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If we remember correctly, a person becomes a national hero when he saves, or at least helps save, his country. So we're a bit perplexed that Hassan Nasrallah, the supposed leader of Hezbollah, who is patiently but effectively destroying his country, is being hailed as a hero at home and in much of the Middle East.

How pathetic can hero worship get?

If results influence the estimate of actions, here we have a man who is demonstrably the world's latest master of misjudgment. With the stalwart assistance of his mismanaged adherents, he recklessly abducts two Israeli soldiers and precipitates a war that has so far killed over 1,000 of his own countrymen and reduced much of its infrastructure to tumbledown cement and unintended cemeteries.

Yet is the bearded dolt held responsible for the debacle and excoriated for it? No. He is more of a hero than ever, with his picture painted bigger than life, even on walls he has helped aerate.

Listen to the dolt and then to his fellow terrorist trifle: "If you hit Beirut, the Islamic resistance will hit Tel Aviv and is able to do that with God's help," says Nasrallah in a televised address that was probably taped earlier in some sequestration and aired the day that Israel already dropped leaflets warning residents of some sections of Beirut to evacuate and resumed strikes on Beirut's burbs.

But, we are told, Nasrallah offered an olive branch, bravely announcing Hezbollah would stop rocket attacks on Israel if Israel would stop its attacks inside Lebanon. "You attack our cities, our villages, our civilians, our capital, we will react," he said, as in, Who wouldn't? Then he goes on to say, "At any time you decide to stop your aggressions on our villages and towns and cities and our civilians, we will not hit any settlement or any Israeli city."

Is this an olive branch? Hardly. It's more like a crown of thorns he's crushing down on his own insensate head.

His ill-timed and ill-considered comments also came after The Associated Press reported that Israel's defense minister had ordered its military to prepare to push 18 miles up to Lebanon's Litani River.

As if the death-invoking idiocies of Nasrallah were not enough, then comes Hussein Rahal, Hezbollah's chief spokesman, trundling up to the mike on Al-Jazeera TV, the Arab equivalent of Fox News for fair and balanced coverage, to tell us his resilient outfit won't agree to a cease-fire until all Israeli troops leave Lebanon, with, of course, the exception of the ones Hezbollah took as hostage.

"Declaring a cease-fire is not the concern of the people of Lebanon as long as there is one Israeli soldier on Lebanese soil ' even one meter (into Lebanon).... We will not accept any (Israeli) soldier staying on Lebanese territory, and it is the right of every Lebanese to fight until liberation."

What is going on here?

Much of the population of this woebegone nation and of the Muslim world is so desperate for distinction, especially when it's at the expense of successful nations, most conspicuously Israel or America, that they raise their praise even for a dingbat whose activities result in a sudden spike in their own protracted misery, as long as the incongruous hero opposes or otherwise offends the nations they envy.

Obviously, what these downtrodden folks need is a little success, so they have positive reasons to pump up their deflated egos. Once they do, murderous pranksters like Mr. Nasrallah will be as odious to them as he is all life-respecting people, who for now can only look on at the horrific effects their lauded leader is wreaking and know that, more acutely observed, he is not the hero but the arch villain of his own nation.

The tough question is, how do the benevolent and heart-rent people of the civilized world shine a flashlight into enough ears in that morbidly retro part of the world to get them to see the light of life ' so they may hail as heroes those who help them improve their lives and remake their sundered nation into the modern and sunny success it ought to have been since way back when, according to The Old Testament, Hiram, King Of Tyre, supplied Solomon the cedars of Lebanon out of which he built his first temple.

What, hangs the question, is this maniac doing making Lebanon the arch enemy of Israel? Whoever imagined that nation of inventive merchants, since the ancient Phoenicians sailed in and out of Tyre and Sidon in far-flung quest of trade, as the point country in a war with Israel?

Can somebody please tap him on the shoulder and inform that him his tenure at the reins is over and that it's time to give sanity its turn at national guidance?