1. The United States has played a major role in the militarization of the region.

2. The U.S. maintains an ongoing military presence in the Middle East.

The United States maintains an ongoing military presence in the Middle East, including longstanding military bases in Turkey, a strong naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean and Arabian Sea, as well as large numbers of troops on the Arabian Peninsula since the Gulf War. Most Persian Gulf Arabs and their leaders felt threatened after Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait and were grateful for the strong U.S. leadership in the 1991 war against Saddam Hussein's regime and for UN resolutions designed to curb Iraq's capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, there is an enormous amount of cynicism regarding U.S. motives in waging that war. Gulf Arabs, and even some of their rulers, cannot shake the sense that the war was not fought for international law, self-determination and human rights, as the senior Bush administration claimed, but rather to protect U.S. access to oil and to enable the U.S. to gain a strategic toehold in the region.

The ongoing U.S. air strikes against Iraq have not garnered much support from the international community, including Iraq's neighbors, who would presumably be most threatened by an Iraqi capability of producing weapons of mass destruction. In light of Washington’s tolerance -- and even quiet support -- of Iraq’s powerful military machine in the 1980s, the United States' exaggerated claims of an imminent Iraqi military threat in 1998, after Iraq’s military infrastructure was largely destroyed in the Gulf War, simply lack credibility. Nor have such recent air strikes eliminated or reduced the country’s capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, particularly the most plausible threat of biological weapons.

Furthermore, only the United Nations Security Council has the prerogative to authorize military responses to violations of its resolutions; no single member state can do so unilaterally without explicit permission. Many Arabs object to the U.S. policy of opposing efforts by Arabs states to produce weapons of mass destruction, while tolerating Israel’s sizable nuclear arsenal and bringing U.S. nuclear weapons into Middle Eastern waters as well as rejecting calls for the creation of a nuclear-free zone in the region.

In a part of the world which has been repeatedly conquered by outside powers of the centuries, this ongoing U.S. military presence has created an increasing amount of resentment. Indeed, the stronger the U.S. military role has become in the region in recent decades, the less safe U.S. interests have become.