Anyone who’s ever watched horror movies knows that monsters are created by brilliant scientists who try to change the laws of nature. And who could blame them for wanting to free themselves of those strait-jackets known as common sense and conventional wisdom? Dr. Frankenstein thought he could create life, or at least, defeat death by galvanizing stitched-together body parts pulled from different coffins. In his own very special way, he was just thinking outside the box.

In the Middle East for the last quarter century we’ve seen similar thinking among some of the leaders of Israel and the United States. When conventional diplomacy failed them, or simply tried their patience, they looked for brilliant solutions that no one else had dared to try before. (“They call me mad, MAD!” said the scientist. So, too, these strategists.) The results in the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan and especially in Iraq, that monumental experiment gone massively wrong, have helped create monstrosities more terrible than anything ever conjured on the back lots of Hollywood.

But here’s what’s so stunning about the current horror show in Lebanon: it’s a sequel. The Israeli government is not concocting bold formulas for the future that were never tried before, it’s dragging out the same old calculations for destruction, humiliation, occupation, and international intervention that failed it in Lebanon 20 years ago. The last time around, Hizbullah is what rose from the rubble. This time we can expect something even worse, and what’s perhaps more appalling, some senior Israeli officials and American officials don’t seem to care.

One especially frank strategic thinker, who’s quite close to the Israeli government, told NEWSWEEK that he (and those in power with whom he’s intimate) see three plausible outcomes of the current war.

One: Lebanon collapses. The political elite there will not, and very probably, can not summon the nerve to rein in Hizbullah, force it to disband and assert government control over all of Lebanon’s territory. In that case, as The Strategist put it, “No more Lebanon.” The territory north of Israel “becomes a no-man’s land.” The Christian, Druze and Sunni minorities flee, if they can afford to. The Shiites, who remain the poorest part of the population, stay by default and very possibly by choice. After all, their leaders would be in control. In effect, Lebanon becomes Hizbullahstan.

No, that’s not the outcome the Israeli government wants. But it’s a gamble that it’s willing to take. Behind its thinking is the passionate conviction that now is the moment when the Lebanese government and the Lebanese people have to decide if theirs will be a nation state, or merely a collection of warring factions held loosely together by temporary truces. “Getting control of Hizbullah is not a task for the Lebanese Army,” as the Israeli strategist told us. “It has to be a national commitment." Yes, the decision would be painful for Lebanon—would cost lives. But “there comes a time when a nation has to decide to preserve itself by sacrifice. If the Lebanese won't seize this moment, then no more Lebanon."

A second option: "Lebanon becomes another Kosovo." Peace is maintained by a massive international force which sits there for years while, one hopes, the Lebanese figure out their destiny. The strategist said this was "an outcome which has been discussed for the past 20 years.” He said that now the time has come, perhaps.

A third option: Syria comes back to control Lebanon "and all is forgiven." Sure, the United States slapped the Damascene hand and helped compel its troops to leave barely one year ago, with the cooperation and, some say, at the instigation of the French. But the spirit of Lebanese national unity that was expected and hoped for—and seemed to be so much in evidence when a million Lebanese filled the streets in protest on March 14, 2005—well, it just hadn’t gelled. Instead of a national government controlling a unified state, politicians started cutting all sorts of side deals (Christian Gen. Michel Aoun got in bed with Hizbullah, for instance).

The Strategist said Israel had no doubt of Syria's (as well as Iran’s) hand in this latest Hizbullah offensive, and he figured Syria, like Israel, saw Syria's return to power as a likely outcome. There was never much question that Syrian President Bashal al-Assad would exact a price on the Americans and French for his humiliation last year. But Israel wouldn’t mind the Syrian hand on Lebanon’s chaos once again. "It would simplify things,” he said. “Every Katyusha that lands in Israel, you bomb Damascus."

So, if this thinker is any indication, and he was speaking frankly to one of my colleagues who is an old friend of his, then Israel’s strategy is brutally simple: “We cannot wipe out Hizbullah by force of arms.” Only the Lebanese, or perhaps the Syrians, can do that. Israel's wide-ranging air campaign is meant to demonstrate that no community in Lebanon—Christian, Druze or Sunni—can opt out of this crisis. How? By doing enough damage to infrastructures that matter to each group. "Israel will punish them harshly because they did not do what they needed to do." In this wider strategy "Hizbullah is a tactical problem." The big issue is Lebanese political will.

