From The “Green Peril”:
Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat a policy analysis by Leon Hamar of the Cato institute written in August 1992 after the Gulf War and at the end of the first Bush administration. Some great points are made here. It’s a long read but very informative. Discovered via Cryptome:
Now that the Cold War is becoming a memory, America’s
foreign policy establishment has begun searching for new ene-
mies. Possible new villains include “instability” in Europe
–ranging from German resurgence to new Russian imperialism–
the “vanishing” ozone layer, nuclear proliferation, and
narcoterrorism. Topping the list of potential new global
bogeymen, however, are the Yellow Peril, the alleged threat
to American economic security emanating from East Asia, and
the so-called Green Peril (green is the color of Islam).
That peril is symbolized by the Middle Eastern Moslem funda-
mentalist–the “Fundie,” to use a term coined by The Econo-
mist(1)–a Khomeini-like creature, armed with a radical ideolo-
gy, equipped with nuclear weapons, and intent on launching a
violent jihad against Western civilization. …
The Islam vs. West paradigm, reflected in such observa-
tions, is beginning to infect Washington. That development
recalls the efforts by some of Washington’s iron triangles
as well as by foreign players during the months leading up
to the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis. Their use of the media
succeeded in building up Saddam Hussein as the “most danger-
ous man in the world”(6) and as one of America’s first new
post-Cold War bogeymen. Those efforts, including allega-
tions that Iraq had plans to dominate the Middle East,
helped to condition the American public and elites for the
U.S. intervention in the gulf.(7) …
The problem with that campaign is that the legitimacy
of the Saudi regime is based on its own Islamic fundamental-
ist principles. The Saudi government is actually more rigid
in its application of Islamic law and more repressive in
many respects than the one in Tehran. For example, Saudi
Arabia has no form of popular representation, and political
rights are totally denied women and non-Moslems. The Saudi
regime has been able to stay in power largely because it has
had both direct and indirect American military support, most
recently during the Gulf War. To paraphrase President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Saudis are Islamic fundamental-
ists–but they are our Islamic fundamentalists.(30) …
Indeed, the Bush administration’s response to the Alge-
rian coup is only the most recent manifestation of a policy
that subordinates the political will of Middle Eastern popu-
lations to the preservation of a profoundly undemocratic
status quo. In the name of combating the elusive threat of
Islamic fundamentalism, which has emerged as one of the most
important engines of change in the region, the United States
allies itself with some of the most anti-democratic forces
there.
I could quote selections all day. Hadar does provide a superb amount of information and from our point of view of a decade later his analysis is right on in most respects.