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David Mack:

My thanks to the US Institute of Peace. And I might just say that the Middle East Institute is an educational organization. We have a very strict non-advocacy mandate, which, however, does not restrict me in my personal capacity in being very opinionated as I am from time to time. But don’t blame the Middle East Institute, which has a broad membership. About half of them agree with me about half the time. And the other half agree with me about half of the time.

Lebanon’s history and the history of peace keeping operations in various parts of the world have a lot to tell us, I think, as we try to move from our going from warfare to lay a foundation for lasting peace in the relations between Lebanon and Israel. Maybe I’ll just use that word ‘sustainable peace’ as it seems to be a politically correct term.

As it happens, I was in Beirut when the Israeli air force attacked the airport in 1968. Nearly four decades later, we had not resolved the intertwined problems of Israel’s security, Lebanon’s sovereignty, and infringements on that sovereignty from various parties, and the survival and well-being of the Lebanese people.

Our four panelists have on-the-ground experience in conflict resolution and peace keeping operations. And the history of such ventures in Lebanon has not been happy, attested by both UNIFIL’s mixed record and by the tragic end of efforts by the US, France, and Italy to stabilize Beirut’s security and nurture a new government in 1982 and 1983.

What lessons can we draw from international peace keeping in crisis areas that are relevant to this crisis? What are the pitfalls that we can avoid? And how can we do it better this time?

Each panelist will speak for a maximum of 15 minutes, followed by a few brief remarks by myself on the political dynamics in Lebanon and, to a certain extent, with its neighbors. And then we’ll have question and answer period, an opportunity for the audience to pose questions to various panelists.

The first up is Bill Stuebner, and he is going to draw upon experiences working with the UN protective force during the Bosnian War when he represented the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. And I will just say a few words about each speaker as they come so that, particularly our C-SPAN audience, will be able to put a name together with the individual who’s speaking. Bill.

Subject Panelists

William Steubner:

Thank you it’s good to be back here at the U.S. Institute of Peace and seeing all my friends and also seeing some new friends I hope in the Middle East Institute. Just a very brief hing on my background because my task here is to keep this short so that we all stay short and then we have some real discussions for a change, which doesn’t happen in Washington very often. But with the experience in Bosnia, I actually went there five years in El Salvador, and the last part of that trying to help with the UN peace talks and the prosecution of the murder trial of the case of the Jesuit Murders. So I thought it was time to do something else.

I first entered Bosnia in the spring of 1992. I was involved in setting up the humanitarian airlift for Sarajevo. I worked at that time for the Department of Defense but then for the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, but at the same time was dual-hatted by the State Department to report on war crimes. I went from there in 1994 to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague and helped to organize and supervise field investigations for war crimes. From there, I went to help set up the OSC mission, from which, I returned to the War Crimes Tribunal and got involved in the mass grave exhumation for the Srebrenica Massacre.

During that period and that very checkered career, I got to know just about all of the UNPRFOR commanders, the UN protection force commanders in Bosnia. And some of them were really outstanding people. Some of them were not so good. But I think I took away a lot of lessons from those conversations with them.

First of all, I want to say the 1990s,although there was a lot of peacekeeping, it wasn’t a good time for peacekeeping. The culmination of that in 2000 was the Brahimi Report. It was written by Lakhdar Brahimi and some of his helpers on how we ought to improve peacekeeping. I would have to say with my experience in Bosnia at the very best, we can say the peacekeeping experience in Bosnia was a qualified failure.

Anyway, I’d like to, just very briefly, run through some of the principles,I think that you need to consider for whether or not a peacekeeping experience can be successful. The principles that I kind of gleaned from watching this over almost a decade in the Balkans was number one, national interests always trump international interests. Whether it’s the national interests of the players on the ground or the people who contribute to peacekeeping. National interests will always take the first place. And I heard this time after time from UNPRFOR Commanders. You’d have a British commander who would complain that a French commander always passed one of his orders back to Paris before he would obey it to get Paris’ approval. And I’m not picking on the French. That’s just the case with all these countries.

