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October 23,2021
Austin Kuan
The geographic region "Middle East" is synonymous with "Arabs" and "oil" in the American worldview. Although the political science community does not agree on the exact extent of the Middle East, in general, the Arabian Peninsula is in the center, Afghanistan is in the east, Morocco is in North Africa in the west, Sudan is in Africa in the south, and Turkey is in the north. This is the "Middle East" in the broadest sense. Among them are not only the Arabs, but also Iran founded by the Persians, Turkey founded by the Turks, and many other peoples you are unfamiliar with. Although Islam is the dominant religion in the Middle East, Israel, which is strongly supported by the US, is also located in the region and practices Judaism.
The Middle East is far more complicated than you may believe. However, one thing is certain. The Middle East has the most oil reserves and exports in the world. As a result, the Middle East must be grasped firmly from the standpoint of the United States' national strategic security. Despite having oil reserves, Afghanistan has been unable to extract oil due to years of conflict and a lack of infrastructure. American forces would never want to enter Afghanistan if it weren't for intelligence that Bin Laden was hiding there.
Prior to 2015, the majority of the world's energy supply came from oil and coal. Petroleum is the focus of energy because it has the potential to drive the development of the heavy chemical and oil refining industries. If a country fails to grasp the source of its oil, the entire country's industry and transportation may be paralyzed at any time. During WWII, Japan was eager to attack Malaya, while Germany was eager to attack the Soviet Union. The most ambitious goal was to obtain a supply of crude oil; otherwise, the naval ships, aircraft, and tanks would be useless. It is possible to argue that whoever controls the supply of oil has a say in the world.
The United States produces a lot of oil, but it is insufficient for domestic consumption, so it must rely heavily on imports. Many industry research reports from 2000 predicted that the world's oil reserves would be depleted before 2065, and humanity has yet to discover a new source of cheap energy supply. At the time, the cost of solar and wind energy generation was prohibitively expensive, and the development of nuclear energy was fraught with controversy. As a result, the United States’ approach was not extracting as much crude oil from Alaska as possible and instead purchasing more crude oil from the Middle East. However, the US discovered that there were two insane leaders in the entire Middle East world who needed to be eliminated. The first was Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who had ruled since 1979, and the second was Libya's Ghadafi. (Muammar Gaddafi) Both Iraq and Libya were oil-rich countries, and their leaders not only opposed the US, but also destroyed and exported revolutions to neighboring countries, making the US increasingly intolerable.
After the US military invaded Afghanistan in 2001, US President George W. Bush's desire to depose Iraqi President Saddam Hussein grew stronger. He must not allow Hussein's power to grow and undermine US control of Middle Eastern oil. And if it can get rid of Hussein and support a pro-American regime in Iraq, the US will be able to gain more control over the country's oil fields. In 2002, the United States and Britain falsely accused Iraq of stockpiling a large number of destructive weapons that could jeopardize Middle Eastern security. The United States declared in March 2003 that it had conclusive evidence, and on March 20, it sent troops to Iraq. The US and Iraqi forces were expected to engage in several fierce battles, but the Iraqi forces almost always surrendered without a fight. Hussein and his family were arrested at the end of December 2003, after fleeing for nine months. Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging on November 5, 2006, and executed on December 30, 2006.
With the US military's victory in Iraq, the US was able to effectively occupy two Middle Eastern countries in less than two years. The US did not withdraw its troops immediately after establishing the democratically elected government that it expected in Iraq because it needed to protect Iraq's oil fields from attack. As a result, US troops remained in Iraq. Subsequent investigations revealed that the US initially accused Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction during Hussein's administration, but no conclusive evidence was discovered. It was later discovered that the evidence had been fabricated.
Hussein is a murderous dictator, but that does not qualify the United States, thousands of miles away, to send the so-called "righteous army" to overthrow him. This is a resource-grabbing aggression that undermines America's good image of democracy and freedom. Many international political commentators believe that the US is using its troops maliciously. Many justice advocates in the United States condemned President George W. Bush's decision. The White House, however, cannot handle that much under the leadership of "Strategic Petroleum Resources."
