Snow said the trip by Nelson, a member of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, and future visits to Syria expected by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., send an unhelpful, mixed message to the Syrians.

"We want to make sure that they understand that just because they have visitors does not mean that the position of the United States government has changed," Snow said.

Taking issue with the White House, Dodd said in a statement that members of Congress "need to go to hotspots not just garden spots. I can't think of a more critical part of the world than the Middle East and I can't think of a more critical player in affecting events in the region for good or for bad than Syria."

Kerry spokesman David Wade said the senators were engaged in fact finding, not negotiating. "If Ronald Reagan could talk to the 'evil empire,' surely United States senators with a responsibility to American troops can visit Syria," Wade said, referring to Reagan's description of the former Soviet Union.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group recommended that the administration engage in direct talks with Syria, but President Bush has reacted coolly to that suggestion.

"The point is that even lending a further specter of legitimacy to that government undermines the cause of democracy in the region," Snow said about Nelson's trip.

Nelson's spokesman Dan McLaughlin called the remarks a "baseless attack" and said the White House was producing the "same old tired, mean-spirited partisan politics" that were unhelpful to the situation in Iraq. McLaughlin defended Nelson's trip as par for the course for a senator who sits on three oversight committees: Armed Services, Foreign Relations and Intelligence.

"In Syria, he met with a man he's met with twice before - not to negotiate, which is the president's job, but to talk and gather facts and report back to Congress and the State Department," McLaughlin said. "Senators meet with heads of state all the time."

The United States has limited diplomatic ties with Syria because of its support of Hezbollah and Hamas, which the United States considers terrorist organizations. Bush expressed reluctance to seek help from Damascus on Iraq until the Syrian government curbs that support and reduces its influence in Lebanon.

"The Syrians should have absolutely no doubt that the position of the United States government is the same as it has been," Snow said.

The UIC, which controls the capital Mogadishu and most of southern Somalia, has given Ethiopia until Tuesday to withdraw its troops from the country. If it fails to do so the Islamists, who are backed by Ethiopia's enemy, Eritrea, say they will attack. Ethiopia, which officially denies having combat troops in Somalia, has rejected the ultimatum.

Western diplomats are seeking ways to bring the Islamists and the Somali government together but little progress has been made. "We still have a tiny window of opportunity to avert war," said a European diplomat in Nairobi yesterday. "But it needs a huge effort ... to get both sides talking."

The US, which tacitly backs Ethiopia's intervention, pushed through a UN security council resolution this month authorising an African protection force to enter Somalia in support of the government. The UIC responded by calling for jihad against any foreign forces sent to the country. The US embassy in Nairobi condemned the UIC's ultimatum yesterday as "irresponsible" and called for negotiations to resume. "Given the existing, heightened tensions in Somalia, this ultimatum further destabilises the situation and undermines international and regional efforts to encourage credible dialogue," the US statement said.

The African Union also voiced alarm yesterday, calling on members to urgently contribute troops to the protection force.

"Somalia has remained a non-state and we have allowed things to rot," said Alpha Oumar Konare, the AU's chairman. "Obviously we are not going to wage war. But there can be no balanced dialogue if the transitional government is not helped and supported." The UN's envoy, François Lonsény Fall, urged a quick resumption of the so-called Khartoum dialogue that stalled in the autumn. Those talks are due to resume on Tuesday.

But hopes that conflict can be avoided faded after Ali Mohamed Gedi, Somalia's prime minister, said war seemed inevitable and his troops were ready for the fight. Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia's prime minister, said his country hoped to avoid war but complained that it was being attacked by the UIC and its Ethiopian Muslim allies. "Since last summer the Islamic Courts have been training and equipping and smuggling armed elements - hundreds of them - into Ethiopia and they have clashed with the security services," Mr Zenawi said recently.

