The Last Thing They Need In The Middle-East Is Another UN Peace Keeping Force

17 Jul, 2006 by John Hawkins

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Whatever the problem may be, you can always count on the UN to propose a hopelessly unworkable solution to it. The fighting between Lebanon and Israel is par for the course:

“French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin on Monday joined British Prime Minister Tony Blair and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in calling for the deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon, in order to end the spiraling conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

…The Prime Minister’s Office said Sunday night that Israel would not agree to the deployment of any troops in south Lebanon, save for the Lebanese army.

Israel is concerned that an international force would make it more difficult for the IDF to respond to future attacks from Lebanese territory.

Speaking at the Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg, Blair said such intervention by the international community could be the only way to end the crisis.

“The blunt reality is that this violence is not going to stop unless we create the conditions for the cessation of violence,” Blair said after talks with Annan in Moscow.

“The only way is if we have a deployment of international forces that can stop bombardment coming into Israel,” he said.”

Setting aside the fact that the UN is extremely hostile to Israel and has great difficulty raising large numbers of troops, as we’ve seen over and over again in the past, any UN force that doesn’t have the United States or Britain doing most of the heavy lifting isn’t capable of fighting its way out of a wet paper bag. Do we want a significant number of our troops in the middle of the fighting over there? No way. Does Britain? Despite having Tony Blair involved in this project, I seriously doubt that they’re willing to commit sending a few thousand troops into Lebanon indefinitely to try to ride herd on Hezbollah.

So, could the UN put enough quality troops on the ground to keep Hezbollah from firing rockets into Israel? It’s highly doubtful. Even if they could, would the countries that supplied those troops be willing to hang in there after they lost soldiers in a terrorist attack? Again, highly doubtful. Heck, even if there were enough troops and they stuck in there, given the UN’s institutional bias against Israel, why would anyone think that they’d actually be willing to use force to stop Hezbollah from killing Israelis? As Jeb Babbin mentioned when I interviewed him back in November of 2004, the UN is already in Lebanon and they’ve been winking at Hezbollah’s activities for years.

“…I would point you to Page 155 of my book. There’s a picture there of the UN peacekeeping outpost on the Israel-Lebanon border and there are two flags flying side by side. It’s a UN peacekeeping outpost so as you’d expect, hunky dorey, you know, there’s the UN flag. Flying 10 or 15 feet away is the flag of Hezbollah.

As you recall, I’m sure, Hezbollah has more American blood on its hands than any other terrorist organization except perhaps Al Qaeda. I think the Marines who lost 241 of their comrades in the Beirut barracks bombing in November of 1983 have a very clear recollection of Hezbollah.

It is outrageous to me that the United States would allow the UN to have this go on and it is obscene and an insult to the memory of all of those brave young men who died that day for this to go on. There’s a lot of reasons, oil for food and all the rest of that, to start cutting off the flow of money from the US to the UN but I’ll tell you what; Were it up to me, until that flag came down, those guys wouldn’t get one Yankee dollar.”

Moreover, from the point of view of the United States, why should we want the fighting to stop at this point? Israel is slaughtering Hezbollah and crippling the infrastructure in the areas that support them. That’s a good thing. We want members of Hezbollah to die. We want the world to see supporters of terrorism living in miserable circumstances of their own making. We want them to have to spend enormous sums of money rebuilding infrastructure instead of using it to buy missiles and fund terrorist attacks. As long as Israel doesn’t topple the Lebanese government or weaken the country so much that Syria is allowed to come back in, these bombings serve American interests.

So, no thanks, a UN peace keeping force won’t be needed in Lebanon.