The oil-embargo problem, not ideology, made reshaping Iraq urgent by 2001

Evidence

This chapter outlined the evolving posture toward the movements of political Islam within the foreign policy establishment from the Cold War to the end of the 1990s. Until the 1970s, policy makers saw various state and non-state actors that mobilized Islam on the political stage as allies, but after the Iranian Revolution “bad” Islam and “bad” Muslims made an entrance. The development of the “Arab terrorist” and later the “Islamic terrorist” stock figure, a product largely of the neocon–Likud alliance, began in the late 1970s and continued through the 1980s. The confrontationist approach toward Islamists was not, however, adopted during the 1990s either by the Bush Sr. or Clinton administrations. During the 1990s, empire sought to craft itself through the lens of liberal hegemony. However, by the end of the 1990s, various US policies toward the Middle East were at a dead end. Significantly, with predictions that world energy demands would increase by 50 percent in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it became necessary to find more effective ways to extract oil from the region. Gilbert Achcar writes that for “the Bush administration, as for U.S. capitalism as a whole, the need to put an end to the embargo imposed on Iraq was becoming urgent.” The attacks of 9/11 provided an opportunity to reshape the region; this moment and its aftermath are the focus of the next chapter. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 485

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Bush to Obama was a rhetorical shift masking unchanged imperial fundamentals. (similarity 0.81)
• Middle East oil control drives virtually every US regional intervention (similarity 0.81)
• Iraq and Afghanistan wars aimed at Middle East oil dominance over rivals (similarity 0.80)
• The Islamic threat emerged only after the 1979 Iranian Revolution (similarity 0.79)
• Bush and Clinton administrations resisted the neocon anti-Islamic-terrorism agenda (similarity 0.79)
• US policymakers treated Islamist movements as allies before the Iranian Revolution. (similarity 0.79)