USA Today: Rice: Not U.N.'s job to disarm Hezbollah

Rice: Not U.N.'s job to disarm Hezbollah

By Susan Page, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The 15,000-member U.N. force being created for southern Lebanon will keep the peace and enforce an international arms embargo, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday, but it won't be charged with disarming Hezbollah guerrillas.

That "political agreement" will be the responsibility of the Lebanese, Rice said in an interview with USA TODAY. In the past, the Lebanese government has been unwilling or unable to disarm Hezbollah, a movement that is now part of the government itself. A United Nations resolution on the books since September 2004 has called for all Lebanese militias to disarm.

"I don't think there is an expectation that this (U.N.) force is going to physically disarm Hezbollah," Rice said. "I think it's a little bit of a misreading about how you disarm a militia. You have to have a plan, first of all, for the disarmament of the militia, and then the hope is that some people lay down their arms voluntarily."

If Hezbollah resists international demands to disarm, Rice said, "one would have to assume that there will be others who are willing to call Hezbollah what we are willing to call it, which is a terrorist organization."

Hezbollah would find itself increasingly isolated from European and other nations, she said, and the weapons embargo would prevent it from being rearmed by its sponsors in Syria and Iran.

The first announcements of countries volunteering troops for the French-led U.N. force are likely within days, she said. The initial deployment of troops to the region could come within weeks.

The foreign ministers of Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia and France were to be in Beirut today as details of the force were being worked out. The Israeli army withdrew part of its force from southern Lebanon on Tuesday, and the first Lebanese troops are to move across the Litani River on Thursday to take control of the area.

The U.N. troops will have a "quite robust mandate," Rice said. They will be able to defend themselves and to use force "to keep the south clear of arms and armed groups." An early goal, she said, will be reopening ports and Beirut's airport.

Rice, who took the lead in negotiating the Security Council resolution, spoke for a half-hour in her ornate State Department office about the conflict.

She denied that the United States had been eager for Israel to go after Hezbollah. It was "not an issue of, you know, how much damage could the Israelis do," she said. Instead, the Bush administration saw the conflict as an opportunity to create "a fundamentally different situation" along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Critics argued that Hezbollah's political support has soared in the region for its success in standing up to Israel's armed forces. "The resolution calls for Hezbollah to stop all attacks," conservative columnist George Will wrote Tuesday. "The United Nations has twice resolved that Hezbollah should be disarmed but has not willed the means to that end."

Rice said Hezbollah's military strength had been undercut and predicted that any political benefit for the group would "be very short-lived."

"We need to let the dust settle, literally, and then the question will be asked of Hezbollah: Exactly what did they achieve?" she said. "They achieved the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese. They achieved the destruction of Lebanese infrastructure and housing and neighborhoods."

She dismissed the idea that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has emerged with new standing. "Nasrallah is going to have to face what has become of those populations in the south and the great devastation that Hezbollah brought on," she said.