ME violence to continue 'for some time': Rice

"We're trying to deal with a problem that has been festering and brewing in Lebanon now for years and years and years, and so it's not going to be solved by one resolution in the Security Council," she told reporters.

Rice said she expected the UN Security Council to take up the resolution on Monday or Tuesday, but added: "I want to emphasize it's the first step, not the only step" to halting three weeks of clashes between Israel and Hezbollah.

"I would hope that you would see very early on an end to the kind of large-scale violence, large-scale military operations," allowing for the deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon, she said.

"But I can't say that you should rule out that there could be skirmishes of some kind for some time to come," she said after talks with US President George W. Bush at his nearby Texas ranch. "These things take a while to wind down.

Rice also sought to ease Lebanese concerns about the resolution after Beirut signalled that the measure must explicitly call for a full Israeli troop pullout from southern Lebanon.

"No one wants to see Israel permanently in Lebanon. Nobody wants to do that. The Israelis don't want it, the Lebanese don't want it, so I think there is a basis here for moving forward," she said.

Rice stopped short of predicting unanimous Security Council support for the resolution, but said talks among that body's 15 members had been "good" and that Washington and Paris considered the document a good compromise.

"There are things the Israelis and wanted and Lebanese wanted and not everybody was going get everything that they wanted. This is the international community's effort to bring about an equitable, reasonable basis for cessation of hostilities," she said.

Rice said she would go to the United Nations "when and if necessary" and emphasized: "We will ask everyone who has any influence with all the parties to talk to them about the importance of taking this opportunity."

She said that there would be a second resolution to shape a multinational force to deploy to Lebanon to make it possible for that country's armed forces to secure the southern border with Israel.

"The real situation in Lebanon is that the south has had a vacuum in which Hezbollah has been operating," she said.

"And the solution to this, over the next several months, is going to be to flow the authority of the Lebanese government and Lebanese forces with the help of international forces into the south so that you don't have that vacuum," she said.