TYRE, Lebanon, July 23 - The day ended in Tyre as it began, with a desperate cry of grief.

"Where's my father? Where's my father?" asked Mahmoud Srour, an 8-year-old whose face was burned beyond recognition after an Israeli missile struck the family's car Sunday. His mother, Nouhad, lurched toward his hospital bed, her eyes welling with tears.

"Is he coming?" he asked her.

"Don't worry about your father," she said, her words broken by sobs.

Barely conscious, bewildered, he lay with his eyes almost swollen shut. His head lolled toward her. A whisper followed.

"Don't cry, mother," he told her.

Mahmoud's father, Mohammed, was dead. An Israeli missile had struck their green Mercedes as they fled the southern town of Mansuri, where the family had been vacationing. The boy's uncle, Darwish Mudaihli, was dead, too. The bodies were left in the burning car. Mahmoud's sister Mariam, 8 months old, lay next to him, staring at the ceiling with a Donald Duck pacifier in her mouth. Her eyes were open but lifeless, a stare that suggested having seen too much. Her hair was singed, her face slightly burned. Blisters swelled the tiny fingers on her left hand to twice their size. In other beds of Najm Hospital were their other brothers, 13-year-old Ali and 15-year-old Ahmed.

"What happened?" Ahmed shouted to no one in particular.

It was a question asked often Sunday in Tyre and its hinterland, a bloody day for civilians, even by the standards of this war. Israeli forces repeatedly struck cars on southern Lebanon's already perilous roads in attacks that victims said were indiscriminate. Seven people were killed, three of them when an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at a white minibus carrying 19 people fleeing the village of Tairi, which Israeli forces had ordered residents to evacuate. The missile tore through the roof of the vehicle as it sped around a bend in the road. Layal Najib, a 23-year-old photographer for the Lebanese magazine al-Jaras, was killed when Israeli forces struck near her taxi outside the town of Qana to the northwest. She was the first journalist killed in the 12-day conflict.

'Nothing more than revenge'

"Are there any armed men here? Is there any resistance here?" asked Ali Najm, a physician helping to treat the injured in Tyre. He surveyed the wounded, struggling to maintain the detachment of a medical professional and suppress the anger of a neighbor watching a war that he said he did not understand. "There is no aim to this," he said. "They are innocent people. They are carrying white flags, and they're trying to escape."

The day's events began at 10:30 a.m. when the Mercedes of Mahmoud's family was struck as it barreled down a coastal road dotted by palm trees and banana plantations. As it burned, Zein al-Abdin Zabit passed in his white Nissan with his wife and four sons. His drive was already frantic: Along the road from Naqoura, he had picked up someone wounded in Qlaile, trying to take him to the hospital. A few more miles, then he reached Maaliye, where he picked up two men wounded as they rode a motorcycle.

Near the hospital, a missile struck behind his car, and it caught fire. He floored it for 200 yards more, feeding the flames as he tried to make it to the hospital. Near its entrance, he crashed into a curb, and his ribs were broken. He and the others clambered out, and the gasoline tank exploded. Hours later, the car was a charred carcass. Its tires still smoldered along a row of seared palm trees.

"It's nothing more than revenge, revenge on civilians," Zabit said from his bed.

The hospital was in chaos. Someone with a fire extinguisher tried to put out the flames incinerating Zabit's car as other cars barreled past, fleeing the south. Mahmoud was carried in, cradled in someone's arms. Knots of women sobbed. Then the victims of the minibus arrived from near the town of Kafra. Gurney after gurney entered. One boy's left hand was shredded by shrapnel. A woman sat in a chair, dazed, as others tried to ask her questions. A stretcher smashed into a row of chairs.

"We didn't feel anything. We didn't see anything coming down," said Ali Shaita, a stocky 14-year-old, whose uncle, Mohammed, and grandmother, Nazira, were killed in the attack on the minibus. "It just hit us," said his 12-year-old brother, Abbas.

Ali sat in a bed at Najm Hospital, holding his IV. He was wounded in his chest and left leg. Blood, his and that of his relatives, drenched his red shorts. His brother was hurt in his right leg, head and right arm. His jeans were splotched with more blood. In another room, their mother, Muntaha, sobbed. Her head was wounded, as was her left arm. Her femur was broken in the attack.

