| Many of the regimes and groups we now see as adversaries in the Middle East were once Nazi and Soviet allies. Their hatred of the United States is far from new.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n All that ended with World War I. The ambition of a foolish kaiser, and the Prussian military elite with which he was aligned, to achieve lasting dominance over the decades-old \u201cstruggle for the mastery of Europe\u201d (in historian A. J. P. Taylor\u2019s words) led to the collapse of four of the six nineteenth-century players. By the mid-1920s, the empires of Germany, Austro-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottomans were no more. In each, the old monarchy had been abolished. Germany had lost the provinces (seized from France after the Franco-Prussian War) of Alsace and Lorraine, the industrial Ruhr Valley, and its overseas possessions, while Austro-Hungary had lost everything outside of Austria. The Russian Empire had collapsed into revolution and civil war. The Ottoman Empire was permanently off the global scene; in its place were seven countries and a League of Nations mandate.<\/p>\n Global and European history since then has been largely the record of democratic countries coping with pathological successors to these collapsed regimes, and with the countries of the \u201cGreat Game\u201d region between the Russian and Ottoman territories. For from the upheavals that followed imperial implosion, in each case emerged autocratic or totalitarian and expansionist governments: nazism in Germany and Austria, communism in Russia and, after a period of monarchies, in the Middle East Nasser\u2019s and now Mubarak\u2019s Egypt, the House of Saud\u2019s Saudi Arabia, Baathist Syria and Iraq, and Khomeini\u2019s Iran. In the old Ottoman domain, only the core country, Turkey, and the post-World War II state of Israel established anything approaching popular sovereignty and, with it, a claim among their own people to governmental legitimacy. To this day, only Israel\u2019s claim is entirely secure.<\/p>\n ![\"this](\"http:\/\/www.hoover.org\/sites\/default\/files\/uploads\/inline\/images\/large\/digest20071_Judge1.jpg\") <\/div>\nGermany, Russia, and the various despotisms of the Middle East produced thuglike ruling parties, distinct in ideologies but common in attitudes, methods, and goals.<\/p>\n In each regime terror quickly became a prime instrument of power, as, sooner or later, did anti-Semitism. All the imperial remnants used hatred of minorities, particularly Jews, to prop themselves up with the majority groups on which they had such an uncertain hold.<\/p>\n In each region, cults of death became a grim norm. The Soviets and the Nazis had their concentration camps, purges, and holocausts, killing orgies mirrored in different forms in the Middle East from the 1970s to today. There also emerged a celebration of death similar to the \u201cyou love life, we love death\u201d rantings of current terrorists. A particularly famous moment came in 1936, at a meeting at the University of Salamanca in Spain. In response to a speech by an adversary, Francoist General Jos\u00e9 Mill\u00e1n-Astray, a Nazi ally, shouted \u201cViva la Muerte!\u201d\u2014Long Live Death. The poet Miguel de Unamuno, the university\u2019s rector, was presiding. His rebuke: \u201cThis is the temple of intelligence and I am its high priest. You are profaning its sacred domain. You will succeed, because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. To convince it is necessary to persuade, and to persuade you will need something you lack: reason and right in the struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n ![\"this](\"http:\/\/www.hoover.org\/sites\/default\/files\/uploads\/inline\/images\/large\/digest20071_Judge2.jpg\") <\/div>\nLike racism and terror, expansionism with global ambitions became the challenge in each region to the United States and its allies. The Germanic successor regimes brought us World War II. The Russian successor brought us the Cold War. And now the successors to the Ottomans and the rulers of the Great Game region have given us the war on terror. Iran\u2019s pretensions are overt, as were Saddam Hussein\u2019s\u2014ambitions that gave them a unifying cry to marshal their peoples. In most countries of the region, promises to destroy Israel likewise offer ballast to unstable governments. And although not a state, Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups are part of this community of conquest. In part they serve as surrogates for states afraid to take on the United States too directly. But they are also state pretenders, like the Nazis or Soviets before their respective seizures of power, making the prospect of expansion and with it expiation of past humiliations part of their appeal.<\/p>\n But the links among the Nazis and Fascists, the Soviets, the Islamicists, and others in the Middle East go beyond shared pathologies. Hitler\u2019s admiration for Stalin and the alliance of the two before Hitler decided to invade Russia are part of high school history texts. Less well-understood are the links of today\u2019s Middle Eastern regimes and movements to the Nazis and Soviets.<\/p>\n For example, as detailed on the widely referenced website\u00a0Palestine Facts, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the infamous mufti of Jerusalem during much of the British mandate, allied himself with Nazi Germany in the 1930s and received financing from the SS from 1936 through 1939. In 1937, after exposure of his role in terrorism within Palestine, he fled to Syria and from there to Iraq. In 1941, he helped organize a pro-Nazi revolt in Baghdad, after which he fled to Berlin. There he became an advocate of and cheerleader for the Holocaust. After the war, he sought exile in Egypt, where he was received and celebrated as a hero of Arab nationalism. Fear of Arab world backlash kept the Allies from prosecuting him for war crimes. On his death, his leadership in the radical nationalist Palestinian Arab community passed to his nephew and prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Yasser Arafat.<\/p>\n ![\"this](\"http:\/\/www.hoover.org\/sites\/default\/files\/uploads\/inline\/images\/large\/digest20071_Judge3.jpg\") <\/div>\nElsewhere in the formerly Ottoman world, Hitler was also having an influence. In his recently published volume,\u00a0The Foreigner\u2019s Gift, Lebanese-born scholar Fouad Ajami writes of the 1930s and 1940s: \u201cThere was a Berlin-Baghdad corridor. It brought to Iraq the ways and culture and hysteria of the Third Reich and inspired, if that is the word, a generation or two of political men to ideologies of absolutism and violence.\u201d As a young man, the founding ideologist of the Syrian and Iraqi Baath parties, Michel Aflaq, was caught up in this stream of intellectual poison. The results can be seen to this day. The Baath Party, according to columnist David Brooks, writing in the\u00a0Weekly Standard\u00a0in November 2002, while inspired at its origins by Leninism, \u201cis not quite like the communist parties.\u201d Instead, he says, \u201cIt bears stronger resemblance to the Nazi Party,\u201d based as it is on a Nazi-like doctrine of racial superiority.<\/p>\n Meanwhile in Egypt, a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna was founding the Society of Muslim Brothers, the radical group behind so much Islamicist terrorism in recent years. Banna created a paramilitary arm to the brotherhood, modeling it after the Nazi SS. As University of London professor Efraim Karsh writes in his 2006 volume\u00a0Islamic Imperialism, \u201cBanna was an unabashed admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, who \u2018guided their peoples to unity, order, regeneration, power, and glory.\u2019\u201d Following the examples of the Nazis and fascists, he was perhaps the Middle East\u2019s first modern synthesizer of the tactic of terror, the cult of death, and the lust for conquest. Banna wished, Karsh notes, to inculcate Egypt\u2019s young people \u201cwith the virtues of death and martyrdom in the quest of Allah\u2019s universal empire. \u2018Death is an art,\u2019 he famously wrote, \u2018and the most exquisite of arts when practiced by the skillful artist.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n \n
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