The Middle East has always interested the United States because of its major oil reserves. Significant control of the region could influence the world’s oil supply and create a monopoly. This explains the U.S. decision to develop allies in the region, starting with Saudi Arabia at the end of the Second World War, and its support for the Iranian coup in 1953 against the democratically elected government to reinstall the Shah (the royal title for the head of the Iranian monarchy), who was in favour of foreign oil exploitation. These two examples show how Americans have always been interested in this region; however, this interest ramped up going into the 21st century.

U.S. interest started in the early 1990s with the Gulf War, which was triggered after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991 in a bid to exert control over the country’s rich oil reserves. This was interpreted as a threat to the U.S., which quickly formed an international coalition to condemn Saddam Hussein, push the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, and punish Iraq for this assault. This first war made Americans very mindful of the threat of the Middle East, a fear amplified by the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. Between 1991 and 2001, the United States went through a period of unipolar domination. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it saw itself as virtually invincible and had no threat to its dominance for about a decade.

The participation of Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden in world conflicts created a fissure in this perception of invincibility and drew the U.S. into other conflicts, specifically the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War in 2003. The U.S. launched the former operation in 2001 to find the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attack. The latter conflict broke out after the U.S. government released intelligence showing that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify preventive action against a country already defeated during the first Gulf War. We now know that this intelligence was unsubstantiated and only fed the paranoia of the Bush administration. Both conflicts became drawn-out wars that led to more conflicts and caused the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Now that we know the role of the U.S. in Middle Eastern conflicts, we can look at the Call of Duty games that draw inspiration from them: Modern Warfare (2007), Modern Warfare 2 (2009), and their more recent sequels in 2019 and 2022. For simplicity’s sake, we will separate the four games into two groups, as the narrative of the first two games in 2007 and 2009 deal more with conflicts in the early 2000s, while the last two games released in  2019 and 2022 are based on conflicts in the 2010s.

The first two games paint a very Manichean portrait of a world torn between two sides clearly identified as good and evil. A dictator overthrows the regime of an unnamed Middle Eastern country and deposes the president, who has close ties to the United States. We know that this dictator is bad because he is supported by ultranationalist Russians and has nuclear weapons, which are later launched to destroy the capital of the overthrown country and annihilate the American forces.

In the second game, the dictator has been taken out through a clandestine military operation, and the United States is continuing to hunt down his supporters who have fled the region. The rest of the game quickly pivots from the Middle East conflict to focus on a terrorist plot involving a Russian invasion of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. The game’s representation of Arabs and the inhabitants of the region is both Orientalist and racist and reinforces the antagonism of these groups as well as the United States’ key role as the world’s police and guardian of democracy. For example, the country depicted in the game is very similar to Iraq but is then represented as the Arabian Peninsula and later Central Asia, specifically Afghanistan.

The Modern Warfare sequels in the second group try to depict a world with more shades of grey, although with a lens still tinted by the dominant ideology. Here, the conflict is a blend between the Syrian civil war (in terms of how the conflict unfolds) and the Libyan civil war (in terms of the positioning of the Western forces). Instead of lumping all Arabs together, the game developers created a country called Urzikstan where they could create new factions: one fighting for independence and another comprised of Russian-backed terrorists carrying out attacks against Western countries. In this case, the games highlight the brutality of the antagonists.