EU sidelined again as US calls the shots

European analysts fear the United States is playing a dangerous game by sidelining the European Union's push for a diplomatic solution to the Lebanon crisis.

The outcome of a United Nations conference in Rome, where the US blocked European attempts to add the word "immediate" to a call for a ceasefire, has prompted many to conclude the White House has given Israel carte blanche to act against Hizbollah.

The civilian death toll in Lebanon from the Israeli strikes is more than 400 and the economic bill is in the billions of dollars.

And Hizbollah's rockets continue to hit Israel, reviving temptations there to re-establish a buffer zone in southern Lebanon - a strategy Israel abandoned in 2000 after 22 years and the loss of hundreds of troops.

This darkening backdrop has fuelled European fears that what Washington hoped would be a powerful but brief strike may snowball into a third Middle East war, alongside the conflicts in Iraq and Gaza.

"In the Middle East, you ignite a match and you do not know how the fire will end," EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana warned last week.

"Diplomatic impotence has rarely been as evident as it was in Rome," said Britain's Daily Telegraph. Looking at US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the other delegates, "it was hard to avoid the impression of futility. In Rome, of all places, the world fiddled while the Levant burned".

The French daily Liberation lamented that the failure had given Israel "more elbow room ... The warnings of the Europeans, prompted by the mounting blunders, seem to be making no impression."

"For the European Union, this instability on our doorstep is especially worrying," says Peter Sain Ley Berry, editor of EuropaWorld, an independent newsletter for EU decision-makers.

"It is inimical to economic growth, it causes energy prices to rise, it triggers the export of terrorism of the most brutal kind and it brings a flood of migrants, both legal and illegal, seeking to escape the cauldron of conflict."

The EU, and France and Germany individually, have sought to fill the perilous diplomatic void by supporting Lebanon's fragile Government and exploring ways to a ceasefire.

But US opposition and Israeli suspicions mean these moves carry minimum weight at the moment.

Many Europeans also worry Lebanon could turn out to be another lesson in the perils of unilateralism after the quagmire of Iraq.

"The Europeans appear to be more immediately concerned with the conflict than the United States is, yet Europe's role to date has been ineffective," says Robert Lowe, of the think-tank Chatham House in London.

That said, there is plenty of potential for a European role, as a mediator, a writer of cheques for humanitarian and reconstruction aid - and in a military capacity too, providing troops for a security force in southern Lebanon if such an initiative is ever realised.

In 1995, it launched the so-called Barcelona process, when the EU and 12 Mediterranean countries, including Israel and Lebanon, pledged to promote "peace, stability and security" in the Mediterranean.

While dormant now, Barcelona has been the only forum outside the UN where Israel takes part alongside its Arab neighbours.

This notion of a wider regional community for the Eastern Mediterranean gives the EU special leverage, argues Berry.

"That is the 'beyond-peace' vision and the context within which all the seemingly intractable problems ... could be addressed. Anything is possible, but first the violence has to stop."