If you even want to look all the way to the political level of the UN Security Council, I would say the one more successful peacekeeping operation in the Balkans was the one that took place in Macedonia, which is where the Americans had troops on the ground. We had and infantry battalion. It was working very well. And the Chinese refused to allow it to continue, because the Macedonians had committed the sacrilege of recognizing Taiwan. So national interests will always trump international interests.

Number two, the mandate of the peacekeeping mission has to be clear and unambiguous. And all the players have to know what that is. They’ve got to have clear orders. And they have to carry them out without exception. Otherwise, you end up creating false expectations. And sometimes those lead to disaster. Frankly with the Srebrenica Massacre, I helped to dig up the results of failed peacekeeping, because we had created what were called ‘UNPAS’, UN Protective Areas. They were not. There was not the capability to protect them. And there was not the will to protect them. But you give a false impression that you’re going to do something that you really can’t do. So, you have to be very clear on that.

The third thing I would say is you’ve got to have unity of command. In Bosnia, we had what was called a dual-key approach on air strikes. You had the UN special representative for the Secretary General along with the military types and the people with the chain up to NATO. They both had to agree on an air strike. Mostly, they were only called in when U.N. forces came under fire. Even then, very often, they did not come. And they were promised fro Srebrenica. The Dutch thought air strikes were coming. To give another example in that same area, General Rittersdug, the Swedish general who ran the Swedish Task Force, which was really outstanding, five times he requested air strikes when his own soldiers came under fire. He never got any of those air strikes. The second time around, he had the best in the region. He had his tank unit fire more than 80 main gun rounds back at the Drina Corps. That task force was never shot at again. He couldn’t get the air strikes, which were promised, so he took action himself.

Resources, resources, resources. And this is the biggest lesson, I think, from the Brahimi Report. Brohemi basically told the Secretary General that the Security Council gives you a mission for peacekeeping and doesn’t give you the means with which to carry it out, then you’ve got to stand up and say, “No. We can’t do this peacekeeping mission.” And that’s very hard to do, because you want to try to help end the conflict. The kinds of things that we saw in Bosnia. We never had, although, ultimately, at the peak, in former Yugoslavia, we had about 38,000 peacekeepers. We never had anything approaching the numbers that were estimated that were needed. Also, countries would donate their troops, very often, with the expectation that, number one, not only would they get a thousand dollars per month per man, which they rarely did, then, turned over to the troops, but also, that if they showed up with no equipment, the UN would have to equip them. Examples of this, Ukrainians showed up with no helmets. And the day after they arrived, three of their soldiers died from head wounds from an artillery round, because of not having any helmets. So of course the UN has to rush in and provide helmets. The Bangladeshi battalion, when they came in, had one rifle for every four men and no radios with which to call an air strike, even if they needed one. So, they had to be armed. The Pakistani Battalion that came in, came in with almost nothing. And the UN had to equip them then, primarily, with excess East and West German equipment. That was a little bit disconcerting out in the woods near Tusla, to see a member of the Pakistani Battalion wearing basically German sweaters with German flags on them and German name tags. It was because they came with almost nothing. So, resources, you’ve got to have it.

And the other thing that you’ve got to have is will. Even if you have everything else in place, if there isn’t a will on the part of the warring parties to actually have peace, then there’s no peace to keep. You’ve got to have a will of the international community at large that they’re actually going to take action. You’ve got to have a will on the part of the national contingents that they will take the actions that are necessary to their mandate. Without that will, no matter what you do, you can fix all the nuts and bolts, if you don’t have the will you need to help make peace, then you’re just not going to get anything done.

