thegipples/iraq

From the page: "Washington's drive for hegemonic control over the geostrategic and oil-rich axis of the Middle East stretches back three-quarters of a century, and has continued unabated to this day.

...the Bush administration's interventionist posture toward the Middle East is no mere post-9/11 aberration, but represents an especially bellicose expression of a longstanding campaign. Today's enemy is terrorism; yesterday's was Communism. And just as the threat of Communism was wildly exaggerated 50 years ago, so, these days, "the global war on terror is in practice an American war in the Middle East against a largely imaginary set of enemies." ­Khalidi's point is not that American policy toward the Middle East has been consistently hys­terical; rather, he says, it has been consis­tently cynical, exploiting an apocalyptic sense of threat in order to achieve the kind of dominance to which great powers, what­ever their rhetoric, aspire."