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

    The Journal of American History, September 2002
    http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/89.2/kuniholm.html

Subscribers only, but there's a cached Google copy here:
http://tinyurl.com/7pb0

I thought the historical section was particularly good:

    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.

    In the twentieth century, the players in this great game of
    imperial rivalry, as it came to be called, were transformed: In
    1917 the Soviet empire replaced the Russian Empire; and after
    World War II the United States, guided by rationales outlined in a
    series of presidential doctrines, gradually replaced a declining
    British Empire and, thanks to a policy most popularly articulated
    by George F. Kennan, assumed Britain's role of containing Soviet
    expansion in the region.

    Over time, the great game of advancing and protecting great power
    interests, which initially involved trade but which increasingly
    revolved around oil, resulted in modi vivendi resting on the
    implicit assumptions that there should be an equilibrium of forces
    in the region and that the vital interests of both powers would
    not be threatened. When observed, such arrangements maintained the
    balance of power in the region. If they were deficient in
    addressing the needs of the region's emerging nationalist forces,
    they mitigated tensions between the great powers, whose post-World
    War II nuclear arsenals magnified the risks of brinkmanship at the
    international level.

    The emerging nations in the buffer zone that separated the
    imperial powers, which were subject to whatever understandings the
    great powers chose to reach, meanwhile did what they could to
    survive. Between World War I and World War II, for example, since
    the threat to them came from outside the region, they allied among
    themselves against threats from without. The Balkan Pact of 1934
    between Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Turkey and the Sa'adabad
    Pact of 1937 between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan
    constituted attempts to escape from traditional rivalries to which
    these emerging states were being subjected. The alternatives to
    forming alliances with each other were playing one power off
    against the other, balancing one against the other, or looking to
    third powers (for example, Germany between the wars) for
    assistance. After World War II, as their survival was threatened
    by the relative disparity between Soviet and British power, Iran
    and Turkey turned to the United States for assistance.

    In 1947, as Britain contemplated withdrawing from its empire,
    including Burma, India, and Palestine, both the decision of the
    British Foreign Office to cease supporting Greece and Turkey and
    the Soviet threat to Iran and Turkey led President Harry S. Truman
    to enunciate the Truman Doctrine. In doing so, he made the first
    in a series of postwar U.S. commitments to contain the Soviet
    threat and maintain the balance of power in a region that the
    United States had previously regarded as within the British
    Empire's sphere of influence. That Joseph Stalin did not expand
    his sphere of influence in the Near East as he did in Europe and
    the Far East following World War II does not mean, as some
    revisionists would suggest, that U.S. concerns were
    overdrawn. Firm U.S. policies put Stalin on notice that expansion
    to the south could be carried out only at the risk of
    confrontation. In the end, he was not prepared to take that risk
    (nor was any Soviet government until the invasion of Afghanistan
    in 1979).

    In the early 1950s, as Britain continued to contemplate withdrawal
    from the region--this time from Suez--Secretary of State John
    Foster Dulles encouraged development of a broader regional defense
    arrangement in the Middle East's "northern tier" states. Following
    Britain's departure and the debacle over Suez, President Dwight
    D. Eisenhower in 1957 promulgated the Eisenhower Doctrine to serve
    notice that the United States would defend the Middle East against
    a perceived Soviet threat. The Eisenhower Doctrine extended the
    containment policy from the northern tier states to the Middle
    East in general; it was institutionalized in both the Baghdad Pact
    and, following the 1958 revolution in Iraq and that country's
    withdrawal from the pact, the Central Treaty Organization
    (CENTO). However one criticizes the Eisenhower Doctrine and the
    concept of the northern tier, and however fashionable it is to
    discuss the ease with which the Kremlin leapfrogged over it, the
    lack of contiguity between the Soviet Union and the Arab world and
    the barrier between them formalized in CENTO posed serious
    logistical impediments to Soviet intervention in subsequent Middle
    East crises, particularly those involving Arabs and Israelis. 9

