An interesting quote form the Monitor article:

On Monday, UN Middle East envoy Terje Roed Larsen recommended that Hizbullah be "molded into the Lebanese Army and thereby into the government apparatus."

I'm not sure how wise that recommendation is. The Lebanese Army shouldn't be a core force augmented by militias added in blocks. Ideally it should grow in a normal fashion, recruiting those who truly believe in a unified Lebanon, rather than becoming a patchwork of militias with conflicting loyalties, ready to break off or sabotage at the first sign of sectarian flare-up. Not to mention how ill-advised it seems to put a known terrorist militia under the wing of a national army, no matter how much they disperse its members among the units (if indeed they try to disperse them).

It is, unfortunately, not too surprising coming from the UN. The UN is usually concerned with decreasing violence only in the short term.

I'd dispute the label "terrorist militia" as applied to HB as a whole. The militia has been attacking military targets on Lebanese soil for at least the past two decades. I'm aware of the supposed links to the Argentina bombing, but the evidence is pretty tenuous.

There are, of course, a lot of other reasons to be worried about HB and about the impact on stability of an independent armed group within a sovereign state, etc. Unfortunately, HB still has a substantial political base, and is committed to at the very least not giving up its armed wing without some serious quid for their quo. The "integration into the army" trick is a face-saving compromise proposal that's been floating around for a while now and has been endorsed by a number of Lebanese politicians - I think Jumblatt brought it up at one point (of course, Jumblatt can be counted upon to take every possible stance on any given political issue at some time or another).

What about rocket attacks on Israeli villages? I suppose they might have been trying to aim at military bases in those villages, and those villages may be full of soldiers anyways, but I'm not sure they care too much. Of course, I understand most of the HB is involved in more classic guerilla action, or simply protecting their own villages. And health care. There is also the matter of smuggling weapons to Palestinian terrorist groups, but that alone doesn't make them terrorists.

Unfortunately, given the fragility of Lebanese politics, and the lack of a strong central government, it might be a necessary compromise. Just not ideal. Maybe a better option is peaceful coexistence now, followed by aggressive disarmament in the future. That could keep the Lebanese Army more intact. It does leave a strong separate militia in the meantime though.

The rocket attacks tended to occur in a pretty clear context of tit-for-tat with Israeli attacks that hit (intentionally or no) civilian targets in Lebanon. I think the health care angle is overplayed and frankly a distraction - Hamas provides lots of health care, but I don't think it's wrong to identify them, or at least their armed wing, as a "terrorist organization". But there has been a decided difference in the behavior of Hizbollah on the one hand, and, say, many of the Palestinian groups, or many of the Iraqi insurgent groups on the other with respect to how they chose their targets. And since I'd sort of like to keep "terrorist" as a meaningful word (probably too late for that), I'm going to stick to that principle in evaluating Hezbollah.