Towards closing, I want to say peacekeeping is nearly always ‘mission impossible.’ No matter how good your intentions are, because of all these pitfalls that you can fall into, it’s almost always ‘mission impossible.’ But, that said, I want to say it’s very easy to be negative. The naysayers can always be negative. They can always say the UN can’t do this. They can always say it’s impossible to accomplish these things in the Middle East. Well, if that’s the case, we might as well just throw up our hands and go home. I don’t think any of us want to do that. The last point I’ll make, and this has to do with the thing with will, is the primary actors who are not the warring parties have got to be brought into the process and they have to be given a motivation for the peacekeeping to work. And who would I say the primary players are in this case? Number one certainly would be Syria. This peacekeeping mission is going to be involved with de-militarizing Hezbollah and also making sure that it’s not rearmed. You cannot control the border with Syria. I would say it’s humanly impossible to completely control it. So if you don’t bring them on, and if you don’t talk to them and find a way to motivate them with carrots or sticks, this peacekeeping cannot work. In the Bosnian case, quite frankly, both the Croatian government and the Serbian government, at that time called Yugoslavian government, were a negative factor in the peacekeeping mission. We never really brought them on board. So you’ve got to look for their interests.

I hope that we will keep it short so that we can have a good discussion period. And on an optimistic note, I hope that in the discussion period we can actually come up with some ideas here on how to make this work. Thank you.

David Mack:

Thank you Bill. Thank you for setting up a good example a concise, to-the-point presentation. Next speaker is Mike Bailey, a retired US Army officer. In the course of twenty-five years in US military service, Col. Bailey served in various capacities with the US Department of Defense dealing with peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.

Michael Bailey:

Thank you David. Good afternoon, and I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to participate in what I think is a timely and very important discussion.

I just wanted to highlight and provide a few more details on why I’m standing up here. I’d been asked this afternoon to discuss disarmament, demobilization and re-integration of Hezbollah. I’ve been asked based on experience starting 1992 in Cambodia where I disarmed and demobilized 10,000 Cambodian soldiers, worked on it in Haiti in support of the UN, most recently in East Timor, where I negotiated the disarmament agreement of the Faluntil, and then developed the modalities for disarmament and in very recent past, was contracted to provide policy procedure plans, assistance to Orha, to disarm, demobilize and re-integrate the Iraqi military.

Based on these past experiences, I want to go over just a couple of lessons learned. DDR is essential to creating the conditions for long-term stability, sustainable peace, requires comprehensive, coordinated, integrative approach, especially on funding, requires financial and logistical support prior to the implementation. Efficient planning implementation supervisory structures should be in place and operation prior to the cessation of hostilities. Demobilization tracking mechanisms are necessary. Transparency strengthens regional and national trust and confidence. The process must be flexible. We’ve discovered that the average cost per soldier is about $100 USD. Post-demobilization and disarmament measures are useful, such as weapons turn-in, weapons for development, etc. Concurrently, steps must be taken to prevent a gap in public security. As we’re seeing now, the process must address irregular forces and weapons.

The good news is that the Security Council resolution addresses disarmament. It tasks UNIFIL specifically to take all necessary action in areas of deployment of these forces. It also recognizes the role of the government of Lebanon and the Lebanese armed forces. Moreover, the Security Council resolution really pins the rose, if you will, on the Secretary General to develop the modalities for DDR, and that’s where we’re starting to see positions being staked out. The Minister of Defense of Lebanon just was recently saying as the Lebanese armed forces will not disarm Hezbollah, but moreover, he said it be part of a national dialogue. We’re starting to see positions as the Secretary General embarks upon a very long and difficult journey to develop the modalities, if you will, for the disarmament, demobilization and re-integration of Hezbollah and then turning those modalities into reality. I would offer the coming days and weeks will be very telling as these discussions unfold. Moreover, what actions UNIFIL and the Lebanese armed forces are going to be taking on the ground to deal with Hezbollah’s infrastructure in southern Lebanon.

A few ideas to help create the conditions to enable the Secretary General to develop these modalities: Meetings at the field level are going to take place; I can tell you from my experience in Cambodia. I met with a local Khmer Rouge timed commander. These forces are in close proximity. These meetings are going to take place. These meetings are important and they should take place. However, the UN Headquarters in New York, in the UNIFIL force headquarters in the region has to provide very clear guidance to the forces to enable these meetings to bear fruit. The bottom line is to build confidence on the ground of the parties.

