What was our original reason to declare our right to be in, with force, the Middle East?

[Skip Intro]

We're there now, if you ask the one's who've increased our presence there, through force, we're there to prevent wmds from falling into the hands of Islamic Terrorists (the worst kind, I guess?). But we were there long before our invasion of Iraq. The invasion of Iraq has to be part of a bigger plan. The future's scary, if we continue on this course, escalating and escalating, over years but now quickening, our presence in a part of the world so far away. It will backfire on us, I have no doubt. Who the hell are we to tell people on the other side of the globe what to think or believe or how to live? Bad idea, and bush has gone nuts with it. He thinks its his destiny to remake the world into a mirror image of some twisted view of what he thinks America is. Its insane. But it is the past I wonder about. What was our original reason for asserting ourselves so forcefully in that part of the world? What were our original "national interests" there?

[bananas]

1. The Carter Doctrine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Doctrine

[Kagemusha]

2. Oil, and the vaccum left by the British Empire's waning

which in turn threatened the oil. And which opened the area to potential Communist influence, which in turn threatened the oil.

To be perfectly honest, there ought be no special shame in that. Oil is a vital military commodity. The Commies weren't exactly saints and I never wished for their success in undermining the US' strategic military position. My problem with it has more to do with, oh... the intervention driving the price of oil to its current high levels, the US doing nothing to change this (which in turn saved Saudi Arabia from a major internal crisis due to long-term low oil prices), the general ignorance, ham-handedness and simple (and grand) incompetence that went into asserting ourselves so forcefully in that part of the world.

Anyway, the US only got there on the ground in force after the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. That's a historical fact. The US relied on a combination of Israel, naval aviation and quietly run air bases prior to that.