ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the potential of US policies to redirect established historical patterns of Middle Eastern politics and society in new and troubling directions. It seeks to place these developments in their proper historical context and so considers the legacy of certain American policies in the 1990s. The chapter discusses the policy of dual containment in the Gulf through the imposition of a sanctions regime during the 1990s; and the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center towers in New York on September 11, 2001. It describes the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq; and the nuclear negotiations with Iran. Al-Qa'ida was a new phenomenon, a stateless international terrorist network that sought to establish an Islamic order along the lines of the Taliban government. By 2002, the George H. W. Bush administration had shifted its focus from al-Qa'ida to Iraq as the most threatening source of anti-American terrorism.
