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       For months, the refrain has been the same. Even as they backed Israel to the hilt, U.S. officials repeatedly stressed that they didn’t want to see a wider war explode across the Jewish state’s northern border with Lebanon. Leaders of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, a longtime Israeli antagonist, and their supporters in Iran signaled that they, too, had little desire for a full-blown conflict. And in Israel, top political and security officials in a country already in the throes of a sweeping, bloody campaign against Hamas in Gaza bickered over what to do about the threat posed by Hezbollah — recognizing, perhaps, that the Middle East’s most powerful military may be too stretched by another massive war.