You can see the logic here, and also the wider goal, which is to show Hizbullah’s backers, Syria and Iran, what could happen to them. “The most important thing is to establish deterrence,” he said. "The Syrians know that Israel is doing all this with one-fifth of its air force," he said. “And they saw we shut down the country [Lebanon] in a matter of hours."

Have Hizbullah’s backers indeed been paying attention? The Strategist says yes. The Iranian leadership used to boast about supporting Hizbullah. Of late, the regime has been more circumspect. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, co-founded by retired Israeli intelligence officer Yigal Carmon, “On July 28, 2006, the Iranian news agency Fars published a report on a meeting in Damascus between Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani and Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. Several days later, the Iranian regime issued a denial, stating that Larijani had not gone to Damascus at all. Apparently, the regime also ordered the rest of the Iranian media to deny that the meeting had taken place—even though it was the regime itself that had informed the media of the meeting in the first place.”

The Strategist also discerns indications that Assad has decided to reject Hizbullah requests for re-supply, but, typically, without actually saying no to Nasrallah. According to the Strategist, at the start of the war Israel sent a message to Syria through third parties saying that Israel did not intend to widen the conflict so long as Syria did not send fresh arms shipments to Hizbullah. Any trucks going into Lebanon would have to remain uncovered so their contents could be seen from the air. While NEWSWEEK could not confirm this independently, subsequent events do lend credence to this account. In the first week of fighting, Syria sent a military convoy down the road to Lebanon—three big tractor-trailers of a kind often used by the Syrians as tank-transports and for other heavy weapons. All three had canvas covers, and Israel duly destroyed them. (Video footage taken from the air of trucks being blasted as they crossed the border was subsequently released by the Israelis.) Not a peep from Syria. The Israeli supposition is that Assad deliberately sent the trailers, knowing they would be destroyed, to demonstrate to Hizbullah’s leaders that he was willing to re-supply them but, alas, could not.

So in the mind of the Strategist, and presumably of at least some members of the Israeli government that he’s close to, this war is working to Israel’s benefit. Iran can no longer threaten to “unleash” Hizbullah in response to pressure, whether diplomatic or military, to stop its nuclear program. Hizbullah will be eviscerated if not obliterated. And long-term, this source figured, Syria might even be pried away from its alliance with Iran. The regime in Tehran, especially President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would not be forgiven for repeated calls to destroy Israel. "Words have consequences,” said the Strategist. “His life is forfeit."

I don’t doubt that the Strategist and many members of the Israeli government believe this analysis, just as the Bush administration believed in May of 2003 that its mission was accomplished in Iraq.

But, the Lebanese Army? After 15 years of civil war and 15 years of Syrian occupation, which only ended last year, Lebanon’s military is at best ineffectual, at worst a bad joke. “What do the soldiers do? They’re used to drive the officers’ wives to the beach,” says a Lebanese woman with close ties to the Beirut government, who asked not to be named because she was speaking unofficially. And whatever political will against Hizbullah the Lebanese had a year ago has been bombed out of existence by Israel in the last month. That’s why there’s all the wrangling at the United Nations about what kind of international force will back up the local troops, and in fact do the job of enforcing the disarmament of Hizbullah themselves.

Which brings us to the Kosovo model. In the early days of this war, the Israeli military under Air Force General Dan Halutz, the chief of staff, seemed to think air power alone could win the day, as it did in Kosovo in 1999. But France and other countries that might put their boots on the ground see the grim precedents of the 1982 Lebanon war—the elusive enemies, the tenacious suicide bombers—as the bit of history to remember. They’ve been down that road, and don’t want to go there again. As for a restoration of Syrian suzerainty, such a move would make even more of a farce of the democracy the Bush administration says it wants to promote than the “state within a state” that Hizbullah represented.

Unfortunately for thinkers in Israel like the Strategist, for the Bush administration officials who are often drawn into their wake, and for the innocents of Israel and Lebanon who pay the price with their lives, it’s not only words, but wars that have consequences, and they are rarely those intended.