"I believe that the scale of total challenge we face is more like April 1861 than any other period since then," Gingrich says. He goes on to explain that April 1861 was the month Fort Sumter was fired upon, setting off a chain of events--from the Civil War to the construction of the transcontinental railroad to the printing of paper currency--that no one at the time foresaw. "You go back through the cold war, the Second World War, the Great Depression, the First World War--each of those were large, singular, focusable events. In some cases, they were excruciating, but they were containable," he says. "We're going to be hit over the next 15 or 20 years with so many different things simultaneously that the total number of solutions we have to come up with is going to stretch our capacity as a society to talk to itself well enough to actually reach agreement to get something done."

For Gingrich, the deeper problem, as he might put it, is not so much the size of the challenge, but that no one is prepared to face it--especially not President Bush. He adds, "I think the administration is trapped in normalcy." And that, in Gingrich's view, is a tragedy, because normal leaders are not what these times call for. "The genius of guys like Lincoln and Reagan and FDR--the great communicator leaders--is that they're actually educators, so they understand when they use a phrase that they have to explain it, because, by definition, you won't understand it or they wouldn't need to be using it," he says. "I think Bush is like a lot of managers who think, if they repeat it, it's your problem to figure it out."

Now, as the region teeters on the brink of a new and potentially more violent cataclysm, it is important to revisit the lessons of the Six Day War, a conflict that few Middle Eastern countries wanted and none foresaw.

And so, suddenly and unexpectedly, a regional war erupted that the principal combatants-- Israel, Egypt, and Jordan--neither desired nor anticipated. The lesson: Local conflicts in the Middle East can quickly spin out of control and spiral into a regional conflagration.

Iran, OPEC's second biggest producer, supplies the world with more than 2.4 million barrels per day (bpd), making it the fourth biggest exporter. Traders say a loss of this amount would be hard to replace as, except for about 2 million bpd of spare crude oil capacity in top exporter Saudi Arabia, OPEC is pumping flat out. Syria exports only about 200,000 bpd of oil.