Evaluation of Relative Importance of Democracy Promotion - Essay Example

The United States foreign policy could no longer simply address state actors and disregard nonstate actors; it could no longer support, or turn a blind eye towards, oppressive, authoritarian and dictatorship regimes, and, above all, it could not allow a religious wave of anti-American/Western sentiment to sweep through the Middle East and negatively affects American strategic interests in the region(Talbott and Chanda,2001; Chomsky,2002; Wolin,2002). 9/11 imposed the necessity of the United States to revise, and possibly completely redesign its foreign policy towards the Arab/Islamic world, especially towards the oil states of the Persian Gulf. The U.S foreign policy towards the Middle East took a more dramatically aggressive turn following 9/11.

Despite the absence of any connection between it and the terrorist acts of September 11th, and despite the lack of any concrete and persuasive evidence for the existence of weapons of mass destruction that threaten the United States, Iraq was invaded. The invasion of Iraq was in immediate opposition to international law and violated the UN Charter regarding the conditions under which war may be legitimately declared (Falk, 2003; Fare, 2003; Benn, 2004). Saudi Arabia, long recognized as an invaluable ally within both the Muslim and Arab worlds and vital to the United States’ economic interests, came under severe public, and official, criticism from the United States.

Not only was the acknowledged head of al-Qaeda, the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, Saudi-born but the majority of the nineteen terrorists identified as the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack were Saudi citizens, but Saudi Arabia was accused of being the major financial supporter of fundamentalist groups in the Middle East like al-Qaeda and Hamas. Yet, it was Iraq, not Saudi Arabia, which the United States targeted. While the United States’ foreign policy towards Saudi Arabia did not assume overly aggressive posturing, the facts surrounding 9/11, alongside evidence implicating wealthy Saudis in the financing of Islamic fundamentalist groups such as al-Qaeda, motivated the United States to revise its foreign policy towards Saudi Arabia.