Jason Van Steenwyk argues for forcing "the moment to its crisis" and it just goes to show, even professional military men can get strategy badly wrong. As I've written before, the US strategy is serialization. We want to pop off crises in a fairly linear fashion so that each can be handled by our available forces, our available aid structures, and our available supply of competent diplomats. Each crisis is an opportunity to spread liberty which, eventually, will lead to governments that we can deal with because they'll be accountable to their people for results and nothing we want is incompatible with that.
Our enemies are trying to create crises in parallel so that they can snatch some of these countries more fully to their side, disrupting the points of accommodation that all states make with each other and creating friendlier regimes for them. The crises themselves are merely opportunity points. They are not in and of themselves tilted to one side or the other.
I've got no doubt in my mind that Lebanon was unplanned. The assassination of Hariri blew up in ways that the original bomb maker could not have foreseen. An extra crisis point is a sign of danger for US strategy. It's using up our emergency reserves of crisis handling. Adding further fronts voluntarily at that point is executing the enemy's strategy for him. We want, need to bite, chew, and swallow to enlarge the free world. The enemy wants the free world to bite, half-chew, and bite again until we choke. We should not aid him.