Shortly after the evacuation began, I had dinner with a young woman who had been one of the first Americans evacuated by the government to Cyprus. She hadn't eaten or slept for days, and for a time stared blankly into her lentil soup. The soothing night air of Cairo's summer eventually coaxed her into eating a bit. She had been notorious for her appetite, and told us that her friends in Beirut really started to worry when she stopped eating several days into the bombing. You have to wonder if the pampered armchair warriors cheering on the increasingly doomed and barbaric assault on Lebanon by Israeli forces would be able to last five minutes in such conditions.

And pity the citizens of Lebanon, for whom there will be no friendly aircraft carriers and cruise ships, no evacuations. They are the prisoners of an Israeli government that seems not to have learned the lessons of its own recent past, and of a clueless and cold American administration that steadfastly refuses to call for a cease-fire. When Condoleezza Rice told stunned reporters that the bloodshed represented the "birth pangs of the new Middle East," people across the region wondered what kind of monster was being brought into the world.

Hundreds of thousands of innocent Lebanese have already been deliberately displaced, with no end to the war in sight despite the recent "pause" in the bombing. The country's infrastructure and economy have been ruined, and about 700 Lebanese civilians have been killed. Far from turning the Lebanese people against Hezbollah, recent opinion polls have confirmed that Israel's brutal aggression has succeeded only in uniting the Arab world behind Hezbollah, including Lebanon's Christians. America's favorite regional dictators remain silent and watch nervously from their palaces as their repressed citizens demonstrate against the U.S. and Israel. And so far the Israeli war plan has failed miserably, with an emboldened Hezbollah inflicting serious losses on the Israeli Defense Forces, and continuing to launch rockets into northern Israel.

Meanwhile, Republican opinion leaders call for — what else? — more war. It is not enough for the Israelis to demolish an entire country to resolve a situation that could easily have been dealt with through negotiations. It is not enough to have the bulk of U.S. military forces tied down fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq and bankrupting the country for decades. No, what we need, of course, is to take the war directly to Hezbollah's sponsors in Iran.

Discussing a potential strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, the dean of the neoconservatives, William Kristol, recently asked, "Why wait?" Meanwhile sources within the Pentagon, hoping to avoid yet another debilitating war, leaked to the press the rather unsurprising "secret" that our military doesn't have the resources to take on the Iranians. The neoconservatives, however, have never let the pleas of their own military professionals get in the way of the apocalyptic schemes for World War III.

With American-made bombs falling from American-made jets on the people of Lebanon and Palestine, the result will be more terrorism. As one frustrated Egyptian graduate student told me, "Israel is America." So after the next terrorist catastrophe, I hope you won't have to think very hard for an answer to the inevitable question, "Why do they hate us?"