The first president to promise the peoples of the Middle East that American power would free them from tyranny was Franklin D. Roosevelt. The context was Operation Torch, when American and British forces landed in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, the first major Allied offensive of World War II and, up to that point, the largest amphibious operation in history.
In many ways, President Donald Trump has broken with the traditional model of American leadership. But by combining the use of American force with repeated calls for Iranians to change their regime, he is the fourth president in a century to raise the banner of “freedom” in the Middle East. One can only hope that this story ends better for the citizens of Iran than it did for those in the previous three episodes.
The first president to promise the peoples of the Middle East that American power would free them from tyranny was Franklin D. Roosevelt. The context was Operation Torch, when American and British forces landed in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, the first major Allied offensive of World War II and, up to that point, the largest amphibious operation in history.
To complete the invasion, a message in Arabic was distributed on Roosevelt’s behalf to the population of the area, then under the control of Vichy France, a fascist collaborator of Nazi Germany. The declaration called the Allied landing a “Great Jihad of Freedom” and urged the local Muslims to unite to defeat their common enemies: “We have come to liberate you. … Welcome us as brothers, as we will welcome you, and help us. If we are thirsty, show us the way to water. If we lose our way, guide us to our camps. … Help us, as we have come to help you.”
Allied troops defeated the Vichy forces in just three days. But the promises of “freedom” remained unfulfilled. Roosevelt preferred to reach an opportunistic deal with a Vichy admiral to preserve the status quo in the region under new leadership. It would be almost ten years before any North African country enjoyed freedom from foreign control.
We have to go back almost 50 years to find the second example of an American president encouraging the people of the Middle East to take their freedom into their own hands. It was February 1991, after the bombings that opened the US-led Gulf War but before the ground offensive that forced Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait. In a televised address, President George HW Bush called on Iraqis to rise up and “take matters into their own hands.” “We have no disagreement with the people of Iraq,” he said. “Our disagreement is with that brutal dictator in Baghdad.”
After the U.S. military pushed Hussein’s forces back into Iraq, the Iraqi people responded to Bush’s call. Uprisings erupted in both Iraq’s Shiite south and its Kurdish north. Encouraged by the call to action, Iraqis anxiously waited for America to support their struggle for freedom. But the help never came. Hussein brutally suppressed the revolts, using helicopter gunships to massacre thousands. In 2003, President George W. Bush pursued a different approach to bringing freedom to Iraq. On the eve of the war, he gave a speech in which he emphasized that regime change was the goal of the campaign: “To help Iraqis achieve a united, stable, and free country. This will require our continued commitment… We have no ambition in Iraq other than to remove a threat and return control of that country to its people… We will bring freedom to others and we will triumph.”
In retrospect, this was a classic case of regime change gone awry. Operation Iraqi Freedom lasted nine bloody years. Three years after its conclusion, American forces returned to Iraq to fight the Islamic State, born of resentment and contempt for the American occupation that followed Hussein’s overthrow. Although Iraqis today enjoy more freedom than under his regime, Iraq remains a fractured and divided state, and both the Iraqi and American people paid a heavy price.
Then comes Trump. One of his early political insights was to understand the emotional power of Iraq’s disastrous legacy. He made denouncing regime change a rallying cry for his MAGA movement, a key theme of his “America First” policy. As he said last year in Saudi Arabia, “the so-called nation-builders destroyed far more nations than they built, and the interveners were intervening in complex societies that they themselves did not understand.”
It is therefore not surprising that Trump explicitly identified regime change as a goal of Operation Epic Fury. With a faint echo of Roosevelt and the two Bushes, Trump declared: “To the great and proud people of Iran, I say tonight that your hour of freedom has come. Now is the time to take your destiny into your own hands and unleash the prosperous and glorious future that lies before you. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.” From an operational perspective, the crucial question is how committed Trump is to this vision. At one end of the spectrum, will he act like Roosevelt, finding a new Iranian figurehead and leaving the regime structure intact under a more compliant leader? Or like the first Bush, settling for massively damaging Iran’s offensive military capabilities and choosing a quick path to ending the war?
Or, at the other extreme, will he become embroiled like a second Bush in the mud of nation-building in Iran, causing problems we cannot even imagine today? Or, more optimistically, will Trump, the first of four to rely primarily on air power to achieve victory, find a solution that empowers the Iranian people at a moderate cost to American lives and resources? For the long-suffering people of Iran and for Americans who fear long, far-reaching involvements, few questions are more crucial than this one. (History Today)