Perhaps no region of the world is more integral to global politics than the Middle East. It would not be devoid of the truth to claim that since World War I, the trajectories of both world politics and the politics in the Middle East continue to be determined and shaped by each other.
Along with the other regions of the world, the Middle East was a major flash point of Cold War politics and after the collapse of USSR, US policy makers had started talking about the dawn of the ‘Green Peril’ in lieu of the Red Peril. The entire gamut of post-Cold War politics was first experimented in Iraq and later executed in other parts of the Middle East and beyond. For instance, the US-led forces launched their military operation in 1991 to expel the Iraqi forces from Kuwait which Iraq had occupied in August 1990. Indeed, this anti-Iraq military operation was the beginning of the birth pangs of US-led New World Order, that which was referred by many as Pax Americana and others had called the collapse of the USSR as end of history.