Joint Special Operations University

and the Strategic Studies Department

The Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) provides its publications to contribute toward expanding the body of knowledge about 

joint special operations. JSOU publications advance the insights and 

recommendations of national security professionals and the Special 

Operations Forces (SOF) students and leaders for consideration by the 

SOF community and defense leadership. 

JSOU is a subordinate organization of the United States Special 

Operations Command (USSOCOM), MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. 

The JSOU mission is to educate SOF executive, senior, and intermediate leaders and selected other national and international security 

decision makers, both military and civilian, through teaching, outreach, and research in the science and art of joint special operations. 

JSOU provides education to the men and women of SOF and to those 

who enable the SOF mission in a joint environment. 

JSOU conducts research through its Strategic Studies Department 

where effort centers upon the USSOCOM mission and these operational 

priorities: 

• Preempting global terrorist and chemical, biological, radiological, 

nuclear, and explosive threats

• Enhancing homeland security

• Performing unconventional warfare and serving as a conven-

	 tional force multiplier in conflict against state adversaries

• Conducting proactive stability operations

• Executing small-scale contingencies. 

The Strategic Studies Department also provides teaching and 

curriculum support to Professional Military Education institutions—the 

staff colleges and war colleges. It advances SOF strategic influence by

its interaction in academic, interagency, and United States military 

communities.

The JSOU portal is https://jsoupublic.socom.mil. 

Joint Special Operations University

Brian A. Maher, Ed.D., Education, President

Editorial Advisory Board

John B. Alexander

Ph.D., Education

The Apollinaire Group and 

JSOU Senior Fellow

Joseph D. Celeski

Colonel, U.S. Army, Ret.

JSOU Senior Fellow

Gilbert E. Doan

Major, U.S. Army, Ret.

JSOU Institutional 

Integration Division Chief

Thomas H. Henriksen

Ph.D., History

Hoover Institution Stanford 

Univ. and JSOU Senior Fellow

Russell D. Howard

Brigadier General, U.S. Army, Ret.

Director of the Jebsen Center for 

Counter-Terrorism Studies, The 

Fletcher School, Tufts University 

and JSOU Senior Fellow

John D. Jogerst

Colonel, U.S. Air Force, Ret. 

18th USAFSOS Commandant

James Kiras

Ph.D., History

School of Advanced Air and Space 

Studies and JSOU Associate Fellow

Michael C. McMahon

Lt Colonel, U.S. Air Force

JSOU Strategic Studies 

Department Director

William W. Mendel

Colonel, U.S. Army, Ret.

JSOU Senior Fellow

Alvaro de Souza Pinheiro

Major General, Brazilian Army, Ret.

JSOU Associate Fellow 

Kenneth H. Poole

Colonel, U.S. Air Force, Ret.

JSOU Senior Fellow 

James F. Powers, Jr.

Director of Homeland Security, 

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 

and JSOU Associate Fellow

Richard H. Shultz, Jr.

Ph.D., Political Science

Director, International Security 

Studies Program, The Fletcher 

School and JSOU Senior Fellow

Stephen Sloan

Ph.D., Comparative Politics

University of Central Florida

Robert G. Spulak, Jr.

Ph.D., Physics/Nuclear Engineering

Sandia National Laboratories 

and JSOU Associate Fellow

Joseph S. Stringham

Brigadier General, U.S. Army, Ret.

Alutiiq, LLC and JSOU

Associate Fellow

Joseph A. Stuart

Ph.D., Educational Leadership

JSOU Dean of Academics

J. Paul de B. Taillon

Ph.D., International Affairs

Royal Military College of Canada 

and JSOU Associate Fellow

Graham H. Turbiville, Jr.

Ph.D., History

Courage Services, Inc. and 

JSOU Senior Fellow

Jessica Glicken Turnley

Ph.D., Cultural Anthropology/

Southeast Asian Studies

Galisteo Consulting Group 

and JSOU Senior Fellow

William S. Wildrick

Captain, U.S. Navy, Ret.

JSOU Senior Fellow
JSOU Report 08-1

The JSOU Press

Hurlburt Field, Florida

2008

Is Leaving 

the Middle East

a Viable Option?

Thomas H. Henriksen
Comments about this publication are invited and should be forwarded 

to Director, Strategic Studies Department, Joint Special Operations 

University, 357 Tully Street, Alison Building, Hurlburt Field, Florida 

32544. Copies of this publication may be obtained by calling JSOU at 

850-884-2765; FAX 850-884-4732. Electronic versions of this and all 

JSOU Press publications can be found at https://jsoupublic.socom.mil/

publications/index.php. 

*******

The Strategic Studies Department, JSOU is currently accepting written 

works relevant to special operations for potential publication. For more 

information please contact Mr. Jim Anderson, JSOU Director of Research, 

at 850-884-1569, DSN 579-1569, james.d.anderson@hurlburt.af.mil. 

Thank you for your interest in the JSOU Press. 

*******

This work was cleared for public release; distribution is unlimited.

ISBN 1-933749-24-5
The views expressed in this publication are entirely those of 

the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy

or position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, 

United States Special Operations Command, or the Joint 

Special Operations University.
Recent Publications of the JSOU Press

The War on Terrorism, December 2005, James A. Bates

Coast Guard SOF, February 2006, Gary R. Bowen

Implications for Network-Centric Warfare, March 2006, 

Jessica Glicken Turnley

Narcoterrorism in Latin America, April 2006, 

Alvaro de Souza Pinheiro

The Changing Nature of Warfare, the Factors Mediating Future 

Conflict, and Implications for SOF, April 2006, John B. Alexander

Civil-Military Operations and Professional Military Education, 

May 2006, James F. Powers, Jr. 

Blogs and Military Information Strategy, June 2006, 

James Kinniburgh and Dorothy Denning

2006 JSOU/NDIA SO/LIC Chapter Essays, June 2006

One Valley at a Time, August 2006, Adrian T. Bogart III 

Special Operations Aviation in NATO, September 2006, 

Richard D. Newton

Beyond Draining the Swamp: Urban Development and 

Counterterrorism in Morocco, October 2006, Stephen R. Dalzell

Filling Special Operations Gaps with Civilian Expertise,

December 2006, James F. Powers, Jr. 

Educating for Strategic Thinking in the SOF Community,

January 2007, Harry R. Yarger

The Israeli Approach to Irregular Warfare and Implications for the U.S.,

February 2007, Thomas H. Henriksen

Psychological Operations: Learning Is Not a Defense Science Project,

March 2007, Curtis D. Boyd

2007 JSOU and NDIA SO/LIC Division Essays, April 2007

Hunting Leadership Targets in Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorist

Operations, June 2007, Graham H. Turbiville, Jr. 

Executive Report, JSOU Second Annual Symposium (30 April–3 May 2007)

A Theory of Special Operations, October 2007, Robert G. Spulak, Jr.

Block by Block: Civic Action in the Battle of Baghdad, November 2007, 

Adrian T. Bogart III

Private Security Infrastructure Abroad, November 2007, 

Graham H. Turbiville, Jr. 

Intelligence in Denied Areas, December 2007, Russell D. Howard


Foreword

Dr. Thomas H. Henriksen in this publication provides a perspective on the challenging question, “Is leaving the Middle 

East a Viable Option?” He lays out a convincing argument 

that historical involvement within the region based on commercial 

ties, the need to secure stable international oil supplies (for the U.S. 

as well as its allies), and engagement in the internecine Israeli-Arab 

conflict all remain critical security issues for the United States. He

captures in a few pages volumes of information on the Middle East as 

he crafts and weaves the history of United States’ involvement from 

1783 to the present, highlighting the key policy-making decisions 

concerning the Middle East. The historical review provides the novice 

reader new understanding of the Middle East and the knowledgeable 

reader an excellent overview.

No discussion of the Middle East could or should take place without the issue of oil—the world’s primary energy resource. Dr. Henriksen goes into great detail on the strategic importance this region has 

to America’s and the world’s economy with reference to the implication 

of a continued tightness in oil supplies. Until the world develops an 

alternate energy source, the Middle East will remain a critical world 

region. How the United States and other interested nations work to 

maintain this region’s stability is open for discussion and one that 

will continue for many years to come. 

As conventional forces are reduced in the region, U.S. Special 

Operations Command personnel will be expected to continue to be a 

critical element in any United States security engagement with the 

Middle East. Therefore, regional understanding and the role America 

and its allies play is important to the Special Operations Forces (SOF) 

community as the fight for Middle East stability continues and the

role of SOF becomes even more pivotal. However, it is important to 

note that, ultimately, it is up to the region’s governments and their 

people to solve the challenging security issues facing them. The United 

States and SOF can only help them achieve the level of security the 

region’s citizens deserve. 

Michael C. McMahon, Lt Col, USAF

Director, JSOU Strategic Studies Department

vii

About the Author

Dr. Tom Henriksen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. 

Until September 2003, he was the Hoover Institution associate director for program development. His other administrative duties included serving as executive secretary of the National 

Fellows and National Security Affairs Fellows programs, as well as 

director of the Media Fellows Program. Dr. Henriksen also serves as 

a senior fellow with the JSOU Strategic Studies Department.

His current research focuses on American foreign policy in the 

post-Cold War world, international political affairs, and national 

defense. He specializes in the study of U.S. diplomatic and military 

courses of action toward terrorist havens, such as Afghanistan, and 

the so-called rogue states, including North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. He 

also concentrates on armed and covert interventions abroad.

Dr. Henriksen’s most recent volume is entitled American Power 

after the Berlin Wall, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007. JSOU 

has published two of his monographs, The Israeli Approach to Internal Warfare and Implications for the United States (February 2007) 

and Dividing Our Enemies (November 2005). A prior published book 

is an edited volume on competing visions for U.S. foreign policy, 

Foreign Policy for America in the 21st Century: Alternative Perspectives 

(Hoover Institution Press, 2001). Other works include Using Power and 

Diplomacy to Deal with Rogue States (Hoover Essays in Public Policy, 

1999) and the edited collection North Korea after Kim Il Sung (Hoover 

Institution Press, 1999).

He also authored or edited the following books and monographs: 

One Korea? Challenges and Prospects for Reunification (Hoover Institution Press, 1994); The New World Order: War, Peace, and Military 

Preparedness (Hoover Institution Press, 1992); Revolution and Counterrevolution: Mozambique’s War of Independence (Greenwood Press, 

1983); The Struggle for Zimbabwe: Battle in the Bush (Praeger, 1981); 

Soviet and Chinese Aid to African Nations (Praeger, 1980); and Mozambique: A History (Rex Collings, 1978). 

