Wow. Last summer, I wrote a piece for Slate about how people are using Flash games as a form of political commentary — using the physics of games to create elegant visual metaphors to make a political point. One of the big areas where this was happening, of course, was with war-related material.

I just happened upon a brilliant and quite mind-blowing new Iraq game, from the folks at idleworm. They’ve posed the question that the U.S. isn’t asking: What happens the attack on Iraq sets off a domino effect? What if the U.S. manages to kill Saddam Hussein — but in doing so, makes the Islamic world so angry that it we get a Mideast powderkeg?

To make this scenario a little more concrete, the idleworm folks created an interactive cartoon that shows their prediction for what the next few years look like — represented as icons moving, war-game-like, across a map of the Mideast. The result is darkly funny and massively unsettling. There’s something unspeakably creepy about the aesthetics of this thing: Part Saturday-morning cartoon, part CNN-political-map, and part role-playing-boardgame. As with many of these interactive Flash games, you laugh — but it makes you think in a way substantially different from when you read an old-school New York Times editorial.

Indeed, the idleworm games illustrates a principle that dawns on almost anyone who plays a five-hour session of Risk, Diplomacy or Dungeons and Dragons: In a complex world of negotiations and multiple interests, things rarely go as planned. Teenagers and game-players the world over, cloistered in their basements, know this. The U.S. administration, apparently, doesn’t.

(Image above taken from the idleworm site!)