While the two-year-old government has failed to win support from the Somali population, the Islamists have widespread approval. Having kicked the warlords out of Mogadishu in June, and brought order to the city for the first time in 15 years, they quickly spread their influence. Ethiopia is distrusted by most Somalis, who are wary of foreign intervention.

The Islamists' rise also worries the US, which accuses them of links to al-Qaida. In a bid to slow the courts' progress Washington backed the Mogadishu warlords against them - unsuccessfully.

A French Defence Ministry spokesman said the action - which included regular Mirage sorties in neighbouring Chad where tens of thousands of refugees from Darfur are living - was in line with international calls to stabilise the region.

He claimed that without action there was a danger of a "Somalisation" of the region."We want to ensure that the Darfur crisis does not take on a further dimension. The region is crucial if we want to put a peace force in Darfur," he said.

After opposition from the Sudanese President Omar El Beshir, plans to send 20,000 United Nations peacekeepers to Darfur have been axed. Mr Beshir will only accept a beefed-up African Union force with UN logistical support.

The French operations in CAR have been centred on repelling rebels which the government claims are - like the Darfur militias - backed by the Sudanese regime. Others say the rebels of the Union des Forces Démocratiques pour le Rassemblement (UFDR) are disgruntled allies of CAR President François Bozizé who helped him come to power in a 2003 coup and are dissatisfied with his ruling of the country along ethnic lines. Both the rebels and Sudan deny they have any links.

In early November, the UFDR took the north-eastern town of Birao, which has a population of 30,000 people, as well as Ouadda-Djalle and Sam Ouandja.

President Bozizé asked for French help and Paris added 100 troops to the 200 already stationed in the country. These, including paratroopers, are on the ground with the CAR army and with Fomuc - soldiers brought in from regional allies Chad and Gabon.

According to the UFDR, the raids over several days at the start of December included an attack on Birao with six Mirage F1 fighters and four helicopter gunships. It claims the attack forced thousands of civilians to flee towards Darfur and southern Chad.

A French armed forces spokesman yesterday refused to give details of whether bombs, missiles or machinegun-fire had been used by the jets.

Humanitarian groups have not yet succeeded in reaching Birao but in phone calls to residents they have heard reports of executions and rapes by the CAR army.

The rebellion, according to the CAR army, was finally crushed on Monday with the capture of Ouadda-Djalle. However, there are fears that the rebels, who have scattered, will relaunch their offensive.

Nganatouwa Goungaye Wanfiyo, president of the Central African Human Rights League, said France's intervention on the side of the CAR army had been out of all proportion and may have increased the risk of a Darfur-style ethnic conflict. "They have just delayed the problem and worsened it. The opposition wants dialogue with Bozizé, that's all."

The woman, a member of Rwanda's Tutsi minority that made up the vast majority of the some 800,000 victims of the genocide, claimed she had been handed over to a French soldier by extremist Hutu militia in southwest Rwanda.

"I resisted when he tried to unzip my skirt," she said, sobbing continuously from behind an opaque screen as she recounted the alleged attack near the Nyarushishi refugee camp in the former province of Gikongoro.

"He tore my skirt pushed me onto a mattress on the floor and then he forced my legs open," she said.

"I felt like I was dying," she said. "There was blood everywhere and I couldn't breathe. I spent the night in the bush because I couldn't walk back home. I prayed for death, that would have been much better."

The second female witness also claimed to have been raped by a French soldiers after Hutu militiamen delivered her to a military base.

"They destroyed me," she said through tears. "They killed me. I thought the white men were going to save me."

A third, slightly older woman, said she had been walking with her husband when French troops ordered them into trucks, took them to a unidentified location and separated her from her spouse in a room.

"A white man putting on a blue beret found me in the room and raped me," she said. "When he was done, he threw me out of the room and ordered me to join my husband and the other men in front of a nearby building."

Another witness, a soldier in the former French-backed Rwandan government's army, said he and colleagues had brought young Tutsi girls from Nyarushishi refugee camp and nearby hideouts to French troops in exchange for canned meals.

