The invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, by a US-led “coalition of the willing” set the standards for the use of armed force as an instrument Great Power foreign policy outside the scope of the UN resolutions. 

That action destabilized the delicate balance of power in the Middle East and North Africa and undermined the system of alliances built in the wake of WWII, paramount amongst them the cornerstone of the Quincy Agreement on Feb. 14, 1945 — signed aboard the USS Quincy moored in the Great Bitter Lake along the Suez Canal — between President Franklin D. Roosevelt — who had just returned from Yalta — and King Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman Al Saud, setting up the “oil for protection” pact between the United States and the Saudi kingdom. It would “fuel” the West and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization against the Warsaw Pact, rich with the plentiful oil fields of Siberia and the Caspian, then in USSR territory.  

The Iraq invasion was a protracted reaction against the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, known as the “two blessed raids” in Islamist parlance. To a large extent, though, the four planes that hit America on that day were but US jihadi chickens coming home to roost, as the United States itself had unleashed the genie from the bottle when the CIA instrumentalized the Afghan and international brigades of mujahedeen to vanquish the Red Army and kick it out of Kabul, on Feb. 15, 1989. That would prove the final blow to the Soviet system and a prelude to the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9 of that same year.  

Using jihadis to unsettle the USSR looked at once like a coup de maître, but it would soon prove to feel more like a sorcerer’s apprentice, as jihadism was fueled into becoming the major world threat until the 2020s, morphing from local to regional then international stages under the guises of al-Qaeda and finally the Islamic State (IS), reaching deep into America and then European societies.