The Iraq war has significantly shaped the way U.S. foreign policymakers view the world. There have been suggestions that the war was not in fact initiated based on strategic concerns (WMDs) but because then President George W. Bush had the political support to do so, what Ian Lustick has called a "supply-side war." I intend to explore U.S. Foreign Policy towards three Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries before and after 9/11, in an effort to determine whether U.S. Foreign Policy was driven mainly by domestic political factors, or rather by the international strategic interests of the U.S.. The three cases will be Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Each of these countries has had a different kind of relationship with the U.S. and is located in a different part of the MENA region, thus giving my research the breadth that could not be obtained from analyzing any one country, increasing the level of confidence in any pattern identified. My research will be drawn from primary sources—congressional hearing transcripts, presidential memos and speeches, legislative bills—and secondary sources such as academic journal articles and journalism from the years 1990-2013. The government documents will show changes in policy and suggest what drove such changes, while the secondary literature will provide corroboration or challenges to my own analysis. I hypothesize that domestic politics determined the extent of and means by which the strategic interests were carried out, and in some cases were the stronger force behind U.S. Foreign Policy actions rather than the interests at stake.