Usa And Terrorism

Which countries has America come to consider to be Ð''Rogue States' and what criteria does it use?

The term Ð''Rogue State' is used to describe states that are seen to be a threat to the peace of another country. Criteria used to identify certain Ð''rogue states' include being ruled by authoritarian regimes that restrict human rights,sponsor terrorism and seek to to proliferate weapons of mass destruction.

In the late 1990s America considered North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Libya to be Ð''Rogue States'. After 9/11 the U.S and Pakistan formed an alliance which removed Pakistan from the Ð''rogue state' list. The U.S then invaded Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003. Libya is now also not seen as a threat after its success through diplomacy. When Bush became President, the idea of Ð''Rogue states' was changed to Ð''Axis of Evil'

According to Noam Chomsky the concept of Ð''rogue state' plays a pre-eminent role in policy planning and analysis. The Iraq crisis that took place in 2003 forced Washington and London to declare Iraq as a Ð''rogue state'

However previously Iraq had been seen as an ally to America and Suddam Hussein as a friend. Iraq and Saddam's status changed when he misunderstood U.S enthusiasm to allow him to modify the border with Kuwait by force as authorisation to take over the country. Since this event , Iraq replaced, Iran and Libya as the leading Ð''rogue state'.

In November 1978, America's main ally the Shah of Iran showed signs of trouble. Since 1953, Reza Shah Pahlavi's fate had been bound in with the United States when the CIA had helped his return to power. It was only in the early 1970s that the interests of the two countries fully merged, which was partially prompted by Britains decision to withdraw from it's military presence east of the Suez.This left a gap in the security of the Persian Gulf at a time when its oil was making the area of strategic importance. The Nixon Doctrine had an extension to it which meant that Iran could fill this gap. In May 1972, Nixon and Kissinger came to an agreement with the Shah that in return for protecting western interests, Iran would have access to some of America's advanced military equipment, but not nuclear weapons. Reinforced by the increase of oil revenues after 1973, the Shah ordered $9, billion worth of weapons by 1976. However not everyone in the Defense Department was convinced by this idea or by the amount of time spent of their security on a single individual. Ð''Although aware of serious human rights abuses, the Carter administration felt it had no alternative but to follow existing policy towards Iran'

Carter referred to Iran as Ð''an island of stability in a turbulent corner of the world'

On December 25 1979, the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan,the administration believed that Brezhnev and his advisers had been encouraged to prevent the spread of Islamic rage in their own Muslim provinces.'Carter feared that if the soviets could secure a hold in the country, it would place their forces dangerously close to key areas of the Middle East, already destabilised as a result of the events in Iran' Carter saw this as an expansion to the Soviet power, which needed to be stopped, one way of doing this was to put an embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union as well as withdrawing from the Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980, this was a rather large blow since the Soviets had spent a lot of money on preparing for the games.

Carter expressed fears about the Soviet Unions intentions of the Middle East in a speech for the State of the Union on 23 January 1980 when he said that Ð''An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such assault will be repelled by any means necessary including military force' (Carter, 1982)

The Soviets misjudged the area and the strength of Islamic assistance, they embarked on a crusade which would weaken the armed forces and bring an end to the Soviet Union. In 1989 Soviet troops left Afghanistan after 9 years of being in a civil war there. President Gorbachev of the Soviet Union then stopped the Brezhnev Doctrine which had declared the right of the Soviet Union to intervene in internal affairs of Communist countries. Communist party rule ended in Poland and Hungary, then in Czechoslovakia and in Bulgaria. In Romania the peaceful revolution ended when the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was uprised against by the Romanian people and the army. He and his wife were captured, tried and then executed on Christmas Day. But the new government fell under the control of the old Communist establishment. Then in late 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed when the Berlin Wall was torn down by the Germans and East Germany united with West Germany in 1990. Gorbachev built a new presidential system which increased his powers, his popularity in the Soviet Union decreased. In August 1991, a few political and military leaders tried to take control of power, they confronted Gorbachev and demanded that he sign a decree proclaiming a state of emergency and transfer powers to them. He refused and was placed under house arrest, the plan did not work out too well for the plotters, as they had not arrested Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic. President Bush decided to help and supported Yeltsin by refusing to recognise the new Soviet government. The plotters gave up and fled, Gorbachev was freed but Yeltsin seemed to be more popular, Gorbachev resigned as President.

This failed coup encouraged, the Soviet and America to reduce nuclear weapons, in 1991 Bush announced that the U.S would destroy all its nuclear weapons on land and at sea in Europe and Asia. As well as taking the 24 hour alert status off long-range bombers, he said that a Soviet invasion of Western Europe now seemed unlikely and decreased a threat of usage of nuclear weapons. In 1991 the Soviet Union had fully collapsed and was broken up into twelve independent republics.

On November 4th 1979, a group of militant university students who took over the U.S diplomatic mission in Tehran, they were objecting to the American influence in Iran and it's support since the fall of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who the CIA had restored to power in 1953. Iran's post-revolutionary regime supported the students, the students took hostage 63 U.S diplomats and three American citizens.

In decades before the hostage situation,America had been an ally of the Shah, during the second world war, Britain

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