Additionally, he has written numerous journal articles and newspaper essays concerning international politics and security as well as 

U.S. policy toward rogue states in the post-Cold War era. Dr. Henriksen 

has also received research grants from the American Philosophical
viii

Society, State University of New York, National Endowment for the 

Humanities, and National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship Program. His book Mozambique: A History was chosen for the Outstanding 

Book Award for African History by Choice. During 1982, he traveled 

to the former Soviet Union as a member of the forum for the U.S.-

Soviet dialogue.

Dr. Henriksen’s education and public service developed in the 

1960s, specifically earning his B.A. in History from Virginia Military

Institute (1962) and the M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Michigan State 

University (1966 and 1969). He was selected for membership in Phi 

Alpha Theta—the history honorary society—as a graduate student. 

During 1963-1965, Dr. Henriksen served as an infantry officer in

the U.S. Army. He taught history at the State University of New York 

from 1969, leaving in 1979 as a full professor. During the 1979-1980 

academic year, he was the Susan Louise Dyer Peace Fellow at the 

Hoover Institution. 

Dr. Henriksen’s national public service includes participation as 

a member of the U.S. Army Science Board (1984-1990) and the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships (1987-1993). He also 

received a Certificate of Appreciation for Patriotic Civilian Service from

the U.S. Department of the Army in 1990. He is a member of the Board 

of Trustees for two organizations, the George C. Marshall Foundation 

and the International Conference Group on Portugal. 


Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

The American public, pundits, and policy makers are understandably frustrated with developments in the Middle East.1 For 

the last several decades, that region has been a fountainhead 

of problems felt by ordinary citizens as well as by U.S. governments. 

Oil shortages, steep prices at the pump, militant Islam, terrorism, 

and now conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia emanate along

an azimuth extending from the Rock of Gibraltar to Rawalpindi in 

eastern Pakistan. Moreover, there appears to be no end in sight to 

the consequences of political and sectarian strife that find their way

onto our shores and those of our allies. Many, therefore, muse how 

satisfying it might be simply to walk away from the entire mess. One 

commentary writer bluntly asked: “Might we not be better off just 

leaving the region alone?” 2 Another pundit advised that “backward 

societies [like the Middle East] must be left alone, as the French now 

wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned 

to do in Sicily.” 3 And at least one congressional representative, an 

opponent of the Iraq War, advised that it is time for the military to 

start leaving the Middle East.4

Leaving the Middle East and returning to a more trouble-free life 

is an exceedingly appealing notion. After all, American troops vacated 

Vietnam in 1973 after an eight-year 

bloody and unrewarding conflict, and no

calamity befell the United States when 

the North Vietnamese overran the South. 

The plight of the South Vietnamese boat 

people, the Cambodian killing fields, or

the fall of eleven countries to communist forces in the half decade 

after 1975 did not materially affect the United States. Less than two 

decades later, in fact, the United States won the Cold War and the 

Soviet Union collapsed. Won’t history repeat itself following a pullout 

from the politically chaotic and violence-prone Near East? 

Americans are also tempted by the prospect of a silver-bullet solution to problems. The 1945 atomic bombing is a prime example of an 

action that in one fell swoop ended the Pacific war and precluded a

bloody invasion of the Japanese home islands. The current construction of a missile shield to protect our country from a long-range rocket 

After all, American troops 

vacated Vietnam in 1973 

after an eight-year bloody 

and unrewarding conflict...


JSOU Report 08-1

attack offers another purported technological panacea to a threat. But 

a deeper reflection alters these rosy scenarios. Japan’s atomic defeat

opened a horrific Pandora’s Box to a nuclear age of annihilation. And

as for U.S. missile defense, its security extends only to the lone accidental or rogue state intercontinental ballistic missile, not salvos from 

Russia or China, which would overwhelm its capabilities. 

The prospect of a total withdrawal from the Middle East is another 

such desperate silver-bullet answer to the complex challenge this 

region presents to the United States. It is intriguing to imagine walking 

away from the “clash of civilizations,” suicide bombers, and seething 

hatred of the United States. The prospect looks appealing—washing 

our hands of intractable problems—and deserves a serious review. 

Any carefully reasoned argument for or against American disengagement from the Middle East must consider a variety of factors including 

historical involvement, energy supplies, psychological consequences, 

strategic implications, American ideals, and, of course, the current 

conflict with Islamicist terrorists. It is natural to begin an analysis

with an historical account of our interaction with the Middle East to 

provide a context and foundation for discussion. Our interchange with 

lands stretching from Casablanca to the Caspian Sea is historically 

longer and more politically convoluted than sometimes realized. 

Historical Overview of the United States in the Middle East 

America’s commercial, political, and military involvement in the Muslim 

world began over 200 years ago. Despite this lengthy engagement, it 

pales in comparison with European contact with the Muslim Arab 

world, which stretches back millennia and recalls a host of major 

episodes. These significant epochs can only be recalled briefly here

despite their impact on contemporary events. They included the sweep 

of Islamic conquests over the Roman and Phoenician enclaves in North 

Africa during the seventh century; the 700-year Muslim occupation of 

two-thirds of the Iberian Peninsula, the fall of the Byzantium Empire 

and afterwards the subjugation of the Balkans by Muslim armies, and 

the expulsion of the Crusaders who sought to recover the Holy Land’s 

Christian shrines from Muslim seizure. Even this summary points 

up the tremendous level of conflict in the early East-West struggle,

although it must be emphasized that the two spheres also interacted 

peacefully in the exchange of commercial goods, culture, and learning. Thus, American contact with the Muslim Arab world began more 


Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

recently than Europe’s, but is built on the same foundation of mutual 

hostility broken by spells of trade and peaceful coexistence. 

What early interest America did evince toward Muslim polities 

was both episodic and yet portentous for our own times. The newly 

independent American colonies encountered unconventional and 

ruthless foes, who flourished by plunder, piracy, and tribute. Official

Washington’s attention to the lands east of Gibraltar came soon after 

the Republic’s birth, when Barbary Corsairs in the name of religion 

assaulted American merchant vessels, imprisoned their crews, and 

demanded ransom for their freedom. Located along the North African 

coast, the renegade states of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers (the 

Barbary Coast) had disrupted Mediterranean commerce for centuries 

with their mercenary jihads. The Ottoman sultan ostensibly ruled 

over the regencies in Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis from his imperial seat 

in today’s Istanbul (then called Constantinople) in Turkey; but his 

writ never extended to Morocco. The Barbary States’ single-masted 

feluccas or xebecs also ventured into the Atlantic to waylay American 

merchantmen. They captured and enslaved European Christians, who 

secured their freedom only when ransomed. Until released by payment 

or death, Christian men toiled in galleys or mines, while the women 

found themselves in Mideast harems. 

Sailing in small craft from al-Maghreb (“the West”), the Arabic-speaking pirates styled themselves mujahideen, or warriors in an Islamic holy 

war, as they preyed on Western sailing craft from the twelfth century. 

Before the American collision, the Barbary (from the Latin bararus) 

powers’ piracy turned into a bleeding ulcer for Western Europe. 

After securing their independence from Britain in 1783, the 

American colonies were no longer protected by the Royal Navy. The 

newly independent country confronted the choice of paying tribute 

or fighting the piratical ships cruising from Muslim North Africa.

Early on, the new Republic’s Congress appropriated $80,000, some 

20 percent of its budget, to pay tribute, a practice fully recognized at 

the time as serving to only whet the appetite of the Barbary hostagetakers for more payments. As his country’s ambassador to France and 

later its secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson echoed the admonition 

by Rudyard Kipling when writing about the Viking raids and their 

demand of bribes for security—if you pay the Danegeld (tribute), you 

never get rid of the Dane. The Virginian realized that the easy money 

stimulated the extortionists to press for repeated payoffs. In the years 


JSOU Report 08-1

afterwards, however, the infant country initially chose cash transfers 

over war as the cheaper alternative. When it ransomed 115 sailors 

in 1795, Washington paid almost a million dollars in cash, supplies, 

and a frigate to the dey (ruler) of Algiers.5

From his Paris embassy, Jefferson tried to fashion an alliance 

among such maritime states as Denmark, France, Naples, Portugal, 

Spain, and Sweden for an allied naval police force along the North 

African coast. Despite a positive interest in a cooperative venture, the 

kingdoms flinched at actually providing ships and crews for a joint

defense pact. Paying tribute was seen as less expensive, except for 

the United States whose anemic government under the Articles of 

Confederation had difficulty in raising the funds for “gifts” intended

for the Barbary Corsairs. Indeed, the shameful spectacle of American 

frailty helped spur the Founding Fathers to draft the U.S. Constitution, 

begetting a stronger central government able to defend itself.6

This appeasement policy of ransom and tribute payments again 

came in for a hostile review when Thomas Jefferson settled into the 

White House in 1801. President Jefferson rejected Tripoli’s extortion 

for $250,000 immediately and $25,000 per annum indefinitely. The

new administration thus embarked on a course of action that led to 

America’s first overseas conflict after its independence struggle with

King George III, and to its first war on terror. Its belligerent posture

led to a protracted Cold War-style standoff against the piratical Barbary States that was punctuated by two hot wars. This confrontation 

centered on economic advantage instead of any clash of civilization 

or religion. 

The First Barbary War (or Tripolitan War) began in 1801 when the 

pasha of Tripoli in effect declared war on the United States by cutting 

down the American flag at the U.S. consulate because Washington

had spurned his demands for tribute. The nearby states of Algiers, 

Morocco, and Tunis initially joined with Tripoli. In response, the U.S. 

Senate passed a “state of war” preamble to the House of Representatives bill that authorized the commander in chief to attack and seize 

Tripolitan ships. Congress’s delegation of war powers to President 

Jefferson prompted several naval engagements and a blockade of 

Tripoli’s harbor.7

The delegation of war powers also resulted in a covert plan 

for America’s first-ever regime-change operation, hatched by 

men-on-the-spot James L. Cathcart and William Eaton. Cathcart, the 


Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

U.S. consul in Tripoli, orchestrated a plot to replace the pasha with his 

brother, who pledged to his American backers a benign policy toward 

U.S. shipping in the Mediterranean. The Jefferson administration 

approved the operation and allocated $20,000 for its execution. Cathcart contacted his counterpart in Tunis, William Eaton, to organize an 

overland expedition to oust the pasha. In time, Eaton and Commodore 

Samuel Barron, the commander of a new Mediterranean expedition, 

launched the operation with a land force comprised of a handful of 

American officers, Greek mercenaries, and 2,000 Bedouin irregulars.

