Following the bulk of western reporting on the Iraq crisis, you’d think the self-styled ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ‘ ( Isis ) popped out of nowhere, took the west completely by surprise, and is now rampaging across the Middle East like some random weather event. The reality is far more complex, and less palatable. The meteoric rise of Isis is a predictable consequence of a longstanding US-led geostrategy in the Middle East that has seen tyrants and terrorists as tools to expedite access to regional oil and gas resources. Since the second world war, as British historian Mark Curtis documented extensively in his seminal study, The Ambiguities of Power , US and UK goals in the Middle East have focused on oil. As a secret British document from 1958 explained: “The major British and other western interests in the Persian Gulf [are] (a) to ensure free access […]