The Middle East has taken over the agenda, crowding out news from Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran’s nuclear program and the G-8 Summit, not to mention news from Washington, D.C. The issue is not the narrow one of Israel/Lebanon/Gaza or Israel/Hamas/Hezbollah. It is about state sponsors of terrorism, especially Iran and Syria, for whom Hamas and Hezbollah are surrogates. The world is changing before our eyes, requiring a new paradigm for considering terrorist organizations, regimes and threats and America’s role in this world.

Resident Scholar Norman J. Ornstein

Less than a week before Hezbollah’s attack inside Israel that resulted in the death of several Israeli soldiers and the capture of two others, I was standing with a group of fellow pundits and journalists, including Roll Call’s Stu Rothenberg, on the Lebanon-Israel border near the spot where the incursion took place, looking across at a Hezbollah bunker barely a stone’s throw away.

The bunker brazenly was situated next to a United Nations checkpoint--brazen because the U.N. Security Council passed resolutions when Israel pulled back from Lebanon to the internationally recognized border, requiring that Hezbollah remove itself and its arms from the area so the Lebanese government could police the area.

The government of Lebanon, of course, did no such thing. For a long time, the Lebanese government was close to being a wholly owned subsidiary of Syria. (Hezbollah, for its part, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran, with the active assistance of Syria.) When the Syrian influence in the Lebanese government was reduced after the Assad government apparently assassinated one Lebanese patriot politician too many, the Lebanese government was both too weak to disarm or move Hezbollah and hemmed in by public opinion among Lebanon’s Shiites.

So Hezbollah stayed and grew, and worked furiously to add deadly armaments and thousands of rockets and missiles aimed directly at Israeli cities. The impotent U.N. personnel frequently are harassed, pushed around and intimidated by Hezbollah combatants; in any case, they observe and do nothing more.

The Hezbollah presence and its actions in Southern Lebanon underscore the brutal reality that neither the U.N. nor a weak Lebanese government could do anything to contain it or to keep it from amassing more and more arms with more sophisticated and destructive capacity. The Hamas strength in the West Bank and Gaza, and its actions, underscore the brutal reality that the weak Palestinian Authority, both before and after Hamas’ election victory, was incapable of doing anything to restrain Hamas or temper its terrorist charter, goals and actions.

Here is the larger set of brutal realities. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza was not seen by Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria or Iran as a sign of progress or action that could be a springboard to stability or peace in the region. Rather, it was seen as a sign of weakness to be exploited to achieve the larger goal of a one-state solution--the pre-1948 map with no Israel. Israel’s prior willingness to negotiate prisoner swaps was seen as a series of green lights to do more incursions to kidnap more Israeli hostages.

Add in to this deadly mix Iran’s goal of dominating the region and Syria’s goal of being a major player. The apparent presence now in Hezbollah’s arsenal of highly sophisticated rockets and missiles, along with Iranian experts to help use them, underscore the even greater danger of allowing Iran to build nuclear weapons. Don’t forget the history here includes the huge arsenal found in 2002 on the Karine A ship being sent to the PLO by Iran. Almost certainly, if Iran’s terrorist government gets suitcase nuclear bombs, it will try to get some of them to Hezbollah and Hamas. Remember, too, that Hezbollah is not simply a force in Lebanon. Iranian-sponsored and Hezbollah-led terrorism has been found as far afield as South America.

David Brooks made the basic point cogently in The New York Times on Sunday: “You can kiss goodbye to the fascinating chess match known as the Middle East peace process. That chess match was dependent on a series of smart and reasonable Arab players with whom Israel could negotiate. Those smart and reasonable interlocutors still exist. They still invite visiting Westerners to dinner and may still represent the majority of their countrymen. But they are not running the show now. ... Israel’s main enemies in this crisis are not normal parties and governments that act on behalf of their people. They are jihadist organizations that happen to have gained control of territory for bases of operations. Hamas and Hezbollah knew their kidnappings and missile launches would set off retaliation that would hurt Gazans and Lebanese, but they attacked anyway--for the sake of jihad. They answer to a higher authority and dream of genocide in his name.”

There are big questions that follow. How does the United States respond to this brutal reality? How does our presence in Iraq affect things? What do we now do with Syria, which has not only enabled Hezbollah and protected and encouraged Hamas, but also has engaged with impunity in vicious mischief in Iraq against Americans? Can we or will we change our approach to Iran? How can we build on our common distaste for Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran with the Saudis, Jordanians and Egyptians to create a different dynamic in the Middle East? Is there now a broader opportunity to build common ground with Russia and Europe on the danger of a nuclear Iran?

The president and his administration are the drivers here. But Congress also is relevant. Of course, it should not be second-guessing or back-seat driving as delicate diplomacy unfolds. But neither should it just passively sit and wait for policy answers, or for the bill for reconstruction in Lebanon, Israel and Gaza to be presented to it.

Most importantly, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the estimable leadership of Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) and Joseph Biden (D-Del.), should be structuring a set of hearings on the new scope of conflict in the Middle East, the larger realities that now drive politics in the region and the world, the dangers to America and the West, and the opportunities for new alliances or new breakthroughs.

We need more than a set of diplomatic initiatives from the White House. We need a national conversation on what we can and cannot do, should and should not do, in this dangerous environment--one that can at least create a better understanding and perhaps a broader consensus before the next crisis, or the next major American action.

That conversation is not going to take place on cable news networks that cover breaking news. It will get some traction on shows such as “The Charlie Rose Show” and “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” It will flower in think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. But it also should be led and enhanced within what is supposed to be our national center of deliberation.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI.