UNITED NATIONS – As President Assad of Syria called for resisting external influences in the wake of Hezbollah’s election victory and the U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen prepared to fly to Damascus yesterday, diplomats said that American-led international pressure on Syria is certain to intensify.

The U.N. Security Council awaits a crucial report on the assassination of Rafik Hariri, which might trigger new measures against Syria. Senator Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, said yesterday that he has seen enough evidence to conclude that Syria is responsible for the February 14 car bombing that killed the Lebanese opposition leader and sparked the Cedar Revolution.

“I don’t think there is a single person in Lebanon, and probably nobody in Syria, who doesn’t believe they are behind this,” Mr. Leahy told U.N. reporters yesterday after meeting with Mr. Annan. “There is no question in my mind that [the Syrians] are behind the assassination” and “likely” behind last week’s Beirut car bombing that killed the anti-Syrian journalist Samir Kassir, as well, he said. Mr. Leahy added that he agrees “completely” with President Bush’s policy on Lebanon.

President Assad of Syria said that Arab regimes should resist Western influence as Hezbollah celebrated yesterday, with spokesmen for the terror organization declaring that they now have a “mandate” to keep their armaments in defiance of the U.N. Security Council. Voters “expressed their determination to protect the resistance and its weapons,” a newly elected Hezbollah member of Lebanon’s parliament, Mohamad Raad, said yesterday, according to Agence France-Presse.

The sponsors of Security Council’s Resolution 1559, America and France, have preferred to delay the disarming of Hezbollah until later this month, when the election cycle is expected to be completed. Both have insisted, however, that in the end all militias must disarm, as the resolution demanded. Resolution “1559 was quite clear,” the spokesman for the American mission to the U.N., Richard Grenell, told The New York Sun yesterday.

“Lebanon is no Sweden,” Knesset Member Ephraim Sneh of Israel’s Labor Party said. “Naive” Westerners who hail the Shiite coalition’s Sunday victory in southern Lebanon as “democratic,” he said, overlook the fact that Hezbollah is heavily armed, while its political rivals are not.

Far from a local political party, Hezbollah is “an armed extension of Syria and Iran inside Lebanon, which was created as a force to counter Israel. It also happens to have a parliamentary presence,” Mr. Sneh told the Sun. According to Israeli intelligence, he said, Damascus and Tehran maintain arms deliveries to Hezbollah even while the Lebanese political process is ongoing.

Mr. Assad, meanwhile, told a convention of his ruling Ba’ath party yesterday that Western information technologies threaten the Arab way of life. “They simply aim at transforming us into a negative reactive mass which absorbs everything that is thrown at it without the will or even the possibility of thinking of rejecting or accepting it,” he said, according to news reports.

America, however, intends to intensify the diplomatic pressure on Syria. Washington plans to introduce, as early as today, a draft for a Security Council statement that would denounce the Kassir assassination, Mr. Grenell said. Late last week, American diplomats suggested that the team that had been sent by the Council to Lebanon to investigate the Hariri assassination might now add the Kasssir car bombing to its probe.

Mr. Annan, however, discouraged the idea, according to several diplomats who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the negotiations. Mr. Roed-Larsen will instead go to Damascus for meetings with Mr. Assad “as soon as possible” in order to “ensure the full implementation” of Resolution 1559, a U.N. spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said yesterday.

“Syria has been duplicitous in this,” Mr. Leahy said. According to a recent U.N. report, Syria has withdrawn the vast majority of its uniformed troops from Lebanon, but the withdrawal of the powerful intelligence apparatus that ran the country was not verified. “I don’t think anybody can say with certainty they are gone,” Mr. Leahy said.