"The bandages are too tight on my head," she pleaded to a nurse.

The Shaitas said the car was speeding out of the village at midmorning. The boys' uncle was carrying a white flag with his hand, as was another passenger. Soon after they were hit, a Red Cross ambulance arrived, the crew worried about roads they deemed too risky.

Abbas Bahr, an orthopedic surgeon, had just come out of six hours of surgery, and his face was drawn.

"This is so hard," he said. "I don't know." He repeated the words again.

"And still I don't know what will happen tomorrow."

The day before in Bint Jbeil, two cars carrying seven people were following a Red Cross ambulance when one was wrecked in an Israeli attack, he said. Two wounded women were put in the trunk of the other car. They had died when they arrived at the hospital in Tyre.

Pain and fear

The story of pain and fear was the same across the region, whose inhabitants have abandoned it or are in hiding. The Srours were one of the last families left in the village of Mansuri. They said they had been too afraid to leave. As elsewhere in the south, rumors flew among the huddled: that a ship would take them away, that they had safe passage, that they might be evacuated.

The sense of siege deepened Sunday in Tyre, where residents desperate for fish detonated dynamite in the sea to bring them to the surface. In one of the occasional scenes of confusion, an ambulance hit a 21-year-old resident on a motorcycle, injuring him. Most shops remained closed, and for those people remaining, items like baby's milk, gasoline and chicken were disappearing.

The signal of Hezbollah's radio station, al-Nur, was jammed by Israel, which repeated its own message. "Know that the state of Israel will continue its campaign with force and determination with the goal of ending the terrorist work coming from Lebanese land," the voice said. The message ridiculed Hezbollah's leader, saying he was hiding in a cave. "Where is Hasan Nasrallah?" the voice taunted.

At Jabal Amel Hospital, director Ahmed Mroueh opened the ledger of the wounded.

"This is today," he said. "It begins at No. 267 and ends at 300. This is today, until now."

The physician pointed out the children: 8-year-old Diana Said, 4-year-old Hatem Naame, 7-year-old Mariam Hamadeh.

He shook his head. "This is the worst day we've seen."

A relief worker arrived in an ambulance carrying two corpses from an attack on Srifa, where bodies remain buried in rubble.

'Our morgue is full'

"Take them to the government hospital," Mroueh told him. "Our morgue is full."

The hospital director turned away. "Ten days," he said -- that was how long he thought the staff could cope with the pace.

"It has to stop," he said matter-of-factly. "It has to stop."

Upstairs was Diana Said, hurt in the attack on the minibus. A white bandage covered her left eye. She sat at the foot of the bed of her father, 34-year-old Said Finjan. He asked a doctor about the car's Syrian driver, Mohammed Abed Sheikh, who was killed.

"Where did they put him?" he blurted out.

Across the hall was his wife, 25-year-old Fawziya Finjan, her face swollen and her head bandaged.

"Thank the Lord," she said softly. "God saved my daughter. That's the most important thing."


© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Six Red Cross volunteers were wounded in the Sunday attack, and the injured family they were ferrying to safety suffered fresh agonies. A middle-age man lost his leg from the knee down. His mother was partially paralyzed. A little boy's head was hammered by shrapnel.

Perhaps most dangerous of all, the attack blunted the zeal of the band of gonzo ambulance drivers who have doggedly plugged away as Red Cross volunteers. Young men and women with easy grins and a breezy disregard for their own safety, they have remained as the last visible strand of social structure intact after days of Israeli bombardment.

When the fighting erupted between Israel and Hezbollah, many of the volunteers sent their families north and stayed behind to help their countrymen. Clad in helmets and flak jackets, they brave a rain of Israeli bombs, a crazy maze of cratered roads and perpetual uncertainty over how bad the fighting might become. Fiercely proud of their work at the Red Cross, they had clung desperately to the hope that, as lifesavers, they would be spared.

Many times over nearly two weeks of bombing, medics say, missiles struck the roads nearby; they felt harassed. But somehow, they managed to convince themselves that they were invulnerable to attack.