"On one occasion, they refused to pay me and my friends for a girl we were bringing them," he told the panel. "We threatened to kill her. They told us to go ahead. We did it before them."

Thursday's witness claims came a day after two other women told the commission they had been raped by French troops and testimony from ex-militiamen that French soldiers had driven them to sites to massacre Tutsis.

France's defence ministry on Thursday rejected the rape accusations as baseless, accusing the Rwandan panel of political bias.

"This procedure, which has nothing to do with searching for the truth, can only elicit one reaction, and that is indignation," said ministry spokesman Jean-Francois Bureau.

"These accusations are being made without a shadow of proof, for purely political motives," he said, predicting that the panel "will do all it can to bring charges against the French army."

Rwanda accuses France of complicity, if not direct involvement, in the genocide through its training of the country's former army and alleged support for the extremist Hutu Interahamwe militia.

France denies the charges and says its troops instead helped save Tutsis by running a UN-endorsed humanitarian mission in Rwanda at the height of the genocide.

France backed the Hutu-led government of the late Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, whose assassination triggered the genocide, against Tutsi rebels headed by now President Paul Kagame.

Seething anger over France's alleged role and allegations by a French judge against Kagame and current senior Rwandan officials in Habyarimana's death led Kigali last month to sever diplomatic relations with Paris.

The inquiry panel is charged with determining if there is enough evidence to file suit against France for damages at the world court.

A suicide car bomber killed two Afghan soldiers and injured at least one NATO soldier in an attack on a convoy in the restive southeastern province of Paktia, police said.

Another male suicide bomber dressed in a burqa -- the all-covering dress worn by some Islamic women -- wounded two more Afghan soldiers in neighboring Paktika province.

And as winter sets in and fighting enters its traditional annual lull, hundreds of NATO troops backed with armor moved into Kandahar, the Taliban's birthplace in the deserts of the south.

This year's fighting has been the worst since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001 and there has been a dramatic increase in suicide bombings -- a tactic rarely used a year ago and still not as common here as in
Iraq.

At least 4,000 people have been killed in 2006, a quarter of them civilians.

TALIBAN HAVEN

Overnight, hundreds of British, Estonian and Danish troops, backed by scores of armored vehicles, moved from Helmand province to north of the Arghindab River valley in neighboring Kandahar in one of the biggest operations in recent weeks.

British commanders say the area is a haven for Taliban guerrillas in a province that in September saw a massive NATO offensive involving thousands of soldiers. Alliance commanders say it killed several hundred insurgents.

"We're here on an intelligence-led mission against the Taliban," said operation commander Lieutenant-Colonel Matt Holmes. "You can tell by the size of our presence that we mean business."

Kandahar has seen some of the country's fiercest fighting this year and most of the more than 40 Canadians killed since 2001 have died there.

"All right, let's party," said British Marine Taff Blower as members of his Lima Company, 42 Commando, set out in their Viking armored personnel carriers overnight.

After months of NATO commanders in the deserts and snow-covered mountains asking for more soldiers, European Union leaders meeting in Brussels pledged to intensify their efforts in Afghanistan, but offered no more troops.

"Security and development in Afghanistan are mutually dependent," they said in a joint statement, adding that the bloc wanted to ensure development help reached all parts of the impoverished country.

EU officials bristle at suggestions within the alliance that the bloc -- 19 of whose members are also in NATO -- could be doing more, and point not only to the European troop presence but their longstanding reconstruction program.

The draft NATO summit communiqu� promises more reconstruction and development aid, but NATO generals, Afghan leaders and other analysts say money pledged by Afghanistan's allies is not being spent on time and military victories are not being backed by an improvement in the economy or living standards.

Several EU members have troops in Afghanistan but some, including France, Germany and Italy, have said their contingents cannot be sent to the more dangerous parts of the country except in emergencies.

Britain, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, Denmark and Australia have troops deployed in the dangerous south.

