United States in Middle East

The United States holds an ongoing military presence in the Middle East, including military bases in Turkey, a strong naval presence in Mediterranean and Arabian Sea, as well as large numbers of troops on the Arabian Peninsula since Gulf War I. Most Persian Gulf Arabs and their leaders felt threatened after Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait and were grateful for the U.S. leadership in the 1991 war against Saddam Hussein's regime(until the U.S. left) and for UN resolutions designed to control Iraq's ability to create weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, there is an enormous amount of cynicism regarding U.S. motives in waging that war. Gulf Arabs, and even some of their rulers, cannot shake the sense that the war was not fought for international law, self-determination and human rights, as the senior Bush administration claimed, but rather to protect U.S. access to oil and to enable the U.S. to gain a strategic toehold in the region.

The ongoing U.S. air strikes against Iraq have not garnered much support from the international community, including Iraq's neighbors, who would presumably be most threatened by an Iraqi capability of producing weapons of mass destruction. In light of Washington’s tolerance -- and even quiet support -- of Iraq’s powerful military machine in the 1980s, the United States' exaggerated claims of an imminent Iraqi military threat in 1998, after Iraq’s military infrastructure was largely destroyed in the Gulf War, simply lack credibility. Nor have such