Don't
at this stage send
the UN into Lebanon
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
August 3, 2006
LONDON - So once again a
conservative American government, with a history of being
anti the organisation, is running to the UN to find a way
out of the quagmire in Lebanon. Ronald Reagan's
Administration did the same in 1983 in cahoots with
General Ariel Sharon, then the chief of the Israeli army,
who decided to agree to sharp reductions in the Israeli
forces in Lebanon on condition that the UN forces be
deployed between them and the Syrians in the Bekaa
valley.
Yet a year before, the UN forces,
attempting to contain the dangerous situation between
Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (which
was then based in the Lebanon), had been brutally pushed
aside by the Israeli invasion.
At first President Reagan had
thought that with French and Italian help the U.S. could
do the job itself. But Hizbollah engineered an attack
that led to the killing of over 300 American and French
soldiers. Reagan then decided he wanted the UN to go into
Beirut and also into the Chuf mountains where a battle
raged between Phalangist Christians and Druze
militias.
Understandably, the Soviet Union
vetoed the American volte-face, reflecting a widespread
opinion that the international community did not have to
salvage the American chestnuts from the fire. Why had the
concerned parties not gone to the UN in the first place?
And why, earlier, had the U.S. vetoed the suggestion of
posting UN observers in Beirut?
The U.S. learnt the hard way that
it needed the UN. An all-western force was simply not
acceptable to the local population, just as a NATO one
would not be today. Moreover, the joint
U.S.-French-Italian forces had other major defects. They
did not have either troops specifically trained for
peacekeeping, nor a collective intelligence system, nor
the high degree of coordination necessary in a fast
moving and subtle situation.
On the ground the joint force
mainly had light infantry. But at sea the Americans had
20 ships, and these were joined by deployments from the
allied navies. The Syrians had the only conventional
force against which the navies' firepower could have been
useful, but they had no intention of taking on the
Western forces directly. The irregular forces were never
concentrated enough to be a target for heavy gunfire or
air attack. Yet political pressures on the French and
Americans to use their heavy naval firepower were at
times irresistible. Few irregulars were killed, but
civilian sympathy was lost.
So why today should the UN accept
the mandate that the U.S., Britain, France and Israel
want it to shoulder? It would be a high cost deployment.
The UN has maintained its peacekeeping operation in
southern Lebanon for three decades now. Only last week
four UN peacekeepers were killed by Israeli guns. Over
260 of its peacekeepers have died since 1978. To extend
this operation to cover Beirut and other parts of war
torn Lebanon would be a horrendous and deathly exercise
as long as Israel and Hizbollah are still at loggerheads.
Not even a Nato force, assuming it were acceptable, would
have the muscle to disarm Hizbollah.
But how to get from A to B, how to
win a modicum of peace, in an age when Israel believes
with reason that it can act on an American blank checque,
bombing its way to peace? An Israeli cease-fire is
rejected. America and Israel are isolated and hated as
never before in the Arab and Iranian world. Many, if not
most, of the Shiites throughout the region could happily
cut every American throat; the Sunnis are angry too and
are torn within which way to go.
It all comes back to Palestine. As
long as Israel pushes on with its policy of widening its
tenure of the West Bank, no Shiite or Sunni is much in
the mood to compromise. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
rightly warns that the stakes have never been higher and
a full-scale war in the region is now a distinct
possibility.
It would be the height of folly and
irresponsibility for the UN to widen its peacekeeping
responsibilities in the Lebanon at this stage. Its
soldiers would be put at terrifying risk, and for
what?
Before the situation worsens there
has to be an Israeli cease-fire and a return to the
status quo ante, a position which Israel and the U.S.
maintain they cannot countenance. And then there must be
pressure on Israel, from Washington not least, to get out
of the West Bank. Then we can think about various UN
deployments, first in Lebanon and second, perhaps with
Nato troops, on Israel's internationally recognized
borders.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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