Hmm. What I think is sorta like this...

I think there was a consortium of people in politics and the private sector (particularly the oil industry) who had a great strategic plan in mind for the early 21st century, and that plan went something like this:

"The Soviet system is going to fail soon. When it does, the USA will be in an unchallengeable position as the world's only superpower. This will place us in a position to secure much greater profits and to basically run pretty much the entire world as we want to, because we will have military supremacy.

The first thing we must do is secure the world's main oil reserves. This is not only a matter of profit, it's vital to our future as the reigning superpower.   The coming breakup of the Soviet Union will give us full access to the oil in the Caspian region, and we can pipe it down to the Indian Ocean if we can persuade the Afghans to let us. If not, we find an excuse to knock out the Taliban and replace them with a client regime in Kabul. We also must secure the Iranian and Iraqi oil by causing regime change in both those countries...particularly in Iran, because we still haven't taken revenge on them for what they did to us in 1979....and ruling superpowers do NOT allow defiance on the part of small countries. If one gets away with it, more will be emboldened to, so we can't permit that.

Any country that is defiant of our New World Order which could also be called the Pax Americana will be dealt with sternly. We will apply economic pressure and diplomatic pressure on them until they comply with our gameplan. If that doesn't work, we will accomplish regime change by whatever means is feasible, up to and including fullscale war.

We will need new threats in the world to replace the vanished Warsaw Pact, because without an existing threat it would not be possible to get public consent to maintain our habitually very high levels of military spending and our research into new weapons systems.

Who shall the new threat be? How about radical Islam? It would be perfect. Their way of life is unacceptable to us in many ways, and we have already fallen out with them over events in Iran and in the Arab-Israeli conflict. They are incapable of militarily posing any real danger to the USA, because they are too disunited and backward, and they don't run any major power which can meet us in a relatively even fashion on the battlefield. They will be the perfect "bad guys", and can be relied upon to provide a simply endless series of excuses for intervention exactly where we need and want to intervene...where the oil is.

Okay. Now how do we accomplish this? If we want to go to war, we need a Pearl Harbor level event to get the American people onside. Nothing less will do. Perhaps we can upset the more fanatical Muslims enough that they will provide us with such an event through a terrrorist action. If so, great! All the better. We'll watch, wait, and make sure to let it go ahead when we see it coming.

If, on the other hand, they are not well organized enough to pull off such an attack...well, then...I guess we'll have to arrange it somehow ourselves, only make it look like they did it."

*****

And that's how I figure it. Either they saw it coming, and helped allow it to go ahead...or they fully arranged it. It has all been done to secure the aims laid out well in advance by the PNAC (Project for a New American Century).

Russia knows that. Europe knows it. China knows it. The Arabs know it. How they will deal with it remains to be seen, because the wrong decisions in such matters can lead to hundreds of millions of people dead and a worldwide disaster beyond anything we've yet seen in any past war.

If there is going to be a great war over this, I think the opening salvoes were fired in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, but the crucial incident is likely to be an attack on Iran. If that happens, it may have an effect equivalent to Hitler's attack on Poland in '39. There may be no going back after that.

So, let's hope that cooler heads prevail, and they mutually back off.

(*all the above is mere speculation on my part...)