For the longest time we’ve been stuck in the middle of two books that we started a year apart, The Man in the High Castle and Prayers for the Assassin. They are both books about alternative futures, one about America after a Nazi victory and the other about America (and civil war in America) after an Islamic victory. In The Man in the High Castle, the Nazis turn on the Japenese, with a plot to launch an unexpected nuclear strike on them. When we read the gloomy assessment by Ralph Peters above, we were reminded of this plot, called Operation Dandelion.

What do you suppose the chances are that some strategists in the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department or elsewhere in the administration foresaw a reasonably high possibility that Iraq could become the locus of a Sunni/Shiite civil war — and thought this was a good thing? What if all the talk about democracy in the Middle East were more of a hope than an expectation, and that the highest expectation was that the US could create a situation where our Shiite enemies and our Sunni enemies spend their energies and resources on internecine warfare? Is there no one sufficiently cold or cynical in this government to have calculated (whether correctly or incorrectly) that a failure in Iraq might be almost as good as success if it pitted the Islamic world against itself? Aren’t the neo-cons conniving or evil enough for such a plot — or is that to be left for a novel of alternative futures?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 4:52 pm and is filed under art, culture, General, Iran, Left of Left, Religion, Republicans, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.