The day of reckoning for Hizballah has arrived. Prime Minister Olmert:

Israel will not halt its offensive in Lebanon until Hizbullah is disarmed, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Friday.

Olmert made the comments during a telephone call with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Israeli government officials said Friday. Olmert agreed to allow a U.N. team come to the area to try to mediate a cease-fire, an official close to Olmert said.

[snip]

Olmert said he would only cooperate with the U.N. team if its mandate would be to free the captured Israeli soldiers and force Lebanon to comply with a U.N. resolution that calls on it to deploy its forces along its border with Israel, moving Hizbullah guerrillas out of the area, the official said.

Unless there is some kind of intervention – serious rhetoric from Washington warning the Israelis to halt their incursion into Lebanon – it appears that Hizballah’s days are numbered as a fighting force. As this short entry in Foreign Policy blog points out, this is a cause for celebration in many Arab capitols as well as Tel Aviv and Washington:

You’d think the last thing citizens of a country that suffered decades of civil war would want is an all-out attack by one of the most advanced militaries in the world. But some Lebanese and other Arabs around the region (including the Saudis), while obviously not in favor of the Israeli assault, are seeing this crisis as a death knell for Hezbollah and quietly cheering it on. The WaPo ran an analysis piece on the subject today, and ynetnews.com – the English version of the most widely read Hebrew daily in Israel – also has some analysis. A year after the Lebanese successfully booted most of the Syrian influence out of the government, some are realizing that allowing minority parties, like Hezbollah, to make decisions that affect the entire nation does not make for a functioning state.

Ever since the Cedar Revolution succeeded in kicking the Syrians out of Lebanon and electing a majority government, the question of what to do about Hizballah has alternately roiled and vexed Lebanese politics. The fragile coalition of religious, secular, and nationalist parties threatened to fly apart several times as the Lebanese cabinet struggled to come to grips with a seemingly insoluble conundrum; the fact that Hizballah is both a terrorist and political organization with real power both in the government and in the Lebanese street.

Any attempt at negotiating a solution that would have enabled the Lebanese to comply with UN Resolution 1559 that called for the disarming of all militias as well as the extension of Lebanese sovereignty over all of Lebanon was met with either a stonewall or doubletalk by Hizballah’s charismatic leader Hassan Nasrallah. He steadfastly refused to endorse UN assistance in disarming as well as rejecting out of hand any attempt by the Lebanese army to supplant his militia as the recognized “resistance” to Israel. This effectively meant that Nasrallah saw Hizballah as an independent force in both the military and political life of the nation, something that was proven when his cadres attacked Israeli troops and kidnapped two IDF soldiers.

It is unknown whether Hizballah’s aggression against Israel was planned or whether it was initiated by some local commander who saw an opportunity to inflict some pain on the Israelis:

Hezbollah and Israel stand along this border every day observing each other through binoculars and waiting for an opportunity to kill each other. They are at war. They have been for 25 years, no one ever declared a cease-fire between them. … They stand on the border every day and just wait for an opportunity. And on Tuesday morning there were two Humvees full of Israeli soldiers, not under observation from the Israeli side, not under covering fire, sitting out there all alone. The Hezbollah militia commander just couldn’t believe it—so he went and got them.

The Israeli captain in charge of that unit knew he had really screwed up, so he sent an armored personnel carrier to go get them in hot pursuit, and Hezbollah led them right through a minefield.

Now if you’re sitting in Tehran or Damascus or Beirut, and you are part of the terrorist Politburo so to speak, you have a choice. With your head sunk in your hands, thinking “Oh my God,” you can either give [the kidnapped soldiers] back and say “Oops, sorry, wrong time” or you can say, “Hey, this is war.”

It is absolutely ridiculous to believe that the Hezbollah commander on the ground said Tuesday morning, “Go get two Israeli soldiers, would you please?”

This may be true although it is not beyond the realm of the impossible to believe that local commanders had Nasrallah’s blessing to act if they saw an opening. However the events unfolded, Nasrallah embraced the action and is now paying an enormous price for it:

Hizbullah leaders and operatives were leaving Beirut on Saturday following a massive IAF strike on an 11-story building that served as the organization’s command center, initial intelligence indicated.

Channel 2 reported that the move appeared to be made under heavy security.

Earlier Saturday, IAF jets attacked targets in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, some 90 kilometers north of Beirut, marking the deepest Israel has struck inside Lebanon since the onset of Operation Just Rewards.

The jets also hit bridges and gas stations in eastern and southern Lebanon, and dropped tens of thousands of fliers over Lebanon trying to convey the message that Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah has taken control of their country and is bringing them disaster.

There are also reports of severe clashes in the south around the disputed Shebaa Farms region which would indicate that in addition to taking out as much Hizballah infrastructure as possible, the IDF was trying to degrade the combat capabilities of the terrorist group as well.

In short, Israel is doing to Hizballah what the Lebanese government lacked the power and political will to do for itself; Hizballah is being systematically disarmed.

It is unclear whether Israel’s intervention will be met with grudging assent by the Lebanese people or if the they will rally around Hizballah in sympathy. My own guess is that it will depend on how far Israel goes in Lebanon. If this operation takes many weeks and costs hundreds or thousands of Lebanese lives, I doubt very much that the people will feel anything but hatred for the Jewish state. It therefore becomes a matter of urgency that the Israelis do as much damage as they can to Hizballah as quickly as possible without “collateral” damage to either Lebanese infrastructure or the civilian population. This is what President Bush and Condi Rice have been asking and it makes perfect sense. Any Israeli action that allows Hizballah to become ascendant in Lebanese politics or in the government would be an unmitigated disaster.

Nasrallah may have had no choice but to embrace the actions of his subordinates. But it will be tough to spin a victory that will be believed by the Lebanese people with his entire infrastructure in ruins and his men scattered to the four winds.