The invasion of Israel in 1948 by its massed Arab neighbors led to their defeat, and the firm establishment of the state of Israel with twice the amount of territory originally awarded under the United Nations partition plan.

The secret agreement by Britain and France to help Israel and so recover the Suez Canal from Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1956 led to their humiliation, the loss of the Canal and turned Nasser into the leader of the movement of Pan-Arab nationalism.

Israel's stunning victory in the six-day war of 1967, which began with a pre-emptive strike on the Arab airfields, seemed like a brilliant stroke at the time. But it launched Israel on the lethal path of occupying the West Bank and Gaza and the Palestinians into terrorism, and turned the myth of the gallant little underdog into the distasteful and unfamiliar new image of Israel as a nuclear-armed Sparta.

The Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack of 1973, with the help of massive Soviet arms deliveries, led to the near-eclipse of Soviet influence in the Middle East, to the humiliating defeat of Syria and the encirclement of an entire Egyptian army -- and eventually to a cold peace that in turn led to the assassination of Anwar Sadat.

Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was a failure that led to a damaging and costly occupation and eventually to the humiliating withdrawal that allowed the new Hezbollah movement to claim the first Arab victory over the Israelis. And now Israel's latest invasion of Lebanon has led to another serious setback for Israel's military reputation.

Israel's vaunted intelligence networks did not sufficiently appreciate the defensive capabilities of the tunnel and bunker systems Hezbollah was building, nor the effect the Iranian-supplied anti-tank missiles would have on the Israeli armor. The Israeli infantry were neither trained nor equipped for the kind of high-intensity infantry battles they had to fight. As a result, the new coalition government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, formerly of the Likud party, and the Labor Party leader Amir Peretz, who is now out of his depth as defense minister, looks incompetent and weak.

The wars of outsiders in the Middle East have been equally unpredictable in their outcomes. Few would have expected that when the United States led the 1991 coalition in the liberation of Kuwait that the result would be to keep Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq and to install U.S. forces an apparently permanent basis in the Arabian peninsula -- which turned out to be Osama bin Laden's prime complaint as he began establishing what became al-Qaida.

The latest U.S. war in the region, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the attempt to install a representative democracy in Iraq, hardly needs elaborating as another classic example of wars not turning out the way their authors expected, just as the old Soviet Politburo never expected their 1979 Afghan invasion would become their Vietnam.

And the initial attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan turns out to have exchanged one fundamentalist Muslim regime that effectively banned the production of opium for a semi-secular regime in Kabul whose survival depends on U.S. and NATO forces and warlords who are enjoying the biggest opium boom in Afghan history, with obvious implications for the drug trade in the European countries supplying the troops.

Given this sobering track record, one wonders why any sane statesman would ever want to contemplate launching a war in the region ever again, or why any responsible general would not try to talk his political masters out of it.

The answer is that it depends on the kind of war you want to fight. Hezbollah learned in the 1980s that the way to defeat the all-conquering Israeli army was never to fight them as an army. Hezbollah fought primarily as victims, using the bodies of their women and children as military tools, as so many bloody exhibits for the media. As a tactic of urban guerilla war, it is hideously effective when combined with just enough terrorism and guerilla fighting to provoke the frustrated Israeli military into over-reaction.

It worked for Hezbollah in the 1980s and the 1990s and it worked again this summer, and the surprise is that the Israelis did not seem ready for it. It has, after all, been a classic Arab tactic since the Algerian FLN used it, along with terrorist bombings, to drive the French army and over a million French colonists out of Algeria in the 1960s.

And it is working in a rather different way in Iraq, where Sunni and Shiite militants alike seem to have concluded that the best way to drive out the foreigners is not by forcing up the body count of the Americans but by ratcheting up the killings and the horror among their own people. This is new, the tactic of deliberately trying to start a civil war in order to win a guerilla war against the occupier, and the evil genius of the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi must be credited with one of the nastiest innovations in the military arts.

Of course, the law of unintended consequences may kick in for the guerillas, just as it has for those who started the various Middle East wars with such dangerous over-confidence. Zarqawi's Shiite-hating killers may yet bring about the wholesale destruction of the Sunni communities of Iraq. And Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army of militant Shiites, even as they carry out revenge slaughter among the Sunni, are weakening Iraq to the point that eventual Iranian domination is looking more and more likely -- the very outcome that the nationalist Moqtada sought to avoid.

Having sown the wind in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah's Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah must now reap the whirlwind of the perilously high expectations he has aroused. The new Saladin may have found a way to provoke the Israelis into an ill-advised invasion, and has now forced them to leave. But the Lebanese economy is destroyed and Hezbollah depends on the Iranians and Syrians to rebuild their arsenals and to provide the cash that buys Hezbollah so much support in the slums and refugee camps.

And having learned yet again the lesson that urban guerillas are not to be fought by conventional troops with conventional arms and tactics, the Israeli military will be thinking hard and creatively about how to tackle such a complex war on civilian territory in the future. The irony, of course, is that even if they figure out how to do it, the law of Middle East wars always going wrong is likely to apply yet again.