This motley band marched 500 miles from a staging area in Egypt 

and managed to capture the seaside town of Derne en route to Tripoli. 

Thus threatened by imminent attack, the pasha decided to negotiate 

so as to preserve his rule. On 3 June 1805, the United States signed 

a treaty with Tripoli that secured the release of American prisoners 

and trading privileges while withdrawing U.S. military forces.8

Like the contemporary Middle East, a 

single success brought neither lasting peace 

nor decisive victory. In the years ahead, 

Thomas Jefferson faced similar problems 

with Morocco, and subsequent presidential 

administrations encountered a recurrence of 

plundering, pirating, and snatching sailors 

from American commercial vessels in the western Mediterranean Sea. 

But at least the Jefferson government won the Barbary Powers’ fleeting respect for the Stars and Stripes. Its policy also set a precedent 

for subsequent Washington governments. 

The War of 1812 interrupted the young Republic’s campaign to halt 

Barbary depredation on American shipping. The North African piratical 

states took full advantage of the U.S. preoccupation with America’s 

second war against Britain. They resumed their bushwhacking of 

U.S. vessels, impounding the ships and imprisoning the crews. With 

America’s victory over Britain in 1814, Washington turned again to 

confronting the Mediterranean menace. Slow to anger, Americans had 

grown tired of losing ships, seamen, and money to the Middle East 

predators in what had become a national humiliation. 

James Madison went to Congress, asked for a declaration of war, 

and quickly obtained it. Next, the president dispatched a powerful 

naval flotilla under the command of Stephen Decatur, a national hero

from earlier engagements on the Maghreb’s littoral. His instructions 

Like the contemporary 

Middle East, a single 

success brought neither 

lasting peace nor 

decisive victory.


JSOU Report 08-1

were to the point—inflict “serious disasters” on the Middle Eastern

renegades and secure “a just and lasting peace.” 9 The U.S. warships 

first took two Algiers’s ships out of commission off the Spanish coast,

then dropped anchor in the port of Algiers, and readied to bombard 

the dey’s harbor and city in late June 1815. The ruler capitulated to 

the American demands for the freedom of all American captives and 

payment of a $10,000 indemnity. Next Decatur sailed his squadron to 

Tunis and Tripoli where he repeated his non-negotiable terms to stunned 

adversaries who promptly accepted them to escape annihilation. 

Before the Barbary Wars came to an end, the conflict had lasted

three decades. The North African states had seized thirty-five American ships and abducted 700 sailors. The captives suffered appalling conditions from meager rations to floggings and even tortured

deaths. By prevailing over the Barbary Corsairs, the episode left the 

United States a respected maritime power with a small but aggressive 

Navy and Marine Corps. The conflicts witnessed American ships and

fighting men doing battle on foreign soil for the first time. Some of

the enterprises—“operating from bases, making short-term alliances 

and using insurgents and local troops”—foreshadowed operations 

in future wars.10 Moreover, the Barbary victory restored American 

pride after years of military and political embarrassments. No greater 

foreign threat menaced American seaborne commerce until Imperial 

Germany launched unrestricted submarine warfare against America’s 

trans-Atlantic trade in the course of World War I. The cessation of 

Barbary raids brought the United States a century of freedom from 

equivalent sea attacks. 

American involvement in the Middle East of a different sort followed the Barbary Wars. While U.S. Navy frigates cruised off the North 

African coast for many years, the United States pursued pacific relations to the east, particularly in the territories near the seat of the 

Ottoman Empire in Anatolia (contemporary Turkey) such as Lebanon, 

Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The United States militarily intervened 

only three times before the start of World War I, by sending Marines 

ashore on Middle Eastern soil to protect American lives and property 

from rampaging anti-Western mobs. But these were discrete foreign 

operations, entailing no extended occupations, regime changes, or 

democracy-transferring missions. 

Commerce, faith, and fantasy—all drew Americans to the eastern 

Mediterranean. Throughout the nineteenth century, American explorers,


Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

businessmen, tourists, diplomats, missionaries, mercenaries, and 

writers in search of inspiration journeyed eastward to the exotic 

lands as their interest was quickened by the Bible or A Thousand and 

One Arabian Nights. They were dazzled by its splendor, variety, and 

decadence. Philanthropic, educational, and religious motives spurred 

ministers, churchmen, and teachers to journey to the Levant to save 

souls, educate minds, preserve Christian shrines in Jerusalem, and 

care for despised populations. These secular and religious evangelists 

beseeched their audiences to embrace American values of democracy, 

freedom, hard work, and tolerance. Ninety-five years before Secretary of

State Condoleezza Rice traveled to Cairo and exhorted Egypt to become 

more democratic, former President Theodore Roosevelt preceded her to 

the Egyptian capital in 1910 and told his listeners to emulate America’s 

traditions of democracy, hard work, and free enterprise.11

But the keen sense of strategic interest, so prevalent in America’s 

Manifest Destiny across the continent or in the Monroe Doctrine’s 

warnings to Europeans about their designs on Latin America, was 

absent in the Middle East. This detachment contrasted with European fears of Russian and later German expansion into the sprawling and declining Ottoman Empire. As official Washington stayed on

the sidelines of the Middle East except for missionary ventures and 

trade, the high tide of European imperialism and colonialism washed 

over the region. 

World War I and the Middle East 

The United States gazed almost disinterestedly while the European 

great powers circled, like vultures, the dying carcass of the Ottoman 

Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. They were eager 

to carve out colonies or spheres of influence. Germany, the newest

predator in the imperial bevy, searched for its place in the colonizing sun by aligning itself with the sultan’s decrepit government. 

German machinations worried the Entente Powers—Britain, France, 

and Russia—all of which had their own designs on Ottoman lands. 

American policy was narrowly focused on maintaining free-trade and 

commercial relations (much as in China during the same period), and 

in keeping unrestricted contact with missionaries running hospitals 

and schools to ensure their safety from anti-Christian pogroms and 

rioting populaces. Despite their traditional anti-colonial sentiments, 

Americans prior to 1914 favored dismantlement of Ottoman suzerainty 


JSOU Report 08-1

and imposition of British and French colonization on the region to 

eliminate its slavery, polygamy, segregation of women, and explosive 

violence. They believed that European colonizers could civilize the 

local populations and bring them into the modern world. 

Even the immense exertions of World War I failed to alter Washington’s virtual disengagement from the Middle East. True, various groups 

lobbied the Woodrow Wilson administration for American involvement 

in their causes, whether American Zionists or Christian humanitarian 

groups, which opposed the slaughter of their brethren or the Turkish 

genocide of the Armenians. Yet, the United States stayed clear of conflict

in the Eastern Mediterranean. When the U.S. Congress declared war 

against Germany and later its ally Austro-Hungary, it did not likewise 

enter into a state of belligerency with Turkey. America rejected the 

international pattern and diplomatic custom calling for it to declare 

war on its adversary’s allies. President Wilson remained unpersuaded 

of the legal grounds for a Turkish war without aggressive acts, worried 

about the ill-preparedness of American forces for any major conflict,

and concerned about the practicality of fighting a war in the Middle

East with overextended supply and communications lines. 

Thus, the major combat operations in the Middle East during the 

1914-1918 war were undertaken by America’s allies, chiefly the British, who took Iraq and with the aid of irregular Arab forces (advised 

by Lawrence of Arabia) captured Arabia and sections of Syria. For its 

part, France concentrated on what today is Lebanon and segments 

of Syria. 

At the conclusion of World War I, America was devoid of a military 

presence in the Near East, unlike its British and French allies. Nor did 

it possess grand imperial goals or exclusive economic ambitions for 

the region. This freed the United States from being bound by vested 

interests in former Ottoman domains. 

President Wilson pushed for the adoption of his principles of selfdetermination for the populations freed of Turkish rule by British and 

French forces. London and Paris objected to independence for Syria, 

Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan (later Jordan), whereas the 

indigenous peoples demanded their own sovereignty. The interlocutors convening at the Paris peace conference in 1919 came up with 

a compromise in the mandate system whereby the League of Nations 

bestowed conditional territorial control to Britain and France, mandating them to prepare the populations for future independence. British 


Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

and French leaders tried to entice the United States into the mandate 

system by having Washington assume administration of Armenia, 

Constantinople, and the Dardanelles—the strategic international 

waterway that along with the Bosporus links the Black and Mediterranean seas. President Wilson warmly entertained the idea especially 

of an Armenia mandate but realized that Congress would object to 

what amounted to a de facto American colony in the Caucasus. 

In the end, America walked away from all the mandate schemes and, 

more profoundly, any involvement in the Middle East. Indeed, the U.S. 

Senate rejected membership in the 

League of Nations itself, crushing 

Woodrow Wilson’s internationalist 

dream. The U.S. withdrawal from 

Middle Eastern responsibilities 

angered London and Paris because 

they had only agreed to mandates at Washington’s insistence. They 

accommodated President Wilson’s wishes and assumed “novel responsibilities” in the Middle East by occupying the turbulent lands. At this 

stage of minimal political engagement in the Middle East, the United 

States could afford to turn its back on the region’s predicament without experiencing negative unintended consequences. 

Subsequently, American policy in the Near East reverted to its 

commerce-only pattern. President Warren Harding, Wilson’s successor, 

revamped U.S. policy almost exclusively toward protection of American commercial interests, which were beginning to focus on access 

to oil. President Harding did not share his predecessors’ concerns 

about American college and missionary endeavors in the Mideast.12

Harding’s successors in the White House—Calvin Coolidge and Herbert 

Hoover—hewed to similar insular views. Washington governments 

sought to avoid foreign entanglements and international commitments 

anywhere in the world, not just in the Middle East. 

Between the two world wars, American attention to the Middle East 

concentrated on two main enterprises—oil and the ripening problem in 

Palestine. The West’s industrialization by the early 1920s necessitated 

adequate petroleum stocks to keep pace with the motorization of U.S. 

drivers. American and European firms prospected for, contracted, and

produced oil from Mideast fields. American oilmen and their European

counterparts struck pay dirt in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Bahrain, initiating a flow of crude and a dependency on foreign energy that persists

In the end, America walked away 

from all the mandate schemes 

and, more profoundly, any 

involvement in the Middle East.
10

JSOU Report 08-1

undiminished today. The intervening years witnessed the expansion 

both of oil exports and reliance on fossil fuels from the Middle East, 

which was transformed from a romantic haze of sun-seared sands 

and impoverished camel caravans to gold-leaf opulence within a generation. As the world’s thirst for energy accelerated, the Middle East 

assumed a geostrategic pivot point in global affairs. In time, it drew 

official Washington deeply into its affairs.

