The 15,000-member U.N. force being assembled for southern Lebanon had been
tasked with a peace-keeping mission and international arms embargo enforcement,
and it would not be required to disarm Hezbollah guerrillas, the U.S. Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice has said.
"I don't think there is an expectation that this (U.N.) force is going to
physically disarm Hezbollah," Rice on Wednesday was quoted by the USA TODAY
newspaper as saying in an interview. She added that "political agreement" would
be the responsibility of the Lebanese.
If Hezbollah resisted the 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."
Hezbollah would find itself increasingly isolated by European and other
nations and the weapons embargo would prevent it from being rearmed by its
sponsors in Syria and Iran, she said.
Rice denied that the United States had been eager for Israel to go after
Hezbollah. It was "not an issue of, you know, how much damage could the Israelis
do," she explained.
Instead, the Bush administration saw the conflict as an opportunity to create
"a fundamentally different situation" along the Israel-Lebanon border, according
to the report.
