WASHINGTON — President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair called Friday for an urgent U.N. resolution backed by international peacekeepers to help end the fighting between Israelis and Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon.
Both stopped short of endorsing an immediate cease-fire, however, insisting that Hezbollah militias must be prevented from controlling southern Lebanon if the most intensive Arab-Israeli warfare since 1982 is to end.
"Now's the time to be firm," said Bush. "Hezbollah and its Iranian and Syrian sponsors are willing to kill and to use violence to stop the spread of peace and democracy. And they're not going to succeed."
Blair, standing beside Bush in a White House news conference after an Oval Office meeting on the conflict, echoed the essence of the president's position, even as he stressed the need to end fighting that has killed nearly 500 people in the past 16 days.
"We want it to stop, and we want it to stop now," said Blair. "But the brutal reality of the situation is that we're only going to get violence stopped and stability introduced on the basis of clear principles."
Hoping to nail down the key markers, Bush directed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to return to the region, just days after she left, to hammer out the terms of a U.N. resolution both governments could accept. Rice was to arrive in Jerusalem late today. While in the region, she is to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his counterpart in Lebanon, Fouad Siniora.
Bush said that quickly setting a clear framework for ending hostilities and mandating a multinational force "will make possible what so many around the world want to see: the end of Hezbollah's attacks on Israel, the return of Israeli soldiers taken hostage by the terrorists, the suspension of Israel's operations in Lebanon, and the withdrawal of Israeli forces."
At the U.N. headquarters in New York, Jan Egeland, the under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, called for a three-day cease-fire to allow aid workers to deliver food and medical supplies to thousands of civilians in Lebanon who have been stranded by the fighting.
On the ground, though, the conflict raged. Hezbollah militia units claimed to have launched a rocket — the Khaibar-1 — more powerful than any of the more than 1,500 the militants have launched into Israel since the conflict began. Israeli officials said the rocket was likely an Iranian weapon with a range of 45 miles, capable of threatening the Tel Aviv suburbs and other areas far deeper into Israel than the shorter-range Katyusha rockets Hezbollah has previously relied on.
Israeli warplanes and heavy artillery bombarded scores of Hezbollah targets across southern Lebanon as Israeli infantry troops waged an intense firefight with Hezbollah militia near the group's stronghold of Bint Jbail, the Associated Press reported.
At the East Room press conference, Bush and Blair, the president's closest military ally, presented a united front, saying the role of a U.N. force would be to assist Lebanon's own military in taking control of territory in southern Lebanon where Hezbollah militia units and their Syrian backers have long held sway.
Syria withdrew its uniformed forces from southern Lebanon after a 2004 U.N. resolution calling for the area to be returned to Lebanese government control. Hezbollah, though, which is also supported by Iran, has maintained effective control.
"We want a Lebanon free of militias and foreign interference," said Bush, who has backed the elected government led by Siniora.
Blair said the U.N. force would not "fight their way in," but would deploy, instead, only with the approval of Lebanon, Israel and Hezbollah.
With Hezbollah not officially represented in the diplomacy, however, neither leader explained what incentive the militant group might have to agree to a cease-fire. Its guerilla forces have fought Israeli troops to a tactical draw across parts of south Lebanon and has turned Arab opposition to its early raids into widespread support.
"The leadership is intact, the arms supply seems to be ongoing, and hence their deterrent capability, and in its ground battles the party's inflicted very heavy losses on Israel and, of course, they've paralyzed the country of Israel," said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, assistant professor of politics at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. "They're already considering it a victory."
Bush, though, appeared to leave room for negotiations. While he referred to a U.N. resolution two years ago that called for "the disbanding and disarmament" of Hezbollah's militia units, he did not explicitly demand that the force be dismantled.
And while he called for the release of two Israeli soldiers who were captured on July 12, sparking the fighting, he did not rule out the kind of prisoner exchange Hezbollah has insisted upon and also made clear that an Israeli troop withdrawal from southern Lebanon would be part of any U.N. resolution.
Under those terms, said Saad-Ghorayeb, "maybe a compromise can be worked out."
At U.N. headquarters in New York, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan also suggested that there is room for diplomatic maneuvering on the question of dismembering Hezbollah,
which has a political arm represented in Lebanon's elected government.
"There has been suggestion in the past by the Lebanese that they would want to transform Hezbhollah into a sort of a national guard, bringing it under command of the army,"
Annan told reporters. "There's many ways to skin a cat."
Rice has ruled out U.S. combat troops as part of any peacekeeping force. That doesn't exclude, however, a U.S. role in providing intelligence, transportation, training and equipment for peacekeepers operating with a U.N. mandate.
Blair suggested that Friday's initiative has broad support across Europe, where leaders have been critical of Israel's assertive response to the kidnapping of its soldiers and have widely urged an immediate cease-fire. As he has for nearly six years, Blair has sought in recent days to play the role of policy broker between Bush and his European counterparts.
Blair said he has consulted extensively on the matter in recent days with the leaders of France, Germany, Turkey and the president of the European Union, among others.
Bush, who keeps a bust of Britain's gutsy World War II premier, Winston Churchill, in the Oval Office, praised his "close relationship" with Blair. He even joked about an embarrassing impromptu conversation the two had at the Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, two weeks ago, when a microphone Bush thought was off broadcast his salty dialogue with Blair.
"You tell me what you think, you share with me your perspective, and you let me know when the microphone is on," Bush said to Blair, tapping the podium microphone before him for effect.
Both Bush and Blair cast the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict as a part of the larger battle being waged between a shift to Middle East democracy and a move by Islamic militants to undercut democratic change.
"The stakes are larger than just Lebanon," said Bush. Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian patrons, said Bush, are linked in ideology and tactics to Hamas militants he accused of trying to derail democracy in the Palestinian territories and to al-Qaida and its partners in the insurgency in Iraq.
"The notion of democracy beginning to emerge scares the ideologues, the totalitarians, those who want to impose their vision," said Bush, dismissing the charge that the invasion of Iraq and other aspects of his policies have fueled Islamic and Arab anger. "They've always been violent," he said.
Blair, who has stood by Bush in Iraq, built on the theme.
"What has happened in the past few weeks is not an isolated incident," said Blair. "There is a big picture out in the Middle East, which is about reactionary and terrorist groups trying to stop what the vast majority of people in the Middle East want, which is progress towards democracy, liberty, human rights — the same as the rest of us," said Blair. "That's the battle that's going on.
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