Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (speaks at a parliament meeting in Tehran, Iran, on Aug. 20, 2017. Rouhani said Sunday that Iran's top foreign policy priority is to protect the nuclear deal from being torn up by the United States. Ahmad Halabisaz/PA Images. All rights reserved.The multipronged tensions in the Middle East have disturbing echoes of the immediate post 9/11 period. After the attacks that day in New York and Washington, the George W Bush administration moved rapidly to terminate the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and destroy the al-Qaida movement. The use of special forces and CIA personnel, heavy air bombardments, and the deployment of Northern Alliance warlords as ground troops combined to secure apparent victory within three months.
That allowed Bush, in his state-of-the-union address in January 2002, to celebrate a military achievement over terrorist foes. But to the surprise of many, especially outside the United States, the president went much further. He extended the ominously titled "war on terror" against al-Qaida and the Taliban to a wider panoply of enemies, bonded in an “axis of evil”. This was a group of states that sponsored terrorism and sought to develop weapons of mass destruction. Its key members were Iraq, Iran and North Korea, with second-division evil states being Libya, Syria and Cuba.
In June of that year, Bush's speech at the West Point military academy made it explicit that the United States had the right to pre-empt these threats. Saddam Hussein's power-base in Baghdad was terminated in March 2003, and – under Bush's successor – Muammar Gaddafi's in Libya in 2011. North Korea is now in the spotlight, and rightly causing considerable concern given Trump’s rhetoric and the near paranoia of the Pyongyang regime. Amid the recurring dramas, however, Iran tends to be neglected. This is even more ironic when its power and influence have so greatly expanded during this period, and continue to do so.
