Beginning with the first problem, it is clear that Israel's conflict with Hezbollah and Hamas is a proxy battle, in which the real enemies are Syria and Iran. Iran supplies rockets, arms and money, and Syria provides money, intelligence support and sanctuary. Khaled Meshaal, political leader of Hamas, is based in Syria.

The motives of Iran and Syria are clear. Ever since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the regimes of Damascus and Tehran have felt, not without reason, that they are the next targets for the regime change envisaged in the Bush administration's strategy for a reformed and transformed Middle East. For each regime, therefore, the overwhelming policy objective has been to distract, deter and otherwise fend off the American threat.

With considerable thoughtfulness, Iran has pursued its nuclear ambitions, built up its influence among fellow Shiites in Iraq and used its energy reserves and its cash to buy diplomatic support in China and Russia, and to scare the pants off the world's energy consumers, who fear the oil price will soar beyond $100 a barrel if the U.S. administration pursues that military option that President George W. Bush insists is always on the table. This may be enough to deter the Americans, but only a very bold and confident Ayatollah would count on it.

Syria is in a far worse situation. It has little energy to export, few friends and no known nuclear option. With its economy stalled, and humiliated by the forced expulsion of its troops from Lebanon and still facing the United Nations-sponsored inquiry into its role in the killing of Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, it is also a regime in much deeper trouble than Iran.

So in the absence of other assets, Syria is quite logically using in Hezbollah clients to restore its own position in Lebanon, to rebuild its prestige among the Palestinians and Arab radicals as the last sure bulwark against Israel, and to create the kind of crisis that make Arab and world opinion once again see Israel -- rather than Arab and Palestinian extremists and rejectionists -- as the problem. It may be a flawed strategy, but for the Damascus regime which thinks it is battling for survival, it makes sense.

Hamas and Hezbollah are not cat's-paws to be used and abused by Tehran and Damascus, but political bodies which have seen serious rivalry between moderate wings, who are prepared to move toward some kind of modus vivendi with Israel, and the rejectionists, who are not.

To come out on top in the internal political struggle, the rejectionists found the fiendishly clever tactic of kidnapping Israeli soldiers, which put intense pressure on the new and relatively untried government of Ehud Olmert, who felt he had to demonstrate that he was a tough and worthy successor to Ariel Sharon by sending tanks back into Gaza.

Tehran and Damascus were only too ready to support the Hamas-Hezbollah extremists in this deliberate escalation of tension, since the last thing they want is any kind of peace breaking out that would reduce their leverage on the Israel-Palestine front. But Iran and Syria appear to have made one major miscalculation. For good historical reasons, they over-estimated the emotive power of Israel's attacks on Gaza and Lebanon to incite and ignite a wider Arab outrage.

Just like the famous dog in Sherlock Holmes that significantly failed to bark in the night, the main Arab states have this time failed to rally behind the call of Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to help Hezbollah in its fight against "the evil and cancerous being" that is Israel.

Iran and Syria are on their own. In a phone call Tuesday between Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, the Iranian leader pledged to back Syria against any Israeli attack.

He was quoted by Tehran's state-controlled media as telling his Syrian counterpart: "If Israel commits another act of idiocy and attacks Syria, this will be the same as an act of aggression against the entire Islamic world and will receive a stinging response."

But in this, Ahmadinejad is wrong. The Egyptians and Jordanians are silent. The Saudis have issued a statement that stresses: "A distinction must be made between legitimate resistance and uncalculated adventures undertaken by elements inside Lebanon and those behind them."

The Sunni world is not going along with the vision from Shiite Tehran. And while Syria's population is predominantly Sunni, its regime is dominated by the Alawite sect, a Shiite offshoot.

The Sunni world has seen the way that the wretched misadventure in Iraq has created a sectarian war within Islam, and suspects Tehran of seeking to build a Shiite empire that stretches from Iran's Indian Ocean coastline to the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon, and takes in the Shiites of southern Iraq and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia -- and their associated oil fields -- along the way. And they want no part of it.

So the hopeful news from this latest Middle Eastern crisis is that a wider regional war of the old fashioned kind that sets Arabs against Israelis looks unlikely, but the new kind of Islamic civil war that Iraq has suffered for the past three years looks all too possible. And so long as the regimes of Damascus and Tehran believe that they are fighting for their lives against the American superpower, dangerous mistakes and escalations are all too likely to happen.

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