The Israeli-American invasion.

Israel's invasion of Gaza and Lebanon illustrates the futility of war. It is a blunt instrument that exacts an unbearable price on civilians, and it aggravates problems rather than resolving them.

By the first week of August, Israel's attacks had killed more than 700 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, many of them children. It turned hundreds of thousands of Lebanese--as much as one quarter of the population--into refugees. In Gaza, it killed more than 150 people and created a humanitarian crisis by destroying the only power station there. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights all condemned Israel for committing war crimes.

Hezbollah, too, committed war crimes. It precipitated the conflict with its cross-border attack on Israeli soldiers and the taking of two hostages. It killed dozens of Israelis and terrorized hundreds of thousands more by repeatedly sending rockets into civilian centers.

Even though Hezbollah committed these unjustifiable acts, it escaped with its reputation enhanced, as millions of Arabs and Muslims swelled with pride to see some Arab force finally fight back against Israel.

As a result, Hezbollah is in an even stronger position. It can claim to have stood up to the fourth-largest military in the world not once but twice now (as it takes credit for having expelled Israel from southern Lebanon in 2000 after eighteen years of occupation).

Meanwhile, Israel's moral reputation, which had already fallen steadily after forty years in the West Bank and Gaza, fell even further. And its military reputation suffered as well.

Israel's offensive did not make it more secure.

Nor did the footage of the corpses of Lebanese children. Played over and over again throughout the Arab and Muslim world, the images stoked the hatred of Israel. A fraction of those who watched this coverage will translate their rage into terrorism not only against Israel but also against the United States.

For this was not just an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, it was an Israeli-American invasion.

Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. aid, and has been so for decades. From 2001 to 2005, "Israel received $10.5 billion in Foreign Military Financing--the Pentagon's biggest military aid program--and $6.3 billion in U.S. arms deliveries," Frida Berrigan and William Hartung of the World Policy Institute wrote. "The bulk of Israel's current arsenal is composed of equipment supplied under U.S. military aid programs."

Beyond supplying Israel, the United States put itself foursquare behind the invasions of Gaza and Lebanon. "Let the Palestinians sweat a little," one senior Administration official said after Israel went back into Gaza. The assault on Hezbollah has been a longtime objective of the Bush Administration.

"Hezbollah may be the 'A team' of terrorists and maybe Al Qaeda is actually the 'B team.' And they're on the list, and their time will come," said Richard Armitage, formerly Colin Powell's number two man at the State Department, on 60 Minutes in 2003. "There is no question about it. It's all in good time. And we're going to go after these problems just like a high school wrestler goes after a match. We're going to take them down one at a time."

Vice President Dick Cheney himself gave the green light to Israel in June, according to investigative reporter Wayne Madsen. Incidentally, Cheney's Middle East adviser is none other than David Wurmser, who, along with Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and a few other neocons, wrote the 1996 document "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." This paper gave hawkish advice to the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu. "An effective approach, and one with which America can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon," it said. The "Clean Break" strategy was not lost on Cheney. He echoed that very phrase in a talk he gave to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on March 7 this year.

Israel had the blueprints for the Lebanese invasion drawn up for quite some time. It was just waiting for a pretext to unroll them, and Hezbollah obliged.

"More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists, and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail," reported Matthew Kalman of the San Francisco Chronicle.

At any moment in the offensive, the Bush Administration could have pressured Israel to call it off. Instead, the unforgivable Condoleezza Rice, the execrable John Bolton, and their boss, Bush, kept blocking calls for an immediate cease-fire. Instead, they talked about the need for a "sustainable" cease-fire, even as Israel was killing innocent people. Everyone could decipher that code. "Sustainable" meant no cease-fire; keep on killing.

When matters went from bad to worse, Rice threw up her hands in disingenuous helplessness.

"We want a cease-fire as soon as possible, I would have wanted a cease-fire yesterday if possible, but the parties have to agree to a cease-fire and there have to be certain conditions in place," she said on July 30, the day Israel bombed civilians in Qana, Lebanon. But it was her insistence and Israel's insistence on those "certain conditions" that prevented the ceasefire from taking place, as she well understood.

