Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, based in the UK, is the executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development. He is the author of Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy & the Struggle for Iraq.

BARSAMIAN: Let’s talk about your book. What is the Western secret strategy in Iraq?

AHMED: It goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, when the British and the French went into the Middle East and interfered in the operation of the Ottoman Empire, with the very clear design on the huge oil reserves in the region. They manufactured the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Previously, the Middle East was united, more or less, under this empire. They basically co-opted various factions that didn’t have popular support and used them to create conflict and division. It was a very bloody process. In the end, they carved the Middle East into 12 previously nonexistent nation states—Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Syria. This is the legacy that we live with today. They gave a lot of financial and military support to these regimes. The result was a great deal of repression because the Arab people didn’t like this. It was a way of getting control of regional energy.

One of the interventions occurred in 1953 in Iran, when the conservative parliamentary democracy of Mohammad Mossadeq was overthrown by a British-U.S. operation—MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency. What happened in Iran in 1953?

Mohammad Mossadeq was a popular, democratically elected leader. He wasn’t any kind of Islamic fundamentalist. He nationalized the oil industry, which previously the United States and Britain had monopolized. Both governments were extremely worried about this because it occurred in the context of the Cold War. That was the justification for trying to remove Mossadeq—that Mossadeq had connections to communism. In reality, there was no meaningful Soviet presence in Iran. According to declassified British Foreign Office documents, they were fully aware that the communist Tudeh Party was marginal and had no real relationship to Mossadeq. So this was, as one document mentions, the Mossadeq brand of nationalism. That was the key problem.

It also represented a wider threat to the region because if Iran was able to successfully come out of the grip of this imperial system, it would serve as the threat of a good example. Many other nations could be inspired to do the same. So they arranged this military coup installing the Shah of Iran, essentially reinstalled him. The Shah went on to reverse everything that Mossadeq had done. He opened the country up, under so-called free market principles, to the West, which allowed them to have free rein over the entire country, undercutting business, industries, and development. Most notoriously, with the help of Israel, the United States and Britain set up the Savak secret police, which imposed horrendous human rights conditions. It was a police state. They were spying on anybody who said anything against the regime.

That period culminated with the Islamic revolution of 1978 and 1979.

There is no doubt that this policy of the United States and Britain ultimately generated the grievances that led to that revolution, because the Shah of Iran was very similar in some ways to Kemal Ataturk. It was all justified that this was a secular democracy. Of course, it wasn’t. It was a complete dictatorship. This is what partly fueled the response of the Iranian people, that we have to go back to our own culture, which is why it expressed itself in Islamic terminology. As the revolution intensified, the Shah’s response intensified as well, to the point that 10,000 Iranian civilians were killed by Iranian troops firing into crowds of protesters. There was one time when the demonstrations were very huge and the Shah had completely cracked down on them, firing into crowds. Then the Shah went to Washington and met with President Carter who said something like Iran is an island of stability in a turbulent part of the world. You could hardly imagine a clearer statement of support for state terrorism.

One of the explanations that the U.S. gives for its invasion and occupation of Iraq is that by establishing democracy there, it will have a domino effect. What kind of confidence can people have in those kinds of expectations?

They can have absolutely zero confidence in that. There is no doubt that the United States and Britain have never had any concern for democracy. It’s been the opposite. There are quite candid admissions about this in documents that have come out in both the state department and the foreign office.

Almost all of the discussion in the United States on the events of September 11—and that has been amplified during the hearings of the September 11 commission—have been on the mechanics: How did it happen? Where were the failures of intelligence? Why weren’t different agencies communicating? What about some of the whys?

Nobody discusses the why very much. Why did terrorists attack on September 11? If you look at the transcripts of some of Osama bin Laden’s speeches, you can see what he’s talking about. He’s highlighting very specific grievances about the Middle East—the sanctions on Iraq, which killed—there is no disagreement about this—over one million civilians, half of them children. He talks about the occupation of Palestine by Israel and the apartheid. He talks about the occupation of Saudi Arabia, considered by Muslims to be a holy land. It’s very clear that U.S. and British policy in the region, by oppressing the populations, by denying them the right of self-determination and exploiting their resources, has created extreme anti- Americanism and resentment. That’s not a case of legitimizing the attacks; that’s an analysis to understand the causes, the social and psychological causes, behind them.