Liaison mechanisms in the early days are going to be important to facilitate communication as well as resolve tensions. This communication is going to be a problem, I’m pretty confident in saying that there’s not a lot of trust between the parties in the region. The more liaisons, the more transparence we have, the more confidence will begin to be built.

The international community should conduct a donor’s conference, perhaps specifically pointed towards disarmament, demobilization, and re-integration of Hezbollah. As I mentioned earlier, one of the key lessons learned is funding for DDR. It is an expensive timely undertaking, but if the funding is not there, the process will begin to break down. For these soldiers, Hezbollah soldiers, if you will, these weapons are their source of authority. You have to give them something else to break that.

Lastly, I would offer a strong information campaign. The UN, the international community has to get word out to the local Lebanese what’s going on, how the process is going to unfold.

Hazards of not doing DDR: Hezbollah retains the initiative. The UN is left in a difficult position with no exit strategy, no chance to complete the transformation of Hezbollah, no weapons control, acts of vengeance. We’ve already seen leaders of Hezbollah saying we’re going to talk to those who weren’t very supportive of us during the thirty days. If there is no trust in the process then it will be difficult for humanitarian operations operating, and then moreover, return to hostilities is almost certain.

In closing, I would like to offer that the DDR process is politically, institutionally and logistically complex. However, DDR creates bridges in space, requires competent planning and management, and is a long-term undertaking and transparency is essential. Again, thank you and I look forward to discussion.

David Mack:

Thank you, Mike. Our next speaker is Jim Dobbins. Ambassador Dobbins was Assistant Secretary for Europe, and also held Senior White House and State Department positions dealing with the Balkans, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, and the European Community, which alludes to us in fact wouldn’t be qualified as a troubled spot, but I suppose that provided its own share of danger at various times in his position. He will speak from his broad range of experience.

James Dobbins:

I’m certainly not an expert on Lebanon, but I will talk a bit based on my personal experience in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, and the research we’ve conducted at the Rand Corporation over the last several years on both American and UN performance in nation-building and peacekeeping. First, I’d like to clarify a few phrases and talk about what this mission is and isn’t. One of the phrases is nation building. This is the use of armed force in the aftermath of a conflict to promote a series of economic and political reforms that allow a strengthened government to secure its own territory. Second is peace enforcement. This is an intervention over the objection of one or more of the parties in order to compel a cessation of hostilities and prevent a return. Third is peacekeeping which presumes the agreement and acquiescence of the parties. The last is counterinsurgency.

The mission as it’s described in the Security Council resolution could theoretically involve all of these, but I think that for the most part, it is not a nation building, peace enforcement or counterinsurgency. It is principally peacekeeping. The resolution calls for the force to support to support the government of Lebanon, not to reform it. Its support for the government of Lebanon is very limited; it’s to support its assertion of authority in a geographically limited area. Therefore, while it has a slight component of nation building, it’s a very limited one. Secondly, it does appear to authorize the use of force, but it authorizes it under an article of the UN Charter that doesn’t authorize the UN to use force. I read carefully the only authorization to use force is to use force at the request of the government of Lebanon. Therefore, the force, to the extent it chooses to do so, may use force when requested by the government of Lebanon and otherwise, not at all, under any circumstances, except for its own protection. Again, it’s not peace enforcement or at least, it’s a very limited sort of peace enforcement. The third phrase, which I think is most applicable, is peacekeeping, and last it’s definitely not counterinsurgency. It’s not a force that is going to employ force in order to suppress Hezbollah and enforce its dismantling and disarmament. It’s not realistic to think it could. What 160,000 American soldiers have been unable to do in Iraq and 20,000 Israeli soldiers were unable to do in southern Lebanon is not going to be done with 15,000 risk-adverse Euros. Therefore, it’s definitely not a counterinsurgency force.