"We have to realize that military means alone are not sufficient to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan," Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, whose country has 300 soldiers in the south, told reporters in Brussels.

"If they have an interest in a stable Iraq, they will do it anyway," Rice said.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group included talks with Iran and Syria among its key recommendations it presented to the White House last week for dealing with the worsening chaos in Iraq.

The group, led by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, urged that its report be adopted as a whole.

President George W. Bush is reviewing policy in Iraq and plans to outline a shift in course early next year.

Rice told The Washington Post that Bush could be "quite expansive" in the policy review and that the new plan would be a "departure." However, she told the newspaper that Bush would not radically change any of his long-term goals or commitment to Iraq.

Rice said the administration's goal over the next two years was to help Iraqis marginalize extremists and create a moderate middle that can hold the country together, the Post reported.

The newspaper said she acknowledged that violence may not have ended before the administration leaves office in about two years' time, but said she hopes that Iraqis would "get to a place that is sustainable" by the end of 2008.

Rice also said the administration would not retreat from its push to promote democracy in the Middle East and reiterated her commitment to pursuing peace between Palestinians and Israelis, the Post said.

"Get ready. We are going to the Middle East a lot," Rice said.

Taliban militants have increasingly targeted government officials. Since September, they have killed one provincial governor, narrowly missed another, and killed several district-level police, intelligence and administrative chiefs.

The attacks are aimed at undermining the government of Karzai, who on Tuesday employed some of his toughest rhetoric yet against Pakistan, Afghanistan's eastern neighbor and a U.S. ally.

"The problem is not Taliban. We don't see it that way. The problem is with Pakistan," Karzai told foreign journalists during a trip to Kandahar, the Taliban's former stronghold."

He said the Taliban took power with support from Pakistan, calling it "more than a boss."

"The state of Pakistan was supporting the Taliban, so we presume if there is still any Taliban, that they are being supported by a state element."

Pakistan, a former backer of the Taliban government ousted by U.S.-led forces in 2001, denies that its intelligence agencies still give tacit support to the militants. It says it is doing all it can to patrol the border, which is populated on both sides by Pashtun tribes from which the Taliban draws its support.

Pakistani officials blame the instability in southern and eastern Afghanistan on a failure by Afghan and international forces to bring security and development to the lawless region and public dissatisfaction with Karzai's government.

A purported Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, claimed responsibility for Tuesday's suicide attack.

The bomb went off in a parking lot and Helmand Gov. Mohammed Daud escaped injury, although a district chief was killed. It was the second deadly attack near Daud's office in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, in less than three months. Eight other people were wounded.

Tuesday's suicide bomber - identified by the Taliban spokesman as an Afghan named Mullah Famiullah - approached Daud's compound on foot. His bomb went off as the police guards tried to search him, officials said.

The explosion killed six guards, Washer district chief Abdul Sattar Khan and an unidentified civilian.

Helmand is a center of Afghanistan's vast opium and heroin industry as well as Taliban resistance, and has seen some of the heaviest fighting this year. The bombing came one day after the province's deputy governor, who is the brother of Helmand's former governor, was fired. The two are seen by many as linked to the drug trade.

A British soldier was killed in a clash with insurgents in the province Tuesday.

Karzai was in neighboring Kandahar province, where he traveled with Western diplomats - including U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann - and the chief of NATO forces in Afghanistan to discuss how to prevent civilian casualties in military operations.

A series of civilian deaths during NATO fighting with Taliban militants and in the chaotic aftermath of suicide attacks has fueled Afghan anger.

"We are rightly angered by it and worried by it. NATO is also worried by it, and is working with us to reduce such casualties," Karzai said.

In the latest civilian death, U.S.-led coalition and Afghan forces killed a 13-year-old girl and wounded an 8-year-old girl in a raid in eastern Khost province that also claimed the lives of four suspected militants who had opened fire when challenged to surrender.

