JERUSALEM: The Bush administration’s influence in the Middle East is in danger of becoming another casualty of the war in Lebanon, giving Iran a chance to build up its clout in the region.

Despite a US-backed truce taking effect between Israel and Hezbollah on Monday, Washington faces erosion of credibility in the region and strained ties with Arab moderates that could doom its post-Sept 11 push to spread democracy there, analysts say.

The Arab world is seething at how President George W. Bush, after promoting free elections in Lebanon, made no effort to stop Israel from weakening the new government by destroying much of the country’s infrastructure in a bid to cripple Hezbollah.

But there is also unease among Israelis at a brewing debate in Washington about the Jewish state’s value as a strategic ally against Iran, given the failure of its vaunted, US-equipped military to subdue a small, Iranian-backed guerrilla army after a month of fighting.

“Iran comes out of this stronger, with the reflected glory of Hezbollah’s performance,” said Judith Kipper, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

Analysts say Bush’s initially halting response to the conflict was of an administration already overstretched by foreign policy problems — an unpopular war in Iraq and twin nuclear challenges from Iran and North Korea.

“This administration doesn’t do diplomacy very well,” Kipper said.

US officials also made clear from the start that Bush wanted to give Israel maximum time to inflict damage on Hezbollah.

When Israel launched air and ground assaults and Hezbollah responded by raining rockets on northern Israel, Bush was quick to frame the battle in the good-versus-evil terms of the US-led war on terrorism and put the blame on Iran and Syria, the group’s supporters.

US officials had hoped a crushing blow to Hezbollah would send a tough message to Tehran, which denies Israel’s right to exist and has defied US-led international efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear programme.

But Bush and the Israelis did not count on Hezbollah’s resilience. Taking a more realistic view, US officials had to drop demands for a timetable for Hezbollah’s full disarmament in a resolution passed by the UN Security Council on Friday.

Instead it calls for 15,000 Lebanese troops to be deployed along with an equal number of UN peacekeepers to enforce a Hezbollah-free zone in south Lebanon.

US insistence on letting Israeli forces stay in place until peacekeepers arrive has only served to reinforce perceptions in the Arab world of Washington’s bias in favour of Israel, which receives $2 billion in annual US military aid.

“Whatever credibility the US had left in the region has been badly degraded,” said Mouin Rabbani, an Amman-based analyst with the International Crisis Group.—Reuters