"We used to kid ourselves, think we couldn't be hit," 38-year-old volunteer Imad Hillal said. "Even in this war, even when bombs fell around us, we never thought we'd be hit. But what happened has changed everything."

Sitting in the radio room at Red Cross headquarters here Monday, Hillal rested his head wearily on one hand. When asked whether the ambulances would continue running, tears clouded his eyes.

The Red Cross team had been sent out into a night that thundered with falling bombs. They'd been assigned to ferry three wounded civilians out of the heaviest battle zone of the southern borderlands on Sunday. One team of medics had headed north from the town of Tibnin, the wounded family stretched flat on gurneys in the back. The other team had rushed south from Tyre to meet them halfway.

From the time the call came in, Chaalan hadn't been able to shake his dread. He didn't understand why. He had made the trip plenty of times before.

As he made his way out to the ambulance, he turned to the other medics loitering around and, surprising even himself, used a traditional Arabic farewell that implies death may be near.

"I'll see you, forgive me," he told them. He'd never said that before. One of his colleagues followed him out the door. "Please take care," she said. She'd never done that before; it made him even more nervous. He brushed her off and climbed into the ambulance.

The three young men drove out to the town of Qana. Looking up, they could see red lights in the sky overhead. Israeli planes, Chaalan thought.

They came to a stop on a stretch of battle-pocked roadway in Qana.

The medics favor that spot because the ambulances, with their trademark red crosses emblazoned on the roofs, can be seen clearly from above. They thought it was safe.

They climbed down, removed the patients from the other ambulance and slid them into place. They moved fast; everybody was nervous.

Then the roar and smash of the missiles shattered the summer night. Both ambulances were hit, directly and systematically, by Israeli bombs, the medics said.

Everybody else must be dead, Chaalan remembered thinking as he slowly came to his senses. He called out his first medic's name, and got an answer. He called out the second man's name. Silence. "We lost one man," he thought.

The grandmother had crawled out of the ambulance after the first missile strike, but the medics didn't realize that. There was no way the adults could have survived, the medics decided.

So they grabbed the little boy and took shelter in a nearby basement.

Most of the houses on the street stood empty, abandoned by families who'd heeded Israeli evacuation orders and fled north. More bombings continued to puncture the night.

Huddled in the darkness of the basement, they ran their hands over their own bodies, checking for injuries. The boy's head, full of shrapnel, was bleeding badly. They used T-shirts to bandage his wounds.

Then they waited in the darkness. They managed to get through to the Red Cross station from their cellphones. An hour and a half dragged past.

Finally, Hillal and the other medics made it to the scene. "It was a disaster," he said.

"The cars had exploded all over the place. There was one man so badly injured we didn't know what to do for him."

At first, the Red Cross had considered whether to stop making ambulance runs altogether, he said. Then the organization thought better of it and recommended that the teams only stop driving south. Hillal didn't know what would happen. He only knew that the ground rules had been blasted away - the medics had been stripped of their sense of safety.

"When we were driving in the ambulance before, we did not feel we are safe 100%," Chaalan said. "But now it's direct on us."

On Monday, medics and the wounded family were all in the hospital. The grandmother lay on her side in a hospital bed, face turned to the sky outside her window.

"Give me something for the pain," she groaned. "I'm going to vomit." A son and grandson were unconscious in the intensive care unit. Her son, whose leg had been struck by the missile, lay under a tangle of tubes. The sheet reached just below the knee. His calf wasn't there anymore.

Chaalan was bleeding from the ear, and stitches bound his chin and a leg. He needed a few more days to recover, but he insisted on going home.

He peeled off his bandages before stopping by to kiss his mother.

And then he was back at the Red Cross station, padding around in a Las Vegas T-shirt, insisting that he was ready to get back to work.

"I prefer to die when I'm helping people," he said. "Not when I'm hiding."

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

"There were 14 other incidents of firing close to this position in the afternoon from the Israeli side and the firing continued during the rescue operation," he said.

In Jerusalem, an Israeli army spokeswoman said the military was investigating the report.

