As Washington obsesses over the Baker-Hamilton report and other plans for the war in Iraq, the battle over Lebanon is being lost. The apparent winners, as we can see from this weekend’s protests, are Iran and its allies.

Can Al Qaeda be far behind?

While every Washington politico presents a plan for salvation in Iraq, most Americans believe the problems in Lebanon can be delegated to the hapless United Nations. While debating whether Israel’s shedding of security assets could help or hurt America’s strategy in Iraq, Lebanon is seen as a battlefront in some other galaxy.

Tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters and pro-Syria Christian groups flooded the streets of Beirut yesterday in a show of force meant to topple the elected government of Prime Minister Siniora, but Al Qaeda also wants in.

Le Monde’s Philippe Bolopion last week quoted a memo by a U.N. representative in Beirut that warned of a plot hatched by Al Qaeda-linked militants who planned to assassinate 36 of Lebanon’s anti-Syrian leaders.

According to another U.N. report, Somali militants joined Hezbollah in last summer’s war. The New YorkTimes also reported recently that hundreds of Iraqi so-called “insurgents” have been trained in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Israel’s chief of research in the army intelligence unit Aman, Brigadier Yossi Baidatz, reported to the Cabinet in Jerusalem yesterday about increasing Al Qaeda presence in United Nations-run Palestinian Arab refugee camps in Lebanon.

“Hezbollah tolerates some Al Qaeda presence in Lebanon and even cooperates with it,” a Brookings Institute visiting fellow, Yossi Kuperwasser, told me. But Hezbollah also wants to maintain supremacy, Mr. Kuperwasser, who was Mr. Baidatz’s predecessor at Aman, added.

It is not merely a Lebanese party, he said. “Everybody in Lebanon who is not Hezbollah knows it is operating on behalf of Iran.”

As in Iraq, where Saudi-backed Sunni militants compete with Iranian-backed Shiite groups for the title of the biggest, meanest anti-crusader on the block, similar forces act in Lebanon as well. Hezbollah has its base of operation in the South, while Sunni militants operate in the semi-autonomous refugee camps.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of this summer’s war, the Security Council enlarged and emboldened the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon. Instead of disarming the camps and the areas controlled by Hezbollah, however, UNIFIL immediately proceeded to count Israeli reconnaissance flights and report them as violations.

A French general currently leads UNIFIL, but Italy is the largest troop contributor and hopes to take the lead soon. Repeated statements by Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema indicate that Rome sees its presence in Lebanon as an opportunity for deeper involvement in the Middle East. Mr. D’Alema wants to send Italian troops to Gaza to monitor the flow of weapons from Egypt.

But even more that other Europeans, Italy has growing commercial interests in Iran. So far, its UNIFIL troops failed to control the flow of arms to Hezbollah and the Palestinian Arab camps. The newspaper Il Giornale quotes an Italian UNIFIL official as saying, “There is a tacit agreement with Hezbollah: They do not show off their weapons, and the troops do not go looking for them.”

And so Mr. Baidatz told the Cabinet yesterday that Syria itself is moving missiles close to the Israeli border in anticipation of a renewed war and that it is also stepping up its missile deliveries to Hezbollah — which suffered severe material losses in the summer war that it now celebrates as a glorious victory.

Lebanon’s border with Syria is open not only to weapons but also to people, many of whom, according to a U.N. source, were trucked in to Beirut from Damascus over the weekend to participate in Hezbollah’s show of force yesterday.

Hezbollah is outmaneuvering the West in Lebanon, which is fast becoming the hottest arena in the Middle East’s larger war. It would be a mistake for Washington to treat it like East Timor, a place that Turtle Bay bureaucrats can handle.