Scrambling for a simple standard to measure events in Egypt and across the Arab world, the blogosphere and the airwaves have been full of references to 1979. That point of reference is probably more apt than imagined, for much more happened that year than just the Iranian revolution. It was also the year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Sunni extremists, and the year that Saddam Hussein assumed overt power in Iraq. In sum, it was a year when the political tectonic plates of the region shifted violently and profoundly.
It was a shift that was rapidly reflected in American strategy making and military posture. The “Carter Doctrine,” nominally a reaction to the Soviets and expressed as a willingness to defend the region against outside influence, quickly morphed into a broader doctrine of opposing any hostile bid for hegemony – be it local or external. The United States began to move from being an “off-shore balancer,” content to work entirely through regional regimes, to being ever more deeply and directly involved. And the ad hoc “Joint Readiness Deployment Task Force” became, in 1981, U.S. Central Command.
