Secretary of State Rice, in an interview today in USA Today (h/t our buddy Seth Leibsohn) (italics mine):
The 15,000-member U.N. force being created for southern Lebanon will keep the peace and enforce an international arms embargo, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday, but it won’t be charged with disarming Hezbollah guerrillas. That “political agreement” will be the responsibility of the Lebanese, Rice said in an interview with USA Today….
“I don’t think there is an expectation that this (U.N.) force is going to physically disarm Hezbollah,” Rice said. “I think it’s a little bit of a misreading about how you disarm a militia. You have to have a plan, first of all, for the disarmament of the militia, and then the hope is that some people lay down their arms voluntarily.“ If Hezbollah resists international demands to disarm, Rice said, “one would have to assume that there will be others who are willing to call Hezbollah what we are willing to call it, which is a terrorist organization.”
Right. The “robust” international force wants no part of Hezbollah; disarming them is the “political” (i.e., not military) job of Lebanon — the government that has told us it is too weak to protect the country, that Hezbollah is part of, and that fought against rules of engagement that would enable an international force to disarm Hezbollah.
So how is this disarming going to happen? Well, Hezbollah, having killed Israelis and Americans with great success for a quarter-century, is now — in the middle of a war which, for good reasons, it thinks its side is winning — going to lay its arms down voluntarily! If it doesn’t, we are going to call them names (like “terrorist” — a name these guys actually like being called). That oughta do it, no?
What must Nasrallah, bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, et al. think when they read this stuff?