The Prophecy is upon U.S.

Was Frank Herbert a seer, a prophet of things to come? No; what he was, though, was a great, far-sighted science fiction writer of the first rank, a latter-day Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, who, like him, were astute political and social observers, as well as creative geniuses.

Something that I pointed out in a paper I wrote while working on my Masters in Political Science, was that, like Edward Bellamy, the Author of "Looking Backward," Herbert was able to look at the world around him, its trends and its dangers, and set down a warning for the generations to come. Mr. Herbert in Dune has made a startling accurate, and alarming roman a clef
prediction for the U.S.A.

Consider these ideas as symbols:
Spice=Oil
Arrakis(Dune)=Iraq
Terms that crop up with similarity are Shaddam (Saddam) Fedayken (Fedaye'en)
...but what is most apparent is that Herbert foresaw that if anything troubling ever happened in Arrak (heh) that the Emperor (President) would be forced to commit his highly advanced, heavily armed troops (Sardukar/US Armed Forces) to fight the more spiritual, rag-tag zealots that peopled the desert, and controlled that most vital of commodities, without which (space) travel is impossible.

This piece of literature is a vital insight into what is transpiring in the Middle East today, and it is chilling if one reads the entire series, and takes Herbert's vision into account, and places in that context...for he saw Western involvement in the Mideast as meddling, internicine, and ultimately, fatal for the powers that intervene there.

It is indeed ironic that fate has placed us in the hands of a president who has probably never read a book. The one lesson that history has taught us, and that Mr. Bush's late address made abundantly clear that he had missed; while he pledges repeatedly that "America will not leave until the job is finished," America's foes learned thirty years ago, that you do not have to beat America to win. You just have to keep her from winning, any dirty way you need to, and you might just win when they tire of your crummy little country and at last go home.
Was Herbert right? Had he seen the coming Mideastern struggle, even as the ashes of Viet Nam still smoldered? Time will tell.

The oil must flow.