End of an Era

End of an Era

William Pfaff | http://www.williampfaff.com/article.php?storyid=665

Paris, February 19, 2014 – This is probably, but not certainly, the year that sees the end to the United States’ three-decades-long effort to establish permanent American strategic bases in the Muslim Middle East and in Muslim Asia. This effort began before the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. The attacks were revenge for Washington’s refusal to remove the airbase and troops it had installed in Saudi Arabia, the Holy Land of Islam, following the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait, following Iraq’s invasion and occupation of  that country.

America’s retaliation was the invasion of Afghanistan and destruction of its Taliban government, the invasion of Iraq and destruction of Saddam Hussein’s government and devastation of the country’s infrastructure. The Hussein government, dominated by Sunnis, was replaced with a puppet government dominated by Shias. That government eventually turned against its occupiers and ordered them to leave – which they did. Today the country is assailed by violence as the Sunnis attempt to recover power. The United States has turned to wage its war on global terrorism elsewhere.