<P> The West had become increasingly unpopular in the Middle East following World War II . The Arab states greatly disliked the West's support for Israel . Many soon had a special hatred towards the United States, Israel's greatest ally . Also, partly to ensure stability on the region and a steady supply of the oil the world economy needed, the United States supported many corrupt dictatorships in the Middle East . In 1979, an Islamic revolution in Iran overthrew the pro-Western Shah and established an anti-Western Shiite Islamic theocracy . Following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, most of the country came under the rule of a Sunni Islamic theocracy, the Taliban . The Taliban offered shelter to the Islamic terrorist group Al - Qaeda, founded by the extremist Saudi Arabian exile Osama Bin Laden . Al - Qaeda launched a series of attacks on United States overseas interests in the 1990s and 2000 . Following the September 11 attacks, however, the United States overthrew the Taliban government and captured or killed many Al Qaeda leaders, including Bin Laden . In 2003, the United States led a controversial war in Iraq, because Saddam had never accounted for all his weapons of mass destruction . By May of that year, American, British, Polish and troops from other countries had defeated and occupied Iraq . Weapons of mass destruction however, were never found afterwards . In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States and its allies established democratic governments . Following the Iraq war, however, an insurgency made up of a number of domestic and foreign factions has cost many lives and made establishing a government very hard . </P> <P> In March 2011, a multi-state coalition led by NATO began a military intervention in Libya to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which was taken in response to threat made by the government of Muammar Gaddafi against the civilian population of Libya during the 2011 Libyan civil war . </P> <P> In general, Western culture has become increasingly secular in Northern Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand . Nevertheless, in a sign of the continuing status of the ancient Western institution of the Papacy in the early 21st century, the Funeral of Pope John Paul II brought together the single largest gathering in history of heads of state outside the United Nations . It is likely to have been the largest single gathering of Christianity in history, with numbers estimated in excess of four million mourners gathering in Rome . He was followed by another non-Italian Benedict XVI, whose near - unprecedented resignation from the papacy in 2013 ushered in the election of the Argentine Pope Francis - the first pope from the Americas, the new demographic heartland of Catholicism . </P> <P> Personal computers emerged from the West as a new society changing phenomenon during this period . In the 1960s, experiment began on networks linking computers and from these experiments grew the World Wide Web . The internet revolutionised global communications through the late 1990s and into the early 21st century and permitted the rise of new social media with profound consequences, linking the world as never before . In the West, the internet allowed free access to vast amounts of information, while outside the democratic West, as in China and in Middle Eastern nations, a range of censorship and monitoring measures were instigated, providing a new socio - political contrast between east and west . </P>

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