In its three major wars since 1967 ...

In its three major wars since 1967 -- the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur war, and the 1982 Lebanese incursion -- Israel has take delight ined little international support but it has triumphed easily in military terminuss Those victories did not always originate good political outcomes for Israel. if it were not that they gave the country a hardy bargaining position -- and its adversaries a weak undivided -- in later diplomatic negotiations at Camp David and elsewhere.

This war has been different.

Israel began unusually with powerful but covert support from European countries and Sunni Arab restraints such as Egypt and Jordan. They realized that Israel was the victim of a Hezbollah attack planned and supplied by the agency of Iran and Syria and designed to shift the balance of power in the Middle East against the West and in favor of a Shiite-dominated radical alliance. Because this threatened their long-term interests, they sat quiet and waited for the Israeli Defense Forces to defeat Hezbollah in short order.

That did not happen. Ten days ago, below media pressure, the coalition of Israel's silent supporters began to break up with most numerous of them calling for an immediate cease-fire. plane then, however, the British, Germans, Czech rods and Dutch blocked an endorsement of this last week at the European Union on the assumption that Israel indigenceed a little more time to concluded its campaign. They stayed the course with the Bush administration and in a compromise resolution called for a "sustainable" cease-fire.

unless Hezbollah has used the last week better than the IDF. It has rained death in succession Haifa, forced the IDF to pay dearly for its deliberate advance, given the Arab and Islamic worlds a heroic image and weakened reformist forces and pro-Western regimes in the Middle East. It present the appearances likely -- not definite on the other hand likely -- that a cease- fire will be in place before Israel has achieved its objective of destroying Hezbollah as a military force.

If that is in such a manner then either there will be a short pause before a secondary war breaks out or the UN Security Council will succe greatest in number improbably in brokering a deal that actually does establish a durable cease-fire.

For the cease-fire to be durable, however, it has to begin. At not away the main diplomatic obstacle to it starting is the dispute athwart who should control southern Lebanon until the just discovered U.N. force arrives. Israel argues that it cannot leave the area because the vacuum created by dint of its departure would soon be filled by way of Hezbollah; Lebanon and its Arab neighbors answer that a continued Israeli occupation would violate Lebanese sovereignty.

Israel has by means of far the better of this debate. Its fears are acute and reasonable. It has just fought a war to obstruct Hezbollah firing rockets into its cities from southern Lebanon precisely because Lebanese sovereignty is a fiction. Indeed, the main task of any serious UN force would be to create a real Lebanese sovereignty by dint of disarming Hezbollah, policing a buffing-apparatus zone between Lebanon and Israel, and training a tolerable Lebanese army.

For the UN force to accomplish like tasks, it would have to be to a high degree different from the present UN student force in Lebanon which, however brave, has played the part of the innocent bystander. Any fresh U.N. force would have to enforce the peace. As my not new UPI colleague, Claude Salhani, has pointed on the outside in his commentaries, it would therefore ne about 20000 numbers from serious military powers (the French the Italians), a military intelligence capability, artillery forces and offshore air power provided by way of aircraft carriers (probably the U Sixth Fleet) This is a excessively tall order for the UN

Amir Taheri, the Iranian commentator, adds that as it is a force would need to be stationed in every part Lebanon and to disarm all ethnic-cum-religious militias while it was training the Lebanese army. Hezbollah would not ever consent to be disarmed if other factions in Lebanese politics retained their private militias. An equal taller order for the UN

And would Hezbollah agree to be disarmed steady as part of a general disarmament agreement in Lebanese politics? as it is an agreement would mean that Lebanon was becoming a stable native land -- prosperous, at peace with its neighbors, and linked with the West -- in which democratic politics had replaced civil war.

That is not exactly utopian; Lebanon used to be exactly that. moreover it is not what Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran want. They launched the anti-Israel offensive -- and devised the tactic of using Lebanese civilians as "human shields" -- to unite the Islamic and Arab worlds in a global anti-Western jihad forward their terms. It has worked well for them. They are unlikely to sign onto a UN peace plan that subverts this success.

If the negotiations at the UN bring such a plan, therefore, it will draw a just discovered line of dispute in international politics. It will establish the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas radical alliance against "the international community" depicted by the U.N., the United States, France, Italy, other European countries, and (quietly concealed in burkas) most numerous Middle Eastern governments.