From dust of war, more potent Hezbollah?

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Hiyam al-Ameh surveyed the pile of splintered wood and crushed concrete that, before Israeli jets pulverized it, was her home in south suburban Beirut.

Al-Ameh, 42, says her two sons, ages 21 and 16, were never involved with the Hezbollah militants who for the past month battled Israeli forces in Lebanon. Now, she says she will insist both join the Shiite Muslim militia. "They don't want to, but I'll make them," says al-Ameh, an accountant. "There's a cause now. And you have to carry it on, even if you die for it."

As Beirut residents returned this week to their ruined neighborhoods after the start of a cease-fire, they came back to a city dramatically transformed by Hezbollah, whose military branch proved far tougher and better-armed than even its staunchest supporters could have imagined.

By holding out for more than a month against Israel, the most powerful military in the Middle East, "Hezbollah showed it is a powerhouse," says Fawas Gerges, a Middle East expert who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.

Some see more than a military triumph. Already a formidable social and political force in Lebanon, where it is part of Prime Minister Fuad Saniora's government, Hezbollah has emerged as a credible antagonist to Israel in the region. Michael Oren, an Israeli military historian and author of "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East," says, "Hezbollah emerged from 34 days of combat as "the champion of the Arab world."

The United States is taking a different lesson from the conflict. President Bush said this week that Hezbollah lost. And, asked Tuesday whether Hezbollah has been politically enhanced by the conflict, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told USA TODAY, "They achieved what has not been achieved before, the movement of the Lebanese army into the south to displace them with an international force."

The United States strongly backed Israel's military campaign to dislodge Hezbollah once and for all from southern Lebanon. Rice said Tuesday that the Bush administration saw the conflict as an opportunity to create "a fundamentally different situation" along the Israeli-Lebanese border.

But the failure to eliminate Hezbollah's arsenal and leaders and win the release of two soldiers whose capture sparked the conflict, however, left Israel's leadership reeling. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday acknowledged "deficiencies" in the way the war was waged.