After four weeks of conflict, Lebanon lies in tatters and the Middle East is poised on the brink of a wider conflagration. Yet there are hopes of a ceasefire and an eventual diplomatic resolution, writes Paul Cullen
Less than a month is all it took to turn the clock back 20 years. A month to destroy Lebanon's infrastructure, so painfully rebuilt after previous conflicts. A month to make hundred of civilians pay with their lives, and to ratchet up the quotient of hatred once again.
So far, over 900 people have died in Israel's bombardment of Lebanon, most of them civilians. Almost 70 have died in Israel, many killed by rockets fired by Hizbullah from across the border.
Israeli military might has struggled against a surprisingly well organised and entrenched enemy; already the conflict has gone on longer than the Yom Kippur War and the Six Day War, with no clear sign of victory in sight.
As seen on television, the war seems localised. The Israeli army has concentrated its firepower on Hizbullah's strongholds in south Lebanon and the south of Beirut; Hizbullah's Katyusha rockets can barely reach farther south than Haifa. The number of casualties is less than half the death rate in Iraq over the same period.
Yet this conflict is anything but localised. Behind both Israel and Hizbullah lie distinct networks of support, financing and arms supply leading back to the US on the one hand, and Syria and Iran on the other. Those caught in the middle include, in different ways, the weak coalition governing Lebanon, moderate Arab neighbours such as Jordan, and the EU.
The positions taken by various sides are influenced by wider motivations - for example, America's desire for regime change in the Middle East, or Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. The potential for a wider conflict - in the form of civil war in Lebanon, or a US or Israeli attack on Syria and/or Iran - remains significant.
Whatever their politics, most observers are agreed on a few key points: Hizbullah started the conflict with its cross-border raid on July 12th, in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed; Israel has reacted with massive and disproportionate force; and Lebanese civilians have borne the brunt of the violence.
This war is different from previous conflicts; in 1967 and 1973, Israel fought conventional, conscript armies sent out by authoritarian Arab regimes.
Today, the other side doesn't play by the traditional rules.
Its opponent, Hizbullah, operates beyond the limits of a state and has no infrastructure. It appears, makes a stand and melts away again. Its rockets don't have to hit their targets; merely by landing in Israel they shatter the myth of Israeli invincibility. Its forces are distributed, minimising the chances of them suffering a knockout blow, and by operating from within communities, are extraordinarily hard to root out without incurring civilian deaths.
For Israelis, other wars were about borders; this one, it is increasingly being claimed, is about their very existence. Lose this one, and the tide could start running out on this creation of the founding fathers of Zionism. Without the protection afforded by a strong army, the equation that pits six million Israelis against 1.2 billion Muslims starts to look rather uneven.
This war is, more than any before, a battle for public opinion.
Since 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, the Arab world is more polarised than ever. Al-Qaeda and its supporters use the tools of modern communications effectively to propagate their philosophy and recruit, and Israeli attacks on Lebanon are grist to their mill. Already, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah is being acclaimed as the new Abdal Nasser, the nationalist Egyptian leader who was the first Arab to take on the West in 1956. In the battle of perceptions, Hizbullah can lose heroically and still win.
In 1982, when the Israelis invaded south Lebanon and marched into Beirut, their aim was to get rid of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and remove Syrian influence from the country. Initially at least, many Shias, weary of being targeted as a result of the PLO's guerrilla adventures, cheered on their efforts.
That didn't last long. The PLO left, only to be replaced by Hizbullah, which is firmly rooted in Lebanon's Shia community and acts as a state within a state.
Secular enemies were replaced by fundamentalist enemies using hitherto unused tactics, notably the suicide bomb. Unlike the PLO, whose leadership fled in a boat to Tunis, Hizbullah isn't going anywhere.
Talk of a ceasefire will remain just that - talk - until Israel achieves its war goals. The US will see to that, by using its veto on the UN security council and resisting the rush towards an immediate ceasefire. The trouble for the Israelis is that it isn't clear what their aims are.
They started by demanding the return of two soldiers abducted by Hizbullah, and that ostensibly remains a core demand.
However the level of violence inflicted on Lebanon in the past four weeks could never be justified by such a limited objective.
More critically, the Israelis want to destroy Hizbullah. The army, with neo-conservative elements in the US acting as cheerleaders, see this as an opportunity to root out a malign force threatening Israel's safety. This aim always looked ambitious, and given the lack of progress in the campaign so far, it now looks impossible.
So the objective then became to knock out Hizbullah's offensive capability by destroying its rockets and command centres. Lately, as the Shia militia's rockets continue to rain down on Israel, this aim has been further softened; now the talk is of "degrading" Hizbullah's attacking forces.
In the words of Israeli deputy prime minister Shimon Peres this week, a tactical victory would mean that Hizbullah cannot endanger Israeli lives from southern Lebanon.
Achieving this aim means inflicting the maximum military damage on Hizbullah before being forced to accept a ceasefire. Massacres such as the one at Qana, even if it was accidental, are counter-productive because they bring forward the date of a likely ceasefire.
With more Katyusha rockets than ever falling on Israel at the end of this week, it's clear the army's work is far from done.