My hawkish nature will come out now with the statement that we could have then tackled
Syria and Lebanon, and piled up on Iran, to intimidate them, if not go for Teheran as well.
Saudi Arabia would be intimidated also just by our presence in force. We end up with control of the Straits of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, Damascus, Beruit, Teheran, Rhiad, and all that oil too. (The British and French may have had the same idea in '53 or so, that Eisenhower managed to stop) With "enlightened" administration, the region could have been pacified and suppressed to this day, but with far better lives for all of the people there.

Globally, the two bad guys--The USSR and China--could have been neutralized, in my opinion, since the USSR was just about broken anyway, and China was not close enough to do anything rash. Present them with a fait accompli and they go along, especially if they are assured of oil supplies.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that it may no be what we've done, but what we haven't done, i.e., not responding in a clear, aggresive, and unambiguous manner, that has led to the perceived increase in violent radical Islamism.

The U.S. could have urged its Arab allies to introduce long-overdue reforms as a step toward legitimizing their regimes and broadening their domestic political support. At the very least, the U.S. might have urged the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council to end their decades of intramural feuding and forge a broader alliance with Jordan and Egypt. This, with American support, might have helped create a new balance of power in the region to counter the ambitions of adventurist regimes like Iran, Iraq, and Syria.”

To at least some extent it did precisely this. However remember the geopolitical situation of the day; we were following the lead of the United Nations. Which, I should add, is why Saddam Hussein was still in power.

In the context of criticizing those who assume that the solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict is critical for changing everything else, Taheri starts by asking himself your question:

"Fifteen years ago, after the first defeat of Saddam Hussein and the liberation of Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker faced the question of how best to exploit the American victory as a means of stabilizing the Middle East. The obvious course would have been to deploy the immensely enhanced prestige of the United States, backed by its unprecedented military presence in the Persian Gulf, to help create new and durable security structures in a region regarded as vital to American national interests.

How might this have been done? The U.S. could have urged its Arab allies to introduce long-overdue reforms as a step toward legitimizing their regimes and broadening their domestic political support. At the very least, the U.S. might have urged the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council to end their decades of intramural feuding and forge a broader alliance with Jordan and Egypt. This, with American support, might have helped create a new balance of power in the region to counter the ambitions of adventurist regimes like Iran, Iraq, and Syria."

Although a new balance of power is still needed, its purpose will have to go beyond countering the ambitions of Iran. It will also have to draw a line at the regional level about the activities of radical groups that would be legal. I believe that a necessary condition to bring about that new balance is for the US to win decisively in Iraq, meaning the formation of a coalition central government with limited powers and the military defeat of all insurgent groups (I'm not American and I live in Chile). This win would recreate a situation similar to that of September 1991.

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