In all fairness, even before W. Bush was in office, the Pentagon was realigning for the “war belt” across North Africa, the ME, and southern Asia, figuring for the next 100-200 years, that is where the hottest wars will be.
There were even plans for AFRICOM (Africa Command) that would be in the center of the hurricane. And here’s why.
The intelligence estimates were that the whole belt was tinder dry and ready to explode. With the Khan nuclear weapons scheme fully underway, there was a good chance that it would escalate to a medium sized nuclear war. And yes, that would have directly affected the US.
So like a big dry forest in summer, it was thought that “controlled burns” could reduce the risk. And as far as that goes, they might have been right.
After 9-11, we finally realized that large, well financed and fanatical organizations were trying to destabilize much of the world, so we decided to channel them to concentrating and fighting our soldiers over there, rather than waiting for them to attack us here.
And in pursuit of that goal, we have exterminated an awful lot of such villains, even though many remain.
See #11
Oil made it all possible. Oil was money, and the middle east had plenty of oil. Money is power, so they had power to go with their oil.
In that sense, we allowed that genie to get out of the bottle. For a long time every day Americans have known that we could change that balance of power by not enriching our enemies by buying their oil.
We were told that our oil had pretty much run out. Now we find that wasn’t precisely so, that there was plenty, but it was out of our reach. We didn’t find a way to reach it with a crash program. Instead we kowtowed to the sheiks and gave them a foothold on the world and on our own government.
We still need to stop using their oil and enriching them. We need the rest of the world to follow suit.