The second, and unofficial, link to the Middle East grew from planting of Zionism in Palestine. Like other nationalistic communities that 

awoke in the nineteenth century, Jews desired their own independent 

existence in their own homeland. European Jews yearned to rejoin their 

brethren living in Palestine. Even after the Diaspora saw the Roman 

Empire’s expulsion of Jews from their ancestral home in the Holy 

Land, other Jews remained. In the late nineteenth century, Jews made 

up a majority around Jerusalem, if not the entire Palestinian coastal 

strip. Fresh waves of anti-Semitism and pogroms convinced Jewish 

thinkers and activists in Europe and the United States to advocate a 

return to their ancestral homeland. Thus, Jews from Russia, Ukraine, 

and Poland moved in large numbers during the 1920s to the eastern 

Mediterranean enclave. The rise of the Nazis and their genocidal polices 

during the 1930s and 1940s increased the flow of Jews into the tiny

Levantine land. Tensions with the local Arab inhabitants soon flared

into violent conflicts. In spite of calls for U.S. assistance to protect

Jewish settlers from Arab attacks, the United States held firm to the

policy that Palestine was a British responsibility. 

During the interwar period, official Washington clung to a policy

of neutrality, while some Jews and their Christian supporters looked 

to the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land. They 

strove to facilitate the establishment of a vibrant Jewish homeland. 

The Holocaust dramatically served to strengthen their resolve for a 

sovereign Jewish state. Three years after the conclusion of World 

War II, in 1948, the Jewish immigrants and their native brethren in 

Palestine declared statehood.13

World War II, the Cold War, and the Middle East 

The United States dropped its standoffish posture toward the Middle

East during the 1939-1945 global conflict. It could no longer remain

indifferent to the prospect of losing access to Middle East oil or EastWest communications through the Suez Canal. When German and 
11

Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

Italian forces overran Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete and drove the 

British troops to within sixty miles of the Egyptian city of Alexandria, 

North Africa and the Mediterranean basin loomed large on strategists’ 

maps in Washington. Oil, waterways, and supply routes to southern 

Russia stood imperiled by the Axis victories. The Franklin Delano 

Roosevelt presidency swung first toward land warfare not in Europe

proper but in North Africa. It had been over a hundred years since 

Washington sent unseasoned armed forces to the former Barbary Coast 

in what was now designated as Operation Torch and the intervention 

into North Africa. Freedom of the seas was once 

more at stake, and control of North Africa’s littoral 

became crucial in Washington’s calculations. Other 

foundations of American interest in the region were 

laid during the war. America’s oil ambitions were 

entrenched in Saudi Arabia, where the U.S. military 

started construction of an airbase close to an American petroleum 

entrepôt in Dhahran. 

Unlike World War I, the second global conflict left the United States

with a large military presence in North Africa. It also marked the beginning of a permanent U.S. interest in the vast region between Tangier 

and Tehran. The Allied defeat of Germany’s Afrika Korps resulted over 

time in the displacement of European colonial rule in the Middle East 

as well as North Africa. American anti-colonialist sentiments collided 

with British, French, and Italian imperial rule. U.S. officials mentored

nationalist movements, and America proclaimed the colonies’ right 

to independence. As a consequence, the Middle East broke free of 

European rule in World War II’s aftermath. 

The advent of the Cold War and the adoption of the containment 

doctrine necessitated that American governments manage local political 

turbulence to deny the Soviets an opportunity to acquire warm water 

ports in the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. For example, 

when Libya demanded independence at the war’s end, the fledgling

Harry Truman administration brushed aside demands by France, 

Egypt, and the Soviet Union for Libyan territory, which would have 

jeopardized American predominance in the Mediterranean by bowing 

to the colonial powers’ aspirations and by allowing the Red Navy a 

warm water port or Moscow access to Wheelus airbase, near Tripoli. 

Next, the United States and Britain faced down Soviet troops advancing 

southward from their bases in northern Iran, bent on latching onto 

America’s oil 

ambitions were 

entrenched in 

Saudi Arabia...
12

JSOU Report 08-1

the Iranian oil reserves, securing a harbor window on the Persian Gulf, 

and threatening Anglo-American concessions over the petroleum fields

in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Only the Allied determination blocked 

Moscow’s ambitions. 

In the eastern Mediterranean, Washington also grew apprehensive about Soviet pressure on Greece and Turkey. To preserve their 

territorial integrity, the White House resorted to several defensive 

measures such as stationing what became known as the Sixth Fleet 

in the eastern waters of the Aegean Sea, gaining congressional support for military and civilian assistance for Greece and Turkey in the 

Truman Doctrine, and rallying the American people to the preservation 

of order in the Middle East. While Americans more readily recall the 

U.S. defensive measures to the north in establishment of the North 

Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Berlin Airlift, and Marshall Plan, 

the events in the Middle East in the mid-1940s were no less dramatic 

and far-reaching expansions of American power. 

In addition to its defensive steps, the United States as well as 

individual American citizens played a crucial role in the founding of 

the modern state of Israel in 1948. Holocaust survivors and Jewish 

refugees flocked into Palestine, reinforcing the demands of the longresident Jewish community for a small political state of its own. Some 

Jews took up arms against the British colonial troops and the Arab 

residents who fought to hang onto their orchards and villages against 

what they viewed as a foreign invasion. Wearied from its exertions 

during the war and its mandate responsibilities in the volatile Levantine country, London announced its decision to turn over the Palestine 

imbroglio to the United Nations. The UN, in turn, chose to partition 

the land into Jewish and Palestinian mini-states. When Israel claimed 

statehood, the United States followed the Soviet Union in recognition 

of its independence. Rather than peace, however, Israeli and Arab 

hostility has produced sixty years of almost incessant conflict, either

low-intensity fighting or major wars.

The protracted Soviet-American global confrontation played out in 

the Middle East, where abundant oil reserves, emerging independent 

states, and superpower interests converged in a near-perfect “political 

storm.” Rather than being left to its own devices, as the Arab feudal 

sheikhs, Bedouin tribes, and caravan traders had been for centuries, 

the Middle East became one of the epicenters of competition among oil 

prospectors, arms suppliers, and diplomats who pursued resources 
13

Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

and geostrategic advantage. These political and economic forces tended 

to reinforce authoritarian inclinations in the newly sovereign states, 

which lacked democratic traditions. 

America pursued three main objectives in the greater Middle East 

during the Cold War era. It resolved to block Soviet penetration, back 

anticommunist leaders, and mediate peace between Arabs and Israelis 

as the best way to guarantee stability and the flow of oil upon which

the West grew evermore reliant. These incompatible ends on occasion 

tossed U.S. policymakers into agonizing dilemmas:

a. How to reconcile containment of Moscow’s aggression by backing less-than-democratic rulers with American idealism for 

promoting democracy, which was open to Soviet subversion 

b. How to stand with Britain and France to safeguard the Middle 

East from Kremlin machinations, while avowedly declaring 

that America stood against colonialism and for national independence 

c. How to reconcile support for Israel while desiring to cultivate 

goodwill with Arab governments. 

The crosscurrents of Middle Eastern violence, religious feuds, and differing aspirations for independence often whipsawed U.S. policies. 

Washington’s approaches, therefore, sometimes appeared contradictory to outsiders and critics. For example, the United States helped 

Iranian conspirators to oust Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister 

in 1953 because of his reliance on the communist Tudeh Party. Yet, 

it pressed for the restoration of Morocco’s King Muhammad V to the 

throne and the return of Tunisia’s national leader Habib Bourguiba to 

power against French rule. But America’s actions were based on anticommunist realism and anti-colonial principles. The clash between 

ideals and realpolitik resounded strikingly in the 1956 Suez crisis. 

When Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdul Nasser announced the 

nationalization of the Suez Canal, the British, who had stationed troops 

in Egypt for seventy-five years, resolved to act. London brought along

Paris, which detested Nasser for funding the Algerian resistance to 

French rule, and the Israelis, who feared Cairo’s Soviet-equipped army 

posed a mortal peril to the Jewish state’s existence. Thus, Britain, 

France, and Israel launched a coordinated attack in 1956 against 

Egyptian military forces. It is here that Washington embraced its 

anti-colonial creed and reversed its anti-Nasser policies. The Dwight 
14

JSOU Report 08-1

Eisenhower government joined with the Soviet Union in condemning the 

invasion, and diplomatically blocked and economically sanctioned its 

European friends from ousting Nasser, ensuring the Egyptian dictator’s 

survival. Nasser repaid America for its regime-saving intervention by 

denouncing the United States as the new imperialist power in the 

Middle East. The Anglo-French-Israeli operation fizzled out, humiliating the perpetrators. In its wake, the Soviet Union made headway in 

the Middle East as Arab states looked to Moscow for massive arms 

packages and diplomatic clout against Washington. 

While the Cold War in the Middle East played out directly between 

the superpowers, it also fell to their proxies. American military assistance to Israel grew, especially after the Jewish state crushed its Arab 

neighbors in the 1967 war. Successive American administrations recognized that Israel represented “the most effective stopper of the Mideast 

power of the Soviet Union,” as President Richard Nixon phrased it.14

For its part, the Kremlin channeled weapons and Red Army trainers to 

Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Syria, and South Yemen. Throughout the turbulent 

1960s and 1970s the United States tried to contain Soviet advances, 

promote reconciliation between Israelis and Arabs, and maintain a 

steady flow of oil. In fact, petroleum as a weapon came into its own

during this period. 

After the Arab states’ defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War (or 

October War as the Arabs designate it), Saudi Arabia and the other 

oil-exporting countries jacked up the price of their crude exports to 

the West by curtailing and regulating output. The result was lengthy 

gas lines at American filling stations, nation-wide inflation, and stagnant economies. Even more pivotal was the realization of American 

and Western (including Japanese) reliance on Middle East oil for their 

economic survival and prosperity. The growth in demand for energy 

in the West was aggravated by the huge economic expansion created 

by the industrial modernization in China and India. Consequently, 

American and world dependence on Middle East oil has mushroomed 

in intervening years, which vastly deepened the strategic significance

of the Persian Gulf. But international reliance on the region’s energy 

reserves was not the only variable that changed. 

