Why Hizballah Can't Be Disarmed

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The harder question is what the force would do after deployment. The U.S. view is that it should keep Hizballah fighters and weapons out of a strip near the Israeli border and help Lebanon's army take a greater role there. According to Lebanese officials, Rice has suggested rules of engagement allowing its soldiers, who may number up to 20,000, to shoot back but not to go door to door looking for Hizballah. That reflects a realistic appreciation that foreign soldiers could not possibly disarm the group throughout the country and could become enmeshed in a nasty war if they tried. British Prime Minister Tony Blair signaled that Hizballah would hardly be a straightforward enemy when he said the deployment "can only work if Hizballah is prepared to allow it to work." Even so, U.S. officials still hope the foreign presence could strengthen the political forces inside Lebanon--Christian, Druze, Sunni and others--that resent political domination by Hizballah's private army, perhaps to the point that Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government would finally move against it. But Aaron Miller, a former top U.S. Middle East negotiator, says Lebanon's political fragility means that a serious try at bringing Hizballah under government control "can't be done without triggering civil war."

If no outside force can pacify Hizballah, what's the chance it will choose to restrain itself? Fighting Israel is the core of its politics, key not only to its self-definition but also to the arms, money and backing it gets from Syria and Iran and the support it gets inside Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab world. "There's not enough money in the world for them to disarm, because it means giving up their major philosophy," says Miller. As part of efforts to normalize Lebanon earlier this year, Hizballah was engaging in a national dialogue with other parties in which it listened sympathetically to entreaties to forget fighting and concentrate exclusively on politics for the good of the country--at the same time it was stockpiling missiles and preparing for a war it started without anyone's consent. Few would now trust any promise it gave.

Indirect pressure is another tack to try, but in this case, neither Iran, which supplies Hizballah's weapons, nor Syria, which transships them into Lebanon, is very susceptible to urging. Iran already faces the possibility of sanctions from the U.N. Security Council over its nuclear program and may well be grateful to Hizballah for diverting the attention of world powers through this major conflagration. Syria is close to being Washington's least favorite country: the U.S. has withdrawn its ambassador and permitted only low-level contacts since a U.N. report last year implicated top Syrian officials in the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. According to TIME sources in the Middle East and Washington, Syria's envoys have been desperately reaching out to re-establish a dialogue with the Bush Administration, even offering help in reining in Hizballah.