Israel's war with Hizbollah part of wider US plan

The United States and Israel are dictating truce terms to Hizbollah, but the Lebanese Shi'ite guerilla group rejects them and is sticking to its own demands, unbowed by two weeks of war.

The United States wants to cut Hizbollah down to size, partly to prevent it from menacing Israel but also to humble the group's founding patron Iran and its ally Syria, whose actions Washington says threaten the entire Middle East.

But Hizbollah has long prepared for renewed conflict with Israel in the mainly Shi'ite south, where it fought Israeli troops for 18 years before they withdrew in 2000, and is unlikely to agree to anything that smacks of capitulation.

Hizbollah's military and political resistance leaves US and Israeli demands looking unachievable, suggesting further fighting ahead.

"No one can impose their will on Hizbollah," said Timur Goksel, former spokesman for UN peacekeepers in the south.

"Even if the Israelis march to the Litani river and level south Lebanon, Hizbollah won't admit defeat," he said, referring to a line about 20 kilometres north of the Israeli border.

American terms for a Lebanon ceasefire demand that Hizbollah free two Israeli soldiers seized in a cross-border raid, halt rocket attacks on Israel, pull back to the Litani, accept a robust international force in the area and ultimately disarm.

These conditions, which mirror Israeli demands, have broad support from Britain and some other European nations.

"A durable solution will be one that strengthens the forces of peace and democracy in the region," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Jerusalem. "It is time to say to those who do not want a new Middle East that we will prevail."

Hizbollah's broad reach in Lebanon make it impossible for the Lebanese army to strip it of its weaponry.

Not only a formidable military force, Hizbollah is also a political and social movement to be reckoned with. It runs many welfare services for Shi'ites, Lebanon's biggest community, and holds 14 seats in Parliament and two in the Cabinet.

Hizbollah has stuck to the terms its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah set at the start of the war: a ceasefire, a prisoner swap with Israel and pursuit of a Lebanese dialogue on Hizbollah's weaponry and on sending the army to the south.

The fragile Lebanese government wants an immediate ceasefire before talks to solve the conflict, which has killed 411 people and inflicted enormous physical and economic damage on Lebanon.

The war has also cost 42 Israeli lives. Hizbollah rockets fire has forced thousands of civilians to flee northern Israel.

Some Lebanese blame Hizbollah for igniting the war, but at the same time they are furious at Israel's wide-scale bombing of their country and the world's failure to protect them.

They also fear that US-led pressure to change the status quo at Hizbollah's expense could upset the delicate communal balance in a land still scarred by its 1975-90 civil war.

"The single basket presented by Rice yesterday cannot be implemented in Lebanon without creating internal strife and this is very dangerous," said Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, a Shi'ite ally of Hizbollah who met Ms Rice in Beirut on Monday.

Ms Rice says it is time for a "new Middle East", but past US attempts to reorder the region have often fallen foul of violent resistance by Iraqis, Lebanese and Palestinians to occupation. Hizbollah will cast its struggle for survival in the same light.

The United States is likely to seek a UN Security Council resolution encapsulating its demands whether the Beirut government likes it or not, predicted Mustafa Alani, a Middle East analyst at the Gulf Research Centre in Dubai. He said wide international support for the plan would put Hizbollah under great pressure to comply and would focus the spotlight on Syria and Iran if it failed to do so.

Deploying foreign troops without Hizbollah's agreement would be dangerous, if not impossible, analysts said.

Mr Goksel described talk of deploying a deterrent force as "naïve" and said only a reconfigured version of a UN force already in the south might be acceptable to the local populace. Israel regards the existing UN peacekeepers as ineffectual.

Louise Hayward, at London's Royal United Services Institute, said questions remained on the size, composition, command structure and mission of any new outside force for Lebanon.

She said countries "won't just jump in" to contribute troops unless there was a political solution first.

"Any international force cooked up outside Lebanon without the consent of all Lebanese forces would be seen as an occupation," said Lebanese analyst Amal Saad-Ghorayeb.

She recalled the fate of a US-led multinational force sent to Lebanon after Israel's 1982 invasion led to massacres by pro-Israeli Christian militia at Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. That force withdrew after devastating Shi'ite suicide bomb attacks against US Marines and French paratroopers.