xxi In the year and a half between the Septem- ber 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, President George W. Bush argued per­sis­tently for war. The president and administrative offi- cials presented an array of justifications for war. Some of their reasons had been presented before, but the terrorist attacks on Washing- ton, DC, and New York City gave them new urgency. The claim that Saddam Hussein pos- sessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and had ties to terrorist organ­izations to which he might give ­ these weapons persuaded an American public fearful of another attack that something had to be done about the brutal dic- tator. Persuasive though this argument ulti- mately proved, it hid a more complex real­ity. A mix of ideological and pragmatic motives lay ­ behind the decision to invade Iraq. By themselves or even together, they prob­ably would not have been compelling enough to persuade the American ­people that war could not be avoided. Only the terrorist argument could do that, but many experts believe that September 11 provided a pretext for a war that the administration had wanted all along. U.S. Foreign Policy and the ­ Middle East During the second half of the 20th ­ century, figured prominently in American foreign policy ­toward a crucial but volatile region of the world. That policy rested on three pillars. The United States wished to make certain that it and its Eu­ro­pean allies would have unfettered access to ­ Middle Eastern oil. West- ern vulnerability to a cutoff or even a reduc- tion of supply became painfully clear during the oil embargo following the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Americans experienced rising prices and gas rationing for the first time since World War II. Security for the state of Israel was the second pillar of American pol- icy. With its technological superiority and nuclear arsenal, the Jewish state had proven a match for any combination of Arab countries in ­every war since 1948. The Yom Kippur War, however, had demonstrated Israel’s vul- nerability. Only a massive infusion of Amer- ican military aid made pos­ si ­ ble victory over Syria and Egypt without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons, which the government of Golda Meier seriously considered. Israel’s reliability as an ally, coupled with a strong Zionist lobby in the United States, has assured American support for the Jewish state. Preventing any state from dominating the region formed the final pillar of U.S. ­ Middle Eastern policy. The year 1979 proved transformative for American foreign policy. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by a fundamentalist religious state shocked both ­Iraq Causes of the Iraq War
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