Last weekend millions of Brits, egged on by hundreds of sports journalists, turned on their TV sets on Sunday morning to witness a British tennis player win a Grand Slam tennis event after an agonisingly, ingloriously long 75 year wait. It didn’t happen but it was good fun getting all worked up especially since both Federer and Nadal had both been knocked out of contention. Only Novak Djokovic stood in the way and Murray had beaten him on their last three encounters. Djokovic cruised home three sets to nil. Murray chocks again, screamed the Monday headlines and the long suffering British tennis fan just shrugged their shoulders and went back to work.

Not so for the Egyptians. They have been on the streets and in a state of revolutionary fervour for the best part of two weeks now, with a final showdown with strongman Mubarak and his police thugs looming any day now. He may well be in the dustbin of history by the time you get to read this blog. As the second most populous nation in Africa, boasting the worlds 10th largest army courtesy of Uncle Sam’s military industrial complex, the events in Egypt are anything but insignificant. Remember too that a significant proportion of the West’s oil supply passes through the Suez Canal so the outcome of this potentially revolutionary situation is by no means academic. Stock markets are decidedly jittery and the price of crude oil has just hit a two year high.

So while we in the UK busy ourselves with tennis Grand Slams and record breaking football transfer fees, it is worth reflecting on both the historical and contemporary dimensions of the current revolutionary ructions, and ponder the possible global ramifications of where all this might be leading.

The British state has never been, and is still not, a passive onlooker in Middle Eastern affairs. Far from it. Where oil is at stake expect Britain, the US and other Western powers are found to be heavily implicated in every political twist and turn. In order to maintain a steady supply of the black stuff – the essential lubricant of the West’s military, political and economic dominance complicit client states are essential. Hence, pro-Western client dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, The Gulf States and Egypt. And, until relatively recently, in Iraq and Iran as well. Chris Harman sums up the historical dimension fairly succinctly in his, A People’s History of the World, tracing Britain’s involvement right back to the First World War and the collapse of the once powerful Ottoman Empire.

The Middle East, with its huge oil reserves, was by far the most important prize for any imperialism in the second half of the 20th century. Britain had extended its Middle East empire during the First World War by collaborating with the ruler of Mecca, Sharrif Hussein, in an Arab National Revolt that promised him all the territories ruled by Turkey. But the British government also promised the Zionist leaders that it would allocate one of the Arab lands, Palestine, to Jewish settlers from Europe, seeing them as a barrier against any Arab threat to the nearby Suez Canal. As the Israeli political leader Abba Eban later explained, “We would help Britain become the ruling power and Britain would help us to develop the Jewish National Home.” P558

Nearly a hundred years on and its pretty much the same script save that British Imperialism has largely been replaced by US imperialism with Britain now very much the junior partner. Harman fills in the details;

Such double-dealing worked, up to a point. British firms got their hands on the oil reserves of Iraq and Iran, and Jewish settler volunteers worked with Britain to put down a Palestinian Arab revolt, the most serious rebellion to face the British Empire in the 1930’s. But over time the policy backfired. There were growing Arab antagonism towards the Zionist settlers as they bought land from rich Arab owners and drove off the peasant families who had been cultivating it for centuries. Jews who had fled oppression in Europe found they were expected to oppress others in Palestine. Britain then tried to defuse Arab bitterness by restricting Jewish immigration and ended up under attack from both sides. By 1946 Jewish paramilitary groups which had been armed (by the British) to suppress the Arabs were now carrying out attacks on British troops and instillations. P558

No matter what continent the British applied its divide and rule strategies, they always and inevitably would reap what they had sowed. The division of the Indian sub-continent into warring and mutually hostile states, the ramifications of which are still being played out today, can be attributed directly to perfidious British colonial rule. Harman continues the sorry story of British colonial duplicity.

Britain decided to escape from the problem it had created by withdrawing its troops in 1947, relying for the defence of its oil interests on the puppet Arab monarchies in Iraq, Jordan and Egypt. The US and Russia were both keen to move in as Britain moved out, jointly backing a UN resolution partitioning Palestine and establishing an Israeli settler state. As fighting broke out they (the Israelis) terrorised much of the Arab population into fleeing by massacring the inhabitants of the village of Deir Yassin, and then defeating an ill-organised army sent by the Arab monarchies. Israel was established as a powerful settler state, willing and able to assist Western interests which usually meant the US in return for arms and financial aid. P559

By now all the ingredients were in place for the current round of explosions happening in the Middle East, including the rise of the Iranian Mullahs and the ensuing deadly war between Iraq and Iran; the two US imperialist wars against the secular dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and now, the revolt of the secular forces in Egypt against the Western backed dictatorship of Mubarak. But before all this came to fruition it was necessary for the US to fully supplant Britain as the key Imperialist power in the region. This they achieved during what is commonly but inadequately described as The Suez Crisis. Harman elaborates: The bitterness caused by Israel’s victory over the Arab armies helped spark a military coup in Egypt which brought nationalist officers led by Abdul Nasser to power and ended the pro-British monarchy. Nasser’s move to nationalise the Suez Canal, owned by Britain and France, provoked British Imperialism’s last great fling in he region. In November 1956 British, French and Israeli troops launched a joint attack on Egypt. The attack almost succeeded militarily, but completely backfired politically. The US took advantage of Britain’s financial problems to pull the plug on the operation and supplant Britain as the dominant power in the Middle East, while a wave of anti-British agitation throughout the region led to the overthrow of the British backed Iraqi monarchy two years later. P559
You would think that US imperialism would have learnt a lesson or two from the bumbling machinations of their British predecessors, but not so. The US, motivated only by economic self interest and blinded by a virulently anti-Soviet policy, sought to carry out exactly the same type of treacherous intrigues that Britain had so illustriously failed at. Harman sums up the imperialist mess most adequately.