According to a tally by The Associated Press based on reports from Afghan, NATO and coalition officials, nearly 4,000 people have died in violence during 2006 - mostly militants but also including about 300 civilians.

Meanwhile, in a video message obtained by AP Television News in Pakistan, Afghan insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar claimed that U.S. troops would be forced out of Afghanistan like the Soviets before them.

Hekmatyar, a former prime minister and fugitive leader of the Hezb-e-Islami militant group that supports the Taliban-led insurgency, also touted the Republican defeat in the U.S. midterm elections as a victory for Islamic militants.

"It seems that every bullet that mujahedeen had fired toward the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan has turned into a vote against Bush," Hekmatyar said. It was not clear where or when the three-minute video was made.

"How?" I asked. But Hariri just flicked his right hand in the air dismissively. There must have been some compromise with Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the chairman of Hizbollah. He wouldn't say.

Only Nasrallah now knows what that compromise was, because the airport is now renamed the Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport - for last year, he was to become the "martyr" associated with the gleaming new terminal and runways - and Nasrallah's own followers are camping out in the centre of Beirut, less than 100 metres from Hariri's grave, demanding the destruction of the elected government supported by Hariri's own son Saad. Nasrallah's son Hadi was killed in a suicidal attack on the Israelis before their withdrawal in 2000, and the Hizbollah leader - true to the necrology associated with his faith - insisted that he receive only congratulations, rather than condolences, for his son's death in battle.

You need to be in Martyrs' Square to understand the absolute conviction with which the Shiites of Lebanon - the largest religious sect in Lebanon, although not a majority - are protesting at the government led by Rafiq Hariri's former economic adviser and friend, Fouad Siniora. Hundreds of Hizbollah security men in white baseball caps cordon off roads so that there can be no contact with the Lebanese troops guarding Siniora's ancient Ottoman serail, in which the Prime Minister and his allies are eating, sleeping and - possibly - working.

They check all bags, like plain-clothes policemen (which, of course, is exactly what they think they are). But their Shiite ministerial colleagues have resigned; so the Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druze in the administration are now supposed to rule Lebanon without those cabinet members who may now represent up to 38 per cent of the population.

If Hizbollah's insistence that the government should resign is unconstitutional, so too, it seems, is Siniora's cabinet now that it no longer contains Shiites. Last Sunday's massive rally in Beirut ended in a peaceful return to their homes by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, policed once again by Hizbollah. Many Lebanese unwisely concluded that this symbolised failure - that Hizbollah's supporters had not been emotionally roused enough to provoke violence - but they were wrong. The discreet ending of the day's rally showed Hizbollah's discipline, not its weakness.

Nor should the government forget how fiercely and how ruthlessly Hizbollah fought the Israelis for 34 days last summer. It may not have been the "divine victory" of which Nasrallah boasted, but it was certainly a defeat for the Israelis, who, when a few thousand of them did manage to fight their way into Lebanon, were appalled to find that some of the Hizbollah fighters possessed Israeli uniforms and - much more seriously - Israel's own aerial photo-reconnaissance pictures of Hizbollah's Lebanese positions, complete with their Hebrew markings.

Hizbollah is a strict and moralistic organisation, but it uses drugs as currency and the assumption in southern Lebanon is that Hizbollah men traded narcotics with Israeli border guards in return for the photographs. Some of the Hizbollah read Hebrew and quickly worked out which of their bunkers had been identified and which remained unknown to the Israelis. So when the war began on 12 July, Hizbollah had already evacuated the caves known to the Israelis and waited for its enemy in the concrete emplacements that it knew the Israelis had not discovered.

Whether you loathe or admire Hizbollah, this was a startlingly professional intelligence operation by the Middle East's most powerful army. And while the resistance was fighting within only a few hundred metres of the Israeli border - at one point attacking an Israeli Merkava tank whose crew simply ran for their lives, abandoning their vehicle and even leaving behind its heavy machine gun - Siniora was on television, wiping away his tears and pleading for a ceasefire. Hence Nasrallah's profound contempt for Siniora's current government, a repugnance that is leeching dangerously into the various religious sects that provide Lebanon with a political system so complex that even some members of the Lebanese parliament cannot understand it.