But it was also because the United States' intention to send troops to Iraq was so obvious that the entire Islamic world in the Middle East panicked. Is the triangular alliance of the United States, Britain, and Israel the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Crusade? As a result, radical-thinking Islamists began to form a slew of armed organizations. Despite the fact that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were at odds with the US military in Afghanistan, they had established branches of organizations outside of the country to train new blood step by step. Muslims who were previously moderates chose to remain silent at this time. So, while the US ruled the Middle East from 2003 to 2011, the forces that would oppose the US in the future were gradually growing.
In December 2010, a wave of pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in Tunisia, North Africa, and the original regime fell. Because jasmine is Tunisia's national flower, this wave of people's demand for democracy has been dubbed the "Jasmine Revolution." Within a year, the original military governments of Egypt, Libya, and many other Middle Eastern countries were deposed and replaced by democratically elected governments that the Western world desired. This process was later summarized and dubbed the "Arab Spring."
Is the democratic political system of the West appropriate for the Islamic world? This is a matter of differing viewpoints. However, according to large-scale reports in the Western mainstream media, this once again demonstrates that Western civilization is superior, and the people of the Middle East long for it. We can see from "the Arab world's spring is here" that this political change in the Middle East has made European and American countries happy.
The following year, 2011, brought more happy events to the Western world. The US military assassinated Bin Laden in Pakistan on May 2, this year. On October 20, Libya's military strongman Gadafi was assassinated as well. Within a year, the United States had resolved two major issues. As a result, the US military, which had been in Iraq for eight years, withdrew first, and the Afghan garrison continued to pursue the remaining Al-Qaeda members, but the withdrawal date should not be far away.
Just as Europe and the United States celebrated their major victory in 2011, the entire Islamic world was in a state of panic. Is the democratically elected government, which ostensibly meets European and American democratic standards, the people's gospel? Can Islam's original lifestyle and social operation withstand the influence of European and American values? God genuinely cares about the United States, as evidenced by another historic event in 2012.
The United States made a major breakthrough in the development of shale gas technology in 2012. A large amount of natural gas and oil can be extracted from the land in the east of the United States, and neighboring Canada has extracted significant amounts of oil and gas from special rock formations in the west. Because of these two new oil sources, the United States has been able to gradually reduce its capital investment in obtaining oil from the Middle East. Despite the fact that the United States still buys about 15% of its crude oil from the Middle East, it still has spare capacity to export oil. In other words, from 2012 to 2019, the US gradually moved toward "oil independence" without being constrained by the Middle East. Naturally, oil is no longer the primary strategic material for competition in the country. The Middle East is no longer a priority for the US. Even troop withdrawals from Afghanistan can be completed as soon as possible.
When the United States was immersed in the country's prosperity, the Islamic guerrilla forces trained and cultivated in the Middle East from 2003 to 2011 began to to enter the stage of maturity and acceptance. The turntable of fate, where things must be reversed, started to play. When the United States withdrew from Iraq in 2011, a group of militants in the Iraqi branch of the Al-Qaeda organization took advantage of the vacuum in local power and continued to conquer and grow the city. The Islamic State (ISIS) actually controls approximately 200,000 square kilometers of land in northern Iraq and eastern Syria. Its growth rate is much faster than that of the original Al-Qaeda organization or the Taliban.
However, as the world's most powerful country, does the United States need to be concerned about a small Islamic State? Obviously not. The Islamic State, on the other hand, uses social media to recruit radicals from all over the world who are dissatisfied with their home country. They are welcome to come to ISIS for training, where they will be instilled with hatred for the Western world and then encouraged to return to their home country to carry out terrorist activities. Therefore, in a bombing on London's streets, the planner was most likely the Islamic State in the Middle East, but the direct perpetrator was a cynical white British youth with no prior convictions. They had no idea where to look for him. The Western media referred to it as a "lone wolf" style of committing crimes. As a result, since 2012, a large number of lone wolves have committed multiple explosive crimes in the Western world's elite crowded areas, such as the United States, Britain, France, Australia, and others, causing panic among Europeans and Americans. They were viewed as threats to national security.
In 2014, the United States sees the Islamic State's growing power, and it will breed more lone wolves around the world. Because it could not catch all the lone wolves at one time, the US was forced to re-deploy troops to Iraq in order to defeat the Islamic State. The Afghan garrison had no choice but to stay due to the close personnel exchanges between Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Islamic State. The United States has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to compensate for this delay.