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July 20, 2006
Just what has the Ghana Battalion been up to?
Pajamas Media's editor in Sydney, Australia (aka the author of The Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez), has posted a link to a map showing the disposition of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFL), as of July, 2006. Richard makes the case on his own blog that the site of much of the recent fighting is in the area of operations of the Ghana Battalion of the UNIFL.
I have no problem with Ghana. A friend once did a study abroad there and spoke highly of it. But doesn't one wonder: what have the Ghanan troops and other members of the UNIFL been doing when Hezbollah yokels up and launch a rocket across the border? Any attempts to chase them down? Fight them? Arrest them?
In fact, what's the UNIFL doing right now?
Let me make an assumption that the answer is, "very little." Jed Babbin recently recollected his own experience in this regard:
The UN's years-long record on the Israel-Lebanon border makes mockery of the term "peacekeeping." On page 155 of my book, "Inside the Asylum," is a picture of a UN outpost on that border. The UN flag and the Hizballah flag fly side-by-side. Observers told me the UN and Hizballah personnel share water, telephones and that the UN presence serves as a shield against Israeli strikes against the terrorists.Here we have an answer to the questions implied in a previous post:
The next step will be: how to ensure that no terrorist force metastasizes on Israel's border once again? Or really, how to ensure that no terrorist force can threaten Israel from the north? A buffer zone isn't really helpful if Hezbollah or anyone else can just get longer-range missiles and use them from Northern Lebanon. Instead, one of two things has to happen:If Babbin's account of the actions of UNIFL can be trusted, then the answer to the problem of proxy war and Lebanese sovereignty is rather different than the actions necessary to end the conflict. Instead, the presence of UNIFL actually legitimizes an area of non-state lawlessness, when the goal should be to somehow reduce it.a) someone responsible has to control Lebanon's borders. It could be the Israelis, though they won't want to; the Lebanese though they'll be questionble in their effectiveness; or the "international community" which probably means the US (though perhaps the French would help, given that they used to own Lebanon).
Or
b) Lebanon's borders must be redrawn and the Beka'a declared an international DMZ of some sort. This is extremely unlikely.
The reason for the necessity of one of these options is because the international system should have no desire for a conflict like the current one to happen again. The only way this is possible is if the next time a terrorist organization supported by Syria launches attacks at Israel, it does so from within Syria. This will then clarify thngs for the rest of the world. Borders, which are among the most sacrosanct of the current system's rules, will have been violated, and that makes consequences easier.
It is hard to see how any United Nations force will be able to offer a solution that is favorable to either of the two states involved, Lebanon and Israel, and unfavorable to the non-state terrorist group, Hezbollah. And shouldn't the reduction of non-state terror organizations be in the interest of the international system?
One is truly left to wonder whether the actual goal is inspried more by anti-Semitism or a desire to frustrate the United States.
No, more likely is the explanation offered by Bruce Bawer in While Europe Slept as to why Europe is so tolerant of the extreme Islam growing in its midst. One of his arguments is that Europe and America learned fundamentally different lessons from WWII: The US learned not to give in to tyranny, even if war is necessary. Europe learned to avoid war at all costs, even if putting up with a bit of tyranny is required.
This is not so different from Robert Kagan's seminal essay of a few years back, Power and Weakness, in which he notes a similar problem:
It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power — the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power — American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory — the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.The UN is a vehicle for the expression of the European attitude to power as described by Kagan, and to war as described by Bawer. And this is why the Ghanans et al. have not stopped Hezbollah's attacks on Israel: Stabiliy, ceasefires, and peacekeeping are preferable to a decisive end to conflicts, because decision requires violence. Europeans are from Venus.
Posted by Chester at July 20, 2006 10:10 PM
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Comments
Great point.
What you didn't bring up is this: Why did the Ghanans not tell the Israelis or the Americans about the tunnel networks the Hezzies were building under their noses?
Half a dozen Israelis are dead because of bad intelligence on that point. Apparently the UN wasn't forthcoming with intelligence even!
Today the SkyNews reporter is broadcasting from a UNIFIL base in Tyre. He is giving some good info on Hezi positions exploding in the hills. But do I imagine that the UNIFIL officers ever helped with the targeting?
It would actually be the minimal job of a peacekeeping force to observe and report. Bolton needs to blow his top about the lack of even this service to the world.
What were they doing: providing operational security for a terrorist group as well?
Google Earth is a great way to figure out how the invasion will probably go.
But can someone hear discuss exactly how the 1982 invasion went? I understand it was up the coast to Sidon and then east into the Bekaa?
Posted by: Jim Peterson at July 21, 2006 10:51 AM
Thank you for the Kagan reference. The philosophy he articulates is consistent with what I observed first-hand over about 13 years of living in Europe and having contact throughout the Western nations. The Europeans have held the US in contempt since the start of the cold war, and cynically relied on the US for their defence, which we underwrote at great cost to our taxpayers. As we were spending 9-10% of our GNP for defense, the EU nations were happy to spend 2-3% of their far lesser GNPs, and they joked about it in the halls of NATO HQ. "Let the Americans pay for it!" they said, all too often. Much better to institute social welfare programs and to bring in "guestworkers" to do the dirty work. They will soon reap what they have sown, and the US just may not be able to help them survive the takeover by Islam.
Posted by: mannning at July 21, 2006 11:24 AM
While I agree w/ the ineffectiveness of any UN Force in general, I believe any "peacekeeping force" is ultimately doomed to failure given the fanaticism of Hezbollah and its state sponsors. Only a determined force ready to use force and ready to withstand force could do the job. The long term problem then would revolve around the sustained willingness of 3rd Party forces (or more accurately, their governments) to maintain their posture in the face of continued attrition of material and lives.
Posted by: Good Captain at July 21, 2006 2:09 PM