In Rome, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan declined immediate comment on the bombing, saying only: "We are trying to get more details."

Reports also emerged from the Israeli army last night that it had killed the "senior Hezbollah militant" Abu Jafr in fighting in southern Lebanon.

The claims came as Mahmoud Komati, the deputy chief of the Hezbollah politburo, suggested the group had miscalculated Israel's response to its cross-border raids.

"The truth is - let me say this clearly - we didn't even expect [this] response ... that [Israel] would exploit this operation for this big war against us," said Mr Komati.

Why this Israeli savagery? By their cross-border raids and the capture of three Israeli soldiers, Hizballah and Hamas humiliated the Israeli army and dented its deterrent capability. In Israeli eyes, this cannot go unpunished. It is determined to bring home to the Arabs the tremendous cost of daring to attack Israel.

The Israeli army has a score to settle with Hizballah which, by guerrilla harassment, drove it out of Lebanon in 2000, ending its 22-year occupation of the south. With this success, Hizballah demonstrated to the whole Arab world - and to the Palestinians in particular -- that Israel was not invincible. Now Israel is trying to set the record straight.

No doubt some Israeli hawks, like chief of staff Dan Halutz, regret the 'unfinished business' of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon when, having killed 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, it failed to secure the political reward of bringing a submissive Lebanon into its orbit.
This time, too, Israel may find that its war aim of destroying Hizballah and Hamas is unattainable. These are popular movements enjoying mass support. If crushed in the short-term, they will eventually spring back to life and seek revenge. To 'win', Israel would have to kill, not just hundreds, but hundreds of thousands, of people.

Hizballah's leader, Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah -- Israel's 'Enemy Number One' -- has repeatedly warned Israel to expect 'surprises'. The missile attacks on Haifa, Israel's third largest city, and the disabling of one of Israel's most advanced warships, were certainly painful surprises. They carried the war into Israel's home territory, posing a severe challenge to Israel's strategic doctrine, which has always been to fight its wars on Arab territory.

The greatest 'surprise' Hizballah's might still have up its sleeve would be to survive the present crisis, bloody but unbowed. The longer Hizballah holds out, the greater Israel's problems with the international community, and the greater the pressure of Arab opinion on those Arab regimes that have so far stood shiftily on the sidelines.

Israel has always relied on brute force to ensure its security. Since its creation in 1948, it has sought to dominate the region by military means. This doctrine rests on the belief that the Arabs will never be strong enough, or capable enough, to challenge it. This is a fundamentally racist attitude.

But beneath the bluster and the muscle-flexing lies a deep-seated paranoia and insecurity, reflected in the conviction, shared by many of Israel's citizens, that the Arabs want to kill them and that they face a permanent existential threat. The choice, they seem to believe, is between killing or being killed. This dark view of their environment - something of a self-fulfilling prophecy -- goes some way to explaining the extravagantly disproportionate nature of Israel's attacks and its blatant disregard for international legality and any semblance of morality.

Israel is able to behave in this way because it has been given extraordinary immunity by the United States. A striking aspect of the crisis is, indeed, America's total political, diplomatic and strategic support for Israel -- even to the point of rushing to give it $300 million of aviation fuel with which to continue smashing Lebanon!

America's gross bias has paralysed the Security Council, the G8 and the European Union. So great is American pressure that none of these bodies has been able to insist on an immediate end to the Israeli onslaught. Britain dutifully followed its American Big Brother in repeating the mantra that 'Israel has the right to defend itself', while even France, Lebanon's traditional protector, has tended to put the blame on Hizballah, rather than Israel, for the massive destruction and loss of life.

Terrorism is usually defined as the indiscriminate killing of civilians in pursuit of political goals. Is this not what Israel is doing in both Lebanon and Gaza? It is killing large numbers of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in pursuit of its political aim of annihilating Hizballah and Hamas. By any objective standard, Israel is guilty of state terrorism.

But killing Arabs in this wanton manner and smashing their countries must inevitably have negative consequences for Israel's own security. Israel's terrorist behaviour legitimizes the terrorism of its enemies. And America's uncritical support for Israel legitimises terrorism against the United States itself. That is what 9/11 was all about, although to this day the United States has not faced up to why it was attacked. The United States and Israel are sowing the wind and will reap the whirlwind.

