Middle east missteps.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: STATE OF THE NATION - Column

AMERICAN MILITARY involvement in the Middle East since World War II has been episodic, complex, and unsatisfactory. We practically stripped down our NATO military inventory to assist Israel in the 1973 war and that nation remains in peril. Since the Israel-Egyptian peace treaty, we have sent Egypt billions of dollars in military aid and a new regime is likely to be quite hostile. In 1958 and 1982, we sent Marines to Lebanon with nothing to show for it. We have a longstanding military relationship with the Saudis; yet, they remain a weak and unreliable ally. The Shah of Iran once was one of our closest allies. Now, Iran is a troubling adversary; preventing an Iranian nuclear capacity has been a major strategic objective for a decade, but the prospects for success are marginal. We have engaged in two important conflicts, the 1991 Gulf War and the recently concluded war in Iraq. Given Pres. Barack Obama's latest military withdrawal, the fruits of those endeavors have been jeopardized.

Why such involvement? During World War II, Hollywood portrayed the Middle East as exotic, silly, and overromanticized in such films as "The Thief of Baghdad," "Arabian Nights," "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," and "The Road to Morocco." U.S. forces were involved in Noah Africa to drive out the Germans and assist the British. The people who actually lived there were considered only a backdrop with little to say about the mighty forces that were slaughtering each other in the desert. As the war was drawing to a conclusion in February 1945, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt visited with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia in Egypt on his way home from the Yalta Conference. It was a moment of symbolic importance. Roosevelt's political and economic advisers were concerned about the enormous use of American oil reserves during the war and had their eyes on the Saudi's rich oil fields. No doubt the U.S. oil companies, far more powerful than they are today, saw opportunities in assisting the Saudis and others in the region in developing those fields.

Since then, many have claimed with absolute certainty that the American interest in the Middle East was motivated by oil profits only. During the Iraqi War, the anti-war movement invoked the slogan, No Blood for Oil. Of course, oil was at the heart of the American interest in the region, but profits for the oil companies were a small part of that. The strategic question was much broader. Should any one country establish hegemonic...