Carrying Costs
Despite the burden of war, Neither Israel nor Hezbollah folds easily
The pace of diplomatic efforts quickened--and, paradoxically, so did the pace of war. With perhaps only days left before international pressure jells into a form that might silence the guns of both Israel and its tormentor to the north, Hezbollah, the bloody, summertime fight along the eastern Mediterranean last week appeared to be nearing a climax.
Israel threw its Army into forward gear as some 10,000 soldiers rolled across southern Lebanon and commandos helicoptered deep into the country--attacking Hezbollah targets in the Bekaa Valley city of Baalbek and taking five prisoners. Hezbollah fighters did what they're trained to do, resist fiercely, then melt back into the towns and countryside, where civilians bear the brunt of the Israeli ground assault. The "Party of God" also demonstrated its staying power by hurling hundreds of rockets into Israel. And Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, threatened to hit Tel Aviv with what would be a longer-range and deadlier missile supplied by Iran.
The embattled prime minister of Lebanon, Fouad Siniora, said that more than 900 Lebanese had died, most of them noncombatants. On the Israeli side, nearly 80 have died, mainly soldiers. The war's peril for civilians was illuminated in the Lebanese town of Qana, where more than two dozen perished, most of them women and children, in a collapsed building following an airstrike that Israel said targeted a source of rocket fire nearby.
The Bush administration, by and large, has fused its diplomatic strategy to that of Israel, which hopes to draw in a multinational peacekeeping force that can disarm Hezbollah. Israeli officials told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that they would need 10 to 14 days to complete their military thrust. Even so, Israel's Army was fighting with one eye on the diplomatic clock.
With anger across the Arab and Islamic worlds mounting against the United States and Israel, President Bush's diplomats were in a mood to compromise on some of the particulars in the United Nations plan. Yet any cease-fire faces major obstacles. The emerging deal at the U.N. has two parts. A first Security Council resolution would sketch out a future political arrangement and demand a "cessation of hostilities." A second would send a new international force into a buffer zone in southern Lebanon. It would also specify the features of a settlement: disarming Hezbollah, stopping weapons shipments into Lebanon, fixing a border dispute with Israel, and readying Lebanon's Army to control the southern border area.
It seems far-fetched, though, that Hezbollah would agree to drop all its military activities and function solely as a political movement. Disarmament, Hezbollah official Ibrahim Moussawi tells U.S. News, "is a question for the Lebanese, not for the U.N." Any U.N.-sanctioned force is unlikely to be strong enough to take on an unwilling Hezbollah. "If Israel can't disarm Hezbollah, why would we think someone else would succeed?" asks James Dobbins, a veteran U.S. diplomatic troubleshooter now at Rand "We can't disarm the insurgents in Iraq, and we have 130,000 troops there."
Hezbollah was founded as a Shiite Muslim movement in 1982 in reaction to the Israeli military invasion then, and it has thrived since as a symbol of resistance to Israel's occupation of the south, which ended six years ago. "Hezbollah will not accept negotiations over disarming," says a senior western diplomat in Beirut, "but both sides see the need for a cease-fire soon."
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