The American Foreign Policy Regarding Middle East

2006 Words9 Pages
Despite the fact that the war on terror was officially launched by the White House a little more than a decade ago, the main trends in the American foreign policy regarding Middle East have changed significantly in these dozen-something years a couple of times. The issue the United States of America are dealing with in the case of ISIS is something very different, both in nature and in scale. Compared to the devotion of the Bush administration to fight every single suspected organization and individual in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, the Obama administration was and still is far more reserved about American presence and American warfare in the Middle East. After a decade of active involvement and establishment of questionable…show more content…
Given the abovementioned topic, it seems reasonable to look into the roots of the ISIS history in order to incrementally approach the answer to the question of “how is this threat different from the others in the region” like the Taliban or al-Qaeda.
The first thing to know about ISIS is that it originated as an organization not very much like the one we currently know. It emerged in the early 2000’s as a terrorist group known as Jam’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad headed by the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. This group is considered to have its roots in the Iraqi war and is thought to have resistance to the Western occupiers as their primary principle and goal of operation. This is particularly where we find the first difference between other terroristic groups and ISIS as well as the difference between threats represented by both. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other organizations, having been created earlier, tried to instill into the population of territories controlled by them values that diverged very much from the Western ones and while they fought the West in more ideological than literal sense, ISIS is quite another pair of shoes. ISIS began as an organization whose goal is not only to deny aggressively western values, but also to force out the western forces from the Middle East. And that the difference – clash in the worldview in the first case and fighting for dominance over certain territory
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