Starting from a top-down perception of regional stability, the (senior) Bush administration sent thousands of American troops to Saudi Arabia which seemed vulnerable to conquest by Iraq during the second Gulf War. (1991). President George HW Bush interpreted Saddam Hussein's aggression as a threat to international and regional stability and decided to confront it with force. However, the American intervention was not without destabilizing repercussions. The stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia puts it in confrontation with Islamist fighters, and puts an end to the truces which lasted throughout the 1980s between the two parties. More importantly, the Al-Qaeda organization, established around 1988, began targeting American interests in the Middle East and elsewhere. Somehow, the threat posed by Al-Qaeda to regional stability proved greater than the threat posed by the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Historical Background At 2 a.m. on August 2, 1990, Iraq voiced its complaints about Kuwait's oil overproduction. (along with other concerns regarding the Kuwaiti practice of horizontal drilling and occupation of disputed oil fields in al-Rumaylah and the islands of Warbah and Bubiyan) by moving 1,800 Iraqi army tanks to Kuwait. Iraqi forces crossed the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border south toward the capital, routed scattered resistance, and occupied all of Kuwait by 7 a.m. When the invasion began, Kuwait's emir, Sheikh Jabir al-Ahmed al-Sabah, fled with his extended family to Saudi Arabia. Two hours and twenty minutes after the invasion began, the Bush administration strongly condemned the Iraqi attack. as an act of pure aggression and a violation of...... middle of paper ......g intervention; in fact, they could very well have gotten worse. The main features of the US preemptive intervention in Saudi Arabia can be summarized as follows: (1) force – the United States sought to maintain stability through the deployment of massive numbers of troops to Saudi; 2) top-down – intervention was based on strengthening the regional client to ensure regional stability, while ignoring other local actors and interactions, and (3) simplistic – pre-emptive US intervention in Saudi Arabia did not not taken into account the national repercussions. this could result from sending non-Muslim foreign troops into the Islamic Kingdom. Furthermore, US policy towards the Saudi Kingdom has never emphasized democratization as a major element of stability. Instead, U.S. policy has focused primarily on maintaining reliable "status quo allies" seen as capable of securing U.S. regional interests...