The past is an important teacher and causes us to ask whether the American intervention into Iraq has improved or worsened the already existing paroxysm of the Arab-Israeli crisis, the underlying regional problem. 

This is an important question because it has always been assumed, even in the most optimistic plan—certainly the so-called "Roadmap"—that an important ingredient was the stability of countries in the region and their cooperation in reinforcing aspects of the agreement.  To this end, the foreign policy of the Clinton administration attempted to strike positive incentives with Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and other countries in an effort to affect such an outcome.  This was one of the primary reasons why its approach in Iraq was not as bellicose.

However, the recent military invasion of Iraq has destabilized that country in its relationship to the primary Middle East problem, in the tension created between its relations with the U. S. and its neighbors. 

On the recent visit of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, he criticized the United States over the Israeli bombing of Lebanon because he was sensitive to the fact that in the aftermath of America’s departure, the ruling Iraqi party cannot hope to govern successfully if it alienates Iran and its other Arab neighbors on the fundamental question of Israel's military activities in the region.

So, Israel's massive intervention in Lebanon has rebound consequences for the United States, since Iraq may not be so thoroughly pacified as to break with its neighbors on the fundamental questions of their own security. 

As such, it will also complicate the objective of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who, speaking for the Bush administration, said that "now is the time to create a new Middle East."  This sentiment continues the illusion of what can be accomplished with American military power in the region and announces that the administration has not foresworn the neo-conservative plan to create a “New American century,” a project to pacify the region militarily.  But that will require bringing Iran and Syria into the military equations, which they have been attempting to accomplish.

To be sure, Israel has a right to exist as a sovereign state.  The objection to its methods of securing that existence is the tendency to deploy its superior military power beyond the actual threat that it faces, with the result of wrecking massive havoc and suffering in the wake. 

This cannot be defended by any principle of self-defense in a world that has been groping since World War II toward mutually sustainable actions that require collective security. 

Israel's unilateral actions based on its autonomous perceptions of the threat always catch states in the global system—including the United States—in an unsupportable posture of being rationalized after the fact.  This method cannot be sustained, as it not only complicates American flexibility and expends material and political resources, but causes such incredible human casualties of innocent people that it is unsupportable by the international community.  

Most important, since this was also the method used in the Bush administration's intervention into Iraq, the combined military adventures of the U.S. and Israel in the region fly in the face of the movement of the international system toward collective security as the methodology of peace. 

In fact, it has been supplanted as a convenient method that is expedient to clean up a problem created by autonomous perceptions that lead to rogue actions by powerful states.  Both military actions are the engine of motivation for successive generations of the affected to respond by methods of their own choosing.

So, as the bombs fall, the real damage pushed by the illusions of pursing a "global war on terrorism" or "breaking the back of Hezbollah," Al Qaeda or Hamas is that they can be accomplished by war. 

The reality that policy makers refuse to face is that these political manifestations are ideas which ultimately make their form or name unimportant.  And they will recur time and again as victims of war and failed human approaches until the lessons of the past are respected.

Dr. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of the African American Leadership Institute and Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland-College Park.  His latest books are: “White Nationalism, Black Interests” (WayneStateUniversity Press) and “Freedom Is Not Enough” (Rowman and Littlefield Press).