In the current age of American unilateralism and preemptive military interventions, it is hard to remember that just after World War II America still stood for something quite different in the Middle East. Although the US emerged from the war as "the leader of the free world," the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese still ruled over vast empires. To many colonized people the United States was identified with Wilsonian idealism and anticolonialism. Franklin Roosevelt several times changed his mind about whether or not the French should re-occupy Indochina after World War II. American agents of the OSS had met with Ho Chi Minh in his forest hideouts.

In the nineteenth century, Americans had come to the Middle East not as conquerors and colonial administrators but as educators, often Presbyterian, who sought not to convert but to give help. Institutions such as Roberts College in Istanbul, American University of Beirut, and American University in Cairo educated the sons of the Middle Eastern elites. In Iran the American-founded Alborz College was, Kinzer writes, "among the first modern secondary schools in the country, and thousands of its graduates went on to shape Iranian life."

In the early 1950s Stephen Penrose, a president of American University of Beirut, wrote:

Until recently American enterprise in the Middle East has been almost entirely non-governmental, an important difference from most other national patterns. Americans have never been seen as colonizers or subjugators and it is hard even now for most Arabs to conceive of them as such.

Kinzer writes that the few Americans that Iranians "had come to know were generous and self-sacrificing, interested not in wealth or power but in helping Iran."

All of this changed in the 1950s, when America supplanted Britain as the guarantor of "stability" in the Persian Gulf. "Americans were indeed latecomers to the Middle East," Kinzer writes. "The British scorned them as inexperienced and naive. To a degree they were. They were instinctively repelled by Britain's colonial arrogance, especially in Iran, but they did not have enough self-confidence to act decisively on their own."

The CIA was still, early in 1953, a junior partner of the more experienced British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), or MI6. But the Mossadegh coup marked the end of British dominance in secret intelligence matters. The transition from junior to senior partner was described by the CIA's Donald Wilber, who wrote that it

quickly became apparent that the SIS was perfectly content to follow whatever lead was taken by the Agency.... The British were very pleased at having obtained the active cooperation of the Agency and were determined to do nothing which might jeopardize US participation. At the same time there was faint envy expressed over the fact that the Agency was better equipped in the way of funds, personnel and facilities than was SIS.

Britain had begun to see itself as Greece to America's Rome—more cultured, experienced, and wily, but recognizing where real power now lay.

[...]

In many ways America's obsession with terrorism since September 11 is an echo of its obsession with communism fifty years ago. Today the United States and Britain claim they must occupy Iraq because of the threat of terrorism. Officially, both say they want to get out as soon as possible; but ideologues in the Pentagon dream of Iraq advancing America's interests, and Israel's too, in the Persian Gulf as the Shah once did. Talk of a new American imperialism is becoming fashionable among conservative academics, some of them in power. They forget the lesson of British experience, which is that when a people will no longer accept it, foreign domination is almost impossible to maintain. Kinzer begins his book with an apt quote from President Truman: "There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know."