At first it seems like there is a sense of a fatalistic deja vu in what is happening in Lebanon now. Once again, with memories of 1982 reawakened in our minds, we watch as Israel invades Lebanon as if it were its back garden, as it pounds and destroys buildings, and as innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire and children die in their dozens under the rubble.

Israel’s full-scale invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to drive out the Palestine Liberation Organisation led to a two-month siege of Beirut that killed 19,000, permitted the massacre of refugees at Sabra and Shatila, and destroyed not just the PLO but also Israel’s reputation. And, of course, it hatched Hizbullah.

Twenty-four years later, it appears that the same scenes have come back to haunt us, and the massive rebuilding that has been going on in Beirut now seems doomed to collapse again along with its economy

But much, so much, has happened in the meantime and the world in 2006 is no longer the world it was in 1982.

Today, Lebanon, the Middle East and the world itself are all different. The geopolitical contours of the Middle East have been drastically and irrevocably changed mostly due to what happened in Iraq. Now, post 9/11 everything is all the more intricately connected and nothing happens that does not have an impact, a consequence, an effect somewhere else on the geopolitical chessboard.

The war on Iraq, the one George W Bush crowed had “mission accomplished” written all over it, was meant to enable the US to pursue a radical new freedom agenda in the region (tough on terrorism, tough on the causes of terrorism) with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, regime change and the introduction of western-style democracy with elections and the like.

Three years down the line, Iraq is now a broken down State, tottering on the brink of sectarian war between its Sunni minority and its Shia majority, with some 100 victims a day, a shattered State where bandits and sectarians rule.

The newly-empowered Shia majority in Iraq is inflamed by Israel’s US-licensed destruction of Shia Lebanon.

And as Hizbullah keeps threatening to launch missiles that will strike the heart of Israel, Israel, normally paranoid and now ballistically so, pushes forward inside southern Lebanon to take all Hizbullah fortresses and thus implement the UN resolution, which said the Lebanese army should take over from Israel once it withdrew … in 2000.

This is how we got from border incidents, provoked by Hamas and Hizbullah, to the brink of regional conflagration, which could lead to further mayhem. One must also understand the way the US administration, now in its second and final term, is reasoning, or better still, not reasoning. Having failed so signally in Iraq, it is in total denial, thus acquiescing in what is done by its preferred partner, Israel.

If the US has thereby forfeited all its (slim) chances of legitimacy in the Arab and Muslim world, Europe is still a factor that signally does not count for anything in the whole Middle East equation.

All that we are seeing on our television screens proves Francis Fukuyama wrong: he thought the history of the world had come to an end with the overthrow of the Soviet empire. But he never foresaw the coming of age of the militant Islamic world.

It would thus seem that it was Samuel Huntington who was right. The Clash of Civilisations has indeed come and, if we are not exactly at the beginning of the Third World War, as George Bush once said, and if post 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq we are not seeing a billion angry Muslims on the warpath against the West, it does not look all that far away either!

Having said that, it must also be stated that once again it has been Israel that has proved to be more clear-eyed. For it seems to have correctly gauged the growing alarm in the Sunni Arab world at the advance of Shia radicalism under Iran’s leadership. It has even been reported that there has been a wave of private satisfaction – in Cairo, Riyadh and Amman – at the beating being administered to Hizbullah. However, if the pounding of Beirut and other Lebanese cities were to continue and if children, women and civilians continue to be the targets, Arab sympathies may go beyond the Shia – Sunni divide.

The game is now being played in the other Arab countries where Arab leaders, most of them in power through force or power struggles, have come to fear the reaction of their people at what they see on Al Jazeera, or some other Arab TV network, as much as they fear Iranian influence in the Levant and the Gulf.