An opinion poll by Beirut's Centre for Research and Information, for instance, suggests that 73.1 per cent of the population support the creation of a national unity government - the very demand made by Hizbollah. But the breakdown of this figure into religious groups shows that 94 per cent of Shiites and 50 per cent of Christians believe Siniora's cabinet is no longer legitimate, while 83 per cent of Sunnis and 90 per cent of the Druze believe exactly the opposite.

Ex-general Michel Aoun is the quaint, frightening and messianic Maronite leader whose supporters provide the high number of Christians opposed to Siniora. Aoun, who spoke at Sunday's rally in a baseball cap and shirt of bright orange - the colour of his very odd Free Patriotic Movement - provides the essential multi-confessional element that permits Nasrallah to claim that the anti-government protests are not just Shiite. Many Sunni Muslims, Druze and pro-government Christians believe that Aoun's real reason for this pact with the "Party of God", which the US State Department calls "terrorist", is that he wants to become the president of Lebanon. Just why anyone wants to rule Lebanon remains a mystery to me and to many Lebanese, but under the country's hopeless sectarian pact, the president must be a Christian Maronite - which is what Aoun happens to be.

Several cabinet ministers think that Aoun has gone off his rocker. For almost two years - until the Syrians bombed him out of the presidential palace in east Beirut with American permission in 1990 - he deluded himself into believing that he was the president of Lebanon, ruling the country with just three ministers, all of them Christians and one of them an army general, after his would-be Muslim colleagues walked out.

All the while, another Lebanese government ruled in the west of Beirut, an administration that eventually turned out to be the real administration when Aoun fled his burning palace in an armoured vehicle - dressed only in his pyjamas - to plead for asylum at the home of the French ambassador. During this weird period of Lebanese history, Aoun was in the habit of regarding himself as a latterday Napoleon, referring to his "rival" prime minister, the saintly Selim el-Hoss, as Pontius Pilate. When I once suggested to Aoun that this really revealed that he thought he was Jesus Christ, he promptly banned me from Christian east Beirut - until he ended up fighting not only the Syrians but his right-wing Christian allies led by the militia killer Samir Geagea, who today supports the Siniora government.

Readers who find all this a little operatic can imagine the effect it has on the Lebanese. But it all made sense of Aoun's character trait on Sunday when he virtually demanded (with Hizbollah's acquiescence, of course) the setting up of a rival government - presumably led by himself as President - with Shiite ministers and a few Christian party faithful alongside to represent the Prime Minister and others.

This wouldn't be just déjà vu; it would suggest some deep flaw in Aoun's personality that drives him to demand national unity while constantly trying to divide the nation. He found no problem in trying to run Lebanon without Muslim ministers in 1990 - but is outraged at Siniora for trying to remain Prime Minister without Shiite cabinet members today.

In fact, Hizbollah is far more intelligent than to send "Napoleon" back to the Baabda palace. Aoun will be swiftly dispatched - in Lebanon, of course, you have to be careful of using words like this - and the presidency offered to some honourable figure such as Riad Salami who, like all governors of the Lebanese Central Bank, is colourless and boring enough to fulfil his role with due obedience.

Nasrallah is right when he deplores the confessional system in Lebanon, in which the Christian Maronites - perhaps 29 per cent of the country - must hold the presidency, while the Sunnis are prime ministers and the Shiites are given the job of speaker of parliament. As long as it is sectarian, Lebanon cannot become a modern state. The problem is that without being sectarian, Lebanon will no longer exist.

Anyone who has lived in Beirut as long as I have - just over 30 years - occasionally experiences an odd phenomenon which I refer to as the "obvious question" syndrome - the appalled realisation that some extraordinary fact of life here has never been seriously studied or received sufficient reflection.

