America’s Axis of Misery

The Axis of Resistance, what Iran calls its political project in the Arab world, is falling apart. After a brief but intense U.S.-backed war with Israel, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah agreed to disengage from the Palestinian issue and vacate southern Lebanon. Almost immediately afterwards, Syrian rebels launched a surprise offensive, bringing down the Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad, whose bloodsoaked rule Iran had invested so much blood and treasure into propping up.

The feeling in Washington is that the Axis of Resistance was really (in the words of the Carnegie Endowment’s senior editor, Michael Young) an “Axis of Misery,” built on “fragile, impoverished societies, only there to serve as cannon fodder for Iran.” Before getting too smug, however, it would behoove the chattering class to look in the mirror. U.S. power has established an Axis of Misery in the region no less predatory or tyrannical than the Iranian one. For all the comparisons between this week’s events and the Berlin Wall falling, victorious West Germany was not running torture prisons or bombing Polish territory. Now that Iran has been driven out of the Levant, it is an important question exactly what the U.S.-led alternative will look like.

The answer in Gaza and southern Lebanon, where U.S. power is now at its most absolute, is corpses and rubble. In most of the American sphere of influence, the options range from violent militia rule at worst to economic stagnation and mass emigration at best. Immediately after Assad was overthrown by a coalition including reformed Al Qaeda, the wolves began to circle, with Israel and our NATO ally Turkey trying to carve out “buffer zones” on Syria’s soil. Just as “rich kids of Tehran” partied while poor youth died in their wars, an upper crust of Israelis and Gulf elites sit atop a pyramid of tyranny and chaos.

The most articulate manifesto for the U.S.-led order in the Middle East was written in 2022 by the former U.S. official Alberto Miguel Fernandez, who recently claimed that his essay has been vindicated. The Arabic-language voice of the Bush administration during the Iraq War, Fernandez has since given up “Western-type pipe dreams of democracy.” The real struggle, he writes, is “something more elemental” between a “Middle East of Life” and a “Middle East of Death.” His villain is Iran’s “ongoing, murderous effort to reconfigure countries and societies in the region toward near permanent war and conflict,” and his heroes are Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, the “builders rather than destroyers.”

What does it mean to be a “builder rather than destroyer”? In southern Lebanon, it means to demolish every village within reach, including Christendom’s ancient heritage, and to put the population under the semi-permanent surveillance of killer drones. In Gaza, even on paper, Israel’s “day-after” plan is a horror of horrors: starving Palestinians herded into “humanitarian bubbles” and subjected to communist-style brainwashing. In practice, Israeli policy for conquered territory has been and continues to be gangster rule. Israeli soldiers have been filmed (or filmed themselves) shooting unarmed civilians waving white flags, executing the elderly at home, burning down houses, looting women’s lingerie, gang-raping captives, and more.

The other members of Washington’s Axis of Misery have been similarly destructive to the societies over which they have power. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates countered “Iranian influence” in Yemen through starvation, terror bombing, mercenary assassinations, and proxy militias no less predatory than Iran’s allies. What finally reigned in the Gulf states’ ambitions there was simply hitting the limits of their hard power. In Sudan, where the Gulf powers do not even have the excuse of Iranian meddling, the United Arab Emirates has profited from its investments in parasitic rapist militias. And as icing on the cake, the Saudi-Emirati coalition has shuttled mercenary units containing child soldiers between Yemen and Sudan.

To believe that any of these states are “builders” is to wear ideological blinders that would make Trofim Lysenko proud—or perhaps to see Palestinians, Yemenis, and Sudanese as less human. The suffering of these people is not a case of “faults and missteps,” as Fernandez put it, in an otherwise productive regional order. It is not a temporary measure until the wars are won. It is the regional order, now and in perpetuity. This is the structure that allows people Tel Aviv and Dubai to party in comfort. And this is the life that Washington has offered the populations of vanquished enemies for the past thirty years.

Lest we forget, the “Iranian proxy network” in Iraq is itself a result of catastrophic American success. It was the United States that dismantled the Iraqi government, handed over pieces of the state to religious paramilitaries, and unleashed unlimited sectarian war. Iran simply managed to buy off U.S. clients in the country. People whose life’s work was to destroy an independent Iraq now write about promoting “Iraqi sovereignty” for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, simply because they’ve lost control of what they created.

Of course, it’s hypocritical on the face of it. Those who thunder with righteousness about liberating oppressed nations and avenging martyred dissidents are happy to condemn thousands like Adnan al-Bursh and Hind Rajab to die at the hands of thugs. But there’s also a more fundamental issue. If U.S.-sponsored violence, unlike Iranian-sponsored violence, is a means to a positive end, then where is the end? To what god have all these lives been sacrificed? It seems that beyond a few parochial interests, the goal is really power for power’s sake, vengeance for imperial humiliation, and the emotional satisfaction of American policymakers.

Rome made a desert and called it peace, per Tacitus’ Celtic chieftain. A more fitting metaphor for Washington’s peace may be a photo that recently circulated on social media: an Israeli soldier sitting on a beach chair, his pants around his ankles, admiring the rubble below.