What's the real reason we are invading Iraq? According to the Administration, it is to disarm and remove Saddam, establish "regime change," eliminate his weapons of mass destruction and prevent him from blackmailing his neighbors and aiding terrorist groups. According to others, invading Iraq is just the beginning, and the real plan is to reshape the entire region, and then the world.

Robert Dreyfuss has an excellent article, Just the Beginning, in the new issue of American Prospect in which he says the war on Iraq may be just the opening salvo. Dreyfuss quotes several military, national security and other experts who say the war cannot be confined to Iraq. It will spread all over the Middle East. Already, Dreyfuss says, Bush and the neoconservatives in his Administration have formed plans to reshape the entire region, and possibly the world.

But the Bush administration's hawks, especially the neoconservatives who provide the driving force for war, see the conflict with Iraq as much more than that. It is a signal event, designed to create cataclysmic shock waves throughout the region and around the world, ushering in a new era of American imperial power. It is also likely to bring the United States into conflict with several states in the Middle East. Those who think that U.S. armed forces can complete a tidy war in Iraq, without the battle spreading beyond Iraq's borders, are likely to be mistaken. ....In the Middle East, impending "regime change" in Iraq is just the first step in a wholesale reordering of the entire region, according to neoconservatives -- who've begun almost gleefully referring to themselves as a "cabal." Like dominoes, the regimes in the region -- first Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, then Lebanon and the PLO, and finally Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia -- are slated to capitulate, collapse or face U.S. military action. To those states, says cabal ringleader Richard Perle, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an influential Pentagon advisory committee, "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" In the aftermath, several of those states, including Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, may end up as dismantled, unstable shards in the form of mini-states that resemble Yugoslavia's piecemeal wreckage. And despite the Wilsonian rhetoric from the president and his advisers about bringing democracy to the Middle East, at bottom it's clear that their version of democracy might have to be imposed by force of arms.

After the Middle East, the U.S. plans to move on to the Philippines, Korea and even Latin America.

Three thousand U.S. soldiers are slated to arrive in the Philippines, opening yet another new front in the war on terrorism, and North Korea is finally in the administration's sights. On the horizon could be Latin America, where the Bush administration endorsed a failed regime change in Venezuela last year, and where new left-leaning challenges are emerging in Brazil, Ecuador and elsewhere.

The experts see the plan as folly and madness. The U.S. is the "bully in the playpen." We have to agree.