Let’s talk a little about Spain and what happened in the election there in March 2004. Trains were bombed. Tragically, almost 200 people died. A few days later, the ruling pro-war party was voted out and Zapatero, who promised to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, was elected. This election has been described in the liberal New York Times, by its columnist, Thomas Friedman, as appeasement.

This is absurd. We actually heard stuff like this in the British press as well. The Madrid bombing was a backlash, which arose as a consequence of the war on terror. It’s very important to understand that the Spanish people experienced what it means when you go into a country and you invade and you occupy them: there is going to be resistance. As a result of that experience, they said, “We don’t want our troops in Iraq.” They voted for the guy who said, “We’re going to get our troops out.” It’s insulting to the Spanish people to say that this is appeasement because they were the ones who suffered.

People like Bush, Powell, Rice, Cheney, and Rumsfeld now say that they are quite surprised that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but, regardless, Iraq has now been liberated and the Iraqi people and the world are better off without Saddam Hussein because the world is a lot safer. Is it?

Absolutely not. First off, in relation to the whole WMD thing—they knew there weren’t any WMDs. There is a famous defector, General Hussein Kamel, that everybody always quotes. In 1995 Kamel was head of the WMD program in Iraq and he defected. He had this massive pile of documents making clear what Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were. That’s what Powell quotes him as saying: Saddam Hussein has this much anthrax now, blah, blah, blah. But what they don’t say is that when Hussein Kamel was interviewed by UNSCOM officials about the same documents, he said: Saddam Hussein destroyed these weapons. He said, I ordered the destruction of these weapons before the Gulf War because Saddam Hussein was afraid of what would happen when people realized and it became public knowledge that this is what happened. So he wanted to eliminate them so he didn’t get too incriminated. They knew from the start that there was no threat.

But, pundits say, Iraq has been liberated. Aren’t the Iraqis better off without Saddam Hussein?

That’s the most interesting line that I could imagine to justify this war, the lie that this is a war of liberation. If you look at reality, what is happening on the ground in Iraq now, after they removed Saddam Hussein and his immediate entourage, they didn’t go about dismantling the Ba’athist apparatus. They always said they were going to remove the Ba’athist regime. But this was rhetoric. In reality, the war was won by buying off the entire Ba’athist establishment. They paid money to key generals in the Republican Guard, for example—people who were implicated in war crimes and genocide and mass murder of the Iraqi people—to switch sides. I think it was General Vincent Brooks, one of the generals in Iraq, who basically said, some of these people, when they switch sides, they’re going to have positions in the new Administration. This is what has happened. For example, Saddam’s former head of the interior ministry has been installed as the head of the police in Baghdad. Six thousand Ba’athist loyalists, who were former police—the Ba’athist police are notorious for torture—have been unleashed, again, into the streets of Baghdad.

One of the demands that al-Qaeda and bin Laden made was that U.S. troops should get out of Saudi Arabia. Well, they’ve gotten out, but most of them have relocated to Iraq.

If you look at the reasons why they got out of Saudi Arabia, it seems to be because of the increasing unrest in that country. There are reports about Saudi officials saying that there have been contingency plans to grab the oil fields. The Pentagon has done studies of this, to grab the oil fields in case of a coup. There has been more and more unrest, not only on the streets, but also among members of the royal family. There is the possibility that the current regime might topple. There is a  feeling within Saudi Arabia that the United States is controlling the regime, controlling the repression. That they are responsible for the torture, because they’re the ones, as many reports document, providing the regime with weapons. Pulling out of Saudi Arabia is a bit of a PR stunt. It’s like saying, “Look, we are conceding. We’re pulling out of Saudi Arabia.” But by establishing a military occupation in Iraq, they’re hoping that they can transform the geopolitical order in the region to one where the United States plays the role of a regional imperial power.

There are some very schizophrenic tendencies in U.S.-Saudi relations. For example, Saudi Arabia, which has a particularly virulent form of Islam, Wahabism, has been financing a lot of the international terror. But at the same time the U.S. is a very close ally with the ruling emirs in Riyadh.

It says to me that the war on terror is very much a facade, because if this was really about fighting terrorism, they would put sufficient pressure on Saudi Arabia to crack down on the financial arteries of terrorism. They have known since 1996. There was a report in the New Yorker which revealed that National Security Agency intercepts had revealed communications among Saudi royal family members—obviously not the whole family, but people within it—which proved, essentially, that they were funding al-Qaeda to the tune of millions of dollars. Clinton knew about this, Bush knew about this. But Saudi Arabia is consistently being protected.

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