The past two weeks have revived my memories of the 1996 Qana massacre, writes Lara Marlowe in Damascus
Before boarding a plane for Syria, en route for Beirut, I looked up the reports I filed during two previous Israeli assaults on the tiny Mediterranean country, in 1993 and 1996. A decade later, Lebanon's plight - and the prospects of a wider conflagration - are more dire than ever. The country seems locked in tragic repetition.
Thirteen years ago this week, Israel launched "Operation Accountability" after the Shia Muslim Hizbullah and Iranian-backed Palestinians killed seven Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon.
The Irish Battalion was still part of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon then. At Tibnin, where "Irish Batt" had its headquarters, I sat out an artillery bombardment in the local hospital, talking to the hospital's administrator, Lebanese army Col Ali Fawaz.
"The Syrians and Iranians are fighting a war against the Israelis here in southern Lebanon," Fawaz told me. "The Lebanese pay, pay and pay. Arabs say the strong always devour the weak. Lebanon is the weakest country in the Middle East."
There are 1,600 refugees sheltering in Tibnin Hospital, again. Many walked for miles in bare feet or sandals through Israeli bombardment. They are pawns in a cruel and cynical struggle for the control of Lebanon and influence throughout the region.
"A lot of us think the Israelis are doing this for the Americans," a European diplomat in Israel told me a few days ago. "The Israelis are the Americans' proxies, and Hizbullah are the Iranians' proxies." The danger, of course, is that this US-Iranian war by proxy will spread beyond the borders of poor, unfortunate Lebanon - "like a hurricane", says Iran's foreign minister, Manoucher Mottaki.
When Col Fawaz prefigured the European diplomat's analysis 13 years ago, the situation was less desperate. George Bush pere had convened a Middle East peace conference in Madrid in the autumn of 1991. Though progress was glacial, there was an understanding that a settlement would be based on UN Security Council resolutions and the principle of land for peace.
Syria had a stake in the Madrid process, because it hoped to retrieve the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967.
Then Yasser Arafat secretly negotiated a separate, doomed deal with the Israelis in Oslo. Syrian president Hafez al-Assad's dream of a "global, comprehensive" peace with Israel collapsed.
As the beneficiary of unconditional US support, Israel abandoned the idea of relinquishing occupied land in exchange for peace. Israel and the US came to believe they could reshape the Middle East through military force.
In Lebanon, Hizbullah achieved political legitimacy by driving Israeli troops out of the south in May 2000. For the past six years, the "Party of God" pursued a dual strategy of strengthening its political role while building up its military apparatus.
In Hizbullah's mentor, Iran, a far more radical, rabidly anti-Israeli president came to power.
As Iran's conduit to Hizbullah and the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Syria retains a pivotal role in any potential solution to the twin Lebanese and Palestinian crises.
Damascus's prime objective of recovering the Golan Heights has been overtaken by the regime's desire to escape blame for the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others last year. Syria's capacity to restrain Hizbullah may be directly linked to Washington's amnesia.
In the meantime, more than 400 Lebanese have been killed in the Israeli onslaught - approximately 10 times the number of Israelis killed by Hizbullah missiles.
Elie Barnavi, Israel's former ambassador to Paris, told Le Point magazine that, barring "a big blunder" or "intolerable international pressure", Israel will be able to continue its offensive until it has eliminated Hizbullah's ability to attack Israel.
The "big blunder" to which Barnavi referred was the massacre by artillery bombardment of 105 Lebanese civilians who were sheltering at Unifil's Fijian Battalion headquarters in Qana, southern Lebanon, on April 8th, 1996.
A report to then UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali concluded that Qana was "unlikely" to have been an accident. Israeli troops continued shelling for at least 10 minutes after Unifil notified the Israeli army they were attacking a UN base packed with refugees. Boutros-Ghali later told me the US forced him out of his job because of the Qana report.
The past two weeks have revived my memories of the Qana massacre. On the day, I was in an Irish Batt convoy a few kilometres away when the explosions started. I can still hear the voice of a Lebanese army officer screaming over the radio: "The people are dying here! We hear the voice of death. Do you understand?"
I can still see the blood flowing down the slope at the entry to Fiji Batt headquarters, the dazed blue helmets piling up charred bodies, wearing rubber gloves to collect limbs and pieces of flesh in rubbish bags. In the blown-out officers' mess, a soldier held aloft a headless baby.
Now Israel has bombed the UN in Lebanon again, killing four UN observers. Two days earlier, Jan Egeland, the UN deputy secretary general for humanitarian affairs, accused Israel of violating humanitarian law.
Miniature Qanas keep occurring; whole families incinerated in their cars, after they obeyed Israeli orders to flee their homes.
Was the Bush administration making a ghoulish joke when it promised $30 million in humanitarian aid to Lebanon this week?
Do Washington and Tel Aviv not see the irony in their demand for enforcement of Security Council resolution 1559, which calls for the disarming of Hizbullah?
Since Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions criticising Israel. Had Israel complied with resolutions 242 and 338, which require it to give back Arab lands captured in 1967, we would not again be the sad, impotent witnesses of carnage in Lebanon.
The rule of international law - the non-selective enforcement of all Security Council resolutions - provides the only hope of freeing Lebanon from this infernal, repetitious cycle.