When the history of the Iraq and Lebanon wars is written, it may be said they were lost because America and Israel failed to put enough boots on the ground — a petty reason to lose battles of destiny. We are not there yet, but we are pretty close to it.

The issue now is Israel’s ongoing war with Hezbollah and its companions, Gaza, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. Dismissing it as another Arab-Jew skirmish is a serious error. This war is the latest installment in the continuing clash of jihadist Islam and the global Judeo-Christian system.

Similarly, the war in Iraq — regardless of how it began in 2003 — has mutated into another front for jihadists to push their military theocracies and finally drown yet another Muslim country in the growing cesspool of jihadism. Similar outposts have been claimed or are being reclaimed in Somalia, Algeria, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and immigrant Muslim communities in Europe and America, where converts have used suicide bombings to blow up subways and buildings, high on the fumes of the Palestinian Arab struggle and assorted Muslim grievances against the West.

So Gaza and Lebanon are neither the last nor the first, but just the latest spots where people like Sheik Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah stage their wars of choice in the name of the prophet. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi did it in Jordan, as have Osama bin Laden and his no. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, who jumped into the fray yesterday, warning the West of dire consequences over Hezbollah.

Sadly, whenever such conflicts flare, shortsighted Westerners and panicky Arab secularists start talking about negotiations and cease-fires, oblivious to the fact that jihadists are not the least bit interested.

Worse yet, when they do decide to accept the challenge and go to battle, as Israel and America did in Iraq and Lebanon, their leaders refuse to supply the hardware and the armies necessary. Fighting terror on the cheap has been President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s grievous error in Iraq, where twice as many Americans troops were needed from Day 1. The error is now being repeated by Israel’s remarkably inept prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and his catastrophically pacifist defense minister, Amir Peretz. Such errors cost more than lives. They make for a Vietnam rerun, with all the strategic setbacks and emotional baggage that come with defeats.

The battle against suicide-ready Muslim fundamentalists is one where no prisoners will be taken by either side.

Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as their patrons, Iran and Syria, are in the vanguard of a relentless Islamist-jihadist march that challenges human values on a global scale, from Indonesia to Iraq, Lebanon to Palestine, and as far away as Chechnya and the “Mad Max” land of Somalia. The jihadists’ goal is reversing a 200-year history of achievements: Democratic values, freedom of expression, separation of church and state, establishment of civil societies, and the emancipation of women and human beings from theocratic and autocratic rule.

When Israel decided to put an end to what was, in effect, death by a thousand paper cuts — Kassam and Katyusha rockets and Hezbollah-Hamas cross-border raids — it set its sights on bringing down the terrorist proxies of Iran and Syria by dismantling the Hamas government and stripping Hezbollah of political power via a humiliating military defeat.

Yet three weeks into the fighting, Israel has pledged just 10% of its reservists, confining itself to a bombing campaign and a meager ground force in Lebanon. Hezbollah is already broadcasting to the whole jihadi planet that Islam has triumphed. The Web is abuzz with its gloating. There is even talk of negotiations that include Iran and Syria, another recipe for disaster.

Syria’s objective is nothing less than to reassert its control of Lebanon and suffocate what is left of the great Cedar Revolution. Iran is the backer, financier, and godfather of Hezbollah and Syria.

Their goals are utterly incompatible with those of the group that just met in Rome, which pressured Secretary of State Rice on Wednesday to urge Israel to accept a cease-fire. For her part, Ms. Rice was talking of a “new Middle East,” one following the now defunct greater democratic Middle East of 2004. We would settle for propping up the old Middle East.