Following orders: the Arabists

"What is most remarkable in this tale, though, is how quickly our three Arabists were willing to jump to the other side of the street, to go from identifying and encouraging progressive Arab leaders to trying to neutralize them, to go from deriding the client regimes left behind by the European powers to cozying up to them. Certainly the most infamous example was Kim Roosevelt’s intimate role in the 1953 coup that toppled the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, but there were many others: Copeland’s involvement in schemes to assassinate Nasser, Archie Roosevelt’s repeated efforts to overthrow the Nasser-aligned government of Syria. To say this all backfired would be a gross understatement; by the end of the decade, the United States was just as reviled in large parts of the Middle East as the European powers it had come to supplant."