Iran’s revolution sharply redrew the Persian Gulf’s political map. 

Before the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979, Iran 

promoted Washington’s interests in the Gulf arena by serving as 
15

Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

the regional “policeman” within the Nixon Doctrine. After the shah’s 

dethronement, the Islamic Republic developed into an implacable 

American adversary. First it violated 

the diplomatic sanctity of the U.S. 

embassy in Tehran (an act of war), 

imprisoned 52 staff members, and held 

them for 444 days. The abortive rescue 

mission, Operation Eagle Claw, wounded American pride at home and 

standing in the Middle East when it failed to liberate the hostages.15

The failed rescue operation and the kidnapping of Americans in the 

embassy recalled events nearly 200 years earlier off the Barbary Coast, 

when U.S. frigates tried to save imprisoned sailors in the dey’s jails. 

It underscored how intractable Middle Eastern politics could be. 

Next, Iran sponsored terrorism against American and Israeli targets in the Middle East and Europe though its Hezbollah (the “Party 

of God”) auxiliaries. And it embarked on a secret nuclear program 

during the mid-1980s that today confronts the United States and the 

United Nations with the prospect of uranium weapons for its midrange missile fleet. Since the Islamic Republic’s ascendancy to power,

the United States has had to cast a wary eye toward an unpredictable 

and dangerous regime perched on the Persian Gulf. 

A second dislocation in the U.S. stabilizing agenda for the Gulf 

took place across Iran’s border in Afghanistan. In late 1979, Moscow 

deployed the Red Army into Afghanistan. The Kremlin had grown 

apprehensive about the loss of its influence in the remote country where

its allied Marxist regime tottered on the brink of collapse. Instead of 

rescuing the failing government in Kabul, the invasion touched off a 

fierce anti-Soviet resistance. The Afghan guerrilla movement gained

fighters from throughout the Muslim world when it raised the jihad

banner against the infidel occupation of the mountainous country.

Ten years later, the Red Army withdrew across the Friendship Bridge 

but not before its presence triggered a worldwide Islamic reaction. As 

no other single event, the Soviet intervention lit the fuse to an Islamic 

powder keg that exploded into a global terrorist campaign, the end of 

which is still nowhere in sight. The consequences of this event and 

the organizational prowess of Osama bin Laden in harnessing Muslim 

grievances, real and apparent, led to bombings of U.S. embassies in 

Kenya and Tanzania, the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, and the September 11, 

...the Islamic Republic 

developed into an implacable 

American adversary.
16

JSOU Report 08-1

2001 “planes operation” against the Pentagon and World Trade Center. 

This terrorism has sharpened America’s focus on the broader Middle 

East theater beyond its former commercial and petroleum pursuits. 

Before this revelation dawned, Washington was preoccupied by the 

Soviet threat to the West’s oil lifeline and to the Persian Gulf’s warm 

water ports. As a result, President Jimmy Carter pledged to defend 

pro-Western governments in the Persian Gulf. The Carter Doctrine 

found operational expression in the standing up of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force. The task force developed into today’s United 

States Central Command (CENTCOM) during Ronald Reagan’s first

administration. CENTCOM anchored the United States in the Gulf with 

a permanent basing of air, ground, and naval units. CENTCOM proved 

to be a vital forward headquarters in the prosecution of the Persian 

Gulf War and in the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan 

before it oversaw the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. 

America also found itself dragged into action on the Mediterranean coast of the Middle East through peace-making and war-making 

endeavors. President Carter, for example, helped broker peace between 

Egypt and Israel in what became know as the Camp David Accords 

in 1978. President Reagan, on the other hand, was forced by events 

to intervene militarily in Lebanon. When in 1982 the Israel Defense 

Force (IDF) struck back at terrorist incursions from the Palestine 

Liberation Organization (PLO), it pushed the movement northward 

and surrounded it in Beirut. The IDF’s shelling of the seaside capital 

provoked an international outcry at the loss of civilian lives. Under 

pressure, the White House offered to defuse the conflict by presiding

over the transport of the PLO to safety in Tunis. Assisted by Italian 

and French troops, U.S. Marines facilitated the evacuation of some 

16,000 PLO fighters and their families.

Three weeks later, the Marines were back in Lebanon to defend 

democracy by propping up a minority Lebanese government in a 

multisided sectarian conflict among Shiite, Druze, Maronite, and

pro-Syrian factions. It eerily foreshadowed the U.S. invasion and 

occupation of Iraq more than two decades afterwards. The Marines 

had to shoot their way into the city, where they had to be reinforced 

with U.S. Army soldiers and with Navy warships firing from the sea in

the largest combat operation in the Middle East since World War II. In 

April 1983, a Hezbollah suicide bomber drove an explosive-filled truck

into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 17 Americans. In October,
17

Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

another Hezbollah truck bomber struck a Marine base, killing 241 

servicemen, in the single deadliest assault on American troops since 

1945. Initially, President Reagan ordered a counterstrike with carrier-based aircraft and the battleship New Jersey’s sixteen-inch guns. 

Wary of being drawn into a quagmire, Reagan withdrew U.S. forces 

in February 1984. 

The aftermath of this withdrawal from the Lebanese entanglements might offer a foretaste of what a large-scale leave-taking from 

the entire Middle East might bequeath to Washington and the Mideast 

neighborhood. America’s pullback was interpreted in the region as a 

failure to restrain Syria and its allies, which consolidated their grip 

on Lebanon. Next, Lebanon revoked the Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty 

that the United States had brokered. More dramatically, a spate of 

terrorist attacks, most probably by Hezbollah agents, struck American targets in the Middle East. Two bombings of the U.S. embassy 

in Beirut occurred within a little over a year of the U.S. exfiltration.

Hezbollah bombers also attempted to kill U.S. service members at a 

restaurant in Torrejon, Spain in April 1985, but instead murdered 

18 Spaniards while wounding 15 American troops from the nearby 

U.S. Air Force base.16 In January 1985, the same network killed two 

American passengers aboard a hijacked Kuwaiti commercial jet, and 

six months later commandeered a TWA plane bound for Beirut in 

which the U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem was shot, his body 

dumped on the airport runway. 

Lebanon remained Hezbollah’s favorite haunt for kidnappings in 

the 1980s, during which nearly a dozen American journalists, academics, CIA officials, and others vanished, some never to be released.

Other Lebanese factions joined in the abductions. And still other terrorist organizations, such as the Palestinian movement, the Abu Nidal 

Organization, and the PLO staged shootings at the Vienna and Rome 

airports and hijacked the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship. 

Additionally, the Libyan strongman Muammar Qadhafi, whose terrorist agents had for the past several years plagued Washington and 

other international capitals, finally stepped over a red line with the

Reagan government. A bomb—later traced to Libyan operators—killed 

two U.S. servicemen in a Berlin nightclub. In reaction, the Reagan 

White House launched Operation El Dorado Canyon, in which U.S. 

Air Force and Navy warplanes hit targets in Tripoli and Benghazi. This 

counterattack compelled Qadhafi to hunker down, but not for long.
18

JSOU Report 08-1

His hand was discerned in the mid-flight explosion of Pan Am flight

103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in late 1988, killing the 259 passengers 

and eleven villagers on the ground. 

Terrorism and the Middle East 

As bad as the 1980s were for terrorism directed at Americans, the 

next decade recorded even worse attacks. Not only did the scope of 

the bombings widen but their motivation shifted from the secularpolitical to more religious-political ends. The elevated peril faced from 

Islamic radicals developed greatly as a consequence of mujahideen 

resistance to the Kremlin’s invasion of Afghanistan. The mighty Red 

Army—one-time victors over German panzer divisions—stumbled and 

finally marched out. Afterward, victorious jihadis were emboldened

to take on the other infidel power in the Middle East—the United

States—just as the American presence there dramatically expanded 

to stabilize threats from Iraq’s strongman Saddam Hussein. 

Rather than gaining a respite from Middle East troubles with the 

end of the Cold War, the United States found itself more diplomatically 

and militarily entrenched in the volatile theater. Iraq’s conquest and 

rape of Kuwait riveted U.S. attention on the threat it posed to Western 

oil supplies and the precedent it set for settling other border disputes 

by the resort to armed force. In short, Hussein’s 1990 invasion of 

what he termed Iraq’s 19th province risked destabilizing the entire 

Middle East, for it set on edge other states and opened the door to 

forceful resolution of border disputes. Endorsed by the U.N. Security 

Council, the George Herbert Walker Bush administration organized 

a thirty-four-nation multinational force that evicted Hussein from 

Kuwaiti soil in early 1991. 

In the course of deploying some 500,000 troops to the Persian 

Gulf theater, the United States enlarged its military presence in 

Saudi Arabia—the home of Islam’s two most holy sites in Mecca and 

Medina. The ever-expanding footprint of infidel soldiers, airmen, and

sailors on the Arabian Peninsula’s sacred soil deeply aggrieved a still 

obscure Saudi millionaire, Osama bin Laden, who resolved to strike 

back. Fresh from the victory over the Soviet military in Afghanistan, 

bin Laden resolved to humble the United States as well. 

The story of Osama bin Laden and his terrorism network, Al 

Qaeda, is so well known that only the briefest retelling is needed here. 

They both played a central role in attacks on American targets from 
19

Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

Saudi Arabia to the “black hawk down” incident in Somalia, and from 

the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the 9/11 

attacks on Pentagon and the World Trade Centers. Moreover, bin 

Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Al Qaeda inspired, instigated, and initiated a global spate of bombings and shootings from 

Afghanistan, Bali, Ankara, Madrid, London, Amman, Islamabad, and 

Algiers to Iraq. In this cavalcade of terrorism strikes, the American 

homeland was hit once before the 9/11 “planes operation.” In early 

1993, Manhattan’s Twin Towers were struck by Abdul Rahman Yasin, 

an Iraqi who made the bomb, and Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwaiti who drove 

the explosive-laden truck into the under-ground parking lot. They 

carried out the instructions of Omar Abdul-Rahman, a blind Egyptian 

cleric, who headed an extremist group based in a Brooklyn mosque 

and linked to Al Qaeda. Prior to the ramming of commercial jets into 

the World Trade Centers and the western face of the Pentagon, the 

trajectory of terrorism ascended well beyond what should have served 

as wake-up calls. 

