Dan Rather

The rockets and the artillery fire had barely gone silent when they were replaced with a new sound: That of all sides declaring victory - or at least defeat for their enemies - in the month-long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, declared a "strategic and historic victory" over Israel. Joining him, unsurprisingly, were Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who cheered Hezbollah for raising "the banner of victory" over Israel, and Syria's Bashar Assad, who claimed that the new Middle East envisioned by the United States "has become an illusion".

Meantime, President Bush asserted that "Hezbollah suffered a defeat in this crisis," and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote in The Washington Post that the United Nations-brokered ceasefire represents "a victory for all who are committed to moderation and democracy in the Middle East - and a defeat for those who wish to undermine these principles with violence, particularly the governments of Syria and Iran."

Ambivalent tone

Amid this certitude from both sides, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was notable for his more ambivalent tone. Though he stated that Hezbollah would no longer be able to act like a "state within a state as an arm of the axis of evil," he also conceded "shortcomings" in his government's pursuit of the war.

One reason for Prime Minister Olmert's circumspection was surely the outcry that attended the cease-fire in Israel. Israel's editorial pages, Olmert's political opponents and public opinion have all been outspoken in their criticism of a military action that ended - at least for the time being - with both the unconditional release of the Israeli soldiers whose kidnapping precipitated it and the disarming of Hezbollah resting on the potentially shaky ground of a U.N. resolution.

Your reporter remembers hearing Saddam Hussein say, with a straight face, that he had won the first Gulf War. Saddam's armies had, of course, been crushed by the U.S. in Kuwait and on the "highway of death" leading back into Iraq. But by Saddam's twisted reasoning, he and his military had absorbed the blows of the U.S. war machine, and he had remained in power ... and therefore, he believed, he had won.

This comes to mind as Hezbollah's Nasrallah boasts of a "historic" victory, even as Lebanese civilians return home to the ruin he invited upon their nation's south. In the West, the ceasefire is largely seen as the result of international pressure to stop a war that was exacting a heavy humanitarian toll, and of Israel's willingness to bow to that pressure. Nasrallah, meanwhile, celebrates what he sees as Hezbollah's ability to fight the vaunted Israeli military for weeks and to a standstill - the same Israeli military that dealt humiliating defeats to Arab armies in the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars.

The Nasrallah's way

Unfortunately for U.S. and Israeli interests, there are indications that others in the Middle East are seeing it - or choosing to see it - Nasrallah's way. Hungry for anything resembling a victory against the might of Israel or the U.S., even Sunni Muslims are embracing the defiance of Shiite Hezbollah. Shiite Iran and Shiite-ruled Syria, meanwhile, may feel new confidence that they can stave off Western calls to end their support of Hezbollah and, in Iran's case, cease its nuclear programme.

And in a war where the clearest losers were southern Lebanon's civilians, it's worth noting that Hezbollah, backed by Iranian money, is now scoring new political points by taking a lead in the rebuilding effort. "Completing the victory," Nasrallah said this week, "can come with reconstruction."

Dan Rather is an American television commentator