DistendedPendulusFrenulum: Just so you know what we are talking about.

Mmm... wouldn't totally agree with your description.

The old Middle East doctrine was "contain and stabilize." Let them kill each other all they want, long as the oil flows and they leave us alone.

Well, we had to push back on that occasionally. Reagan found it necessary to bomb Tripoli so they would stop bombing German discos in an attempt to murder American troops (hey presto! It worked!).

Then we had to jump all over Hezbollah for a while after they bombed the barracks in Beirut, and they laid low too.

Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and we began to realize that containment had its limits. After the first Gulf War we had incidents like the USS Cole and the first WTC bombing; Clinton handled those like domestic police actions and made a few attempts to go after al Qaida's training camps.

But it took 9/11 to get people to realize that "contain and stabilize" was really "neglect and fester." They weren't going to just leave us alone anymore. In fact, they never intended to leave us alone; it just took years of ignorance on our part to allow them to gear up to that extent.

So the reason the Bush Doctrine went after Iraq was none of these braindead excuses we keep hearing: To avenge his daddy; to get the oil; blah blah blah. It's because Iraq was the most destabilizing, dangerous nation in the whole area. Hussein invaded Kuwait, warred with Iran for eight years,* and tried to assassinate a US president. He also sponsored Palestinian suicide bombings.

So let's not get into this issue on the basis of "Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11" or "They didn't hurt us."

How well is the change of doctrine working? Well, it seems to have worked in some areas--Libya dumped its nuclear program entirely and actually cleaned up its act on sponsoring terrorism; Egypt's wanting to cooperate as well and so (sort of) is Saudi Arabia.

Iraq itself is problematic. I think all this "on the brink of civil war" talk is a bit hyperbolic and silly, but then again I have to wonder which is better for the US and the rest of the world: A stable Iraq that's ripping off the UN, exporting terrorism and murdering its own people by the millions when it's not invading other countries, or an Iraq that's struggling toward a real democracy and actually leaving the rest of the world alone.

And in one instance--Iran--the Bush doctrine seems to have been provocative. But I can hardly believe Iran would be our friend if we'd just stayed out of Iraq and Afghanistan--the Carter-era hostage crisis leaps to mind.

At least the whole world is watching Iran and trying to stop their push for nukes.

Almost forgot: The asterisk after my mention of the Iran/Iraq war was to forestall any pointless rabbit trails about how we supported Hussein at the time. Yes, as the lesser of two evils. Yes, because "contain and stabilize" required us to pick sides. Yes, before Hussein started chasing after nukes, invading Kuwait, defying the UN and sponsoring terrorism in Palestine.

Besides, if we really did help put Hussein in power (we didn't, but never mind) wouldn't that obligate us even more to go do something about him after he went rogue?

DistendedPendulusFrenulum: Could it be because Peace is Not Quite Done Busting Out All Over the Middle East?

Yeah! Geez, it's been three whole years already. Surely that's enough time to overturn centuries of ingrained hatred and oppression. Right?

timmy_the_tooth: We did not choose him to be the lesser of two evils. We chose him to be a brutal dictator because we were afraid the Shi'a majority would want to join up with Iran -- who we were very afraid of and had just gotten out of a different brutal dictatorship relationship with and they were pissed. He was also very good at repressing the Kurds in the north and this was important to us because we were supporting Turkey's brutal repression of
the Kurds in their south and the last thing we wanted was for the whole Kurdish people to try to break away from both countries and form their own government. So, that's a brief history of the repression and violence perpetrated by the US government against the people in that area.

You just said the same thing I did: "Contain and stabilize" meant our choices were guided by whatever we thought would keep the area most stable (or the least UNstable) and keep the oil and world economy flowing.

So from Eisenhower clear up through Clinton, human suffering and war took a back seat to stability.

Backing Hussein was thought to offer more stability; helping the Kurds, Turks or shiites would destabilize things more.
Ergo, backing Hussein was the lesser of two evils.