Oil, Politics and Intervention: an Examination of U.S. Policy in Lebanon and the Middle East in 1958 with Special Attention to Related Developments in Indonesia

Abstract

Standard accounts of Lebanon's first civil war in 1958 have privileged the role of external factors, notably the UAR, in explaining the onset of civil conflict. The approach has similarly dominated conventional interpretations of U.S. intervention in Lebanon, with the Iraqi Revolution and the Cold War as the starring actors. The essay that follows, which is part of a projected longer study of U.S. intervention in the Middle East and the Third World in the decade of the 1950s, breaks with this pattern. It does so in response to the examination of U.S. sources that provide evidence that is at odds with standard accounts in several significant ways.