Freedom_1st
Multiply registered, multiply banned troll.
My own personal opinion is that we invaded Iraq to secure the regions oil reservers.
Its the entire reason we even have an interest in that region of the world.
Before the discovery of oil in the region the US payed little to no attention to the middle east or its politics.
The United States’ relationship with the Middle East prior to the Second World War was limited. Moreover, in comparison to European powers such as Britain and France which had managed to colonise almost all of the Middle East region after defeating the Turkish Empire in 1918, the United States was ‘popular and respected throughout the Middle East’.[1] Indeed, ‘Americans were seen as good people, untainted by the selfishness and duplicity associated with the Europeans’[2] . American missionaries had brought modern medicine and set up educational institutions all over the Middle East.
Thus, there were some connections, which were made between the United States and the Middle East before the Second World War. Other examples of corporations between the US and the Middle East are the Red Line Agreement signed in 1928 and the Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement signed in 1944. Both of these agreements were legally binding and reflected an American interest in control of Middle Eastern energy resources, namely oil, and moreover reflected an American ‘security imperative to prevent the (re)emergence of a powerful regional rival’.[4] The Red Line Agreement had been ‘part of a network of agreements made in the 1920s to restrict supply of petroleum and ensure that the major [mostly American] companies…could control oil prices on world markets’.[5]The Red Line agreement governed the development of Middle East oil for the next two decades. The Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement of 1944 was based on negotiations between the United States and Britain over the control of Middle Eastern oil. Below is shown what the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt had in mind for to a British Ambassador in 1944:
Persian oil …is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours.[6]
On August 8, 1944, the Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement was signed, dividing Middle Eastern oil between the United States and Britain. Consequently, political scholar Fred H Lawson remarks, that ‘by mid-1944, U.S. officials had buttressed their country’s position on the peninsula by concluding an Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement that protected “all valid concession contracts and lawfully acquired rights” belonging to the signatories and established a principle of “equal opportunity” in those areas where no concession had yet been assigned.’[7] Furthermore, political scholar Irvine Anderson summarises American interests in the Middle East in the late 19th century and the early 20th century noting that, ‘the most significant event of the period was the transition of the United States from the position of net exporter to one of net importer of petroleum.’[8]
By the end of the Second World War, the United States had come to consider the Middle East region as ‘the most strategically important area of the world’.[9]and ‘…one of the greatest material prizes in world history’.[10] For that reason, it was not until around the period of the Second World War that America became directly involved in the Middle East region.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_intervention_in_the_Middle_East
