have some specific "interventions" or policies in mind when you asked this question?