A vision, somewhat like the airborne toxic event in Delillo's "White Noise," begins to take form behind the incessant news coverage of the fighting in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. This cloudy menace appears to me in the form of a question.
Is it possible this Administration put the current hot conflicts into motion in the belief that the US can realign the region by inflaming the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites?
Could all this be part of a grand design? Or has the United States been guilty of merely pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck?
Driving a wedge between Iran and Syria could be based on the idea that the Iraqi civil war makes Syrian friendship with the non-Arab Shiite Persians and support for Shiite Hezbollah suspect in the Sunni Arab world.
I was quite struck, taken aback by the spectacle of Eqypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia appearing to urge Syria to separate itself from Shiite Iran and cease support for Shiite Hezbollah.
I pose this as a question as it appears the US could not have done a worse job of planning the Iraq invasion, and could not have been more negligent or derelict in the occupation.
Could it be that this was intentional so as to create the very Iraqi civil war between Sunni and Shiite that now rages each day?
Against the backdrop of what appears to be violent Shiite dominance in Iraq at the expense of a formerly Sunni-led minority, the image of a chess board suddenly appears.
But chess is merely a game. Surely something much less masterful, much more prosaic lies at the heart of all this.
It will take quite some time to see the consequences, as Thomas Ricks says:
"President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy."
Or perhaps not .... One is tempted to quote Groucho Marx:
Why a duck?