THERE IS NO milk. There is not much of anything else either. The shelves in the stores have been swept clean, petrol is scarce and power supplies are being cut. Hospitals are on standby power, but that cannot last long. Medical supply deliveries have stopped. With ports, airports, transport systems bombed almost all supply chains have been broken. Little is getting through.

This is not the suburbs of south Beirut where Hezbollah reigns and where truly bad men, with odious motives, still spurred on by Syria, have decided to break with Lebanese government attempts at consensus-building and have instead declared all-out war on Israel, regardless of the consequences for Lebanon, for Lebanese or Israeli citizens or anybody else. In those areas poison stalks the side streets and the Israelis have full justification for trying every means to neutralise the machinery of terror.

But this is different. This is the situation in the mountain towns to the north of Beirut, the so-called Christian areas, although in fact where all religions live peacefully and where those Lebanese who have any time left to think hate Hezbollah’s violence and contempt for human rights. The people here were glad to see the Syrians go and longed to see their fledgeling democratic Government bring the Amal and Hezbollah factions slowly to into dialogue and common cause.

Now the bombs are falling on them, too, and the infrastructure of civilised existence, so painfully sewn together after years of civil war, has again been swept away. Israel has now set itself not just against Hezbollah but against the entire Lebanese people and the Lebanese State. Incredibly, the Lebanese Government, Israel’s neighbour and the only other democracy in the region, has been declared Israel’s foe. Its very attempts to bring Hezbollah representatives into the process of government have been depicted not merely as tolerance of, but actual collaboration with, terror, giving credibility to those militants and killers for which Israel holds Lebanon responsible. The state of Lebanon must therefore now be punished. From the Israeli military the word seems to have gone out: Lebanon delenda est.

The thinking is fundamentally flawed. Even after the Syrians went, after the upsurge of popular protest against the murder of Rafiq Hariri, the new Lebanese establishment never had anything like enough power and control to disarm the Hezbollah militia. Any frontal attempt to do so would have taken Lebanon back into full civil war at breakneck speed. Its only way forward was through patient, gradual, subtle and often covert manoeuvring.

All that has now been overturned and set at nought. When the bombing stops the old civil war is likely to resume amid the rubble, with the country seemingly forever cursed.

The consequences for Israel will now be even more devastating than the Katyusha rockets, as will the consequences for peace in Gaza and for the all the hopes of the Quartet’s road map. And the ripples will be wider still. Already voices in Turkey are urging a break with Israel — yet another friend gone — while a collapsed Lebanon, although a small state, will leave an almighty hole into which the Syrians will once again pour, with the Iranians riding beside them.

The impact will go further. America’s reputation in the region is already at zero, with the conviction, almost universal, even if only half-true, that Israel is the proxy of the United States and relies on its technological weapons superiority (although that may now be eroding). But Britain, which always had a reputation for greater wisdom in the region, can still be the friend of small nations, the friends of the resurgent Lebanon and the friend of moderation and restraint. But it runs a real risk of acquiring a new and less noble image if it stands aside while America gives the green light for the Israeli destruction to carry on and on.

There is still time to correct this, to tell Israel that it is right to strike against Hezbollah but wrong to pulverise little Lebanon — that there is understanding of the grievous provocation that Hezbollah offers, egged on at every turn by Syria and by Iran, but no green light for destroying a small,beautiful neighbouring nation in response.

Instead, while actual Israeli- Lebanese co-operation against Hezbollah may be wishing for too much, the creative and shrewd minds in Jerusalem, of which there are many, should be turning to the kind of international support and presence that Israel needs to make its northern border safe from murderous attacks. Perhaps such a force should draw on Muslim states and Arab neighbours, who may dislike Israel but dislike Hezbollah even more, as well as the ill-intentioned forces behind it in Damascus and Tehran.

But whichever path is chosen, the worst of all is the one that leaves Lebanon in ruins, its people fleeing or dying, and political power lying in the gutter, waiting to be picked up by those who want more terror and more turmoil. That cannot be right.

Lord Howell of Guildford is Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Lords. Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean was Minister of State in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1997-2005

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