Reports from Lebanon and Israel indicate that popular opinion in both countries has hardened dramatically in favour of Hizbullah and the Israeli government in their 20-day confrontation with one another. Such attitudes reflect the fact that neither side has won this short and increasingly vicious war. Nor will victory be achieved by either side if fighting continues for another week.
That is why it is imperative that a ceasefire should be agreed immediately. Otherwise there is a grave danger that further atrocities such as the massacre of women and children at Qana in an Israeli airstrike will tip the region by accident or design into a wider war that would be much more difficult to contain.
The Bush administration has already given the Israeli government two extra weeks to destroy or seriously weaken Hizbullah, supported by British prime minister Tony Blair. This was on top of its initial harshly disproportionate response to Hizbullah's provocative and unprovoked kidnap of two soldiers and killing of eight more on July 13th. This has proved to be a much more difficult task than anticipated by the Israeli military.
They substantially underestimated Hizbullah's strength and are now seeking a further two weeks in which to conduct their war. The Qana atrocity may finally have convinced the Bush administration to recognise this reality, refuse the request and seek as favourable ceasefire terms as possible this week through the United Nations. It is high time such realism penetrated US policy-making, since their's is the only pressure Israel recognises and responds to.
Attention is now turning to the mandate and composition of an international force. Should it police a buffer zone, seek to disarm Hizbullah, monitor entry points for that movement's Syrian and Iranian arms supplies and strengthen the ability of the Lebanese army to assert full control of the country? Several of these tasks are much too geared to delivering Israel's war aims by other means. Given the intensity of feeling in Lebanon an international force given such a mandate would rapidly become embroiled in a civil war there.
Policy realism therefore needs to be extended beyond Lebanon to embrace the other regional players in this war. Mr Bush continually calls on Syria and Iran to cease aiding Hizbullah, but he refuses to engage them directly. That does not make sense if a durable political solution to the conflict is to be found by diplomatic rather than military means. The US has sufficient power and leverage in the region to be able to offer favourable terms to both states in return for their co-operation over Hizbullah, if the Bush administration wills it so.
The stark alternative to such an engagement is military confrontation. The longer this crisis has gone on the more worried have states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan become that this could happen. European states must aim to link a fresh effort to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire. Without that it would be neither durable nor sustained.