The US followed Britain’s policy of relying both on the Israeli settlers and Arab client regimes. It provided Israel with more military aid than anywhere else in the world. At the same time it worked closely with the Saudi Arabian monarchy, encouraged coups which re-established the absolute rule of the Shah of Iran, and gave power in Iraq to the Baath Party, including a young Saddam Hussain, in 1962. The US was highly successful in asserting hegemony over the region and its oil. It could only do so, however, by encouraging antagonisms between states and peoples which burst into a succession of wars. The 20th century was again seeing wealth, on these occasions oil wealth, transmuted into blood.P560

This is all essential history that has been conveniently whitewashed from the Western popular consciousness, but not so for the peoples of the region. Their endless humiliations at the hands of Western imperialism and its Israeli client state are buried deep within the Arab psyche and help explain, for those with a will to understand, just why this region of the world seems so endlessly volatile. In place of a clear anti-colonial historical discourse has come, in the West, an ugly anti- Arab sentiment mixed now, with a more recent all -encompassing Islamaphobia. Instead of a clear historical perspective on why current events are unfolding, we are left with a blind acceptance of Israel’s own colonial and religious agenda, an acceptance fuelled partly out of Western guilt for past crimes committed against European Jews and partly out of Western economic self interest. Those that do speak out against Israeli colonialism are swiftly knocked back by accusations of anti Semitism. Those of a Jewish background who oppose the colonial policies of Israel are dismissed by the Jewish mullahs as self loathing Jews.

So where does all this historical baggage leave us today? Quite clearly in an extremely dangerous place both metaphorically and literally. In addition to its Arab client states, the West has created and financed its own nuclear armed policeman for the region least one or more of the Arab nations should get ideas above their station. If all these pro-Western Arab client states could be relied upon to stay pro-West and keep the lid on any progressive forces in their own countries, then they would be left to their own dictatorial devices and Britain could get on with the important things in life like tennis, golf, cricket, rugby and all the other old Etonian pastimes. But one nuclear armed state seems to rapidly beget others. The India sub-continent is a sobering enough example of this fact. Iraq tried and failed. Iran is on the cusp of success.

And life in an increasingly multi-polar world is not always so easy to predict. The Soviet Union may have collapsed but Russia has re-emerged as a hugely significant player as an energy supplier in both oil and gas, and it is no surprise that it has its own strategic agenda. China also is now omnipresent in all global considerations and it too has its own levers to pull in the Middle East. The West no longer has total hegemony in the region.

As for Britain and the US, they have been caught in a paradox of their own making. They are forever talking the talk about democracy and free speech but have backed any number of virulently anti-democratic dictatorships in the region just as long as they remained on the right side of the Cold War and didn’t get too big for their boots as per Egypt’s Nasser and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. But when, as in Tunisia and Egypt today, secular forces demand democratic and economic reforms, the US and British ruling elites are in a bind. Side with the legitimate demands of the secular forces and risk losing a reliable client state; side with the old and discredited military dictatorship and risk the feudal fascist Mullahs filling the political vacuum, as was the case thirty years ago in Iran. The thought of the Muslim Brotherhood in absolute power in Cairo in a few months time will definitely put the British ruling classes right off their Sunday afternoon game of tennis.

And that brings us conveniently right back to the thorny question of Britain’s dismal record on the world tennis circuit. Consider that if Murray, like Henman before him, who is not even a product of the LTA, were to retire or get knocked down by a bus, Britain could boast not a single male player in the world’s top 200. The fact that successive governments have decimated the nation’s tennis courts down to ten thousand from thirty three thousand just five years ago- with those remaining being decidedly unfriendly to the grubby working classes, has much to do with our embarrassingly poor tennis standing. Visit any suburban or shire tennis club and you will instantly know what I am talking about. But why bother with local community facilities when the public school system is perfectly capable of producing our future champions.
It is precisely this old-Etonian, colonial attitude, still permeating so many aspects of British society, that makes us so inept, not only at tennis, but at taking a principled position on democracy on the world stage. But as events unfold in Egypt and around the region, it will not be the finer points of Egyptian democracy, nor the tennis fortunes of the nation that will be on the minds of British foreign office, but rather the continued and uninterrupted supply of oil. Economic interests will trump political and sporting niceties every time.

But for today, why should our old-Etonian masters bother their little heads about all this global chaos when they have seriously important sporting matters to busy themselves with? An Olympics to run and a sporting legacy to squander. And then there is footy. Abramovich has just spent a further 75 million pound of his ill-gotten fortune on his hobby football club so its business as usual in the Premier League. And its business as usual in the nation’s upper-middle class tennis clubs this weekend where the nation may well have to wait yet another 75 years before that lot will create anything approaching a tennis champion. The near certainties of history are so reassuring.

Stop Press: And the really good news is that Mubarak is estimated to have spirited away some 43 billion out of Egypt, much of it sitting in British and Swiss banks. Perhaps he might just be tempted to take out ownership of one of our less fashionable football clubs as a goodwill gesture to the nation. After all, his son Gamal has already acquired a very tasty property at 28 Wilton Place, Belgravia, very suitable for some private tennis courts, I’m reliably informed.