The U.S. response to the terrorist equivalent of “Pearl Harbor” consisted of first a counterattack against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan,

then the Saddam Hussein dictatorship in Iraq. Washington mustered 

strong NATO participation for the invasion of Afghanistan and a thirtynation “coalition of the willing” for the Iraq offensive. Both interventions resulted in violent occupations as the United States struggled to 

stand up democratic governments, new police and armed forces, and 

an array of community services in lands long deprived of responsible 

rulers. In the aftermath of the attacks, anti-American insurgencies 

intensified rapidly.

Despite the rapid routing of the Taliban in late 2001 by a combination of Special Operations Forces, airpower, and surrogate Afghan 

forces, the southern countryside of the Central Asian state saw a 

resurgence of terrorist bombings, assassinations, and fire-fights by

mid-2006. These depredations against the local population cast in doubt 

the progress thus far measured in democracy, economic progress, and 

public works, like the expansion of roads, schooling, and clinics. 

Within Iraq, the anti-coalition insurgency morphed into a kaleidoscopic sectarian civil war marked by an array of complex and shifting 

alliances among factions and tribes that entailed not just Shia-Sunni 

clashes but also Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni conflicts.

America’s vast military, humanitarian, and economic commitments 
20

JSOU Report 08-1

to Iraq and Afghanistan were jeopardized by escalating violence and 

civil strife. The once sturdy multilateral coalition dwindled as allied 

governments withdrew their contingents due to domestic opposition 

to the vicious Iraqi insurgency. 

Thus, the predicament sketched at the beginning of this essay—

that many American citizens yearn for an outright departure from 

the Middle East—stems from the protracted and seemingly hopeless 

fratricide in Iraq and, to a lesser degree, in Afghanistan. The nostalgic urge to pull out and return to a 1990s world of apparent peace, 

economic growth, and hope for tomorrow is understandable. Jihadi 

terrorist capabilities have been degraded with the destruction of an 

Al Qaeda base in Afghanistan and verification that Iraq is devoid of

nuclear weapons. America is safer. But the 

odds of a pre-9/11 restoration are virtually 

impossible, because the attacks of jihadi 

terrorists have continued apace. Even 

the 1990s saw anti-American terrorism 

brewing. As of this writing, Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself within 

the lawless frontier zone of northwest Pakistan, known as Waziristan. 

The latest U.S. invasions are not the cause of, nor will they be the 

ultimate solution to, the problem of Islamic terrorism. 

During the intervening years since America’s counterattacks into 

Afghanistan and Iraq, the world has witnessed a series of terrorism 

bombings and killings worldwide. These assaults have often been perpetrated by self-generating jihadi cells that drew inspiration from Al 

Qaeda, if not direct assistance from bin Laden’s headquarters. During 

the past few years, intelligence agencies have confirmed a resurgence

of the volume and effectiveness of Al Qaeda’s proselytizing.17 Al Qaedaminded terrorists have struck in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the Gaza 

Strip, as well as beyond the Middle East. 

Even Algeria, which had enjoyed a patch of relative tranquility after 

the florescence of terrorism in the 1990s, witnessed the recrudescence

of bombings in early 2007. The military-dominated government had 

squelched political violence after it canceled elections in 1991 out 

of fear that the Islamic Salvation Front would sweep into office. The

mid-April 2007 attacks also demonstrated the symbolic resurrection 

of Al Qaeda, (which seemed to hunker down in the face of the U.S. 

counterattack). For example, the local Algerian terrorist movement, 

Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, subordinated itself officially

But the odds of a pre-9/11 

restoration are virtually 

impossible...
21

Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

in September 2006 to bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and renamed itself Al Qaeda 

in the Islamic Maghreb. Other groups from Morocco to Tunisia reportedly merged their efforts. This represented another clear sign that bin 

Laden’s cause had overcome nationalistic divisions in the emerging 

radical Muslim movements. By subordinating themselves under his 

banner and by integrating themselves into Al Qaeda’s global Salafi

jihad, they give the appearance of more unity than is the reality. Still, 

the integration has had very real effects. By pooling resources and 

training in mobile camps in the Maghreb, however, the North African 

cells have attracted returning Iraqi jihad veterans. 

The Maghrebi groups now fight with enhanced legitimacy under the

Al Qaeda banner, posing threats to local governments and the West’s 

access to oil produced in Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Since North Africa 

is regarded as Europe’s “backyard,” its besiegement rings alarm bells 

across the Mediterranean in Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, and London. 

The Secret Organization Group of Al Qaeda of Jihad in Europe operates clandestinely. Along with other networks, it raises apprehensions 

about fresh outbreaks of bombings and murders that emanate from 

the greater Middle East. To the southeast, jihadis operate in Somalia, 

where the United States countered them indirectly by backing the 

Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and Ethiopian forces. Washington has lavished growing support on the TFG and Ethiopia.18

Additionally, a U.S. military base, with Special Operations Forces 

(SOF) has initiated an ambitious “hearts and minds” campaign for the 

Horn of Africa from its headquarters. Soon after the establishment of 

the Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, American forces provided medical 

care, dug wells, and played soccer with local teams to build rapport 

with the surrounding communities and thereby preempt terrorists 

from gaining a foothold.19

The Mideast, therefore, serves as the incubator of much of the 

world’s terrorism. Abandoning the region to its own devices would 

constitute a replay of the late 1990s. At that time the United States 

abdicated its duty to strike back forcefully at terrorism radiating from 

Afghanistan. Engagement in the Middle East need not—and most 

probably should not—mean U.S. occupations and democracy-building 

initiatives. To contain and arrest the spread of terrorism, however, 

the United States will need to operate in the Middle East. Confronting terrorist networks through an indirect approach, as SOF did in 

the Philippines, or winning over local peoples though civic-action 
22

JSOU Report 08-1

programs, as U.S. forces did in the Horn of Africa, constitutes a nonoccupation means to thwart terrorism. But the United States must not 

contemplate a lock-stock-and-barrel withdrawal from the Near East. 

Washington cannot replicate its nineteenth-century disengagement 

from Barbary Coast today because no European colonial powers exist 

to do the policing of the Middle East in our place. Besides, America’s 

long-historical interaction precludes an abrupt departure from a region 

so economically and strategically central to the nation’s interests. 

The Middle East, Energy, and the United States 

Any proposed retrenchment from the Middle East must take account 

of the strategic impact this decision would have on America’s economy 

and its population’s well-being. The United States and its allies rely 

on Middle Eastern energy to power their economies, heat their homes, 

and light their businesses. Oil is the vital fuel of the early twenty-first

century. 

This over-reliance on fossil fuels may lessen as American scientific

research and conservation efforts blossom. But in the foreseeable 

future neither wind-, solar- nor hydro-powers are expected to make an 

appreciable dent in the world’s petroleum guzzling. Some technological 

breakthroughs look interesting. Photovoltaic cells, bio-fuels, ethanol, 

hybrid cars—all hold promise of reducing fossil energy expenditures; 

but to date none dangle much hope of eliminating entirely the world’s 

dependence on crude oil to power its economy. If anything, the consumption trend lines point upwards, with no prospect even of leveling 

off in the years ahead. 

Global oil utilization stood at 80 million barrels per day (mbpd) 

in 2003. Consumption is expected to jump to 98 mbpd by 2015 and 

reach 118 mbpd by 2030. Asian countries, especially China and India, 

will account for much of this growth as their economies accelerate 

over the next two decades.20 World energy consumption is estimated to 

increase by 57 percent from 2004 to 2030. The industrialized economies grouped together in the Organization for Economic Co-operation 

and Development (OECD, which does not included China, India, or 

Russia) are expected to increase their fuel demands by 24 percent in 

the same time span; while the non-OECD countries are projected to 

push up their usage 95 percent over the same period.21

America alone accounts for 25 percent of the world’s daily oil consumption, while accounting for just 10 percent of global petroleum 
23

Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

production. Thus, it relies on foreign imports to power its economy. 

The United States obtains about 22 percent of all its imported oil 

from Persian Gulf nations. At the very least in the mid-term future, 

the United States must protect its and the West’s access to energy in 

the Gulf arena. This strategic location holds over 65 percent of the 

world’s proven (meaning quantities that are reasonably recoverable) 

reserves. War, terrorism, or other severe disruption of the flow of oil

would dislocate the global economy. Uncertainty about the Mideast 

producing states already causes price increases. The increase of 

about 3 percent per annum in global demand also exercises upward 

pressure on oil prices. 

As the world has little sustainable spare oil production capacity, 

the crude exporters would be hard-pressed to make up for a sudden 

dislocation elsewhere in supply from a serious terrorist attack or 

regional instability in the Persian Gulf. The gravity of America’s oil 

dependence is aggravated by the sizzling growth in demand from 

China and India as their economies further industrialize. Indeed, 

China surpassed Japan as the second largest petroleum utilizer in 

2004. In that year, it consumed 6.5 mbpd. Moreover, all estimates 

of Chinese energy consumption predict surging demand, which will 

deepen its dependence on Mideastern petroleum for the foreseeable 

future. Chinese oil ingestion is expected to triple by the end of the 

next decade. 

India’s thirst for fossil fuels will also accelerate. In 2003, it burned 

on average 2.2 mbpd. But by 2010, India’s consumption will surpass 

2.67 mbpd, deepening its foreign dependence on petroleum imports 

because of its own limited oil-field capacity. Other regions of the

world—Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East itself—also put pressure on oil production and export capacity as their economies grow. 

America’s own dependence on imported petroleum has dramatically escalated in the last three decades. In 1973, petroleum imports 

stood at 6.3 mbpd. By 2004, that figure more than doubled and rose

to 12.9 mbpd. Of that amount, 2.4 mbpd, or about 17 percent, came 

from Persian Gulf sources to U.S. refineries in 2004.22

Estimates of world crude oil consumption by the U.S. Energy 

Information Administration forecast that total global demand will 

skyrocket from 78.20 mbpd in 2002 to some 119.20 in 2025, if the 

output can be expanded to sustain this heightened demand.23 As of 

now, global supplies of energy will come mainly from the Middle East 
24

JSOU Report 08-1

and North African producers. The United States, on the other hand, 

has relied not only on Saudi Arabian petroleum but also more heavily 

on Canadian, Mexican, and to a lesser degree, Venezuelan oil exports. 

The Middle East, nonetheless, meets the world’s energy needs. 

In fact, the largest growth in petroleum reserves in recent years has come 

from the Mideast and the Persian Gulf. 