How is it, I ask myself these days, that this tiny country of perhaps only 5 million people - less than the population of London in a state smaller than the Home Counties, with neither oil nor military power - can obsess and capture and alternatively torture or love the United States, Israel, Syria, Iran, UN forces from France, Italy, Germany, Spain, India, Fiji, China, Turkey, Ireland, Ghana, Poland, you name it - and repeatedly dominate entire weeks of UN Security Council business?

This week, the UN's top investigator into Hariri's murder will make yet another report to the UN Secretary General that may - or may not if George W Bush follows James Baker's advice of befriending Syria for help in Iraq - once more finger the assassins of Damascus for the crime.

Partly, Lebanon exerts its influence over far more dangerous and powerful nations because of its strategic geographical location in the Middle East. North of Beirut, on the wall of the Nahr el-Kelb - the Dog river - can still be found the commemorative plaques, steles, memorial tablets and carvings of other armies that have passed through Lebanon, often to disaster.

There are the remains of Roman, Phoenician, Crusader, Mameluke, Ottoman, French and British armies - along with the Australians, we "liberated" Beirut from Vichy France in 1941 - and even a modern inscription recording the Israeli army's retreat from this country in 2000, placed there by Siniora's nemesis and Syria's best friend, the current President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon.

But this cannot explain Lebanon's fascination. Its towering mountains - which give this country its epic, wide-screen quality - have been the curse of invaders, and the Crusaders themselves felt so threatened by the suicide killers of the "hashashin" - they came via Baghdad - that they preferred to travel along the coast by sea rather than risk the Muslim archers in the hills. That, by the way, is why each of Lebanon's Crusader castles - little "green zones" in Tripoli, Batroun, Byblos, Beirut, Sidon, Tyre - were built exactly a day's sailing from each other.

No, I think it is the Lebanese themselves and their ability to condense into their tiny nation all the contradictions - religious, cultural, political, social - of the massive and fearful region upon which Lebanon sits, in both senses of the phrase, on the edge. Every Middle East crisis will be reflected here in miniature, in ghostly but still disturbing form, by its highly intelligent, cosmopolitan people.

The Iranian Revolution? Why, many of its senior Iranian prelates once taught - or were taught - in the Shiite religious schools east of Tyre. The Israeli-Palestinian war? Well, between 200,000 and 360,000 Palestinian refugees live in cruel poverty in the slum camps of Lebanon, survivors - and sons and daughters and grandsons and grand-daughters of the survivors - of the great Arab exodus from Palestine when Israel came into existence in 1948.

When Israel wanted to crush Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories, it tried to wipe out the Palestinian guerrilla presence in Lebanon with a bloody and vain invasion in 1982, which ended in the frightful slaughter of Palestinians by Israel's allies in the Sabra and Chatila camps. When the Iran-Iraq war began, its rival supporters fought each other in the streets of Beirut. When the war ended, Saddam Hussein shipped many of his now idle tanks and armour to none other than General Aoun - because Aoun was fighting Iraq's Syrian Baathist enemies.

Lebanon almost destroyed the Reagan administration when Oliver North tried to purchase America's hostages in Lebanon in what was to become the Irangate scandal. When Iraq descended into anarchy after America's 2003 invasion, Sunni Lebanese and Palestinians left from Tripoli and Sidon to become suicide bombers against US forces in Iraq, while the sectarian conflict in Mesopotamia ran like an earthquake tremor through the Sunnis and Shiites of Lebanon.

Sayed Hussein Fadlallah, the most learned Shiite scholar in Lebanon - the Americans green-lighted a car bomb assassination attempt funded by the Saudis to kill him but only managed to massacre 72 innocent civilians - has both scholar-pupils and cousins in Iraq, one of whom was murdered two years ago.

