International diplomacy finally started to stir yesterday in response to the havoc on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border, including calls by the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain for dispatching an international peacekeeping force. Stopping the fighting won’t be easy, but the dangers of escalation are too great to permit the major powers, or worried Arab rulers, to turn away.
The only beneficiaries of a wider war would be Iran, Syria and the armed Islamic radical groups that they support throughout the region. The challenge for everyone else is to find a formula to achieve peacefully what just about every country apart from Syria and Iran now seems to agree has to happen. Hezbollah should disarm its private militia, stop operating as a state within a state in southern Lebanon and allow the Lebanese government in Beirut to exercise the full sovereignty it has been denied for decades.
As it happens, the United Nations Security Council went on record calling for just that to happen nearly two years ago. Unfortunately, the members of the Council never did anything to turn those particular provisions into reality. Instead, Security Council members, including the United States, hoped that Hezbollah’s participation in parliamentary politics would speed its transformation into a normal political party and eventually lead to the desired result.
Hezbollah’s raid into Israel this month, in which it killed three Israeli soldiers and took two more hostage, put an abrupt stop to such wishful thinking. Now it’s up to the Security Council to finish the job it left unfinished two years ago.
That can be achieved only by a unified Security Council, led by the two countries that have long taken the lead on Lebanese issues — France and the United States. At this point, such unity appears elusive, with the Bush administration arguing that Hezbollah should act first, returning the kidnapped Israeli soldiers and halting its rocket attacks before any cease-fire, while others seem to envision a simultaneous halting of hostilities by both sides.
Those differences need to be worked out over the next few days, so that the killing and human suffering can stop as soon as possible. Washington is right to press for the release of the Israeli soldiers held hostage. But this should not be a precondition for the earliest possible cease-fire. Many lives and the stability of the wider region depend on achieving a quick halt to the fighting.
