Crisis seen as chance to reshape Mideast

JERUSALEM -- The escalating Hezbollah-Israeli confrontation is just one of several political and military showdowns playing out simultaneously as competing players vie to reshape the Middle East according to their own interests.

One arena is the exchange of Hezbollah rockets and Israeli airstrikes that Israeli and Lebanese officials alike have begun to call a war. Another is the bloody confrontation between Israel and the Hamas ruling party in the Gaza Strip.

A wide array of players -- from the militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas to their backers, Syria and Iran, and their biggest enemies, Israel and the United States, all with different goals -- hopes to seize on the growing crisis.

The Lebanese-based militant group Hezbollah triggered the current escalation by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid Wednesday and sending a volley of rockets into northern Israel. That clash occurred two weeks after Hamas fighters crossed into Israel and captured an Israeli soldier and killed two others, prompting fierce Israeli raids into Gaza.

``Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, and Iran are working in alliance, and their agenda isn't just internal, it's regional . . . to change the balance of power in the Middle East," said Ahmad Moussalli, a political science professor at the American University of Beirut.

Moussalli said that Hezbollah's aggressive move was aimed at showing that Arabs can still deal military blows to Israel and indirectly to the United States by staging such a brazen raid, as well as help its state backers, Syria and Iran, flex their muscles at a time when both are on the ropes. Iran is threatened with international sanctions over its alleged nuclear arms program and Syria wants to regain its regional influence after its embarrassing ouster from Lebanon last year.

Israel, on the other hand, wants to win international support for its newly aggressive stance against Hamas and Hezbollah, and paint its enemies as part of a larger anti-Western coalition led by a nuclear-hungry Iran. An obstacle to the Israeli goal is that even though Hamas and Hezbollah are both shunned as terrorist groups by many countries, they have won power through democratic elections -- Hamas ruling the Palestinian Authority and Hezbollah fielding a bloc in the Lebanese parliament.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said Israel wants not just to stop Hamas and Hezbollah from firing rockets into Israel, but to force the total disarmament of Hezbollah -- a well-organized military group that operates as a state-within-a-state in southern Lebanon alongside the weak Lebanese government -- and to win strong international action against Iran and Syria.

Even more broadly, he said, Israel wants to build international consensus that armed groups should not be allowed to run in elections and to convince its allies that Hezbollah and Hamas have now made ``irrelevant" the decades-old assumption that Israel can unilaterally push for Middle East peace by giving up territory.

US, Arab, and Israeli analysts say that both Israel and its foes are taking big gambles that could end in disaster.

Israel risks repeating the mistakes of 1982, when it invaded Lebanon to drive out Palestinian militants and ended up bogged down in an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon that spurred Hezbollah to popularity as a guerrilla group and eventually ended only because of widespread Israeli opposition.

Six years after the occupation ended, the Sh'ite Muslim militant group had lost considerable sway: It had been ordered to disarm under a United Nations resolution and had worn out its welcome among some sectors of Lebanon's complex mix of Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Christians.

Now, said Edward Walker, a former US ambassador to Israel and Egypt, Hezbollah is seeking through its attack Wednesday to provoke a new Israeli occupation in order to renew its popularity. By launching broad attacks on Lebanon's airport, bridges, and parts of Beirut, he said, Israel is playing into that strategy.

``They're the pawn in this thing, they were drawn into it," Walker, who now heads the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank, said of Israel. ``They are being used by Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria to change the pieces on the chessboard."

He said Israel's military might was unlikely to root out Hezbollah entirely or to prod the weak Lebanese government to confront the group. ``Even when they occupied Lebanon they couldn't change the chessboard," he said. ``It's not something an occupying power can do, which we're finding out in Iraq."

However, Hezbollah, too, could see its strategy backfire.

``The Lebanese people are paying a very high price. It's not some small thing to be attacked in tourist season and for infrastructure to be destroyed," said Moussalli. ``The powers of Lebanon may decide that Hezbollah shouldn't have the power to go to war on its own."

The fighting in Lebanon and northern Israel has overshadowed the earlier crisis that began when Hamas militants abducted an Israeli soldier and killed two others June 25, sparking an ongoing three-week Israeli military campaign that has killed scores of Palestinians in Gaza.

As it is with Lebanon, Israel is holding the Palestinian Authority responsible for the Hamas attack. Israel has arrested much of the Palestinian cabinet and closed Gaza's borders, worsening an economic crisis. Now Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has grabbed the limelight from Hamas, saying he wants to negotiate a deal to release all three Israeli captives in exchange for Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners.

Hezbollah wants to assert itself as a leader of the Arab struggle against Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territory captured in the 1967 war, Walker said. But Hezbollah's patron, Iran, will probably want to be seen as the force behind the operation as a way of asserting its regional reach.

Iran, said Walker, wants to show the United States and its allies that it can hit hard if pushed into a corner over its suspected nuclear weapons program. Iran's case has been referred to the Security Council, which could impose sanctions.

Analysts see still different goals for Syria. Some say Syria wants to use the crisis to discredit Lebanon's anti-Syrian government in order to get its troops back into Lebanon and head off Arab support for a full UN investigation into the car-bomb slaying of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005, in which Syrian officials are suspected.

And some Mideast experts say the United States has its own agenda in the current conflict: to win tough international action against Iran and Syria by highlighting what the United States considers dangerous fomenting of violence by their surrogates, Hezbollah and Hamas.

``The bigger theme [for the United States] is to really use Hezbollah in this crisis as an example of why the international community really has to get serious about Iran," said David Schenker, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former Middle East policy aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

But Walker pointed out that the United States is in a bind. Overly tough Israeli action could hurt the new Lebanese government, one of the few recent American foreign policy successes in the Middle East.

Many argue that the US invasion of Iraq has also hamstrung the United States because countries like Syria and Iran believe the US military will not take strong action against them while bogged down in Iraq.

And, as Rami Khoury, editor of the Beirut Daily Star, wrote in a commentary yesterday, the close US alliance with Israel makes the United States vulnerable to the effects of Israel's choices. ``Every Israeli action against Arabs feeds Arab anger against the US," making it harder to win Arab support to investigate Syria, he wrote. ``The world's sole superpower is peculiarly powerless in the current crisis in the Middle East."

Globe correspondent Andrew Butters contributed to this story from Beirut.