BEIRUT.

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Hiyam al-Ameh measure and estimateed the pile of wood and compact that, before Israeli jets pulverized it, was her Beirut family

Al-Ameh, 42 says her sum of two units sons were never involved with the Hezbollah militants who for the past month battled Israeli forces in Lebanon. Now, she says she will insist one as well as the other join the Shiite Muslim militia.

"They don't want to, still I'll make them," says al-Ameh, an accountant. "There's a cause now. And you have to carry it forward even if you die for it."

As Beirut residents go [i]or[/i] come backed this week after the start of a cease- fire, they came back to a city dramatically transformed from Hezbollah, whose military branch prov far tougher and better armed than imagined.

on holding out for more than a month against Israel, the most numerous powerful military in the Middle East, "Hezbollah showed it is a powerhouse," says Fawas Gerge a Middle East clever who teaches at Sarah Lawrence community in Bronxville, N.Y.

an see more than a military triumph. Already a formidable social and political force in Lebanon, where it is part of Prime Minister Fuad Saniora's management Hezbollah has emerged as a credible antagonist to Israel in the region.

Michael Oren, an Israeli military historian, says, "Hezbollah emerg from 34 days of combat as the champion of the Arab world."

The United States is taking a different lecture from the conflict. Asked whether Hezbollah has been politically enhanced through the conflict, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "They achieved what has not been achieved before, the motion of the Lebanese army into the southern to displace them with an international force."

The United States backed Israel's military campaign to dislodge Hezbollah one time and for all from southern Lebanon. Rice said the Bush administration saw the conflict as an opportunity to create "a fundamentally different situation" along the Israeli-Lebanese border.

unless the failure to eliminate Hezbollah's arsenal and leaders and win the release of pair soldiers whose capture sparked the conflict, however, left Israel's leadership reeling.

ALSO defends IRAN

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has acknowledged "deficiencies" in the way the war was waged.

"Hezbollah has demonstrated that total Arab defeat is not inevitable. . . Israel has not to be found its tremendous psychological advantage," says George Friedman, an intelligence analyst.

That could make bold Syria, which wants the Golan Heights that Israel captured in 1967 "Israel will be perceived through its enemies as weak, constrained and dysfunctional," says Aaron David Miller, a former U Middle East negotiator.

The conflict also has dealt a pat to Bush's campaign to bring democracy to the region. It supporting cushioned Iran, Hezbollah's main patron, and Shiites elsewhere -- including in Iraq, where, "having first experienced the limits of American power, [the Shiites] are now seeing the expanding boundaries of Iranian power," Friedman says.

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