Israel may not have wanted to accept the immediate cease-fire, but Rice's job should have been to impress upon Israel the moral and practical necessity of doing so. That was not how she or Bush or Cheney proceeded, however. They had their own agenda. They were pursuing the "Clean Break."

Rice and Bush recycled some of their old propaganda. Just as the Iraq War was going to "redraw the map" of the Middle East and blot out terrorism, now the war in Lebanon was supposed to do the same trick, they told us. But the colonial cartographers were in for a bad surprise. They didn't reckon on basic human nature: When people are being bombed, they don't embrace the bombardiers. In Gaza and in Lebanon, Israel's actions only served to harden the opposition. But Rice and Bush were deaf to all that, just as they were to the magnitude of the casualties.

Infamously, Rice talked about the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" even as Israel was killing innocents in Qana.

And Bush, whose indifference is regal, talked about the conflict as a "moment of opportunity." For weeks, he never even bothered to call Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. (It might have helped. Back in August 1982, according to author Richard Reeves, a simple call from Ronald Reagan to Menachem Begin got Israel to stop the shelling of Beirut. "I didn't know I had that kind of power," Reagan reportedly told aide Michael Deaver.)

Bush said, "America is opposing the forces of terror" in the Middle East. But as the whole world could see, Israel also was a force of terror.

Bush said the United States was "laying the foundation of peace for generations to come." But with each passing day, it became more obvious that it was destroying any grounds on which to build that peace.

The Administration and its supporters seemed eager, at times, to expand the war to Syria or Iran. The Jerusalem Post reported on July 30 that Israeli defense officials said "they were receiving indications from the U.S. that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria."

The White House Communications Office favorably cited an article by conservative columnist Max Boot who said, "It's time to let the Israelis take off the gloves.... Israel needs to hit the Assad regime. Hard."

William Kristol, the organizer of the Project for the New American Century, wrote in the July 24 Weekly Standard: "Our focus should be less on Hamas and Hezbollah, and more on their paymasters and real commanders: Syria and Iran." He called for regime change in both countries, adding: "For that matter, we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"

As bad as the Administration was, Congress was, with very few exceptions, no better. On July 20, the House voted 410 to 8 to give blanket support to the Israeli government. That resolution repeatedly condemns Hamas and Hezbollah but doesn't say one critical word about Israel's actions. In Fact, it praises "Israel's longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss and welcomes Israel's continued efforts to prevent civilian casualties." The Senate passed a similar resolution by unanimous voice vote.

Yes, Hezbollah engages in terrorism. Yes, Israel has a right to defend itself, as Bush said ad nauseam. No civilian should have died, not on the Israeli side or on the Arab side. But to look only on one side and not the other was a moral disgrace--especially when the side Washington ignored was the one suffering the most.

There were a few lonely voices of courage.

"The United States is failing in its moral obligation to bring a cessation of the violence in the Middle East," Representative Dennis Kucinich said oil July 25. "This policy of inaction will have great consequences for the region, the world, and the safety of our nation and our allies."

Even blunter was Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. "This madness must stop," he said on July 31. "The sickening slaughter on both sides must end, and it must end now."

But these voices were barely audible. Rice and Bush sure didn't hear them. instead, they followed their long ago discredited strategy: diplomacy by F-16s.

As mighty as Israel is, it cannot win by military power alone.

As mighty as the United States is, it cannot will by military power alone.

Nor can they win together.

If the battle becomes Israel and the United States versus the world, both countries will be at risk.

The United States and Israel have made heroes of Hezbollah thugs.

Bush's green light for Olmert's spilling of red blood has managed only to further enrage the Arab and Muslim world and isolate the United States among its allies. It is not in the interests of the United States, and it is not in Israel's interests either, to show the international community utter disdain. And the war crimes of Israel, and U.S. complicity in them, will long be remembered.

"Death to Israel! Death to America!" are chants that are being uttered from Indonesia to Nigeria--and by hundreds of thousands of people in Baghdad.

Much more than the Iraq War, Israel's offensive in Gaza and its war on Lebanon have reignited fury across the Arab and Muslim world. This jeopardizes the stability of U.S. client states, such as Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. It undermines democracy movements in places like Iran. And it may incite more acts of terror, not only against Israel but also eventually against the United States here at home.

We will be facing the consequences of this latest blunder for years to come.