Abstract
<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, November 2015 (Volume 67, Number 6)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-06-2015-10/">buy this issue</a></div>To understand why the Middle East is now in shambles, with the United States currently involved simultaneously in wars against both the Assad government in Syria and the Islamic State in Iraq, generating the greatest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War, it is necessary to go back almost a quarter-century to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The Gulf War, unleashed by the United States in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, was made possible by the growing disorder in the USSR followed by its demise later that same year. The USSR's disappearance from the world stage allowed the United States to shift to a naked imperialist stance&mdash;though justified in the manner of the colonial empires of old as "anti-terrorism" and "humanitarian intervention"&mdash;not only in the Middle East, but also along the entire great arc that had constituted the perimeter of the former Soviet Union.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-6" title="Vol. 67, No. 6: November 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>
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