Spreading Democracy - Essay Example

This is not a situation that people and nations are likely to outgrow in the foreseeable future – perhaps not ever (Andersen, Seibert and Wagner). The end product of this mistrust that has grown over time has been the hostility leading from suspicion against the West. The reaction of the populations of the Middle East should however not be thought to always be at a consensus; far from it. There has been support by some regimes for the West which includes the United States seen as the “heir of the British imperialism” (Richman 3).

The united states has been involved in the political situation in the Middle East since World War II in order to ensure that the oil rich fields stay within friendly arms and also in a bid to fending off competition especially from the then soviet union. It is this interests that have amassed a story of triumph and tragedy for the US in that region. The relationship with Iraq was born out of the desire to reign on the threat posed by Iran and this underwent a metamorphosis into a relationship jointly between Iran, Syria and the United States against Iraq in recent years.

The action of President Bush to intervene in the Persian Gulf War with the aim of restoring the feudal monarch of Kuwait, which he viewed as the legitimate one, was not an abrupt decision. It had been the culmination of US foreign policy in the region for a long time that had spun for many administrations. It was as a deterioration of the relationship between the US and Iraq, which had started as far back as during the Baghdad pact that was aimed at making Iraq the capital of NATO which was a strategy against the soviets.

The then government was overthrown by Abd al-Karim Qasim who accused it of being pro-Western. Qasim led the country from 1958 to 1963 when he was driven out in a coup by Abd al-Salam Arif who was said to have received help from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Earlier, in an attempt to overthrow Qasim, Saddam Hussein had been involved in a failed coup in 1959, however, with the help of the CIA which had been accused of being his sympathizer, he overthrew the government of Arif in 1968 (Battle 2).

This proves that the US has been involved in the political landscape of Iraq even before the advent of World War II. In 1979, when Saddam became prime minister, there was a concerted effort by him and his close family members in conjunction with people of his hometown to establish a dictatorship. Jimmy Carter, who was the president of the United States during the Iran-Iraq war, chose to be “neutral” when the war initially broke out (Lenczowski 8). Secretly though, the US was accused of aiding the Iraqis in a bid to undermining the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.

The tilt in the US policy of neutrality was born out of the hostage situation that occurred when Iran held 52 Americans. However, records show that the US was involved in funding Iraq through Saudi Arabia. The US was hoping that by propagating the war, the Iranians would eventually run out of supplies and would need spares. Here, they anticipated that the Iranian resolve would have been eroded and they could secure their hostages. The US did no however anticipate that the Iranians would turn to Vietnam where they themselves had left enough spares during their invasion there.

The US deliberately exposed the weaknesses that the Iranians had in a bid to inciting the Iraqis into the war. This collaboration of the US with Iraq born out of the common enmity with Iran was aimed at serving the purpose of quelling the opposition that the Iranian administration had of the West and of retaining Iraq as a strategic partner in the continued inhabitation in the region. However, the US only looked at the areas that they were to gain, did not see the actions