Washington's not-so tacit support for Israel's strikes threatens to further weaken Lebanon's pro-Western leadership, reports Lucy Fielder from Beirut US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice prefaced her visit to Lebanon this week with a statement that a ceasefire was urgent, but only under the right circumstances. Given Prime Minister Fouad Al-Siniora's frantic efforts for an immediate ceasefire, Condi's statement was about as helpful to her Beirut allies as the US green light to Israel's strikes on Lebanon and the one-week "window" Israel is widely believed to enjoy to try destroy Hizbullah and, it seems, much of Lebanon with it. While Israel steadily demolishes the infrastructure carefully rebuilt over 15 years by former prime minister Rafik Al-Hariri and bombs the fragile army, both Tel Aviv and its friends in Washington attest that they want Lebanon to take control of its borders and disarm the powerful Hizbullah guerrillas they were no match for in the first place. One positive thing, political analyst Ossama Safa says, is that both pro-US Prime Minister Siniora and Shia Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri gave Condi pretty similar messages during her visit. "No rifts emerged between them, they both focussed on the need for a ceasefire. Where they differ is the question of sovereignty, whether the army should spread to the border," he said. Berri, whom Safa described as "a political animal who emerges strongest at a time of crisis," is flexing his muscles as one of the three most powerful men in the country and the mediator between Hizbullah -- and the Shias -- and the government. But as leaders including Siniora met in Rome to try to find a way out of the crisis, it didn't seem Lebanon was any closer to a unified position on what should happen once a ceasefire is finally achieved. In two weeks of Israeli bombardment, some 420 people have been killed in Lebanon, most of them civilians. "Our expectations have been deliberately lowered by the prime minister," said political analyst Sami Baroudi of the Lebanese American University. "I don't think the government is really in a position to decide on anything other than to accept whatever aid packages are offered." Since Hariri's death, the government that was cobbled together from both pro- and anti-Syrian members has been largely hobbled by sectarian divisions. Berri initiated and presided over a National Dialogue to resolve issues including Hizbullah's arms, but all controversial issues looked set to be endlessly deferred before war broke out. The scale of Israel's destruction has papered over the cracks in Lebanon, but the illusion can only be temporary. Both sides need a face-saving solution, Safa said, and the most likely thing is that all the pre-12 July proposals will be taken out of the drawer and dusted off. That means a possible return, if with more urgency than before, to a search for a "national defence strategy" that would allow a force to extend to the border that would encompass Hizbullah by another name. An international border force is a solution with growing world support, but analysts say it's impossible to envisage that working unless the details are threshed out. Hizbullah's support is riding high and broadening among some sectors of the population because of Israel's destructive bombardment, so there seems no reason Hizbullah would accept anything that would smack of a sell-out. Hizbullah said this week that the government should be the mediator with Israel in any future prisoner exchange to resolve the escalation sparked when Hizbullah seized two Israeli soldiers on 12 July. But although such face- saving steps may be the only way out of this crisis, that only underlines the government's weakness. "It's not the government's job to act as broker," Baroudi said. "Unless they have the two soldiers in their possession, they'll probably stay well away from that." Few analysts or Lebanese expect a resolution to the deeper causes of the crisis soon, so all hopes are pinned on a ceasefire to stop the unrelenting bombing, which has turned the clock back decades. After that, the splits in the country are likely to emerge with more force than before, analysts say. "I don't think there's so much a danger of civil conflict," Baroudi said, "but stagnation. I can't see people being eager to fix what was broken, whatever businesses they had, and rebuild again after this."
