hUNman shields

Today Sissy Willis links to what she calls a "must read" piece in Opinion Journal by former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Jed Babbin. Babbin says that a proposal to send a UN-led force into Lebanon to "stabilize" the situation is utter folly, given the UN's past complicity with the activities of the Hezbollah terrorists, even to the point that UN forces have served as de facto "human shields" for Hezbollah:

The U.N.'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 U.N. outpost on that border. The U.N. flag and the Hezbollah flag fly side by side. Observers told me the U.N. and Hezbollah personnel share water and telephones, and that the U.N. presence serves as a shield against Israeli strikes against the terrorists.

The presence of the UNIFIL force in Lebanon (which is currently comprised of about 2,000 troops from China, France, Ghana, India, Ireland, Italy, Poland and Ukraine) did nothing to deter Hezbollah from launching last week's cross-border raids into Israel. What makes anyone in their right mind believe that simply increasing the size of the force, as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan proposes, would bring "stability" to southern Lebanon?

Bosnians in Srebrenica can tell you all you need to know about leaving your security in the hands of the United Nations, after 8,000 of their kinsmen were massacred in a UN "safe area" under the very noses of the UNPROFOR in 1995. The relatives of the nearly 1 million Tutsis butchered in Rwanda can tell you how wise it is to entrust your safety to the UN after UNAMIR failed to prevent the 1994 genocide. The hundreds of thousands of graves in Darfur should show you how smart it is to believe that the dithering UN is willing or able to field another alphabet-soup army of blue helmets to protect innocents who face mass murderers.

Those who believe that the solution to the Israel-Hezbollah crisis should rest on UN "peacekeeping" efforts are correct - if one is referring to the peace found in a graveyard.