Charting a Sane Course in the Middle East -- In These Times

Charting a Sane Course in the Middle East -- In These Times:

"When the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 'everything changed.' Or so people said. This terrifying post-9/11 world required new strategies, new weapons and an entirely new war on terror, itself. Progressive critics were immediately dismissed by the keepers of conventional wisdom as deluded fools with 'a pre-9/11 world view.'

But, as the past four-plus years have revealed, it is the Bush administration that has problem facing the reality of this new threat.


The so-called Bush doctrine is little more than old-fashioned Cold War strategy re-jiggered for a unipolar world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Middle East, where U.S. policy consists of arming 'friendly' tyrants, deposing or undermining the unfriendly ones in the name of 'regime change,' and aligning ourselves with Israel against much of the Arab world.

Sound familiar? Indeed, the very idea of fighting terrorists over there so as to avoid fighting them at home is just warmed-over 'containment' talk. The significant break from the past is our flagrant disregard for our European allies, but this has less to do with 9/11 than the fall of the Soviet Union, which made us the sole superpower."