ABSTRACT
Al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon have unleashed additional anti-systemic social, political and economic forces that could possibly result in US overextension and divide its major allies. In regard to the war with Iraq in 2003, pan-Islamic propaganda initially opposed both the secular pan-Arab leadership of Saddam Hussein, as well as an Anglo-American "occupation"; it also denounced "corrupt" leaderships in Islamic states and propagandized against Israeli and US actions in the region. This chapter argues that despite the fact that US-UK military intervention in Iraq has risked the further destabilization of key states in the Arab-Islamic world in the not-so-long term, the US must now work to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as defuse India-Pakistan tensions, if the war on terrorism is ever going to come to a semblance of an "end". US intervention in Iraq has been compared with American actions after World War II.