Washington's unconditional backing for Israel highlights the fact that this is not simply a war between Israel and Hizballah. By seeking to bomb Lebanon into submission, Israel intends to strike a blow at the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis, which has challenged US-Israeli dominance in the region. The key issue is whose will is to prevail in this vital part of the world.

If the conflict had been a purely local one, Israel might have agreed to an exchange of prisoners, as both Hizballah and Hamas demanded, and as has taken place a number of times in the past. Some 10,000 Palestinian prisoners still languish in Israeli jails. To secure their release is a major Palestinian objective.

But the war has a wider dimension. The United States has given Israel a free rein because it is confronted with the probability of two highly disagreeable developments: a nuclear-armed Iran and a humiliating defeat in Iraq. It urgently needs to regain the initiative in the wider Middle East and has persuaded itself - or been persuaded by Israel's friends inside and outside the Administration -- that Israel can help it do so. The pro-Israeli neocons in the U.S have been trumpeting that a victory for Israel in Lebanon will be a victory for the United States, and a defeat for Israel will be a defeat for the United States.

This is the essential background to Israel's war, which had clearly been long planned in concert with the United States, and with the encouragement of some Christian Lebanese extremists, not unhappy to see Israel 'do the dirty work' for them in 'breaking' Hizballah.
The situation is complicated by a further layer of conflict. The Arab oil producers in the Gulf dread an upset in the regional power balance. They want to continue enjoying their great wealth under the umbrella of American protection. These Gulf regimes fear a dominant Iran and an assertive Shi'ism. This may explain their astonishing passivity in the face of Israel's aggression. But by failing forcefully to condemn Israel's brutality or spring to the defence of beleaguered Lebanon and Gaza, they expose themselves to the anger of the Arab public.
The explosive impact on Arab opinion of the war in Lebanon and the martyrdom of the Palestinians should not be under-estimated, particularly in view of the graphic media coverage of Israeli atrocities, provided by Al-Jazeera and Hizballah's satellite channel, Al-Manar,
Israel's indifference to Arab life risks convincing many young Arabs that long-term coexistence with Israel is not possible. Arab intellectuals are increasingly expressing the view that Israel is a colonial state, which must eventually disappear, as Europe's colonial empires did in their time.
At their summit meeting in Beirut in March 2002, all the Arab states declared their readiness to establish normal peaceful relations with Israel within its 1967 borders. But Israel, intent on expanding its borders, rejected the offer. It must surely be time for Israel to think again. The offer may still be on the table.

Only by withdrawing from Palestinian territories, respecting Lebanon's sovereignty and returning the Golan to Syria will Israel live in peace.

Dear Prime Minister Fouad Siniora,

Perhaps you will be kind enough to answer a few questions regarding the recent visit of United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, so that people around the world who have looked on with sympathy as your country has been ravaged by Israeli aggression can understand your feelings on these important matters.

First of all, why did you allow the Secretary of State to visit Beirut? The Bush administration had already made its position entirely clear and everyone who followed the issue knew that the US would continue to give Israel the "green light" until it finished its military operations according to its original plans.

Were you unaware that Rice had already stated that she was not prepared to offer a "cease fire"?

Were you unaware that the United States was "rushing a shipment of precision-guided bombs to Israel" to continue the slaughter of Lebanese civilians and the destruction of the nation's infrastructure?

Why would you allow yourself to be photographed "smiley-faced" and shaking hands with the woman who is destroying your country and killing your people?

Haven't you seen the pictures of the vast devastation in the south of the country where 750,000 of your people have been forced off their land and shunted into refugee camps? Haven't you heard of the many incidents of the Israeli military intentionally bombing civilians, homes, bridges, milk factories, mosques, airports, power-plants, lighthouses, and ports? http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14069.htm

Haven't you seen the photos of the mass graves and the improvised coffins which have been laid side-by-side in long rows following Israeli bombardment? http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14137.htm

Haven't you heard the reports that Israel is using strange banned weapons in southern Lebanon including cluster-grenades, laser-weaponry, and white phosphorus? http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m25033&hd=0&size=1&l=e

Haven't you heard the haunting shrieks of the young boy who was filmed in hospital by CNN after being incinerated by Israeli napalm? http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14181.htm

Haven't you seen the heartrending picture of the dying Lebanese mother peering up for the last time at her blood-spattered and inconsolable child; another victim of the Israeli onslaught? http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14180.htm

What type of man would put out the "red carpet" for his enemy while his people are still being slaughtered in the field?

