July 25, 2006

What Troops Would Secure the Buffer Zone?

There appears to be a good deal of reticence among some key countries that would ostensibly be front and center as leading candidates to provide troops to patrol southern Lebanon:

The challenge of creating a viable international force to secure Israel’s border with Lebanon was captured by Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot. The European foreign ministers were enthusiastic, he said.

“They only had one small condition for the force to be made up of soldiers from another country,” Mr. Barnea wrote. “The Germans recommended France; the French recommended Egypt, and so on. It is doubtful whether there is a single country in the West currently volunteering to lay down its soldiers on Hezbollah’s fence.”

This would likely be a good time to look at Turkish troops, in particular, under the aegis of an EU or NATO led mission. With some major European powers reluctant to take on major duties (UK, France, Germany), for varying reasons, and with Turkey hoping to prove its bona fides as good EU citizen, if you will, one sees a sizable Muslim Turkish contigent as perhaps an idea worthy of serious investigation--despite the obvious Sunni/Shi'a issue this presents.

MORE: How reluctant will Hezbollah be to accept a foreign force (even if it's for an interim period, with the Lebanese Army being trained simultaneously, to eventually take control of the southern parts of the country)? Hard to say, really, but it will take more than breezy cajoling, to be sure, to get them on board.