AMERICAN POLICY TO NEUTRALIZE IRAQ

This research examines policies that the United States might adopt to neutralize Iraq as a threat to the stability of the Middle East region. The findings of this research are presented in separate discussions of (1) the nature and origin of the problem, and (2) American objectives in the Middle East region, together with possible American policies to neutralize Iraq as a threat to the stability of the region.

The Nature and Origin of the Problem

The origins of the Iraqi threat to the stability of the Middle East region greatly predates the appearance of Saddam Hussein as Iraqi leader or the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, European nations gained political control of the countries of the Middle East region. Britain gained control of Iraq, what is now Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. At the end of the Second World War, when independence from colonial occupying nations came into vogue, Britain arbitrarily and without historical justification carved the state of Kuwait out of Iraq before relinquishing political control over the area. The British want to divide the oil reserves to prevent an Arab leader from gaining too great a control over the resource, and they wanted a leader, which they found in Kuwait, who would assure continued and uninterrupted western access to the resource. Ever since that time, Iraq, regardless of who its leader was, has endorsed a policy of incorporating K

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Category: Foreign - A