The Next Move Is Syria’s : Will Damascus now move to eliminate the threat from Hezbollah?

Civilians from among the half-million or more driven from their towns and villages by last week’s ferocious Israeli bombardments of southern Lebanon have begun returning, in many cases to scenes of appalling destruction.

The brief conflict between Israel and the 5,000 irregulars of the radical Iran-backed Hezbollah movement of Lebanese Shiites for now seems to be over, thanks in part to efforts led by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who is back in the region to promote the peace process. Whether the border will remain quiet depends largely on whether a third party--Syria--decides that it should be.

Syria won some unusual praise from President Clinton last week for its part in getting Hezbollah to halt its rocket attacks on northern Israel, reportedly by stopping new shipments of Iranian-supplied weapons for Hezbollah from moving across its territory. Now comes the real test of Syrian intentions. Will it act further to disarm and so neutralize Hezbollah, as all the other militias that kept Lebanon in anarchy for 15 years have been neutralized, or will it allow the radicals to rearm and to continue goading Israel into the kind of massive retaliation whose chief victims are innocent civilians?

Hezbollah, like its sponsors in Tehran, bitterly opposes Arab-Israel peace efforts, and its provocations aim at subverting that process. Syria, whose 40,000 troops in Lebanon give it a decisive voice in that country’s affairs, is a key participant in the peace talks. Syria is beholden to Iran, an enemy of Damascus’ ideological enemy, Iraq. But its primary national goal is to regain sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which it lost in the 1967 war. The key to that goal lies in making a full peace with Israel. Such a peace almost certainly will require Syria to eliminate the threat from Hezbollah.

The Beirut government, certainly with Damascus’ approval, now says it will soon deploy Lebanese armed forces in the south. The aim--at least the hope--is to extend the so-far nonexistent authority of the central government into that area and so undercut the radicals. If Syria helps out, that could happen. And if it happens, the peace process will get a nudge forward.