BEIRUT -- It has long been feared that the Palestinian intifada would widen into a regional confrontation, and that South Lebanon would be the flash point from which it does so. With Israel's first deliberate attack on a Syrian military target in Lebanon since its 1982 invasion of the country, that confrontation could be getting under way. And Lebanon, resuming its former role as an arena for other people's conflicts, is now trapped -- in the words of its most sharp-tongued politician, Druze chieftain Walid Junblatt -- "between Hanoi and Hong Kong."
Hezbollah embodies Hanoi. It was Hezbollah's killing of an Israeli soldier on Saturday that prompted the air raid against a Syrian radar station Monday morning. He was the third to die in such cross-frontier raids since Israel withdrew last May from its South Lebanese "security zone." The withdrawal had been a triumph for Hezbollah, and there had been high hopes among many Lebanese that it would exploit the prestige it had garnered in a domestic political role. But that was not to be.
Hezbollah cites three motives for keeping up its resistance -- national, Islamic, and regional.