With faint hopes for ending the war in Gaza before President Biden leaves office, U.S. officials have turned their focus to Lebanon, where they are scrambling to strike a cease-fire deal to end Israel’s invasion of the country.
But Lebanon is proving to be just as stubborn a problem as Gaza for the Biden administration.
Israel’s offensive in its northern neighbor alarms Biden officials, who say it could turn into a battlefront between Israel and Iran, create a new humanitarian catastrophe, and even drag in the United States and neighboring Arab countries as combatants. For more than a year, officials have said that it is Israel’s conflict with the Lebanon-based militia Hezbollah, not its war with Hamas in Gaza, that poses the greatest risk to the United States.
So far, however, U.S. diplomacy has failed to stabilize the situation, which a top aide recently warned had “escalated out of control.” And U.S. officials and analysts now say it is increasingly likely that President Biden will hand off the crisis to his successor.
“This is a conflict which can at best be managed or contained,” not fully resolved, said Aaron David Miller, a longtime Middle East peace negotiator at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Some senior U.S. officials have called Israel’s devastating campaign against Hezbollah an opportunity to reshape the politics of Beirut and stand up a stronger Lebanese government, reducing the influence of Hezbollah and its sponsor, Iran. An empowered Lebanese Army with strong government backing is the only way to keep Hezbollah from reconstituting along Israel’s border and avoid further Israel military action, officials and analysts say.
To some, it is a fanciful goal.
While Hezbollah is clearly weakened and Iran may feel intimidated by Israel’s recent displays of military prowess, both retain influence that they are unlikely to surrender easily.
And the United States has an unhappy history of efforts to shape foreign governments, one riddled with costly misjudgments, moral lapses and local outrage. The United States has a particularly painful history in Beirut, where a Hezbollah bombing in October 1983 killed 241 American military personnel on a peacekeeping mission. Many other Americans were kidnapped or killed there in subsequent years.
“The American experience in Lebanon is a tragic one,” Mr. Miller said.
That history is not lost on U.S. officials, even as they try to find some way of assuring Israel that Hezbollah will not simply regroup after the current fighting ends.
“Obviously we want to see a change in the political situation in Lebanon,” Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, said on Oct. 16. But he said achieving that could not be “all on the United States.”
“It is ultimately up to the people in Lebanon, the Lebanese government, to break through the dysfunction that has plagued it,” he said.
A trip to Israel and Lebanon last week by Amos Hochstein, a senior White House aide who serves as Mr. Biden’s point man on Lebanon, focused on a narrow effort to stop the fighting and secure the Israel-Lebanon border. The stated U.S. goal is to implement United Nations Resolution 1701, which was passed in 2006 to bring an end to Israel’s last war with Hezbollah.
That resolution called for Israel and Hezbollah to leave southern Lebanon, and for the border area to be secured and monitored by U.N. personnel and the Lebanese Army.
But Israel says the resolution was a failure, with devastating consequences. U.N. forces were not authorized to use force, and Lebanon’s army proved both unable and unwilling to challenge Hezbollah as it built up a powerful military presence along Israel’s border.
For now, however, the United States has been unexpectedly tolerant as Israel mounts a devastating assault against Hezbollah. Israel has killed the group’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and many of his deputies; destroyed thousands of Hezbollah weapons caches; and killed or injured thousands of rank-and-file Hezbollah fighters by detonating explosive pagers they were carrying.
Even as civilian casualties mount and the number of displaced Lebanese tops one million, according to Lebanese officials, the Biden administration says that Israel is acting in legitimate self-defense. Hezbollah’s attacks from along the border have forced about 60,000 Israelis to flee Israel’s north, and Israel says its goal is to restore security in the area so those families can return home safely.
Mr. Hochstein is now pressing a plan under which Israel, Hezbollah and Lebanon’s government would agree to another effort to implement Resolution 1701. Drafts of the plan envision the United States and other nations providing independent monitoring and oversight, according to people briefed on the efforts. Those countries would probably include France, which administered Lebanon before its independence in 1943.
The approach would also involve U.S.-led efforts to fund and train the Lebanese Armed Forces, whose commander, Gen. Joseph Aoun, is a Maronite Catholic seen as independent of Hezbollah. U.S. officials believe that several more thousand Lebanese troops than the roughly 5,000 currently deployed in the south would be needed to provide an effective safeguard against a Hezbollah return.
It was Mr. Hochstein who warned last month that a year of clashes between Israel and Hezbollah had “escalated out of control” — something Biden officials have long called a nightmare scenario.
That is because they fear that an Israeli invasion of Lebanon could have wider consequences, potentially leading Iran into more direct conflict with Israel. Israel and Iran have exchanged several rounds of airstrikes in recent months, but with few civilian casualties. An outright war between the two countries would run a high risk of drawing in the United States.
A key question for Israel concerning a cease-fire agreement based on Resolution 1701 is whether the Lebanese Army can be trusted to enforce it this time.
Lebanon has not had a president for about two years, and the country has been mired in political paralysis.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has spoken with several of his Arab counterparts who wield influence in Lebanon about how the country might be able to fill the vacant position with someone able to meet the challenge. Hezbollah has vetoed any candidate other than its preferred choice.
Firas Maksad, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said that “a major piece of the puzzle” currently missing “is a willing and capable partner in Beirut to implement any agreement.”
“For that, the U.S. and its partners will need to reboot the Lebanese political system by facilitating the election of a friendly president and the formation of a cabinet that does not legitimize Hezbollah’s arms,” he said.
But analysts say that any serious challenge to Hezbollah — politically in Beirut, or militarily by the Lebanese Army — could lead to civil war.
“At the end of the day, anybody who doesn’t think Hezbollah is going to fight for their position in Lebanon has got another thing coming,” said Matthew Levitt, an expert on Hezbollah at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “I just don’t have faith that the government of Lebanon is going to get its stuff together and stand up to the militants.”
Mr. Levitt said that Biden administration officials mainly hope to stop the fighting in Lebanon before it escalates further. With less than three months left in Mr. Biden’s term, and a fiendishly complex problem, they may have few other choices.
“I think the Biden administration understands the limits of trying to move the chess pieces in Lebanon,” Mr. Levitt said.
Given those looming problems, it is unclear what might lead to even a narrow cease-fire deal.
After Mr. Hochstein departed the region last week, Zvi Bar’el, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote that he saw little sign of progress after at least a dozen trips to Beirut by the White House official. He noted that Hezbollah and its allies in Lebanon’s government were still demanding a cease-fire in Gaza before they would agree to one themselves.
Every trip Mr. Hochstein makes to the region, Mr. Bar’el wrote, “is just a repeat performance, lacking any purpose or hope.”
U.S. officials dispute that assessment. Speaking to reporters last week, Mr. Blinken insisted that the United States “has made good progress” toward understandings to implement Resolution 1701 effectively.
Ryan Crocker, who was the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon in the early 1990s, said the United States might have to content itself with a cease-fire based on the resolution, and “incremental steps” from there.
“Our political calendar and, more importantly, Middle East political reality is not conducive to anything more,” Mr. Crocker said.
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