There's no denying her stamina. Less than 48 hours after painfully giving birth to a "New Middle East", Condoleezza Rice flew by helicopter into Beirut. At least, I think she did.

"There's no official confirmation that she's coming," a Lebanese government spokeswoman told me shortly after the BBC, CNN and just about everyone else had reported her arrival. "If she comes, there will be no press conference."

In fact, the only visible evidence that a Very Important Foreigner was in town came from the Lebanese army which, for the first time since this war began, showed its face on the streets of Beirut in significant numbers, with soldiers standing nonchalantly in ones and twos on corners.

Having failed to catch a glimpse of Ms Rice, I headed off to the UN building, where Jan Egeland, the emergency relief coordinator, was due to announce an appeal for $150m (£81m) to alleviate the suffering caused by Israeli bombs.

It was a sunny afternoon and I decided to walk there. From the relative normality of Hamra district, I made my way downtown to what is supposedly the business and financial hub of Lebanon. It was closed.

The streets radiating from the normally throbbing Place de l'Etoile were eerily silent and utterly deserted apart from a soldier here and there and an occasional private security guard lounging in the shade. With the whole place to myself, I began to wonder if there was something everyone else knew that I didn't.

It resembled that scene in cowboy films where everyone has rushed inside and bolted their door before the gunfight. I half-expected John Wayne to swagger into view at one end of the street and Clint Eastwood at the other, twiddling revolvers around their index fingers.

But perhaps this wasn't a western after all - just my first glimpse of Ms Rice's New Middle East, where security is all and human beings figure nowhere.

And so into Riad el-Solh Square and the UN building, strolling leisurely across a road where normally you have to run for your life. The UN building is where the Nice People hang out: Swedes, Danes, liberal-minded Arabs - that sort of folk. Nice, well meaning, but sadly ineffective most of the time. But even the Nice People have got the security bug now.

You used to be able to wander in, announce yourself at the reception desk and talk to officials. In the New Middle East, though, you enter - one at a time - through a revolving cage, and they don't let the next person in until they've checked the previous one thoroughly.

Explaining the planned relief effort yesterday, Mr Egeland did not repeat his remark from Sunday about Israeli "violations of humanitarian law", but the description of civilian damage in an accompanying report made the picture very clear.

His calls for "safe passage" of essential supplies also underlined the humiliating position that the UN - and most of the world, for that matter - finds itself in: begging for Israel's permission to feed 300,000 Lebanese civilians who have been cut off by the bombing and to help half-a-million more who have been driven from their homes or affected by the onslaught in other ways.

This relief effort, of course, is short-term stuff. The initial $150m UN programme is scheduled to last for only three months. After that there may well be a need for more.

When the war eventually ends, there will be other questions about what the UN ought to be doing - American vetoes permitting.

The most recent parallel that I can think of in the Middle East, in terms of an attack on the civilians of a largely defenceless country, is Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. On that occasion, Iraq was ostracised, international sanctions were imposed and there were moves to indict the Ba'athist leaders.

I don't suppose it will happen in this case, though the thought of Ehud Olmert, the Israel prime minister, sharing a cell with Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader, for several years during their trial at The Hague is quite appealing.

The attack on Kuwait also led to the creation of the UN Compensation Commission to deal with millions of financial claims resulting from war damage. In Iraq's case, the money was recouped by taking control of its oil exports and making deductions from the revenue. If there were any justice, the same would happen now - but I can't see Israel being made to pay up, let alone Hizbullah.

Aside from whatever may lie in store for Lebanon politically, it is hard to imagine that the rest of the Middle East will be unchanged by all this. Washington's problem, as always, is that it fails to make the necessary distinction between regimes and their people. It does make the distinction with regimes it dislikes (such as Iran, where it blindly hopes the mullahs will be overthrown at any moment), but not with the regimes it likes.

And so we have the spectacle of the Egyptian and Saudi regimes hobnobbing with Washington and being broadly supportive, while their people are not. The Egyptian and Saudi regimes have their own reasons for wanting to clamp down on Hizbullah - partly to discourage armed militants at home, and partly because they are Sunni regimes and don't much like the Shia anyway.

Meanwhile, as a reward for their cooperation, and despite public statements to the contrary, Washington seems perfectly willing to take the heat off these regimes in terms of pressing for reform and democracy.

In a way, Condoleezza is right. We may indeed be witnessing the birth pangs of a New Middle East, but not the one she imagines. It is a Middle East in which the US, Israel and the "friendly" but moribund Arab regimes are becoming ever more discredited, leaving the populace at large ever more radicalised and disaffected.