The Hand That Feeds the Fire

The cool rage of Hassan Nasrallah crackled over the telephone line to a Beirut television station. Israeli jets had just tried to kill him from the air, destroying his home and office. "You wanted an open war, and we are ready for an open war," the Hizbullah leader warned. His missile-armed militia would reach deep into Israel. "Our homes will not be the only ones to be destroyed, our children will not be the only ones to die," he vowed. "You wanted to change the rules of the game? You don't know who you're fighting."

He had a point. Israel's nearby enemy was clear enough. The crisis began in Gaza on June 25, when a corporal in the Israeli Army was taken hostage by Hamas guerrillas. Then it exploded across the region last week after Hizbullah guerrillas crossed into Israel to snatch two more soldiers, killing eight. Israel's reaction was swift, brutal and massive. Its forces took the whole of Lebanon hostage, treating the state on its northern border just as it treated the Palestinian territory to its south, tearing apart highways, blockading ports, blowing up the runways and fuel dumps at Beirut's international airport--setting out not only to free the hostages but to eliminate Hizbullah once and for all. Yes, this was war. Nasrallah was right about that.

But battles--and battle lines --are rarely if ever simple in the Middle East. Nasrallah knows that. So do the Israelis, who saw hidden hands behind the Lebanese and Palestinian militants. They accused Syria, which harbors the Hamas leadership in exile and has a longstanding alliance with Hizbullah in Lebanon, of complicity. But they also saw the long arm of their ultimate enemy, Iran--the creator of Hizbullah, a patron of Hamas, the ally of Syria, the provider of rockets that struck 22 miles deep into Israel last week and a missile that crippled an Israeli warship. Iran, developer of nuclear technology and eventually, perhaps, nuclear weapons.

In an exclusive interview with NEWSWEEK's Richard Wolffe, President George W. Bush said he thinks those suspicions are legitimate: "There's a lot of people who believe that the Iranians are trying to exert more and more influence over the entire region and the use of Hizbullah is to create more chaos to advance their strategy." He called that "a theory that's got some legs to it as far as I'm concerned."

One aim of "those who perpetuate violence," said Bush, would be to disrupt the international consensus against Iran's nuclear-enrichment program. Hizbullah launched its attack on Israel the same day that foreign ministers from the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany agreed to push ahead with demands that Iran suspend its nuclear efforts. The second part of the Iranian strategy, Bush suggested, would be to "create conditions such that moderate governments tend to step back in fear, and the vacuum would then be filled by the proponents of an aggressive ideology."

For more than 50 years, the Middle East's wars have been the world's wars. Greater powers have used lesser ones as proxies, and battles between large states have been fought out in smaller ones--often in weak, divided Lebanon. But skirmishes can turn quickly to conflagrations, and calibrated violence can escalate suddenly into atrocity with unpredictable and enduring consequences. As fighting raged last week, global shocks were quick in coming. Oil prices soared to record highs--above $78 a barrel--and the troubled skies over Beirut filled with thunderous echoes of the bloody past: massive Israeli assaults on southern Lebanon in 1978 and 1996, and the full-scale invasion of 1982 that sucked the United States into a nightmare of truck-bombings and hostage-takings.