Hoping Israel would quickly destroy Hizbullah, the Bush administration soon realised its sweeping goals did not easily apply to this region of the Middle East, writes Peter Wallsten in Washington
For weeks, the Bush administration resisted international pressure for a ceasefire between Israel and Hizbullah, insisting that only disarming the terrorist organisation would cure a "root cause" of hostility and prevent another failed peace pact.
But the truce that took effect on Monday - coming without the destruction of Hizbullah's military threat and with no clear path to its disarmament - marks a far less dramatic conclusion than many in the administration had hoped for when the fighting began last month.
Rather than framing the conflict in Israel and Lebanon as another front in President George Bush's broad agenda to promote democracy and eliminate terrorism, US officials were forced to face the realities of a mounting civilian death toll in Lebanon and Israel's inability - or unwillingness - to deal the Shia Muslim militant organisation a knockout blow.
"It's been not a failure, but a massive disappointment," said Edward Luttwak, who served as a policy adviser to former President Reagan and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Several experts called the new US-backed UN resolution a "considerable scaling back" of the administration's aspirations.
"They want to change the world, and they don't want the status quo," said Edward Walker, an ambassador to both Israel and Egypt in the 1990s and now an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, "and, in this case, they found that there are limits to what you can do to change things."
Mr Bush on Monday sought to portray the UN deal as a success, calling his administration's efforts with Israel and Lebanon part of a "forward strategy of freedom in the broader Middle East".
He said the pact marked a "defeat" for Hizbullah, which loses its ability to function as a "state within a state" in southern Lebanon.
When asked though how the resolution would weaken Hizbullah and cut it off from sponsors in Iran and Syria, the president could make no assurances beyond a sense of optimism.
"Our hope is that this series of resolutions that gets passed gets after the root cause," he said, following a meeting with secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. "We want peace. We're not interested in process. What we want is results."
Many analysts however said the UN resolution was vague about how Hizbullah would be tamed. The agreement also was vague, they said, about how Iran and Syria would be prevented from continuing to send weapons, including rockets, to Hizbullah.
Even though the pact calls for Hizbullah to leave southern Lebanon, it remained unclear how the group would be stopped from operating north of the Litani river, about 32km (20 miles) from the Israeli border.
Even before the UN resolution took shape, signs of waning US credibility in the Middle East prompted Mr Bush to conclude that placing US troops on the front lines of a peacekeeping force in Lebanon would be counterproductive.
The administration's scaled-back expectations for the UN resolution deal were reflected over the weekend in comments by officials who offered words of hope, but not the usual assurances of victory.
White House press secretary Tony Snow, for example, deflected questions about whether the US had hoped that Hizbullah terrorists would be defeated, saying only that "disarmament is something that will be the responsibility of the sovereign government of Lebanon, with the assistance of international forces, but it is not something that's going to happen overnight."
Dr Rice was less firm. When an Israeli radio interviewer asked her over the weekend if Hizbullah would still be able to operate, she said only that the Lebanese government "has an obligation to start the disarmament of Hizbullah".
That cautionary language contrasted sharply with earlier messages, delivered when the administration thought the Israeli military would cripple Hizbullah before agreeing to a ceasefire.
On July 18th, President Bush predicted that the conflict could be turned into a "moment of opportunity" to tackle root causes of terrorism and stabilise a young democracy in Lebanon.
As fighting slowed on Monday, some analysts said the truce, with its lack of clarity on key points, could well turn out to be exactly what Mr Bush said he did not want.
"I don't think Hizbullah is likely to be disarmed," said Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively about the United Nations, the Middle East and Mr Bush's foreign policy. "If I were the national security adviser and the president, I wouldn't have gone for this."
Analysts said the Bush administration's new tone reflected the realisation that its sweeping goals did not easily apply to the region and that the US agenda had begun to stray from that of Israel.
Some in the Bush administration had wanted Israel to mount a massive assault to destroy Hizbullah, but the Israelis were facing a dicey political question over whether to commit thousands of ground troops at a time when Hizbullah rocket attacks were not causing destruction on a mass scale.
Instead, experts said, the Israelis attempted to inflict as much damage as possible through air strikes.
At the same time, according to Israeli media accounts and a report in Forward, a Jewish newspaper based in New York, the Israelis had hoped the United States would forge high-level contacts with Syria in hopes of reaching Hizbullah - but the high-level contacts never came.
As it became clear in recent days that the Israelis were not going to wipe out Hizbullah, support in the White House shifted from the hard-liners, typically led by vice-president Dick Cheney, to advocates for more diplomacy.
"Israel's hesitancy kind of took the wind out of the sails of the hard-liners," Mr Muravchik said.
Mr Snow, in an interview, confirmed that some in the administration had been hoping Israel's assault would be more decisive. However he declined to be specific and cautioned that it "was not the defined or explicit position of the president or senior counsellors. There were a lot of people who have said it, some people on the inside."
With Mr Bush back in Washington, fresh from a 10-day working holiday in Texas, the prospect of an emboldened Hizbullah - and continued fighting - loomed.