During the Vietnam War, a Communist leader famously told his US counterpart that the US could kill ten Vietcong for every American who died, and yet would still lose in the end. The same is true of Israel and Hizbollah. Israel is losing for the same reasons that it lost its previous struggle with that organization: bombardment from the air is ineffective; occupation on the ground has to be permanent, and involves an unacceptable stream of Israeli casualties; and outright massacre of the civilian population is (presumably) out of the question.

It is instructive in this regard to compare what is happening in Lebanon to Russia’s victory over the militants in Chechnya. To achieve this took the Russians seven years, thousands of Russian dead, tens of thousands of Chechen dead, and a number of well-publicized atrocities which have severely tarnished Russia in the eyes of the world. Moreover, since Chechnya is legally part of Russia, it was possible for them to re-integrate Chechnya as a republic of the Russian Federation, giving local power to one Chechen faction and handsomely rewarding its leaders.

None of this is possible for Israel. The most Israel can do is to conduct repeated punitive expeditions. These kill numerous civilians, but if anything only strengthen Hizbollah, while damaging Israel’s economy and relations with the wider world, and America’s position in the wider region.

For whatever President Bush may believe, Hizbollah is not simply a “terrorist organization,” if that implies that it resembles Al Qaeda. It is much more like the Irish Republican Army and its political wing Sinn Fein, which so many Americans supported for so long in their fight against the British. This organization used terrorist methods, but it was also a political force with massive political support in its own community and beyond. The suggestion that the British could have “eliminated” or even “disarmed” the IRA by bombing, raiding or occupying the Irish Republic was always self-evidently ludicrous. Such actions would only have enormously increased the IRA’s power, menace and influence. Instead, the end of IRA terrorism was achieved only through a long and arduous negotiating process involving concessions by both sides and the progressive integration of the IRA and its constituents into the Northern Irish state.

In view of these facts -- which are hardly complex or difficult to grasp -- the Israeli government and Israel’s people need to rethink their entire strategy, not only in Lebanon, but towards all their neighbors including the Palestinians and Syria. For Israeli strategy in Palestine has failed just as obviously as it has in Lebanon.

If Israel is prepared to do this, then the international community, led by Europe, should step up with really serious guarantees of Israel’s security. These should include in the short term a large-scale peacekeeping force for southern Lebanon to protect northern Israel from attacks by Hizbollah. In the longer term a much larger force should be made available as part of a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, to ensure that a Palestinian state will not be made a base for aggression against Israel. Ideally, this should form part of a process by which both Israel and this Palestinian state should eventually be invited to join both NATO and the European Union.

For any of this to happen, however, Israel has to be prepared to negotiate regionally and internationally acceptable agreements with its neighbors; and it has to do so simultaneously, as part of one giant package. For as every experience not just of the past few months but of many years shows, the different conflicts in the region cannot be solved in artificial isolation.

Hizbollah came into being in the first place to resist an Israeli invasion of Lebanon intended to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization. Syria supports Hizbollah largely in order to put pressure on Israel to give up the Syrian land it conquered in 1967. The Hizbollah attack which set off this latest war was launched to support Hizbollah’s Hamas allies in the face of an Israeli attempt to destroy their government in the Palestinian territories; and so on.

So we should agree with President Bush when he says that it is necessary not only to stop the immediate violence but solve its deeper roots; but we should draw very different conclusions from this statement. Although it may seem harsh to say so, an international peacekeeping force for southern Lebanon under the terms so far proposed amounts to helping Israel avoid having to confront the fact that its strategy has failed, and avoid having to engage in a very painful but absolutely essential national debate about what to do instead. This is not in the long-term interest of Europe, the Middle East, the United States -- or indeed, in the long run, Israel itself.

Instead, the Europeans should recognize that for the first time in many years, the increasingly visible failure of Israeli and US strategy, and Tel Aviv and Washington’s need for outside help, have given Europe real leverage. They should press this advantage relentlessly to help bring about a real solution to the Middle East’s manifold and interlinked conflicts.