The usual anonymous "senior US intelligence officials" were trotted out in the American press last month to claim that Hizbollah was training members of the Mahdi army of Moqtada el-Sadr in Iraq. It was nonsense, but proof that the US administration still sees a fanatic behind every beard in Lebanon; just as the Iranians believe that Lebanon is always on the brink of a US takeover - which is exactly what Nasrallah claims Siniora is now preparing for Washington.

Yet was it not Fadlallah who once announced that Lebanon was "the lung through which Iran breathed"? Were the Iranians not controlling the hostage-takers of Lebanon in the 1980s? I once ended up in a series of bizarre - and fearfully dangerous - attempts to secure the release of my American journalist friend Terry Anderson from seven years of captivity, and ended up lunching with a man who had flown from Tehran to offer me Terry in return for four Iranian government officials kidnapped in Lebanon, one of whom they claimed was in prison in Saddam's Iraq, the other in Israel. If they had been murdered, the Iranians would like their bodies.

So I embarked on a fruitless search for corpses before the same Iranian asked if I would like to persuade the Americans to send them some missiles instead - at which point I immediately walked out of the quicksand, not realising that Oliver North was already in the mud, up to his neck.

But Nasrallah's other ally, Syria, is the Arab state whose shadow falls most darkly over Lebanon. Syria's leadership is largely Alawite - a branch of Shiism - and Syria is also Iran's only Arab ally. I wrote in The Independent years ago that if the Syrian army ever left Lebanon, the civil war would restart - and that if it didn't, Syria would make sure it did. Which is exactly what the Lebanese now suspect Syria is threatening to accomplish via Hizbollah. This is why Siniora's men talk about an attempted Iranian-Syrian coup d'état. This is why the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, is convinced that Syria's military retreat last year is now being reversed by a frightening neighbour which - through the murder of anti-Syrian figures in Lebanon - is now trying to return. A "national unity" government would provide more power to Syria's Lebanese allies.

Both Lebanon and Syria gained their independence from the French in 1946 and they share the same history and language. But as Hazem Saghieh pointed out in the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat this month, Syria chose "unity" while Lebanon chose "liberty". The Syrian flag, with its governessy and ferocious eagle, rarely flew contentedly next to Lebanon's gentle cedar tree banner. Syria has always looked outwards, towards Arab brotherhood and nationalism, first imagined by King Faisel the First, the spiritual father of Syria who vainly sought an Arab version of the Turkish Ottoman empire.

Lebanon looked inwards, at its internal sectarian divisions, its divided cities. If Syria called itself the "beating heart of Arabism", Lebanon was content to be "the only democracy in the Middle East" - though both claims were happier on paper than they were on the ground. Syrian populism challenged Lebanese individualism. Saghieh claims that Syria was formed on the national model of Germany or Italy, while Lebanon was inspired by the political pacts that created Switzerland and Belgium. Syria has its own confessional divisions - I used to watch the pained expressions of its ministers whenever I mentioned the unmentionable: the Alawite faith of the President, the Kurds, the Sunni majority. But these divisions are to be ignored. Lebanon is Eve, the seducer. Syria is Adam. And Eve was once part of Adam's body.

But into the Middle East we have again sent our military forces, in unprecedented numbers, and given our Israeli allies weapons in unprecedented numbers. And the Muslims - you can see their faithful reflection in the lakes and rivers of Lebanon - appear to be winning the war. We have been engulfed in Iraq and are being crushed in southern Afghanistan. Israel was defeated by Hizbollah and cannot suppress the Palestinian intifada. Civil wars or near civil wars have broken out in the lands of our occupation.

And now the same fate taps Lebanon on the shoulder. Oh yes, America will stand firmly at the side of Siniora's democratically elected government against Iran's axis of evil and the devil-Baathists of Syria. But Siniora, "our man" in Lebanon, is in deep trouble.

What we are watching across the whole region is the steady but increasing collapse of American imperial power. It will not be a joyous event. It may prove to be terrifying. It will definitely be bloody. And Lebanon may now be the mirror that proves it all true.