The mounting campaign aimed at linking Hizbullah with Al-Qaeda is folly of the highest order, and on so many levels that Stephen Hawking would need a calculator to keep track of them.

In a nutshell, the US-led but Israeli-inspired propaganda effort, crafted with the enthusiastic participation of mainstream Western 'journalists', attempts to paint the exceedingly unlikely in the colors of the indisputably certain  Hizbullah has not targeted an American since 1992 at the latest and never on American soil. It also publicly condemned the crimes of 9-11.

In addition, almost all of the US casualties attributed to Hizbullah action  instead it seems designed to force it underground and rejuvenate those who would radicalise it anew.

And what might a newly hard-edged Hizbullah do when faced with the knowledge that the world's most powerful country is gunning for it?

Any port in a storm: if the United States makes it so that cooperation with a despicable bunch like Al-Qaeda is the only way for Hizbullah to survive, it might well do exactly that. Not because its leaders and members want to, but because America pushes them into a corner from which they see no other egress.

The United States has often made enemies by accident because it has interests — real or perceived — around the world and tends to blunder into situations about which many of its supposed experts know less than nothing. That happened here in Lebanon in the 1980s, for example, and again in Somalia in the 1990s.

But today there has been plenty of time for the facts to be analysed and for sober second thought to prevail: If Washington insists on igniting a confrontation with Hizbullah, one that by its very nature will unnecessarily endanger both Lebanese and American civilians, there will be no way to plead ignorance.

And if one of the consequences of that foul-up is having Hizbullah conclude that "my enemy's enemy is my friend," the US government will have no one but itself to thank for having driven a legitimate resistance group into the arms of bloodthirsty terrorists.

Even and perhaps especially if it is happening already, Washington should change course before its self-fulfilling and self-destructive prophecy comes true. — YellowTimes.org

YellowTimes.org guest columnist (Lebanon) MARC SIROIS is the managing editor of The Daily Star , an English-language newspaper in Beirut. He lives in Lebanon.]