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US support for Israel didn't really begin in earnest until the Kennedy Administration, and by that time Pan-Arabism was a lost cause. Pan-Arabism's main proponent was Nasser, and other Arab leaders were rightly suspicious that Nasser only advocated for it under the presumption that he would be running everything. It was this reason that the union of Egypt and Syria was so short-lived; Syria, despite being nominally committed to the Pan-Arab cause, wasn't about to surrender sovereignty to Egypt. I haven't read Gowans's book, but any serious concern about Pan-Arab socialism after about 1970 comes across as anachronistic.
Well, no, it's not sufficient. Saddam may have been an Arab Nationalist but he was one who was already hated by the rest of the Arab world. Even the fellow Ba'athists in Syria sent troops to fight against him during Desert Storm.
Detsabilization by whom? I have yet to hear any credible arguments that the United States, Israel, or any other Western government is responsible for the situation in Syria. Israel had fought wars there but they'd been doing that since 1948, and had officially been in a cease-fire since 1974. If anything the US government was criticized for not getting involved enough; Obama publicly called for Assad's resignation but nonetheless allowed him to cross several "lines in the sand" without any action or consequence other than condemnation. The US didn't get formally involved until 2017 but even then this was pretty minimal involvement.
Nasser was only pro-Soviet because they were willing to sell him weapons when the US wasn't. And the reason the US wasn't was that they were trying to keep the Arab-Israeli Conflict in low gear. Nasser wasn't interested in aligning himself with any superpower, only with doing what he felt was in Egypt's interest. And if that meant playing the powers off of each other and getting into wars, then so be it.
Your summary here highlights a lot of the objections I have with purely ideological writers like Gowans and Chomsky is that they have a sort of tunnel-vision where they stick to a thesis that confirms their priors and if there's tons of evidence to challenge this thesis, they ignore it rather than address it. It's almost as if they assume that their audience is a bunch of fellow tankies without knowledge of the subject looking for a polemic they can use any time they're trying to crap on US foreign policy, kind of like how in Manufacturing Consent Chomsky expects that the reader won't know that the North Vietnamese invaded Laos in 1958 and that that may have had an influence on Laotian politics at the time.
This all assumes that "instability" can only be caused by powerful interference, which in the Middle East is hysterical. The place is built on instability, everyone hates everyone and the minute a strongman falls (like Ghadaffi or Hussein), everyone goes right back to the blood feuds, terrorism and murder that are the normal social interactions of the ME.
These are societies built on ever-shifting clan alliances, backroom dealings, secret accords and political gamesmanship dressed up as muslim piety. It does not require the US or Israel to destabilize it, it is already unstable. Now, both countries and many more have done a lot of bad shit in the ME, but that's a different question to what causes it. And the sad answer is: the will of the people. This is what the populace of the ME wants, an endless struggle of internecine violence, intermittent warfare, insane racism and religious bigotry. This is what they vote for, given a chance (MB in Egypt, Hamas in the territories, Erdogan in Turkey etc.). This is what they default to any time a dictator installed to keep a lid on things so the oil keeps flowing falls.
Ghadaffi, for all his faults, at least didn't allow slavery. Hussein, a truly despicable tyrant, was 100% better than the ISIS regime his people installed at the first opportunity once he and the US were gone. This is not a US problem, it's not an Israel problem, hell, it's not even a dictator problem. It's a people problem. You can't have peace among people who don't want it. You can enforce it, for a while, if you're strong enough. But every dictator falls, and every foreign intervention runs out of money or political will eventually. You're left with the population, and if the boys want to fight, you better let 'em.
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