LEBANON: U.N. TROOPS CAN'T HELP
THEY'RE NO GOOD FOR STOPPING WARS
by Michael Meyer
New York Post
July 21, 2006

July 21, 2006 -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have called for a U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. Almost certainly they will be joined by a chorus of others. But the idea is a recipe for failure, if not disaster.

The humanitarian impulse is to be admired. Amid such a crisis, compounded by feelings of general helplessness, world leaders understandably feel they must do something, anything, to end the violence and prevent an escalation of human suffering. Such missions have succeeded before, the logic goes. We must try this time, too.

But it's also true that such missions have more often failed. When it comes to humanitarian intervention, the trick is to know when it will work - and when not.

There's no shortage of examples. I can choose two from my own experience: Kosovo, where I was a member of the U.N. mission that took over the ravaged province after NATO's 1999 air campaign, and the war in Bosnia, which I covered as a correspondent for Newsweek.

This last erupted in earnest in the spring of 1992, when Serb forces began shelling Sarajevo. It ended in 1995, after U.S. air strikes, with the Dayton peace accords. In-between, the U.N. sent 39,000 of the world's best-armed and best-trained military troops to Bosnia - with almost no effect.

For me, the most darkly emblematic moment came during July of that final year, watching a television broadcast of a Serbian general, Ratko Mladic, entering the embattled Muslim enclave of Srebrenica. A blue-helmeted Dutch soldier, thin and bare-chested save for his flak jacket, tried to bar the general's way. The bear-like Mladic quite literally walked over him, paying less heed than he would give a fly.

Later came other TV images: Mladic's men marching boys as young as 12 or 14 up to freshly dug trenches, then shooting them in the back of the head so that they toppled neatly in - just a few of the 7000-odd victims of that brutal aftermath.

If Srebrenica was the war's worst massacre, it was hardly unique. To this day, friends who served with the U.N. Protection Force (UNPROFOR, they called it for short) describe the experience as the worst of their lives - a case study in futility. The international presence not only failed to stop the fighting but, often, accentuated it. They tell tales of watching Serb, Croat or Muslim forces kill one another (or, more frequently, civilians) and, under orders, standing by and doing nothing.

Kosovo was different. There, NATO rolled in, followed by 10,000 or more civilian nation-builders, and that was that. In Bosnia, international peacekeepers were thrust into a war zone, surrounded by mutually hostile parties; in Kosovo, there was a peace to keep.

For Kosovo's majority Albanian population, freed of their Serb overlords, it was a time of rebuilding and rejoicing. I remember, early on, joking with a colleague: "The best thing we can do for this place is have lunch!" That may sound like a cynical aside on the work ethic of international civil servants, but it was a simple truth. After two years of ethnic conflict, most Kosovars wanted only one thing - normalcy and a measure of prosperity. So that we could go to lunch, they opened cafes and restaurants, in turn generating incomes, jobs and a fresh start on life. Today, the U.N. is negotiating the final stages of what promises to be a signal success story: an independent and stable country.

Lebanon would be far more like Bosnia than Kosovo, with no happy ending. Never mind talk about how large a U.N. force would be required, who would command it, or what its mandate should be. The point is that, as in Bosnia, a U.N. force would be thrown amid warring parties with no interest in peace. Israel wants to squash Hezbollah and create a secure buffer zone in southern Lebanon, policed by the official Lebanese army. Hezbollah will never agree. If forced out of the border zone by the Israeli military, the guerrillas will go underground and continue their fight, as when (in their minds, anyway) they first drove out the Israelis in 2000.

U.N. troops attempting to stop them will automatically become the enemy, possibly even be branded as "occupiers." There could be hostage-taking, as also happened in Bosnia, where militants grab international peacekeepers as insurance for their own security.

Sooner or later, the United Nations would be forced to withdraw. In the eyes of the region's extremists, especially in Iran and the occupied territories, this would amount to a(nother) humiliating defeat for foreign "crusaders" in the Middle East, emboldening radicals of every ethnic and ideological stripe, all the more so if accompanied by a draw-down of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Almost forgotten in the debate is the awkward fact that the U.N. already has a force in the region: the U.N. Force in Lebanon. Set up more than two decades ago to help the post-civil war government of Lebanon extend its authority, UNFIL's history should give pause to anyone contemplating more ambitious plans in the future. Meant to be temporary, it was never able to do more than idly observe when fighting erupted between Arab and Israeli forces. During recent days, its 2000 or so members (including Ghanaian, Indian, French and Polish troops) have scarcely dared to leave their bases.

Will a bigger force make a difference? Not likely. As in Kosovo and Bosnia, everything depends on context - and in Lebanon just now, there is no context for peace.

Michael Meyer, Europe and Middle East editor for Newsweek International, served with the U.N. mission in Kosovo 1999-2001 and is a member of Benador Associates.

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