How we couldn't/wouldn't keep arms from Hezbollah

President Bush hopes you won't notice that one reason Hezbollah had all those rockets to rain down on Israel is that his administration was powerless to stop delivery of thousands of pieces of Iranian weaponry through Syria.

Despite repeated requests from Jerusalem to intervene, the White House not only had little stroke in Damascus or Tehran but also other concerns. At one point, the Bush administration was more interested in using its minimal influence to keep Syria quiet in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

In his visit to the State Department on Monday as the cease-fire went into effect in the Israel-Hezbollah crisis, Bush made the legitimate but tangential point: "We can only imagine how much more dangerous this conflict would be if Iran had the nuclear weapon it seeks."

Let us also imagine how much less deadly the conflict would have been — assuming it would have started at all — if Hezbollah did not have its seemingly inexhaustible supply of conventional weapons.

Bush was very specific — and correct — in naming Iran and Syria as "Hezbollah's state sponsors," but he was mute on his own administration's inability to step in effectively during their years of their arming the Shiite militia.

Bush was willing to say that "sophisticated weaponry ended up in the hands of Hezbollah fighters" and that "many assume and many believe that the weaponry came from Iran through Syria." But here Bush verged on the disingenuous, because the manner in which the arms reached southern Lebanon is well-known.

The Hezbollah supply route was firmly established almost as soon as Israel withdrew in May 2000 from the defensive position it had maintained in southern Lebanon for 22 years. By 2002, the transshipments from Iran through Syria into Lebanon looked at times like a colony of transient ants.

By April 2002, Hezbollah was feeling brassy enough that it shelled northern Israel as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was being briefed by Israeli officials at a command post on the very problem. Powell was shown real-time video of the attack. He was alarmed — or at least irritated — enough that he made a side trip to Damascus to complain, without evident result, to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Later that year, I was at lunch in Jerusalem with a senior Israeli official who said his government could not much longer ignore the arms shipments to Hezbollah and periodic shelling. That raised the prospect of an Israeli strike against the militia just as the United States was preparing the invasion of Iraq — which had attacked Israel with Scud missiles in the first Gulf War. In hindsight, perhaps Israel should have followed its defensive instincts and struck Hezbollah then.

Israel, not wanting to complicate matters for Washington, instead pressed in private for the Bush administration to intervene more strongly, at least with Syria, in protest against the shipments.

Jerusalem was unimpressed.

"They send the marshmallows to Damascus," the Israeli official told me, as I reported back them. Assad "might die from laughing."

One reason that Israel did not press Washington on the issue more publicly, the Israeli official said, was: "The United States probably doesn't want this on the table" at the presidential level "because it shows the U.S. has no leverage" with Assad.

What leverage the Bush administration did have, as I pointed out at the time, was being used to get Syria's eventual vote in favor of a U.N. Security Council resolution against Iraq.

The Bush administration was so focused on what has become its Iraq folly that even with all its blow-and-go about fighting terrorism it allowed Hezbollah, which it had classified as a terrorist organization, to engage in almost unfettered stockpiling of weapons to be used against our best — and about only — consistent ally in the region.

Yes, as Bush contended Monday, this is "a pivotal moment" in the Middle East, but it has arrived, in part, because his administration let so many other potentially pivotal moments slide by.

It's well and good to be determined, in Bush's phrase, "to confront terrorism," but surely that should included more robust (a vogue word, if you hadn't noticed) attempts to stop the arming of Hezbollah.

As my Israeli luncheon partner asked back in 2002, "Why are you guys sitting on your ass for two years?" Almost four years later we have witnessed a brutal result of our recumbency.

Hines is a Houston Chronicle columnist based in Washington, D.C.