Alain Gresh: Uncle Sam's New Backyard: How to Turn a Region into a Graveyard

How to Turn a Region Into a Graveyard
Uncle Sam's New Backyard

By ALAIN GRESH

When the US decided that its backyard would in future be a greater Middle East --from Pakistan to Morocco --it imagined that it could rearrange the region to suit itself. The results have been disastrous and will be long-lasting.

The United States undersecretary of state, Nicholas Burns, said this year: "Ten years ago Europe was the epicentre of American foreign policy. This was how things stood from April 1917, when Woodrow Wilson sent one million American troops to the Western Front, through to President Clinton's intervention in Kosovo in 1999. For the better part of the 20th century, Europe was our primary, vital focus." But, he added, everything had changed and the Middle East was now, for President George Bush and his successors, "the place that Europe once was for the administrations of the 20th century" .

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