The administration has said little about this crucial point, but clearly it has decided that it is not worried about the regional consequences of an invasion. To understand why, we must turn to its larger strategy.

It is impossible, of course, to know exactly what the Bush game plan is. What follows is speculation based on extrapolations from existing U.S. policy, its declared intentions and some vague hints by key policymakers. After Saddam is gone, the U.S. will help stabilize Iraq, promoting an autonomous Iraqi government -- not a U.S. puppet, or at least not a regime that looks like a U.S. puppet -- that will be more democratic and less autocratic than other Middle Eastern regimes. Kurds and Shiites will be given limited autonomy under a federal system to prevent Iraq breaking into three parts; Turkey's restive Kurds remain a question mark, but perhaps Washington will lean on Turkey to grant them limited federal status also. As in Pollack's optimistic scenario, the presence of this relatively enlightened nation in the heart of the Middle East, and the awareness that the U.S. is prepared to act decisively to protect both its interests and to promote positive regional change, will shake everything up.

The U.S. will prod Egypt and Saudi Arabia toward liberalizing their societies, hoping to improve the lot of the middle class and release the dangerous societal tensions that produced a Mohammad Atta and his Saudi hijacking team. If as a result the ruling parties are either toppled or voted out of office, Washington will not necessarily regard that as a bad thing. The status quo -- with the exception of U.S. access to oil -- is no longer sacrosanct, now that we know that Saudi Arabia has been funding extremist Wahabbi groups and we've come to realize that propping up incompetent and repressive regimes like Mubarak's is a devil's bargain. If new popular regimes in Cairo and Riyadh do arise, they will be more openly hostile to Israel than the old ones, but as in the past they will be kept in line by oil (in the case of Saudi Arabia) and massive U.S. cash (in the case of Egypt). Over time, in accordance with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's dictum that joining the global economy trumps the rejectionism of radical Islam, they will work out an accommodation with the modern world, blending sharia (Islamic law) with democracy and capitalism in innovative ways.

Charter axis-of-evil member Iran and honorable mention Syria (which was left off the list for diplomatic reasons) will be put on notice. They will be informed by an envoy holding Saddam Hussein's head on a spike that future sponsorship of anti-Israel terrorist groups and, in Iran's case, pursuit of nuclear weapons will result in extremely unpleasant consequences. If they resist, a crucial policy debate will ensue: The U.S. may attack them (if the hawks win) or it may back down. In any case, Washington will regard time as being on its side. Iran, with its vibrant secular opposition, is already engaged in the democracy debate, and sooner or later the mullahs will fall. Syria, marginalized by the defeat of fellow rejectionist Iraq, will sooner or later join the modern world. Lebanon will be freed of Syrian control, and Jordan, with Iraq removed from its eastern border, will be stable.

That leaves the crucial issue: the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Free from the domestic political constraints of the November election, the White House will throw the long-suffering Colin Powell a bone and pay more attention to the conflict. It will gently turn up the heat on Sharon, insisting on at least a settlement freeze in an attempt to "park" the Palestinian problem, which as always threatens to inflame the region. Given political cover against Benjamin Netanyahu and the far right by Bush's removal of Saddam, Sharon will be able to do this without his right-wing coalition partners bolting on him. If the Palestinian crisis worsens, Bush will face a fateful choice. Will he make the political calculation that he can get away with leaning harder on Sharon, enabling more moderate Palestinians to oust Arafat and eventually achieve a state? Or will he side with Sharon?

The hawks imagine a sun-dappled vision of a post-Saddam future. With one lightning thrust into the heart of Baghdad, the unrivaled U.S. military machine cuts through the Mideast's Gordian knots and brings peace and stability to the region. The problem is that there are too many unknowns in this scenario. How will the U.S. manage the post-Saddam transition in Iraq (based on our post-Taliban track record in Afghanistan, the prospects are not encouraging)? What will Iran do, and what will we do with Iran? If the U.S. is drawn into a war there, the consequences are unforeseeable. Will Egypt and Saudi Arabia survive unscathed -- or will they go the way of Iran in 1979, or Algeria, where secular leaders have brutally crushed popular Islamist parties? As leading scholars like John L. Esposito have argued, it may be developmentally necessary for the Arab world to elect Islamist governments: Will the U.S. accept these regimes, even if they cannot be bought off like Egypt or Saudi Arabia?

