Final meltdown in Iraq and regional mayhem triggered by a US attack on Iran. Is that what this year holds in the Middle East? Will President George W. Bush, trapped between delusion and denial in the Iraqi debacle, try to make it double or quits? The auguries are not good. Given the limited thinking and minimal competence of this administration in its dealings with the region, they never have been. When the US and its loyal British ally, Tony Blair, decided to invade Iraq in 2003, certain consequences were always clear, except to those driving the strategy. This was a step that would proliferate jihadism, risked turning Iraq into a Lebanon cubed, and would destroy western credibility and legitimacy in the Arab and Muslim worlds. But one aspect of the policy was not then clear. What was Anglo- American thinking about the Shia, the dispossessed minority in Islam who, in Iraq, are the majority, and whom the invasion put in the saddle? In their zeal to transform the Middle East through shock and awe, were the democratic missionaries in Washington and London aware they were overturning the nearly millennium-old dominance of Sunni Islam in Iraq and the Arab world, an unbroken run of power since the collapse of the Fatimids, a heterodox Shia dynasty, in Cairo in 1171? Were they at least conscious of how this violent tilt in the regional balance of power would enhance the influence of Shia Iran? There is no evidence to suggest the Bush administration or its acolytes ever seriously considered the tectonic power of this aspect of their decision. There were, naturally, people in the US and British foreign and intelligence services and armies who did think about these questions. They were wilfully ignored. "All you people know about is history," a Pentagon official told a veteran Central Intelligence Agency man in Baghdad at the time, "but we are making history." True enough, and when history turned out to be less malleable than it thought, the "freedom on the march" brigade took fright.

Suddenly, it started to discern an arc of mostly Shia radicalism under the leadership of Tehran, stretching from western Afghanistan to the borders of Israel. A tarnished Anglo-American leadership has taken fright, turned against the Shia and brought the revolutionary strain in this faith of the dispossessed to the fore. Last summer's war in Lebanon was in good part a response to this loss of nerve, a logical extension of the misadventure in Iraq. The Israeli assault on Lebanon to get to Hizbollah, the Shia Islamist movement and militia seen in Washington and London (and Sunni Arab capitals such as Riyadh and Cairo) as the spearhead of Iran in the Levant, was regarded as a regrettable but necessary price to roll back Tehran's perceived ambitions in the region. It failed. The limits of the otherwise overwhelming military might upon which Israel ultimately depends have been held up to pitiless public scrutiny. But the summer war was also another failure for Mr Bush and Mr Blair, both now widely regarded across the region, by friend and foe alike, as dangerous adventurers. Lebanon, along with its elected, west-leaning government, has been profoundly destabilised while Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader, has become an Arab hero - to Sunni and Shia alike - on a scale not seen since the heyday of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Anglo-American licensed attack on Lebanon, furthermore, brought closer the day when the Shia in Iraq cease to be tactical allies of the US and become its enemies. It looks inconsistent, may be hypocritical, and is certainly dysfunctional to seek to destroy a Shia Islamist militia allied to Tehran that is part of an elected government (Hizbollah in Lebanon) while seeking to ally with another Islamist militia allied to Tehran that is part of an elected government (the Badr brigades of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) Washington supports. The mood of the Iraqi Shia turned decisively against their US liberators last summer - not just the followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, the young Shia radical who models his Mahdi army on Hizbollah, but the SCIRI and the Da'wa party of Nouri al- Maliki, the prime minister. The US is dependent on Mr Maliki for the success of Mr Bush's so-called "surge" of troop reinforcements.