The twilight war in Lebanon since 2005 has transformed the geopolitical calculus of the Middle East. As when the PLO established a Palestinian enclave in West Beirut in the 1970’s, Lebanon’s sectarian fault lines risk civil war, no successor to Lahoud lives in the Presidential palace at Baabda, Beirut’s top politicians and journalists have been assassinated by the subcontractors of theocratic and totalitarian tyrannies.

The failure of the Arab summit in Damascus, Israel’s determination to settle scores with Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia’s schism with Alawite-Baathist Syria and the acceleration of Iran’s nuclear programme suggest that political twilight in Beirut presages the next bloody war in the Middle East. The spiral of miscalculation, escalation, betrayal and punishment, so easily predictable by the mathematical models of Von Neumann’s Game Theory, could trigger the next regional war in a manner reminiscent to Sarajevo 1914.

The flashpoints for a regional war are Lebanon and Syria. Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah vowed “open war” against Israel and Zionist targets all over the world after the alleged Mossad hit on his intelligence ops head Imad Mughniyeh, the mastermind of suicide bombing attacks on US Marines, French Legionnaires, the Amir of Kuwait’s motorcade, Western embassies and Maronite Phalangists patrols.

Israel has responded to Nasrallah’s threats by warning that it will retaliate with mass violence on the Lebanese border across the Blue Line, exactly as in July 2006. The diplomatic and shadow souks of the Middle East also speculate that the IDF will attack Syria, the political sponsor of Hezbollah.

It is ominous that the White House, the Elysee Palace, Downing Street and the Kremlin did not rebuke an Israeli Cabinet Minister who threatened Iran with nuclear destruction. The US Mediterranean fleet patrols off the coast of Lebanon and both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have advised their citizens to leave Beirut. As in 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006, the Middle East is sleepwalking into war.

Hezbollah has not raised the stakes against Israel because its missile and rocket arsenals were badly degraded by massive IDF bombardment during the July 2006 war. While Nasrallah boasts that his arsenal is bigger and deadlier than ever, the six fold expansion of UNIFIL after the 2006 ceasefire, tighter US Treasury sanctions against Iran and Syria and the destruction of Lebanese bridges have made a massive rearmament of Hezbollah impossible.

In fact, Nasrallah’s vow of “open war” and exaggerated missile arsenals are an attempt at rhetorical deterrence that only camouflages Hezbollah’s clear military disadvantage to withstand another IDF assault. Hezbollah, like Ehud Olmert, has an existential threat in playing up its missile threat against Israel.

With 13500 Blue Helmets stationed in South Lebanon, with West European NATO troop’s contingents from France, Italy, Spain and Norway, it is impossible for Hezbollah to smuggle and deploy large scale weaponry south of the Litani River. So it is logistically impossible for Hezbollah to hit Galilee with a hail of Katyusha attacks, as in 2006. Hezbollah’s relative impotence to deter Israeli aerial assaults against its command and control infrastructure in Beirut, the Bekaa and the Shia villages of South Lebanon, paradoxically, increase the odds of a regional war.

If Israel is tempted to settle the unfinished business of 2006 with Hezbollah because the Shia militia is vulnerable, Syria and Iran will face a fatal loss of regime legitimacy if they do nothing to prevent the military destruction of their only strategic client in Lebanon.

It is therefore yet another cruel irony of Levantine politics that the existence of an expanded UNIFIL actually increases the risks of a regional war because it prevents Hezbollah from building a credible missile deterrence capability south of the Litani, encourages Israel to launch a June 1967 style preemptive attack on its sworn foes in South Lebanon and Syrian/Iranian intervention to save their Shia militia client from certain military defeat.

Israel’s closest friends in the Bush White House and Sarkozy’s Elysee Palace will not hesitate to give Olmert the green light to attack Hezbollah if it helps resolve Lebanon’s political gridlock and strengthen their pro-Western Sunni, Maronite and Druze clients in the Siniora government. French acquiescence is mission critical because of the sheer number of French “blue helmets” stationed with UNIFIL south of the Litani.

UNIFIL is Israel’s ultimate insurance policy against a reconstituted Hezbollah on its northern border, its human “security fence” and alarm wire to preempt any Shia retaliation in case Israeli and American war planes bomb the Islamic Republic’s clandestine nuclear facilities at Natanz and Bushire.

In a very tangible sense, any Hezbollah attempt to create a second front in Lebanon would be tantamount to an attack against France and the US, who have never forgotten nor forgiven the Shia militia for the truck bombs that massacred the Marines and Legion Estranger troops as they slept in their West Beirut barracks that distant October dawn in 1983.

Israel’s recent security drills and simulated responses to any missile launch or terror attacks from South Lebanon symbolise the hair trigger tension that has now gripped the diplomatic chancelleries and military high commands of the Middle East.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s definant response to international sanctions and threats to annihilate Israel have reawakened old memories of Nasser’s threat “to drive the Jews to the sea” on the eve of the Six Day War and the blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba.

In fact, an Israeli attack on a nuclear Iran is inevitable because a “Persian bomb” would only stimulate nuclear warhead ambitions in the Gulf, Egypt and Jordan.

Meanwhile, the succession to the octogenarian President Mubarak is still resolved and bread riots in Cairo amid soaring inflation could well mean that a future Egyptian regime dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood is all too real a prospect. Regime change in Egypt would be the most traumatic event in Arab - Israeli relations since Sadaat’s troops overran the Bar Lev Line in occupied Sinai in the opening moments of the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. An Israel paranoid about nuclear proliferation in the Arab world has a strategic incentive to attack Iran. The ghosts of Sarajevo haunt us again.

Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker and commentator . THis article first appeared at Khaleej Times.