The Middle East’s proven reserves stood 

at some 367 billion barrels of oil in 

1983. Two decades later that estimate 

doubled to 734 billion barrels of oil. Saudi Arabia remains the granddaddy of proven oil reserves at 262 billion barrels, representing 25 

percent of global reserves. Iraq is currently ranked as second with some 

11 percent of the world’s oil. If the latest estimates are confirmed, Iraq

will strengthen its standing as number two, because comprehensive 

independent studies since the 2003 U.S. invasion have identified the

presence of an additional 100 billion barrels in Iraq’s western desert. 

The finds, therefore, are located in the Sunni-dominated provinces.

Oil deposits in Sunni lands might lessen the stubborn minority’s 

resistance to Shiite and Kurdish areas, which currently benefit from

fossil fuel production. It will, however, take at least a decade and an 

estimated $25 billion in foreign investments to realize the full potential 

of the oil fields.24

Nearby in North Africa and the Horn of Africa, oil reserves are 

likewise concentrated in certain countries while neighbors hold no 

oil or just barely appreciable amounts. Libya, for instance, weighs in 

with nearly 40 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. Algeria, on the 

other hand, possesses just 11 billion barrels, and Tunisia sits on a 

mere 600 million barrels. In the Sudan, one of the epicenters of terrorism instigation as well as a center for ethnic strife, knowledge of oil 

capacity and actual production capability has steadily advanced. It is 

currently estimated to have over 6 billion barrels of proven reserves. 

Thus the broader Muslim Middle East commands the lion’s share of 

the world’s oil wealth. 

The country outside the Middle East with the largest oil reserves 

is Russia; it has 74 billion barrels of proven reserves. Its Siberian oil 

fields rank second only to Saudi Arabia in the largest undiscovered

oil reserves. Russians report their production capacity as 11 mbpd 

in 2005, with plans to expand this flow to 17 mbpd by 2025. But

In fact, the largest growth in 

petroleum reserves in recent 

years has come from the 

Mideast and the Persian Gulf. 
25

Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

Vladimir Putin’s encroachment of state monopoly in the energy sector, 

accompanied by crony corruption, has lessened foreign investment in 

oil production. While Russia’s political stability is much surer than the 

Middle East’s, Moscow’s resort to heavy-handed tactics in threatening to withhold natural gas supplies to Ukraine and Belarus unless 

the two nations fell in political line disconcerted Western European 

governments in early 2007. Dependent on Russian energy, Europe 

took alarm at the Kremlin’s wielding of natural gas supplies as a diplomatic weapon. European capitals criticized the ham-handedness 

of the Putin government and resolved to secure their energy needs 

by pursuing alternative sources and fuels. But pledges are unlikely 

to alter the dependency of Germany, France, Poland, and others any 

time soon.25

Another very promising region for oil, which also has political 

question marks around it, is the Caspian Sea basin. It is speculated 

that Caspian Sea and its littoral might hold the second largest oil and 

natural gas reserves outside the Middle East. If true, it would outrank 

the Russian Federation in potential sources. Since the 1991 collapse 

of the Soviet Union, the Caspian arena’s oil production increased by 

some 70 percent, with the largest expansion occurring in the countries 

of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Still, the Caspian fields lack adequate

export infrastructure. The littoral states also dispute each other’s 

boundaries. Moreover, the governments themselves are based on 

dictatorships rather than stabile democratic electorates. 

Starting from a much smaller base, Latin America saw a tripling 

of known barrels of oil from 34 billion in 1983 to 101 billion barrels 

in the twenty-year span. During the same time period, Asia-Pacific oil

reserves only marginally increased and North American decreased. 

Most estimates place the Asia-Pacific region with the lowest oil reserves

of any region at this time. China has the largest known reserves at 

48 billion barrels; and Indonesia, the only Asian country with OPEC 

membership, is second with 22 billion barrels of known reserves and 

4.7 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. During the past decade, the 

largest oil discoveries have taken place in West Africa, specifically in

Angola, Nigeria, and the Gulf of Guinea. 

Despite its recent output growth, the Middle East production capacity is unlikely to keep pace with accelerating global energy demands. 

This mismatch between ever-escalating consumption and moderate or 

uneven export capacity, if anything, amplifies the strategic importance of
26

JSOU Report 08-1

the Near East for the global economy. The West may be less dependent 

on Persian Gulf oil than in the 1970s because oil fields beyond the

region have come online; but these crude deposits are more likely to 

be exhausted much sooner than those in the Gulf states, which today 

account for 62 percent of the world’s proven reserves. 

America’s, and much of the world’s, dependence on foreign oil 

presents a dilemma. Higher pump prices over the last two years have 

had the effect of stimulating the search for new oil sources, fasterpaced output from existing sites, and alternative energy to satiate the 

mushrooming demand. Elevated costs for fossil fuels also motivate 

consumers and businesses to conserve. If conservation and alternative 

energies drive down the upward pressure on oil prices, then falling 

costs also lessen the stimulation to find new petroleum deposits and

to develop alternative sources. Ergo, painful prices are a necessary 

factor in the quest for new forms of energy. Until new fuels come on 

line, it is simply not viable even to consider a withdrawal from the 

Middle East. Despite the political turmoil and terrorism emanating from the region, economic realities dictate America’s continued 

engagement in the Middle East. Just as early nineteenth-century 

trade in the Mediterranean compelled Thomas Jefferson and James 

Madison to war against the Barbary Coast states, today’s commercial 

interests force the United States to remain immersed in the lands 

east of Gibraltar. 

Threats to Middle East Oil 

Threats to Mideast oil production manifested themselves soon after 

the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Al Qaeda-influenced groups

launched terrorism operations inside Saudi Arabia in May 2003. These 

attacks served as another wake-up call to the Kingdom that it too faced 

the type of internal threats which for so long plagued neighboring 

states. Once alerted, Riyadh ramped up its surveillance of potential 

individuals and groups suspected of terrorism, and it heightened 

security at the country’s oil production facilities. The desert kingdom’s 

Achilles heel lies in its Eastern Province, where most of its minority 

Shia population resides. The Shiite minority number about two million 

people and represent around 10 percent of the total Saudi population. 

Members of this community have participated in terrorist attacks on 

Americans and other Saudis from as early as the mid-1980s. ShiiteSunni sectarian strife has erupted not only in Saudi Arabia but also 
27

Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Pakistan. It also threatens 

the peace in Bahrain, Yemen, and Iran.

The island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf faces an even more 

potentially threatening fifth-column from its majority Shia who make

up nearly 80 percent of the country’s 750,000 inhabitants in this 

Sunni-ruled country. Like the Shiite populations elsewhere, the Bahraini Shias sensed a politico-religious revolution with the overthrow of 

Iran’s shah and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s ascendancy to power in 

1979. They grew restive about their subordinate status on the island 

kingdom. They protested their poverty and joblessness and engaged 

in attempted coups and street protests. Their revival, as elsewhere 

in the Middle East, was well underway by the time of the start of the 

Iraq War.26 Events in Iraq, as they impact the political fortunes of the 

majority Shia there, will carry great weight on the Persian Gulf emirate. Bahrain’s Shiite majority are part of what Jordan’s king Abdullah 

called the Shiite crescent, which are also a concern to the neighboring 

Sunni populations. 

But of all countries located on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen is 

closest to a sort of Wild West land, with what Special Operators call 

“ungoverned spaces” along its joint borders with Saudi Arabia and 

Oman. This remote borderland, in fact, has ties to Osama bin Laden; 

it is the country from which his father emigrated to Saudi Arabia. 

Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, with only 

small deposits of oil. Its Shiite minority represents 15 percent of the 

population, with the remainder made up of Sunni Arabs. Iran has 

been suspected of aiding a Shia group that conducts a guerrilla war 

in the north.27

While an orderly unification between North and South Yemen

(which melded the traditional northern territory with the Marxistruled southern lands) proceeded peaceably in 1990, its history since 

has been marked by periodic violence and even a civil war in 1994.28

The resolution of the intra-Yemeni fighting failed to curb the country’s

border tensions characterized by smuggling and clashes against Saudi 

security forces. 

This political turbulence lends itself to the brewing unstable conditions permitting terrorism to take root. Yemen has already been the 

scene of the boat-bombing attack on the U.S.S. Cole that killed seventeen sailors in 2000. Later, it saw an early application of America’s 

use of preventive force. The CIA fired a lethal missile and killed an
28

JSOU Report 08-1

alleged associate of Osama bin Laden and five suspected Al Qaeda

operatives in the first days of November 2002. An unmanned Predator

drone unloaded its deadly five-foot long Hellfire rocket straight into a

four-wheel vehicle carrying Qaed Salem Sinan al-Harithi, a suspected 

Al Qaeda leader and an accessory in the U.S.S. Cole bombing, as he 

and his riding companions drove 100 miles east of Sanaa, the Yemeni 

capital. 

Washington justified the threshold-crossing attack because the

traveling party was considered a military target—combatants—under 

international law. Although the attack did not rank even remotely near 

the preemptive war doctrine, it did signal a resort to deadly force in 

a different kind of warfare. As a combatant on a broader battlefield,

Harithi fell victim to the campaign against Islamic terrorism. According to administration officials, President Bush delegated operational

authority over Predator strikes to intelligence and military personnel, 

thereby decreasing the response time to sensitive information about 

the whereabouts of terrorists.29

While Yemen is bereft of major oil reserves or a vibrant economy, 

its geographical location lends strategic weight to the country. Its 

seacoasts and islands dot the Red Sea and Indian Ocean sea lanes to 

the Suez Canal. Even more significant, its coastal promontory juts into

the Bab el Mandab, a narrow strait between the Horn of Africa and the 

Arabian Peninsula that serves as a thoroughfare for ships traveling 

from the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal to the Far East. With only 

17 miles across the strait, the waterway is a strategic “choke point” 

in global shipping. Thus, Mideastern oil is not the only vital interest 

of the United States in that unsettled corner of the world. 

Along with historical and energy connections to the Middle East, 

overriding political stakes prevent a large-scale withdrawal from the 

Middle East. It would betray the region to terrorism and abandon 

Israel, a long-term friend and vibrant democracy, to perilous fate. 

