The attacks on September 11 should have made it clear that the hawks had been looking for threats in all the wrong places. Iran and Iraq had been effectively contained, and China was too busy making money off the West to think about harming its economies. At the same time—and in significant part as a result of U.S. support for Muslim fundamentalism as an anti-Communist bulwark—Sunni radicalism had emerged as a much more powerful threat than either East Asian Communism or Baathism and Khomeinism. Mujahidin who had trained in Afghanistan fanned back out to their home countries in 1989, victorious, and determined to establish Islamic states in places like Algeria and Yemen. Sunni radicals fought a virtual civil war in Algeria with the secular military government in the 1990s, waged a less bloody but still highly disruptive campaign against the Mubarak government in Egypt, and pioneered new militant political movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and the neo-Deobandis in Pakistan. Once the Soviets had fallen the Sunni radicals abandoned their alliance of convenience with Washington and turned against the United States, which they now saw as a bulwark of the secular governments that they were trying to overthrow, in addition to resenting its role in supporting Israeli expansionism. The more radical of these groups coalesced into al Qaeda and decided to hit the "far" enemy rather than only the "near" one.

After September 11 the national security hawks, many of whom who had actively fostered the jihadis in the 1980s, attempted to link new the forms of Muslim terrorism to their longstanding preoccupations with Iraq and Iran. The anti-American Middle Eastern states were now even more dangerous, they alleged, because they either had joined up with the terrorists already or might in the future share weapons of mass destruction with the jihadis for use against the United States. But the Iraqi Baathists were devoted to secular Arab nationalism, and the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran despised al Qaeda and the Taliban. It was implausible that Khomeinist Shiites, Baathist Arab nationalists, and Sunni al Qaeda would collaborate closely with one another and share deadly technology. Nor was there any good evidence for it, though plenty was manufactured by innuendo.

The pillars of policy were now trembling. Some within the Bush circles, especially Secretary of State Colin Powell, sought a reduced American tolerance for Israel's expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories, among the main sources of Muslim anger at the United States. Fearful of this outcome, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accused George Bush in October 2001 of trying to appease Arab countries by forsaking Israel in the way that Europe had tried to appease Hitler in 1938 by abandoning the Czech Sudetenland. Sharply rebuked, Sharon backed off quickly, and by late fall of 2001 the Bush administration had been convinced, by a combination of domestic political calculations and geopolitical judgments, to remain committed to acquiescing in substantial expropriations of Palestinian land by Israel.

But the other central pillar remained in doubt. Some analysts associated with the administration criticized the Saudi alliance of monarchy and Wahhabi Islam as dangerously unstable and destabilizing. At the very least, some wealthy Saudis had given monetary support to al Qaeda or al Qaeda–linked charities. Wahhabi missionizing in the Muslim world had spread the distinctively Wahhabi ideas that Muslims who are not strict in their observance are actually infidels and that non-Muslims are threats to Islam. Some suspected members of the royal family of having radical sympathies. Richard Perle, then chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, led the charge in arguing that Saudi Arabia should be abandoned as America's chief ally in the region. He arranged for a former associate of conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, Laurent Murawiec of Rand Corp., to address the Defense Policy Board. Murawiec's PowerPoint presentation painted Riyadh as the source of all America's problems, saying, "The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain" and "Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies." Although Perle attempted to distance himself from the more extreme of Murawiec's allegations once a whistle-blower had publicized the secret briefing, he clearly viewed Saudi Arabia as a problem. In February he told Chris Matthews, "I think at the moment, popular sentiment in Saudi Arabia is very negative toward the United States." The Independent reported him as saying, "The Saudis are a major source of the problem we face with terrorism." Even more pragmatic thinkers such as Wolfowitz decided that it was impractical to continue to base U.S. troops on Saudi soil, given the resentments this presence had caused among the Sunni radicals, and that therefore a new ally would have to be found or created to anchor U.S. military interests in the Persian Gulf. The increasing sympathy among the Saudi public for the Palestinians and the Saudi commitment to Israel's return to its 1967 borders reinforced neoconservative doubts about a continuing close alliance with the House of Saud.

The hawks came to see an Americanized Iraq as a replacement for Saudi Arabia. The plan was risky, not least because the secular Baath government had been among the main ramparts against Sunni and Shiite religious radicalism in the Gulf. The hawks argued that a liberated Iraq would kick-start a wave of democratization in the Middle East, paralleling events in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union weakened and then fell. (They did not explain why the United States, if it wanted democratization, did not start with places like Egypt and Jordan, which were more plausible candidates, being allies, developed civil societies, and recipients of substantial aid). They believed, incorrectly, that Iraq's petroleum-producing capacity—while not at Saudi levels—was significant enough to offset Saudi dominance of the oil markets. And unlike Saudi Arabia, Paul Wolfowitz thought, Iraq did not have holy cities such as Mecca and Medina that would make the stationing of U.S. troops there objectionable: Iraqis, he said, "don't bring the sensitivity of having the holy cities of Islam being on their territory." (He apparently did not then know about the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala). The hawks were aware that a democratic Iraq would have a Shiite majority, but their client, Ahmad Chalabi (head of the expatriate Iraqi National Congress), convinced them that Iraqi Shiites were largely secular in mindset and uninterested in a Khomeinist theocracy. In the short term, they thought, Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress would run Iraq in at least a semi-democratic fashion.

This plan proposed an almost complete reconfiguring of the old pillars of American Cold War policy in the region. The two key alliances were now to be with Israel and a Shiite-majority "secular" Iraq. Saudi Arabia would be marginalized and the allegedly pernicious effects of its Wahhabism fought. Cheap and secure petroleum remained important, but Iraq would emerge as its principal guarantor. Iranian Khomeinism was still seen as an enemy, along with its allies, the Hezbollah in Lebanon and the remaining wing of the Baath in Syria. All three were seen as threats to Israeli expansionism, so their elevation in the firmament of evil dovetailed with the U.S. decision to acquiesce de facto in hard-line Israeli policies of settlement expansion. Iran and Syria were to be forestalled from developing biological or nuclear weapons, from cooperating in this endeavor with the East Asian Communists, and from interfering in a final settlement of the Palestine issue on whatever terms Israel found favorable. Fighting al Qaeda, which one would have thought would have the highest priority in the new policy, actually appears as a minor and subordinate consideration, relegated to a sort of police work. And mollifying outraged Muslims by pressuring Israel to return to the 1967 borders was out of the question.

It is a plan. And like other ambitious plans it makes many assumptions. But perhaps the largest is that the Iraqi Shiites are plausible allies.