"I think you can forget about Hezbollah being disarmed. It is just not going to happen. Hezbollah doesn't want to be disarmed and there is nobody else willing to do it. In that simple fact lies the potential for future trouble.
The UN Security Council resolution 1559 certainly calls for all the militias operating in Lebanon to be disarmed, but the Lebanese Government has side-stepped the whole issue since that resolution was passed two years ago. People here accept that it is a very difficult thing to disarm Hezbollah against its will.
Even if the Lebanese Government had been crazy enough to try to force the army to do it, I think the army would have refused. A lot of its senior officers are loyal to President Emile Lahoud, the last leading ally of Syria to remain in office in Lebanon.
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The alternative option is to send international troops to disarm Hezbollah, when the United Nations mission in South Lebanon is given a new mandate and beefed up with an extra 13,000 peacekeepers.
But that is not going to happen either. It is clearly understood that the last thing that foreign countries sending troops to maintain the ceasefire want to do is to get involved in disarming Hezbollah - or even in preventing Hezbollah from reaching the border and attacking Israel. There is no way they want to be caught in the middle, or seen as Israel's extra line of defence against Hezbollah.
This is what is behind the delay in agreeing the new UN mission. That is why the countries willing to offer troops for the new UN mission are still talking, why the French Foreign Minister is in Beirut today, still asking searching questions about what the mission's mandate means, what the situation is on the ground, and who else is going to be there.
Countries like France and Australia are willing in principle to commit soldiers, but they worry that if their forces suddenly find themselves surrounded by potentially less reliable troops from other countries and acting as the front line of defence for Israel, then they don't want to be involved.
They want a level of political understanding to be in place at the start, that Hezbollah won't attack Israel and that when they arrive in south Lebanon they will not find Hezbollah guerillas still deployed in their bunkers along the border.
In effect, they want the UN force to be mainly a PR stunt to reassure the international community that the situation in Lebanon is under control."
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