Ideology and Demographics 

The Middle East’s volatility is fueled by pervasive virulent ideologies 

and a demographic “time bomb.” Islamic states have long been hostile to infidel invasions and occupations that date from the medieval

Crusades, some of which intermittently held territory in the Holy Land 

for decades before succumbing to Muslim counterattacks. Islamic 

populations deemed the Ottomans’ conquest centuries later more 
29

Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

acceptable than the Crusades, in part because the occupiers were 

fellow Muslims. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the time of 

World War I, its holdings fell into European hands. British and French 

colonial rule encountered quarrelsome subjects at best and anti-European conflicts at worst. As a consequence, most of the Mideastern

countries achieved independence prior to World 

War II. But their hostility to an infidel presence

remained strong. Osama bin Laden was spurred 

into action largely by the arrival of thousands of 

U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to defend the desert 

kingdom from Saddam Hussein’s tanks when they first invaded Kuwait

in 1990. Bin Laden discounted the American defense of Saudi Arabia, 

because the infidel presence, in his mind, defiled Islam’s two most

holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. He proposed to raise a defense 

against a possible attack on the desert kingdom by Iraqi tanks, but 

the monarchy spurned his offer. 

The Islamic resistance to foreign incursions gained activist converts 

when the Red Army marched into Afghanistan in late 1979 to prop 

up a client government. Mujahideen from the Muslim world flocked

to the mountainous battleground to defend Islamic soil from infidel

conquest. Almost ten years later, when the Soviet forces limped out 

of Afghanistan, the militant Islamic reawakening was reinforced by 

the victory. Periodically through history, Islamic resurgences have 

been a reoccurring phenomenon. Born in the trackless deserts among 

nomadic tribes, Islam and its most fervent adherents have always 

viewed urban life as fraught with decadence and religious laxity. Like a 

hot desert wind, the Islamic pious and ascetic descended from remote 

and marginal regions upon their more lax and easygoing co-religious 

for adopting Western mores and beliefs.30 These spiritual rebirths 

often bore a heavy secular component devoted to empowering political forces. Bin Ladenism, the outgrowth of the anti-Soviet campaign, 

conforms to this pattern of waging jihad (or holy war) for temporal as 

well as spiritual ends. The resistance to Soviet occupation and later 

terrorism were fused with militant Islam aimed at the West in general 

and the United States in particular. 

Virulent strains within Islam such as Wahhabism stoked the fires

of intolerance toward Christian, Jews, Hindus, and moderate Muslims, who are perceived as fostering an alien and infidel occupation

of Islamic lands.31 The name of this reform movement was developed 

...their hostility to 

an infidel presence 

remained strong. 
30

JSOU Report 08-1

from teachings of Muhammad ibn abd-al-Wahhab who lived some 200 

years ago in the dry hinterlands of what is today Saudi Arabia. He, in 

turn, derived his inspiration from much earlier writings of Ibn Taymiyya 

and others. Practitioners of Wahhabism preferred to be identified as

Salafist, which refers to the Salaf as-Salifh, or the “early generation”

or “pious predecessors” who were companions or near contemporaries 

of Muhammad the Prophet in the seventh century. 

The contemporary re-ascendancy of these puritanical creeds 

among Muslim subgroups predates the 9/11 terrorism. Yet, those 

attacks gave a fillip to the sagging extreme Islamic cause against a

Western presence in the Middle East. America’s counterassaults first

in Afghanistan and then in Iraq have likewise powered a backlash 

among Middle Eastern populations, exacerbated by the ticking demographic bomb. These pathologies fester among an especially receptive 

host—young males. Unemployed or alienated youths are the perfect 

target for extremist recruitment. 

A demographic burden is manifesting itself across the Middle East 

and North Africa, where 50 percent of the population is under the age 

of 30 years. Female fertility is above three births per woman across the 

regions, except in Algeria, Iran, and Tunisia. Governments have been 

reluctant to address demographic problems because they fear offending 

the cultural norms of their citizens. Such demographic trends are not 

atypical of developing societies; but youth-senior imbalance in some 

Arab nations has reached critical proportions. In Saudi Arabia, for 

instance, women average five births and “unofficial data imply that at

current rates some 60 percent of the population will be under the age 

of 17 by 2010.” 32 Experts point out that population growth in of itself 

is not necessarily a cause for concern if societies can economically 

accommodate an expanding workforce with jobs and wealth-creation 

development to meet rising expectations of youthful workers. But the 

autocratic rulers have not put in place growth-generating policies to 

stimulate economic expansion and job-spawning industrial sectors. 

Over three-quarters of the conflicts that have broken out in the

three decades since the 1970s took place in countries where the 

“at least 60 percent of the population was under 30” years of age.33

Poor countries with rapidly growing populations experience intense 

competition for jobs, productive land, or education. Rising discontent 

among the young facilitates terrorist or insurgent recruiters. Countries 

with birthrates averaging at least four children per woman, such as 
31

Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan, are ripe for explosive social conflicts.

Tempting as it may appear, abandoning the entire Middle East to 

these cauldrons of religious rage and disgruntled youth is unlikely to 

bring security and peace to the United States. Globalization—with its 

exchange of goods, services, and people—has made it nearly impossible 

to raise the drawbridges that connect continents and countries. Even 

if such drawbridges could be raised, breaking off the flow of visitors or

immigrants bent on terrorism would not halt the terrorist takeover of 

some states from the Mediterranean to the Aral seas. Once in control 

of government treasuries and armories, fanatical movements would 

be free to embark on aggressive acts. The fall of Pakistan’s nuclear 

weapons or Saudi Arabia’s vast wealth into extremist hands would 

bode ill for the security of America and its allies. Any total withdrawal 

from the Near East would also leave moderate Arab governments and 

Israel to an uncertain fate. The fall of Morocco, Tunisia, or Jordan to 

jihadis would destabilize the region. Leaving Israel—a long-term ally, 

thriving democracy, and first-world economy—to the potential clutches

of violent fundamentalism would signal a catastrophic retreat, calling 

into question America’s decades-long commitments to other democratic 

allies in Western Europe and East Asia. Moreover, it would buy the 

United States nothing, for Wahhabists such as Osama bin Laden aspire 

firstly to a caliphate stretching from the Iberian peninsula to Indonesia,

then to a world Islamic theocracy. No compromise will assuage these 

megalomaniac designs. They must be defeated or contained until the 

fanaticism recedes like other historical religious floods.

33

Henriksen: Is Leaving the Middle East a Viable Option?

Endnotes

1. The author would like to thank Diane Raub for research assistance. 

2. Christopher J. Fettweis, “Post-Traumatic Iraq Syndrome,” Los Angeles 

Times, 12 June 2007, page 16.

3. Edward Luttwak, “The Middle of Nowhere,” Prospect Magazine, Issue 

134 (May 2007), page 8.

4. Roxan Tiron, “Out-Of-Afghanistan Rumblings On The Hill,” The Hill, 

26 June 2007, page 1.

5. Gerard W. Gawalt, “America and the Barbary Pirates: An International 

Battle Against an Unconventional Foe,” Thomas Jefferson Papers. 

Downloaded from http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjprece.html. 

6. Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970), page 65.

	 7.	 For an analysis of these early conflicts with respect to the U.S. Constitution and its powers granted to the president and Congress, see 

Abraham D. Sofaer, War, Foreign Affairs and Constitutional Power: The 

Origin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger, 1976), pages 208-227.

8. Richard B. Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History (Gainesville, Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 2004), pages 145-147. 

9. Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 

1776 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), page 73.

10. Joseph Wheelan, Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror, 1801-

1805 (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003), page 366.

11. For an illuminating and colorful depiction of American secular and 

spiritual adventures to the Middle East during the nineteenth century, 

see Oren’s book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East,

pages 101-296.

12. David Fromkin, A Peace To End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire 

and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Avon Books, 

1989), page 547.

13. Ahron Bregman, A History of Israel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 

2003), page 48.

14. Cited in Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, page 529.

15. Paul B. Ryan, The Iranian Rescue Mission: Why It Failed (Stanford, 

California: Hoover Institution Press, 1985), pages 107-137. 

16. Edward Schumacher, “Traces of a Chemical Explosive Found in Madrid,” 

New York Times, 14 April 1985, page 14.

17. Michael Scheuer, “Latest al-Zawahiri Tape Targets American Society,” 

Terrorism Focus, Vol. IV, Issue 13 (8 May 2007), pages 5-8.

18. Barbara Slavin, “U.S. Support Key to Ethiopia’s Invasion,” USA Today, 

10 January 2007, page 10. 
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JSOU Report 08-1

19. Dennis J. Herring, “Camp Lemonier Provides Personal Mission for Service Members,” Navy Newsstand, 10 September 2003. Downloaded from 

www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=9207, accessed 31 July 

2007 and Admiral Mike Mullen, “Sailors Building Trust, One Person 

At A Time,” The Hill, 23 May 2007. 

20. “International Energy Outlook 2006,” Energy Information Administration, Report #DOE/EIA-0484 (June 2006), page 1. Downloaded from 

www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/oil.html.

21. “International Energy Outlook 2007,” Energy Information Administration, 

Report #DOE/EIA-0484 (May 2007), page 1. Downloaded from www.

eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/pdf/highlights.pdf. Accessed 19 June 2007.

22. Anthony H. Cordesman and Khalid R. Al-Rodhan, The Global Oil Market: 

Risks and Uncertainties (Washington, DC: CSIS Press, 2006), page 

11.

23. Ibid., page 42.

24. Ed Crooks, “Iraq May Hold Twice As Much Oil,” Financial Times, 19 

April 2007.

25. Mark Landler, “Europe Comes to Terms With Need for Russian Gas,” 

New York Times, 8 January 2007, page A7.

26. Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the 

Future (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), page 233-234. 

27. Iason Athanasiadis, “Iran, U.S. Links Eyed in Downed Drone, Washington Times, 2 May 2007, page 12.

	 28.	 For a discussion of the unification, see Robert D. Burrowes, “The Yemen

Arab Republic Legacy and Yemeni Unification,” Arab Studies Quarterly, 

Vol. 14, No. 4 (Fall 1992), pages 62-74. 

29. David Johnston and David E. Sanger, “Yemen Killing Based On Rules 

Set Out By Bush,” New York Times, 6 November 2002, page A1. 

30. Walid Phares, Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against the West (New 

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), page 57.

31. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicidal Terrorism

(New York: Random House, 2005), pages 21-23.

32. Crispin Hawes, “Change in the Middle East: Why Governance Counts,” 

OECD Observer, No. 249, May 2005, page 1. 

33. Celia W. Dugger, “Very Young Population Contribute to Strife, Study 

Concludes,” New York Times, 4 April 2007, page A6.