Deal Reflects Shift in Bush’s Expectations

For weeks, the Bush administration resisted international pressure for a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, insisting that only disarming the militant group would cure a “root cause” of hostility.

But the truce that took effect Monday left Hezbollah largely intact and outlines no clear path to its disarmament -- a far less dramatic conclusion than many in the administration had hoped for when the fighting began last month.

That contrast was evident Monday, as President Bush sought to portray the United Nations deal as a success, calling his administration’s efforts with Israel and Lebanon part of a “forward strategy of freedom in the broader Middle East.”

But when asked how the resolution would weaken Hezbollah and cut it off from its sponsors in Iran and Syria, the president could make no assurances beyond a sense of optimism.

“Our hope is that this series of resolutions that gets passed gets after the root cause,” he said after a meeting at the State Department with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“We want peace. We’re not interested in process. What we want is results.”

The results thus far are likely to be disappointing to Bush policy officials, particularly hard-liners, analysts said. Several called the U.N. resolution a “considerable scaling back” of the administration’s aspirations.

“It’s been not a failure, but a massive disappointment,” said Edward N. Luttwak, who served as a policy advisor to President Reagan and is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“They want to change the world, and they don’t want the status quo,” said Edward S. Walker Jr., an ambassador to both Israel and Egypt in the 1990s and now an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute. “And in this case, they found that there are limits to what you can do to change things.”

Many analysts said the U.N. resolution was vague about how Hezbollah would be tamed and how Iran and Syria would be prevented from continuing to send the group weapons, including advanced rockets.

And even though the resolution calls for Hezbollah to leave southern Lebanon, it remained unclear how the group would be stopped from operating north of the Litani River, about 20 miles from the Israeli border.

The administration’s scaled-back expectations for the U.N. resolution were reflected in comments by officials who offered words of hope, but not the usual assurances of victory.

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, for example, deflected questions about whether the U.S. had hoped that Hezbollah terrorists would be defeated, saying only that “disarmament is something that will be the responsibility of the sovereign government of Lebanon, with the assistance of international forces.... But it is not something that’s going to happen overnight.”

Rice was less firm: When an Israeli radio interviewer asked over the weekend if Hezbollah would still be able to operate, she said only that the Lebanese government “has an obligation to start the disarmament of Hezbollah.”

That cautionary language contrasted sharply with earlier messages, delivered when some in the administration thought the Israeli military would cripple Hezbollah before agreeing to a cease-fire. On July 28, Bush predicted confidently that the conflict could be turned into a “moment of opportunity” to tackle root causes of terrorism and stabilize a young democracy in Lebanon.

As fighting slowed Monday, some analysts said that the truce, with its lack of clarity on key points, could turn out to be exactly what Bush said he did not want.

What’s more, many agreed that Israel’s failure had strengthened the political clout of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

“I don’t think Hezbollah is likely to be disarmed,” said Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively about the United Nations, the Middle East and Bush foreign policy. “If I were the national security advisor and the president, I wouldn’t have gone for this.”

Analysts said the Bush administration’s new tone reflected the realization that its sweeping goals did not easily apply to the region -- and that the U.S. agenda had begun to stray from that of Israel.

Some in the Bush administration wanted Israel to mount a massive assault from the start to destroy Hezbollah. But the Israelis faced a dicey political question: whether to commit thousands of ground troops when Hezbollah rocket attacks were not causing destruction on a massive scale.

Instead, experts said, the Israelis attempted to inflict as much damage as possible through airstrikes, which also caused many civilian casualties. At the same time, according to Israeli media accounts and a report in Forward, a Jewish newspaper based in New York, Israel had hoped the U.S. would forge high-level contacts with Syria in hopes of reaching Hezbollah. But the high-level contacts never came.

As it became clear in recent days that the Israelis were not going to wipe out Hezbollah, support in the White House shifted from the hard-liners, typically led by Vice President Dick Cheney, to the advocates for more diplomacy.

“Israel’s hesitancy kind of took the wind out of the sails of the hard-liners,” Muravchik said.

Snow, in an interview, confirmed that some in the administration were hoping that Israel’s assault would be more decisive. But he declined to be specific and said it “was not the defined or explicit position of the president or senior counselors.”

“There were a lot of people who have said it, some people on the inside,” Snow said.

But on Monday, back in Washington after a 10-day working vacation in Texas, Bush faced the prospect of an emboldened Hezbollah -- and continued fighting.