A simple phone call to the State Department could have stopped the Secretary from landing in Lebanon. How much courage does that take?

If you were a brave man you would have placed the Secretary and her entire entourage under "house arrest" demanding that Israel stop its "scorched earth" campaign before releasing Rice and her people. But, we do not expect you to do the "courageous thing", just the "decent thing".

No one expects you to join the resistance and fight the butchers who have invaded your country from the south. No one expects you to risk your life to show your love for Lebanon or your willingness to die for your countryman. But why would you humiliate yourself by posing with the very people who have devastated your homeland and killed your country's children? Is your dignity worth so little that you would grovel at Israel/America's feet for a villa in the Riviera and a pocket full of silver?

Jesus Christ said, "For what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world but lose his soul."

What about your soul, Prime Minister? Was that part of America's bargain, too?

You have disgraced your country and betrayed your people. You should do the honorable thing and submit your resignation so that your people can elect a leader worthy of their respect.

Sincerely,

Mike Whitney 7-25-06

What Israel wants

In March, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised that he would officially announce Israel's "new" and in theory "final" borders before 2010. Olmert has committed his government to finish the wall separating Israel from Palestine. Israel will then retreat inside its wall. There was never any intent by Olmert to deal with the duly elected government of Palestine led by Hamas.

As far as Lebanon is concerned, Israel wants nothing less than a permanent buffer zone on its northern flank. And if Lebanon turns into an Iraq, even better - although the Lebanese have learned the hard way about sectarianism and won't "Iraqify" their own country. Beirut will be rebuilt - again, and again the Hariri clan (with its dodgy deals with the US and the Saudis) will plunge Lebanon in further debt purgatory with regard to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as the clan did in the previous reconstruction process.

There's also the all-important matter of the waters of the Litani River in southern Lebanon. Israel might as well prepare the terrain now for the eventual annexation of the Litani.

Beyond Lebanon, Israel is mostly interested also in Syria. The motive: the all-important pipeline route from Kirkuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan, to Haifa. Enter Israel as a major player in Pipelineistan.

So Israel wants to grab water (and territory) from Palestine, water (and territory) from Lebanon and oil from Iraq. This all has to do with the inevitable - the 21st-century energy wars.

This is how we do it

Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, says that "of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared". Since 2000, in fact, when Hezbollah forced Israel out of occupied southern Lebanon.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, already in 2005 the Israelis circulated a "Three Week War" plan - as it unfolds now, almost to the letter - around selected Washington think-tanks and Bush administration officials. The plan was disclosed by an anonymous Israeli army officer equipped with a PowerPoint presentation.

In this war plan, the first week would be dedicated to destroy Hezbollah's long-range missiles, bomb its command-and-control centers, and bomb transportation and communication routes. That has already happened, at least in theory; but although southern Lebanon has been turned into a new Grozny, Hezbollah seems never to extinguish its stockpile of 12,000 rockets.

The second week would concentrate on attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers and weapons caches. Instead, we have seen the continuation of non-stop, indiscriminate attacks. Ground forces would enter the war in the third week - that's where we are now - but only to attack targets discovered during reconnaissance missions (these are ongoing). This plan did not call for a ground invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon. There's not much to occupy anyway - it's all been turned to rubble.

Only the foolish or the misinformed may doubt that this war is also a Pentagon war. As their mutual interest is obvious - Hezbollah must be destroyed - the only detail to be established is who wagged the other's tail first. According to the US-Israel axis' plan, cutting off Hezbollah from Lebanese society would lead to a vulnerable Syria extricating itself from a close relationship with Iran. That's pure wishful thinking, because what Syria wants back is the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights - and that's anathema for Olmert and the Likudniks.

