While Lebanon burns

AFTER MEETING yesterday in Beirut with Lebanon's prime minister and speaker of Parliament, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States is ``deeply concerned about the Lebanese people and what they are enduring." Not only does this profession of concern come exceedingly late, it may be perceived as a hypocritical contradiction of US policy.

People throughout the region, who have seen horrific pictures of the devastation wrought in Lebanon, also know that until now Rice has said the Bush administration wants to wait a while longer before intervening diplomatically to obtain a cease-fire. Even disregarding the callousness of this stance, Lebanese civilians and their sympathizers in the Arab world do not see how the displacing of 700,000 civilians and the shattering of a modern, cosmopolitan country can lead to Lebanon's delicately balanced government disarming the Shi'ite militia Hezbollah.

What Rice did not say is that the longer the war is allowed to continue, the harder it will be not merely to rebuild roads, bridges, and neighborhoods, but also the fragile democracy that the Lebanese have been stitching together since Syrian soldiers packed up and left in April 2005. Many Lebanese who want Hezbollah to disarm, and resent Hezbollah's patrons in Iran and Syria, cannot understand why they are being attacked by Israel's army, and with weapons made in the United States .

President Bush has hailed Lebanon as a paradigm of America's success in bringing democracy to the Middle East. By deliberately delaying diplomatic efforts to reach a cease-fire, however, Bush seems to be helping to tear down the independent Lebanese democracy he had taken credit for constructing.

Meanwhile, other nations have been forming a broad consensus on the need to end the war swiftly and prevent a recurrence. In a crucial shift of position, Israeli leaders are now saying they would welcome a substantial foreign stabilization force in southern Lebanon rather than insisting that only the Lebanese Army should patrol the border. The European Union and major Arab governments are promoting precisely this kind of solution.

Israel has made its point. It will not tolerate Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel. Rice should call for an immediate cease-fire while she hammers out agreements on the countries that will supply troops, the mandate they must have to enforce peace, and the schedule for disarming Hezbollah in accordance with UN resolution 1559. Once the war is ended and Lebanon's reconstruction can begin, Rice should revive active US diplomacy. It alone may produce a negotiated peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians and forestall the spread of Iranian and Islamist influence that Israel and the Arab states share an interest in resisting.