As Mideast Smoke Clears, Political Fates May Shift

Over the past three weeks, Rice devoted 90 percent of her time to the Lebanon crisis, aides said. In coordination with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and France, she worked through the last three issues, all tricky -- the amount of military firepower a U.N. force can use to maintain peace, the status of the disputed Shebaa Farms region, and the sequence of Israel's withdrawal -- right up to the last minute Friday.

Diplomacy over the past week had been like a Rubik's cube, a senior State Department official said: "One minute you think you had it, then you did the turn and discovered you were further away than when you started." After an agreement last weekend, Washington and Paris by Wednesday were at loggerheads over the terms and timing of an Israeli withdrawal. Thursday was a critical day of compromises, U.S. and European diplomats said.

Many diplomats said the resolution was a masterful blend to secure Israel's vulnerable border while strengthening Lebanon's government and containing Hezbollah.

Yet America's image abroad emerges from the crisis badly battered, in part due to prolonged negotiations widely perceived in the Arab world as deliberate to allow Israel to pursue its military agenda -- with U.S.-manufactured weaponry, analysts said.

Rice's comment on the conflict as part of the "birth pangs" of a new Middle East was particularly "crude, insensitive and cruel," said Rami G. Khouri, an analyst and columnist for Beirut's Daily Star newspaper. "She was basically seen as saying you have to kill Arabs to remake them and you have to allow Israel to destroy Arab movements to make better nations.

"If it is a new Mideast, it won't be the one she is expecting," Khouri said, particularly coming after deeply troubled U.S.-led efforts to transform Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Afghanistan.

After the July 30 Israeli airstrike on Qana that killed at least 28 civilians, a large banner went up in downtown Beirut depicting Rice with sharp fangs and blood flowing from her mouth. "The massacre of children in Qana is a gift from Rice," it said.

Almost 90 percent of Lebanese said that the United States is not an honest broker, according to a July 29 survey by the Beirut Center for Research and Information, compared with 38 percent who supported a U.S. role in a January survey.

"Our image suffers from this perception and makes diplomacy and democracy promotion more difficult," Djerejian said.

U.S. officials said they recognize the potential ramifications.

"This is certainly one of the toughest challenges we have faced in the last few years. . . . We knew the consequences were very broad. We recognized this was not just a border war between Hezbollah and Israel," Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns said. "We know there are Arab complaints and anger about our role. But when it came down to the final analysis, the deal could not have been put together without us."

Lebanon suffered the most damage and death. More than 800 Lebanese civilians have died, and one-quarter of the country's population has been displaced. The nation's infrastructure, already rebuilt once after a vicious 15-year civil war, has been devastated. Electrical power plants, roads, bridges and thousands of housing units will require billions of dollars to be reconstructed.