On March 20, President George W. Bush marked the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war by stating that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power was and always will be the right one.  His view is not that of the majority of Americans, who are citing the high costs in American lives and treasure and want to see the U.S. military start pulling its troops out of Mesopotamia.

While admitting that the Bush administration’s original justifications for going to war—Iraq, they alleged, possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and had operational links to Al Qaeda—have been repeatedly debunked or discredited, opponents of a troop withdrawal warn that such a move will not only play into the hands of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups but will create the conditions for a bloody civil war (involving the Arab Shiites, the Arab Sunnis, and the Kurds), which would draw in other Middle Eastern players (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan), igniting a major regional conflict.  Instead, the stay-the-course proponents insist that U.S. forces should stay in Iraq until the country achieves some sense of political stability and internal security.  That process, according to presumptive GOP presidential candidate John McCain, could take more than a century.

Critics of the war, including the two leading Democratic presidential candidates, counter that it was the ousting of Saddam Hussein that opened the Pandora’s box of sectarian discord between Iraq’s Shiites and Sunnis, fomenting the current violence between the ethnic and religious groups in the country and turning it into a new safe haven for terrorists from all over the Middle East.  Al Qaeda was able to establish its presence in Iraq only in the aftermath of the collapse of Saddam’s secular Ba’ath regime, which had been one of the fiercest foes of Osama bin Laden’s radical Islamic terrorist group.

At the same time, the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led Iraq ended up bolstering the power of Iran in the Persian Gulf.  The government in U.S.-liberated Baghdad, which comprises Shiite political figures and groups with close ties to Iran and the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, has become part of what the pro-American Sunni regimes describe as a Shiite Crescent in the Middle East.

Indeed, future historians will probably conclude that the implementation of President Bush’s neoconservative agenda in the Middle East—the toppling of Saddam’s secular Sunni regime; the resurgence of Iran and her Shiite allies; a series of U.S.-driven elections that strengthened the hands of Islamist parties in Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine; the breakdown in the Israel-Palestine peace process—provoked a set of powerful revolutionary changes that are challenging the post-Cold War status quo in the Middle East, in a way that runs contrary to the interests of the United States and her traditional allies there.

To be fair to President Bush and the neocons, these changes might have taken place eventually, since the end of the superpower rivalry had also shaken the relative stability in the Middle East.  Each side of the geostrategic stalemate between Washington and Moscow had placed constraints on the power of its respective allies in the region.  With the United States emerging in the early 1990’s as the sole hegemon in the Middle East, it was only a matter of time before the anti-status-quo forces in the region—radical Arab Sunni groups that opposed Saudi Arabia’s alliance with America; radical Shiite organizations hoping to strengthen their power in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf; an assertive Iran; Kurds seeking independence; Palestinians demanding an end to Israeli occupation—would dare to challenge U.S. power and invite a powerful American response.

In a way, President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq helped to fast-forward history by ten years, making it more likely that the transformation of the Middle East would not have to be postponed until 2015.  Instead, the five years of the Bush war helped set in motion the most dramatic makeover of the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Western takeover of the region after World War I.

Here are some of the scenarios that could result from this acceleration of events: Iraq could very easily break up into three ministates, including a semi-independent Kurdish region, a Shiite area that would fall under Iran’s sphere of influence, and a Sunni zone that would gravitate toward its Arab Sunni neighbors, led by Saudi Arabia.

A nuclear Iran could emerge as a regional hegemon in the Persian Gulf, spreading her political and religious influence into other Shiite areas in the Middle East.  Tehran could then either challenge or accommodate the interests of the United States and her Saudi-led allies.

Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil-rich states in the Persian Gulf could see the transformation of the Middle East as an opportunity to flex their diplomatic, economic, and military muscles.  They might extend their influence into other Sunni parts of the Middle East, especially in Syria/Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, launch a drive to develop an Arab Sunni nuclear bomb, and strengthen ties with the European Union and China as a way of countering U.S. influence in the region.

The new Middle East could see an increase in both regional and outside pressure to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict as part of an arrangement that will include Jordan and perhaps even Egypt.  Without such a resolution, the area of Israel/Palestine will gradually become a binational state.

Lebanon could once again become a central arena for regional power struggles, with Iran and the Saudis trying to establish spheres of influence there, and Syria reemerging as a central power broker.

In Iraq, much of the preparation for a de facto division of the country has already taken place through a process of ethnic cleansing, which explains why the violence seems to be going down.  Some argue that the civil war has already occurred and that mixed areas and neighborhoods are coming under the control of the Shiites or the Sunnis, with the Kurds enjoying almost complete political independence in northern Iraq.

In 2009, the new U.S. president will have to try to formalize this Iraqi “soft partition” as part of a regional agreement that will involve the leading outside players—Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—along the lines of the 1995 Dayton Agreement, which led to the establishment of an independent Bosnia and Herzegovina and the end of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.

Such an agreement will require a readjustment of U.S. policy to the new balance of power in the region—which the Bush administration helped to create—including a diplomatic dialogue with Iran (and Syria) and a willingness to cooperate with a more assertive Saudi Arabia.  Unless the new administration take steps in that direction, we could find ourselves drawn into an even longer and more costly conflict, after which the United States would be even less secure and have even less influence in the Middle East and around the world than she does now, after five years of unnecessary war.