US Interest in the Middle East

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Proceeding from a top-down perception of regional stability, the (senior) Bush administration sent thousands of US soldiers to Saudi Arabia which seemed vulnerable to conquest by Iraq during the second Gulf war (1991). President George H. W. Bush interpreted Saddam Hussein’s aggression as a threat to international and regional stability and resolved to confront it by forcible means. The US intervention, however, was not without destabilizing repercussions. The stationing of the US troops in Saudi Arabia put it into confrontation with the Islamist fighters, and ended the truces which lasted throughout the 1980s between the two parties. More important, al-Qaeda organization, which was formed around 1988, started to target the US interests in the Middle East and elsewhere. Somehow the threat posed by al-Qaeda to regional stability turned out to be greater than the threat posed by the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.

Historical Background

At 2:00 AM, August 2, 1990, Iraq translated its complaints about Kuwaiti overproduction of oil (as well as other concerns with Kuwait’s practice of horizontal drilling and their occupation of the oil fields that were disputed in al-Rumaylah and the islands of Warbah and Bubiyan) by moving 1800 tanks of the Iraqi Army towards Kuwait. Iraqi forces rumbled across the Iraq-Kuwait border heading southward towards the capital, routed scattered resistance, and occupied all of Kuwait by 7:00 AM. When the invasion began, the Emir of Kuwait, Sheik Jabir al-Ahmed al-Sabah, fled with his extended family into Saudi Arabia.

Two hours and twenty minutes after the beginning of the invasion, the senior Bush administration, strongly condemned the Iraqi attack as a naked act of aggression and a violation o...

... middle of paper ...

...g intervention; indeed, they might well have grown worse.

The main features of the American pre-emptive intervention in Saudi Arabia can be summed as (1) forcible—the US sought to maintain stability through the deployment of massive numbers of troops in the Arabia, (2) top-down—the intervention was based on bolstering regional client in order to secure regional stability, while ignored other local actors and interactions, and (3) simplistic—the US pre-emptive intervention in Saudi Arabia did not consider the domestic repercussions that might result from sending non-Muslim foreign troops to the Islamic Kingdom. In addition, the US policy toward the Saudi Kingdom has never emphasised democratization as a major element of stability. Rather US policy focused mainly on maintaining reliable ‘status-quo allies,’ who were thought capable of securing US regional interests.

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