ABSTRACT
With the end of the Cold War, the United States was the world’s lone superpower. The administration of George W. Bush chose to use its unrivaled might to effect a sweeping political transformation of the Middle East and, not incidentally, ensure America’s access to the region’s vast oil reserves. Citing the “war on terror” in the wake of 9/11 and insisting as well that Iraq harbored arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the United States and its allies invaded Iraq and removed dictator Saddam Hussein from power, an action also intended to intimidate other authoritarian regimes in the region, notably Iran and Syria. Though it was al-Qaeda, located in Afghanistan where the ruling Taliban regime permitted it latitude, that was linked to the 9/11 attacks, the United States had quickly shifted its focus from Afghanistan to Iraq, even though most of its allies (except Britain) refused to endorse the notion that Saddam Hussein represented an immediate threat to world peace. Ultimately, a chief US justification for the Iraq War—that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD—proved illusory. Furthermore, with the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, a bloody insurgency took hold among those Iraqis angered at the actions of foreign troops on Iraqi soil, and the nation descended into chaos and violence. The Sunni Arabs, a ruling minority under Hussein but now just a minority, saw power shift to the more numerous Shiite Arabs, who were divided by factions of their own, and the Kurds sought to consolidate their autonomous rule in the north. Meanwhile, America’s occupation of Iraq emboldened Iran. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad adopted a more defiant posture toward the outside world, denouncing Israel and bolstering fears that Iran’s nuclear program was not peaceful in intent. Subsequently, the administration of President Barack Obama strove for a new beginning for American foreign policy in the Middle East, but the policies at the end of Obama’s first year were surprisingly similar to those of Bush at the end of his second term. In Iraq, the United States was already committed to a drawdown of troops negotiated in late 2008 by the Republican administration. In Iran, Obama faced the dilemma of condoning the Iranian’s right to peaceful nuclear power without allowing them to develop a nuclear-weapons capability—and to manage that dance without seeming to interfere overtly in Iran’s turbulent domestic politics. 219The late William L. Cleveland was professor of history at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia.
