9/11, the Great Game, and the Vision Thing: The Need for (and Elements of) a More Comprehensive Bush Doctrine

Bruce R. Kuniholm

Developments in the Middle East and Southwest Asia after the events of September 11, 2001, suggest that the historical geopolitical imperatives driving United States policy in the region since World War II continue to be salient. The context in which the United States is now operating, however, is fundamentally different from the zero-sum rivalry between great powers that characterized the Cold War. In the post–Cold War/post-9/11 world, the "great game" of imperial rivalry has been transformed.1 On one hand, regional powers (states capable of projecting themselves regionally) that possess or seek to possess weapons of mass destruction have become the most serious threat both to stability and to vital U.S. interests in the region.2 Among international, or great, powers, on the other hand, the threat of nuclear war has receded; common threats such as regional wars and international terrorism are facilitating a recognition of common interests; old rivals have become allies of a sort; and the great game is morphing into a clash of values and principles that cuts across traditional borders and cultures, posing serious problems but also providing opportunities for enlightened leadership.	1
The new great game is not a conflict between civilizations, as some would have it; rather, it is a conflict within states, within cultures, and within an increasingly global community over the values and ideas that underpin modernization and the norms and direction of modern civilization—a conflict being played out on a global playing field under new rules not yet clearly articulated or accepted.3 The enemy now is international terrorism––an elusive enemy that can be targeted only through massive international cooperation coupled with the will to go after terrorists and the states that harbor them. The nature of the remedy is dictated by the nature of the threat. If terrorists are willing to die for a cause, and if states support or harbor them, rooting out terrorism requires aggressive action not only against the terrorists but also against states that flout the norms of civilized behavior.4 If they are not contained, civilization as we know it is at risk.	2
Such an apocalyptic statement, coming as it does after an attack by a few people and following a "war" with relatively few combatants, may seem excessive. But Al-Qaeda's penetration of as many as sixty countries, the world's vulnerability to the dictates of Osama bin Laden and the many organizations under Al-Qaeda's umbrella, and the serious threat that increasingly accessible weapons of mass destruction pose to civilization itself—all meant that the attack on the United States served as a wake-up call, putting the world on notice that an almost tectonic shift is required in the way people think about threats to their security and that a vast increase is required in the resources they mobilize to counter those threats.	3
The Historical Context
A brief history of regional geopolitics may help put this sea change in perspective and offer some instructive cautionary observations to U.S. officials. In the nineteenth century, the expansion of British sea power in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf and the expansion of Russian troops into the Transcaucasus and Central Asia eventuated in a struggle for power across a region that stretched from the Balkans to Afghanistan. Each great power—driven by the dictates of empire, motivated by fears of dangers both imagined and real, or trying to "contain" a rival by defensive action—sought to serve its perceived interests and clashed with the other.	. . .