The United States’ unwavering military and political support for Israel is now accepted as the key enabling factor in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

But the US is behind another critical enabling factor in the genocide: the total suppression of political expression in Arab states by authoritarian regimes.

Most readers will remember that brief period in the 2000s when the US purported to care about democracy in the Middle East. If you missed the War on Terror in the post-September 11 period, count your blessings. For the best part of a decade, the world was subjected to a full court marketing press from the Bush, Blair and Howard governments about the risk of Islamic terrorism, the existential danger posed by weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the value of democracy. We haven’t seen a co-ordinated marketing campaign like it since.

The latter two pillars of that three-pronged global marketing campaign were a total charade. There were no WMDs, and democracy promotion was simply a trojan horse for the invasion of Iraq. Democracy in Saudi Arabia? In Jordan? In Egypt? Quickly, someone change the subject. Defenders of the invasion will say that whatever the intent, at least Iraqis got their democracy. But 20 years and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi dead later, former Iraqi PM (2020-22) Mustafa Al-Kadhimi recently wrote that “democracy in Iraq is a sham, serving as a cover for widespread violations against Iraqis’ human rights and political freedoms”.

One of the upshots of the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, along with a sharp rise in anti-Americanism, was to give the........

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