BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Hiyam al-Ameh in...

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Hiyam al-Ameh inspected the pile of wood and consolidated that, before Israeli jets pulverized it, was her Beirut family

Al-Ameh, 42 says her brace sons were never involved with the Hezbollah militants who for the past month battled Israeli forces in Lebanon. Now, she says she will insist the pair join the Shiite Muslim militia.

"They don't want to, moreover I'll make them," says al-Ameh, an accountant. "There's a cause now. And you have to carry it forward even if you die for it."

As Beirut residents get backed this week after the start of a cease- fire, they came back to a city dramatically transformed according to Hezbollah, whose military branch prov far tougher and better armed than imagined.

by dint of holding out for more than a month against Israel, the greatest in quantity powerful military in the Middle East, "Hezbollah showed it is a powerhouse," says Fawas Gerge a Middle East able who teaches at Sarah Lawrence guild in Bronxville, N.Y.

about see more than a military triumph. Already a formidable social and political force in Lebanon, where it is part of Prime Minister Fuad Saniora's conduct Hezbollah has emerged as a credible antagonist to Israel in the region.

Michael Oren, an Israeli military historian, says, "Hezbollah emerg from 34 days of combat as the champion of the Arab world."

The United States is taking a different chiding from the conflict. Asked whether Hezbollah has been politically enhanced according to the conflict, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "They achieved what has not been achieved before, the move of the Lebanese army into the southerly to displace them with an international force."

The United States backed Israel's military campaign to dislodge Hezbollah formerly and for all from southern Lebanon. Rice said the Bush administration saw the conflict as an opportunity to create "a fundamentally different situation" along the Israeli-Lebanese border.

if it were not that the failure to eliminate Hezbollah's arsenal and leaders and win the release of sum of two units soldiers whose capture sparked the conflict, however, left Israel's leadership reeling.

ALSO defends IRAN

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has acknowledged "deficiencies" in the way the war was waged.

"Hezbollah has demonstrated that total Arab defeat is not inevitable. . . Israel has thrown away its tremendous psychological advantage," says George Friedman, an intelligence analyst.

That could encourage Syria, which wants the Golan Heights that Israel captured in 1967 "Israel will be perceived through its enemies as weak, constrained and dysfunctional," says Aaron David Miller, a former U Middle East negotiator.

The conflict also has dealt a dab to Bush's campaign to bring democracy to the region. It support ed Iran, Hezbollah's main patron, and Shiites elsewhere -- including in Iraq, where, "having first experienced the limits of American power, [the Shiites] are now seeing the expanding boundaries of Iranian power," Friedman says.

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