    U.S. problems in the Middle East under the Eisenhower Doctrine
    were minor relative to those presented by the 1968 British
    decision to leave (by 1971) the area "east of Suez," including the
    Persian Gulf, which had been within Britain's sphere of influence
    for over a century. Britain's impending departure from the gulf
    created what was perceived as a power vacuum at a time when the
    Soviet Union was becoming much more active in the region. Global
    commitments and the war in Vietnam, however, precluded a
    U.S. effort to fill the vacuum and resulted instead in the
    application of the Nixon Doctrine (initially, the Guam Doctrine,
    by which the United States relied on regional states to assume
    primary responsibility for their own defense). In accordance with
    President Richard M. Nixon's endorsement in 1970 of what became
    the "twin-pillar" policy, the United States sought to ensure
    stability in the gulf through cooperation with Iran, which
    American officials recognized as the region's predominant power,
    and Saudi Arabia.

    Inept application of the Nixon Doctrine to the Middle East
    eventually created problems that were as serious as those it was
    intended to resolve. The failure of the United States to abide by
    the rules of the great game in Iran may well have encouraged the
    Soviets to break them in Afghanistan, where the Soviets had to
    learn, as the Americans did in Iran, the limits of their capacity
    to dominate the region. The Iranian revolution, which undermined
    the premise of the Nixon Doctrine, with the subsequent hostage
    crisis, the burning of the American embassy in Pakistan, and the
    Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979—all made clear that the
    twin-pillar policy was in ruins and U.S. policy along the northern
    tier in disarray. The response of President Jimmy Carter in 1980
    was the Carter Doctrine, under which the president publicly
    emphasized the vital U.S. stake in the Persian Gulf and, in a
    departure from the Nixon Doctrine, assumed ultimate responsibility
    for regional defense. The Carter administration subsequently began
    construction of a security framework for the Persian Gulf and
    Southwest Asia, complete with improved regional defense
    capabilities and facilities that would be accessible to the Rapid
    Deployment Force (subsequently the Central Command).

    After the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine, the foremost
    challenge to U.S. interests came from the Soviet Union's
    occupation of Afghanistan and from two regional states seeking
    hegemony in the Persian Gulf: revolutionary Iran and, especially,
    Iraq, from which Saddam Hussein launched wars against Iran (1980)
    and Kuwait (1990). The Reagan administration, meanwhile, had
    consolidated the security framework begun under President Carter,
    supporting what the former assistant for national security affairs
    Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to as "regional influentials." Turkey
    and Pakistan received improved assistance packages, and the United
    States continued to develop a close relationship with Saudi
    Arabia, which initially became a reluctant beneficiary of the
    Reagan "corollary" to the Carter Doctrine (the United States would
    not permit Saudi Arabia "to be an Iran"). With Saudi and Pakistani
    assistance, U.S. support for Afghan resistance to the Soviet
    occupation resulted, by the late 1980s, in the withdrawal of
    Soviet troops and contributed to the subsequent collapse of the
    Soviet Union (not to mention the subsequent influence of Saudi
    Arabia and Pakistan in Afghanistan, which, in turn, contributed to
    the subsequent rise of the Taliban).

    When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the impending
    transformation of the Soviet Union made it possible for the Bush
    administration to enlist Soviet cooperation and coordinate a
    multinational military coalition that, thanks to the security
    framework set up by previous administrations, deterred Saddam from
    intimidating Saudi Arabia and eventually expelled him from
    Kuwait. Saddam's defiance of the conditions of the cease-fire, his
    persecution of Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish minorities, and his
    ongoing secret chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs
    resulted in a continuing embargo on Iraq's oil, restrictions on
    his military activities, and, for a time, United Nations (UN)
    inspections of Iraqi weapons sites. Under President Bill Clinton,
    the United States continued to pursue a dual containment policy
    directed, not toward the Soviet Union, but rather toward Iran and
    Iraq, the two regional states bent on hegemony in the gulf. Due to
    an erosion of coalition solidarity, this policy was only partially
    effective. Developments in Iran that accompanied the election of
    President Muhammad Khatami in 1997 offered some reason for hope,
    but Saddam eventually reconstituted the core of his army,
    reimposed his authoritarian control over the country, expelled the
    UN inspectors (in 1998), and continued his efforts to develop
    weapons of mass destruction.