And, most critically of all: What if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to fester, destabilizing the entire region? Will the hawks on the Bush team, most of whom hold views indistinguishable from those of Sharon's Likud Party, be willing to turn up the heat on Sharon? The answer is crucial, for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict holds the key, as it has since 1948, to ending tensions not just in the region but between Muslims around the world and the U.S.

It's impossible to predict what Bush and his team will do. But there is reason to doubt that they will be able to make the tough decisions needed on Israel and Palestine -- decisions they have completely failed to make until now, to the dismay of the world. Let us look at some of the key players.

Bush himself, like most U.S. presidents, seems never to have grasped the historical context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the blinding moral certainty that struck him on Sept. 11 did not help educate him. In a simple-minded way, he conflates Palestinian terrorism with al-Qaida terrorism. Bush has repeatedly deferred to Sharon, humiliatingly doing nothing after the Israeli leader rejected his demand that he withdraw his troops from the West Bank. Vice President Dick Cheney once said he thought Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat should be hanged. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refers to the West Bank and Gaza as the "so-called occupied territories," echoing the Likud line. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is a prominent neoconservative and stalwart supporter of the Likud line. According to a recent New York Times magazine profile, he regards the fact that Saddam pays subsidies to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers as convincing evidence that the Iraqi dictator would attack the U.S. -- almost the definition of an Israel-centric argument. (If they could get away with it, practically every state in the Middle East would pay those subsidies.) Douglas Feith, the fourth-highest ranking member of the Pentagon, is a fervent Zionist who has opposed virtually every peace deal Israel has made, including the original Camp David accords with Egypt, and once wrote that the Palestinians had no claim to any part of biblical Eretz Israel. Then there is Richard Perle, a key Pentagon advisor who for decades has been one of the Likud's most vociferous supporters. Several of the figures mentioned above helped write a hard-line position paper for the incoming Netanyahu administration.

It is remarkable that a group with such a manifest ideological tilt dominates policymaking on an issue of this gravity. It is too vulgar to suggest, as many in the Arab world and Europe do, that the Bush war hawks are planning to invade Iraq on Israel's behalf: The threat to Israel is a (legitimate) factor in their decision, but not the only one. The Bush hard-liners might well have planned to replace Saddam even if Israel did not exist. It would be more accurate to say that Bush and many of his advisors, whether out of emotional identification, shared ideology or a mere coincidence of interests, act as if they regard Israel and the United States as virtually indistinguishable.

To be sure, it is possible that the administration will be willing and able to put pressure on Israel to resolve the Palestinian crisis, if that pressure is needed. (And with Sharon at the helm, it is almost certain to be.) But it is also possible -- though unlikely -- that lured on by the belief that Arabs ultimately respect only force (the famous "iron wall" of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of the Israeli right), the Bush hawks will decide to resolve the Palestinian problem once and for all, with American force.

This would, of course, be a catastrophic development. But unforeseen things happen in war. The armchair generals and think-tank warriors who are Bush's most gung-ho backers of invasion can map out as many scenarios as they please, but reality has a way of confounding expectations. And in the Middle East, a misstep can have nightmarish consequences. Ask Ariel Sharon, whose invasion of Lebanon to root out the PLO -- which he claimed would be limited in scope -- turned into Israel's worst political debacle and gave birth to the Hezbollah.

As Pollack points out, what the U.S. does after Saddam falls is crucial in determining what happens in the region. But Bush's disgraceful performance in postwar Afghanistan does not inspire confidence. Rebuilding Afghanistan to prevent it from falling into chaos was obviously not just a case of altruistic internationalism -- terms of abuse for the machos on the Bush team -- but was emphatically in America's interest. But under pressure from ideological hard-liners -- and still clinging to the isolationist, America-first, anti-globalizing beliefs that found famous expression in his derisive attack on Clinton's "nation building" -- Bush invested only a paltry $296 million toward rebuilding the shattered country and refused to commit American troops to peacekeeping. The result: Hamid Karzai, the country's would-be leader, barely controls Kabul and rampaging warlords are running amok.

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