Michael Ledeen panned his WSJ piece already, and obviously his proposed remedy of inviting Syria back to Lebanon isn’t going to happen. But his piece is still instructive reading in its analysis of the military and diplomatic difficulties of the current situation:

In the past, the Israelis were able to contain Hezbollah through Syria by announcing, from time to time, that if Hezbollah crossed specific “red lines” — notably by launching rockets into Israel — they would attack Syrian military installations. The regime in Damascus paid attention and Hezbollah followed the rules, confining its military action to mostly symbolic attacks within the very small territory of the “Shebaa farms” (which Hezbollah claims belongs to Lebanon, contrary to the U.N.’s yard-by-yard demarcation, and all the maps). No such threat could work against a Lebanese government which could not control Hezbollah.
Lebanon could still be bombed — as is now the case — but mostly to achieve logistic rather than political aims, specifically to close airports, ports and roads from Syria to prevent the resupply of Hezbollah. In addition, there were specifically Hezbollah targets: various headquarters, the residence of its leader Hassan Nasrallah, and hundreds of weapon depots.
This left only two options to the Israelis if Hezbollah did start a conflict. The first is the one they chose — the systematic attack of known or suspected Hezbollah storage sites for rockets and missiles in basements, garages, caves, etc., by artillery fire, bombardment, commando raids and small-scale armored incursions. Because the inventory was huge (more than 12,000 rockets and 100 guided missiles) and very dispersed, its cumulative destruction would be a slow process, lasting weeks rather than days. The second is an invasion of Lebanon as in 1982, in the hope of clashes with Hezbollah to reduce its numbers in direct combat, but mainly to find and destroy weapons-storage sites. That would require the Israelis to stay in Lebanon until Hezbollah were disarmed and disbanded, i.e., indefinitely.

He’s not bullish on a foreign force:

The military option would be to send a powerful multinational force well supplied with ammunition to disarm Hezbollah by force if necessary — and with orders to be ready for guerilla fighting. At the G-8 meeting, for example, Vladimir Putin offered to send troops. But there are almost no other suitable forces. The Americans and British are insufficiently neutral; and while there are always countries willing to supply units to the U.N. if only for the financial rewards, they are invariably forbidden to fight in earnest, and most could not fight anyway. Another and larger Unifil, which would do nothing effective against Hezbollah while freezing the Israeli army in its tracks, would be much worse than useless.

Finally, he gets to the Syrian re-occupation based on the same calculus Michael Rubin mentioned early—Assad is unlikely to be swayed by anything we’re offering at the moment:

Naturally that would imply the recognition of Syrian suzerainty over Lebanon, and of course the thoroughly unworthy Bashar Assad would have to be treated as a leader of regional importance. Only that could tempt Mr. Assad to abandon his alliance with Iran — along with the important rewards that would come his way more or less spontaneously. These rewards would include gifts from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, all three of which now fear Iran as the most dangerous threat they face; they would also include the approval — or at least the diminished hostility — of Syria’s Sunni majority, which vehemently dislikes the alliance with Shiite Iran, especially now that the Iranians are supporting Iraq’s Shiites in their bloody fight with the Sunnis.