The Cease-Fire Stakes

Of all things, some useful U.S.-French diplomacy.

Prior to 9/11, no terrorist organization had killed more Americans than Hezbollah, which was responsible for the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing, among other attacks. The outcome of Israel's current war with the "Party of God" remains very much in doubt. But the good news is that Israel is being given all the diplomatic cover it could have hoped for to strike a blow to the terror group and its Iranian patrons.

The U.N. cease-fire resolution for Lebanon offered on the weekend by France and the U.S. isn't everything we might like. But it does show a new international sobriety concerning the Hezbollah problem. While there are few sources of vocal support for Ehud Olmert's Israeli government, there does seem to be widespread recognition that a return to the status quo before Hezbollah attacked is unacceptable.

Thus the draft resolution would allow Israeli troops to remain in southern Lebanon and to act defensively should the Hezbollah rocket barrages continue. A second resolution would then be needed to create a multinational peacekeeping force whose mission would be to disarm Hezbollah, not just verify that it isn't launching Katyushas.

We doubt this or any other U.N. plan can succeed before Israel has done a lot more to degrade Hezbollah's military capabilities. But the U.S.-French approach is certainly far preferable to the kind of solution proposed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, which is essentially an unconditional Israeli cease-fire that would leave Hezbollah intact and ready to attack again whenever it chooses. For Hezbollah, this would be a major victory--one that would damage both Israel and Lebanon for years to come.

Reaction to the Security Council text has certainly been clarifying. "This agreement is bad in every sense of the word," said Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem, whose government effectively ran Lebanon until last year. President Bush gave the appropriate response yesterday at his Crawford ranch when he said that "Syria and Iran sponsor and promote Hezbollah activities." He added that the Syrians "know exactly what our position is. The problem is that their response hasn't been very positive. As a matter of fact, it hasn't been positive at all."

Harder to dismiss is criticism from the Lebanese government. But that mostly shows the extent to which Hezbollah--with 14 parliamentary seats and violent tactics--is a cancer on Lebanon and that country's nascent democratic process. "A state within a state" is an apt description for the group, whose prominence within Lebanon is akin to what Ireland would have been like if the IRA/Sinn Fein had been armed and powerful enough to launch rockets on English towns from Irish soil. Simply put, any Lebanese politician who resists Hezbollah now risks assassination.

Meanwhile, it's notable that few international voices have seconded Mr. Annan's calls for unconditional cease-fire. The U.S.-French resolution draft craftily goes in the opposite direction, calling on Mr. Annan to come up with suggestions for delineating Israel's border with Lebanon, which the U.N. already recognizes and only Hezbollah disputes.

One oversight in the resolution is the failure to mention--or "decry" in U.N. language--the use of civilians as targets or shields. This kind of "enemy combatant" behavior is Hezbollah's stock-in-trade, and it would be useful to have the Security Council declare that there is no moral equivalence between such tactics and military operations that seek to minimize civilian casualties. Nonetheless, the resolution clearly identifies Hezbollah as the aggressor and points to the solution--the enforcement of prior Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for Hezbollah to disarm and for the Lebanese government to deploy its Army in the southern part of its own country.

To be sure, plenty of obstacles remain should this U.S.-French proposal gain U.N. acceptance. A peacekeeping force might be hard to assemble given the likelihood it would become another target for Hezbollah. But as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pointed out yesterday, "We're trying to deal with a problem that has been festering and brewing in Lebanon now for years and years and years. And so it's not going to be solved by one resolution."

Short-lived cease-fires are as common as dictators in the Middle East, and they merely provide the illusion of peace. The Bush Administration has been widely criticized for practicing a diplomacy that shuns such a feel-good political fix, as if merely by declaring that "the violence must stop" the U.S. could make it so. Just as important, Mr. Bush has stood up to critics who claim that Israel's conflict with Hezbollah isn't part of the civilized world's larger struggle with terror. We imagine the relatives of the American and French peacekeepers who died in the 1983 Beirut bombings would agree with the White House on this one.