ABSTRACT
One year after September 11, 2001, with the “war on terror” a permanent feature of the U.S. political landscape, the dominant question in Washington and much of the world was Iraq. When would the U.S. act on its threat of “preemptive action” against Iraq, the first stage in the Bush administration's reordering of the Middle East? Locked into the hallucinating vision of a recolonized Middle East designed to suit Washington's taste and that of the Israeli right wing was the related question of Middle East oil. And assigned to guarantee U.S. Victory, as the public was repeatedly informed, were American forces in the Gulf. Their deployment was estimated to include some 35,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of October 2002. 1 Is this, then, what the “war on terror” was all about? Was oil politics and its connection to the military a response to the events of 9/11? Or was it those key features of U.S. Middle East policy that had always assumed a global reach, whose significance was dramatized in the light of American power and its open claims to global hegemony, a product of the post-Cold War?
