chickenfeet

It seems the latest idea for dealing with the situation in Lebanon is some sort of international force to do something in the south of the country. If I read code words like "robust" correctly the purpose is essentially to destroy Hezbollah and act as frontier guards for Israel. No doubt it will be sold to as a "peacekeeping force" for, presumably, the same value of "peace" that prevails in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The whole idea seems immensely problematic. No-one in the Islamic world (including most of the population of southern Lebanon) is going to buy this as anything other than an armed intervention in favour of Israel. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that any troops deployed will come under the same sort of attack as in Afghanistan and Iraq which isn't a particularly appealing prospect.

There is a major problem about where the troops might come from and under what command structure. The US (and presumably Israel) don't want a 'blue helmeted' force and the optics of a NATO led mission would be almost as bad as an American led one. Looking around too it's hard to see where the troops would come from. Americans and Brits are right out for obvious reasons. The Canadians and Australians are stretched way too thin already. Of the armed forces capable of deploying for such a mission and not guaranteed to make a complete balls of it that would appear to leave France, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, India and Japan. For various reasons it seems highly improbable that Sweden, Germany or Japan would be prepared to make more than a token commitment, if that. I guess the best bet, if there has to be an intervention force, would be a Franco-Turkish one, though how 'neutral' the Israelis would consider the French to be might pose issues. Ironically, the French would probably deploy the Legion for such a task which would result in a largely German force protecting Israel.

Looking at it more broadly, am I the only one who is concerned that the current reaction to any hot spot (or at least one where sufficiently white people are getting killed) is to send a polyglot expedition with weird command structures and an unclear mission? At least Palmerston had some idea of what he expected a gunboat to do.