New Cabinet for Lebanon, but troubles loom

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov. 10 (UPI) -- After five months of intense political wrangling, with Syria and Saudi Arabia pulling the strings, Lebanon seems set to get a new government that includes Hezbollah.

Israel is infuriated because it sees that as giving Hezbollah a patina of international legitimacy. This has raises tension at a time when Israeli leaders daily denounce the Iranian-backed movement and seek international action against it.

They claim that Iran and Syria, the Islamic Republic's sole Arab ally, are building up Hezbollah's firepower with missiles than can reach Tel Aviv and the nuclear reactor at Dimona further south in the Negev Desert.

Israel claims that the Lebanese army and the 13,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force deployed in South Lebanon are doing nothing to halt the alleged arms supplies.

Israel claims Hezbollah currently has in excess of 42,000 rockets, more than double the number it supposedly had at the outbreak of the 2006 war with Israel, and that Hezbollah is now so strong it cannot be controlled by the Lebanese state.

"The new government will have no bearing on the key political fact looming over Lebanon today: namely, the existence of a parallel state maintained by Hezbollah, which makes its decision without consulting the nominal rulers of the country," Israel analyst Jonathan Spyer wrote in The Jerusalem Post.

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, as a famous Chinese leader once said. In Lebanon, the guns are in the hands of Hezbollah. This is the salient point."

The outcome of the 34-day 2006 war was inconclusive. But Hezbollah is generally considered to have come out best because the Israelis, for all their military might, failed in their stated objective of crushing the movement once and for all and were fought to a standstill by the more nimble guerrillas.

Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, Israel's chief of staff, told the Israeli Parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Tuesday that Hezbollah has missiles with ranges of up to 180 miles, enough to reach the country's main urban conurbation around the coastal city of Tel Aviv.

He conceded that the northern border with Lebanon and the southern front with the Gaza Strip, controlled by the fundamentalist Hamas movement, were "calm at the moment."

But he warned that "it is a misleading calm. Beyond the fences the terror groups are gaining strength."

The chief of Israel's military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, said last week that Hamas now has Iranian-supplied missiles that can also reach Tel Aviv.

The fear is that the Israelis will find themselves caught in an Iranian-engineered nightmare scenario where they are under fire from north and south simultaneously with rockets capable of hitting the entire country.

Last week the Israelis claimed they had intercepted a German-owned freighter in the eastern Mediterranean off Cyprus carrying some 3,000 107mm and 122mm rockets from Iran for Hezbollah.

All told, they said the ship contained 320 tons of arms destined for Syria to be delivered overland to the Shiite group. Hezbollah denies any involvement.

Israel's northern front with Lebanon has been relatively quiet since fighting ended in August 2006, but the deputy chief of the Northern Command, Gen. Alon Friedman, says it could "explode at any moment."

As for the Lebanese, many suspect that the 30-member Cabinet stitched together by Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri, largely due to a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Syria, may not survive for long.

No one expects that the Cabinet, finely balanced between the fraying Western-backed March 14 alliance and the Syrian-backed, Hezbollah-led March 8 opposition coalition, will be able to function -- and will certainly not be able to disarm Hezbollah.

The leftist As-Safir daily, which is close to the opposition, declared Tuesday that the Hariri government embraces all of Lebanon's sectarian complexities and rivalries.

"It is a government of contradictions, which either contains a time bomb waiting to explode or will be able to rule until the end of its mandate," the newspaper said.

The real key to what is likely to happen in Lebanon rests with whether the Obama administration can negotiate a settlement with Tehran over its nuclear program.

If it can't, the region may well be engulfed in a new conflict, with Lebanon a vital springboard for Iranian-sponsored attacks on Israel.