A Vietcong master class

Some, but still only a few, Israelis - sometimes in the columns of the daily newspaper Ha'aretz - are beginning to notice that this carnage will lead nowhere. There are no more than 5,000 Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon. Hezbollah the political party - heavily involved in health, education and social services - is what really matters for Lebanese. It's absurd to pretend to destroy a movement with such popular support as Hezbollah. Secular democrats may not empathize with the movement, but any serious Middle East observer cannot question its legitimacy.

It's as if the Israeli military machine were betting on the elimination of the Shi'ites from Lebanon (they're the majority of the population already) without facing any consequences. Israelis have reasons to believe it's doable. The mainstream US and European media work as nothing but press offices of Israel's Foreign Ministry.

A ceasefire remains "premature" (the whole world is for it, except the US, Britain and Israel). The House of Saud - supported by the US-Israel axis - has de facto encouraged a Sunni-Shi'ite war in the wider Middle East (that fear of the Shi'ite crescent again). It may take time, but the Arab street - and radical Islam - will renew efforts to try to hang the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait from lampposts sooner rather than later. Fawaz Trabulsi, a professor at the American University in Beirut, said, "Now you risk producing something worse than Hezbollah, maybe al-Qaeda No 2."

Meanwhile, Hezbollah's asymmetrical war effort is absorbing everything thrown at it. Resistance is fueled by a mix of beggar's banquet anger, creative military solutions and Shi'ite martyr spirit. Hezbollah fighters are using olive-green uniforms to confuse the Israelis. According to Jane's Weekly, Hezbollah has done a perfect Vietcong - its fighters operating in a network of underground reinforced bunkers and command posts near the Lebanese-Israeli border almost unassailable by Israel Defense Force bombs.

The practical result is that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is ever more popular all over the Arab street. Kind of like the new, 21st-century Saladin. Hezbollah's moral and political cache could not but rise among peoples and movements worldwide who keep being bombed to oblivion but never had a chance to bomb back.

For Hezbollah - as well as for Hamas - "winning" means not being disarmed and/or exterminated, the avowed goal of the State of Israel. Apart from Mao Zedong in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Hezbollah may have also learned a lesson or two from the battlefields of Chechnya - as it configures itself, like the Chechens, as one of the only guerrilla groups in the world capable of facing an extremely powerful state army.

In Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was forced to issue a fatwa denouncing the Israeli assault. This means that Sistani knows very well Iraqi Shi'ites may be on the verge of turning all their anger against - who else - the occupying Anglo-American axis.

The fatwa may not be enough to appease them. Israel's rampage has even unified Baghdad's parliament; Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds took a unanimous vote condemning Israel and calling for a ceasefire. Fiery nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr, whose rising influence rivals Sistani's in US President George W Bush's "democratic" Iraq, hinted what may happen when he said at his Friday sermon in Kufa, "I will continue defending my Shi'ite and Sunni brothers, and I tell them that if we unite, we will defeat Israel without the use of weapons."

As if the few thousand Sunni Arab guerrillas bogging down the mightiest army in history were not enough, Muqtada's Mehdi Army has all the potential to make life even more hellish for the Americans in Iraq.

The asymmetricals never sleep

So this is the way the "war on terror" ends - not with a single bang but with the multi-sonic bangs of asymmetrical actors getting re-energized in their fight against the US-Israel axis. The Israeli army could not put down a Shi'ite guerrilla outfit in southern Lebanon - nor a bunch of stone-throwing Palestinian kids, for that matter. The US Army could not cope with a bunch of scruffy Sunni Arabs armed with fake Kalashnikovs. Sunnis or Shi'ites, stateless or in failed states, freedom fighters or "terrorists", they simply will not go away.

Pursuing their own logic, equally impatient Washington neo-cons and Israeli Likudniks would cherish nothing better than the wholesale destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, and then in Syria and Iran.

What happened in Iraq, and is still happening in Gaza and now in Lebanon, spells that the world will have to get used to a new reality. But against this, the asymmetricals will not only be lurking in the shadows; they will retaliate.

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd