The 1958 Lebanon Crisis in the archive documents of the United States of America

The Middle East, which has shaped the course of world history with the many events it has witnessed, has always been one of the centers of the international system. It is very important for Turkey to closely follow the Middle East both in historical and contemporary terms. In this framework, it is essential to analyze the history of the region from a broad perspective by focusing on the political, social and cultural values of the Middle East. In these analyses, the United States of America (USA), which has attached special importance to the Middle East since the beginning of the Cold War, must be taken into consideration. 1958 was a year of crises in the Middle East, which had become an important area of competition between the US and the USSR since the 1950s, when the Cold War became increasingly heated. Regional tensions, which accelerated with the establishment of the Baghdad Pact in 1955, deepened with the Suez crisis in 1956 and the Syrian crisis in 1957. The unification of Egypt and Syria under the umbrella of the United Arab Republic (UAR) in February 1958 caused the ideological polarization in the region to turn into a conflict over Lebanon. In this process, the US closely followed the crisis in Lebanon, which it had been intervening in its internal affairs through the CIA. Attributing all the crises in the Middle East to the "Soviet influence", the US embarked on a military operation in order not to lose Lebanon after the fall of its ally, the Iraqi monarchy, in a bloody coup d'état on July 14, 1958. This operation, known in history as Operation Blue Bat, was the first US military operation in the Middle East. July 1958 is a milestone of symbolic value for both American history and the history of the Middle East. As a matter of fact, after this date, the US military interventions in the Middle East have continued to this day. This operation, in which the Incirlik Air Base in Adana was used by the US for the first time, is also important for Turkish political history. The 1958 Lebanon Crisis and the American intervention added a foreign policy dimension to the existing government-opposition tension in Turkey. The debate on the American bases in Turkey, which started in this process, is still ongoing. In this framework, the thesis aims to analyze this critical period when the Cold War began to influence the Middle East in the light of US State Department, CIA, UN and American military documents.