It’s principally a peacekeeping force of the traditional Cold War inter-positional sort, and it’s worth looking at what the track record is, the conditions of success or failure of a force of that sort. First, the UN role in peacekeeping is actually a fairly positive one. Most UN peacekeeping missions succeed. So we shouldn’t presume just because it’s a UN mission that it’s destined for failure. And the UN also has a record of some success in the area of peace enforcement – in the Belgian Congo in the 1960s, in Eastern Slovenia in the mid-1990s, in East Timor – but those missions required a very high degree of international consensus behind the operation, international consensus that certainly doesn’t exist in these circumstances. The UN chain of command is formally quite clear; it runs from the force commander to the civilian representative of the Secretary General in place to the Secretary General. In principle, the decision to use force and how to use force will be made not by the force commander but by the civilian representative of the Secretary General in consultation with New York. As a practical matter, however, the rules of engagement for this force are going to be set up by the nations that make it up and are likely to vary significantly from one contingent to another. The force is likely to be commanded by the French; the French are on record in this regard by their performance in Kosovo. They’ve had the most difficult sector, the sector with most of the Serbs in it, with most of the conflict in it. They suggest that they would be extremely conservative in terms of the use of force to do anything except protect their own personnel.

There are obviously inter-positional forces that have been quite successful. One thinks of the force in Cyprus, which has preserved the peace there for more than thirty years, or the observer force in the Sinai. The condition, of course, for those forces to succeed is that the parties of the conflict want them to succeed and don’t want to renew the conflict. Inter-positional forces prevent mishaps; they prevent misunderstandings. They prevent mistakes. They don’t prevent intentional conflict. If one side or the other intends a conflict, the force does nothing but document that event. That’s the most that can be expected of this force is to prevent an accidental conflict arising from an unintended confluence between Israeli and Hezbollah forces in the region.

What can the force do? From the Israeli standpoint, they’re worried about two principle things: rage and rockets. The force, if largely 15,000 men international force that concentrates on the border between Israel and Lebanon, can probably prevent rage or make them much more difficult, not by forcibly attacking Hezbollah raiders, but simply by warning the Israelis that are coming. In which case, the Israelis will be prepared and they won’t be able to sneak in and kidnap soldiers. So the force can probably do that at no risk to itself. On the other hand, going through a much larger area and securing rocket-launch sites and disarming Hezbollah is probably well beyond the capacity of this force or the intention of any of the countries that are going to commit forces to it.

Where are we going? Clearly this force is part of a complex set of compromises designed to bring a conflict to the close. I think both the US, the Israelis, Hezbollah and others need to draw appropriate conclusions in that conflict and we don’t yet know what the conclusions they have drawn are, so we’re not sure how they are going to behave as they seek to implement this Security Council resolution. The general rule on dealing with insurgencies is insurgents win if they don’t lose, and governments lose if they don’t win. By those criteria, Hezbollah won, Israeli lost, and to the extent that the United States’ position coincided with Israel, the United States lost. It’s very difficult to disguise that. There are two logical conclusions one could draw from this. One is that the current policy isn’t working and we’re going to have to try a new approach, on which has one of the other speakers suggested engages all the parties in the region, begins a broader dialogue, tries to solve some of the underlying problem. The alternate solution is while the policy was right, it simply wasn’t pursued vigorously enough. We went after the Iranian surrogate; that didn’t work, let’s go directly to the source. I suspect that there is a debate in Washington and probably in Israel as well as to which of these courses of action is the appropriate lesson to be drawn from the experience of the last month.

David Mack:

Thank you Jim. Next up is Art Hughes. Ambassador Hughes was Director General of the Multinational Force and Observers, an example that the last speaker mentioned as one of the more successful examples of peacekeeping. Art was in charge of their Egyptian Arab peacekeeping in the Sinai Peninsula. In his long diplomatic career, Art served as Ambassador to Yemen, but he was also DCM in Tel Aviv, another reason for having him here as a speaker. Art?

Arthur Hughes: Thank you very much for inviting me to participate today. It was my privilege to serve the MFO and Egypt and Israel in the cause of peace for six years as Director General of this very unique organization. It is so unique in fact some might think it’s not relevant to this situation and the things we’re talking about today. I’ll go quickly through some of the activities at the MFO, some of the way it’s organized and operates. There are some lessons learned from the experience of the MFO that do have some application.

First of all, the MFO is unique because it was created by the two parties themselves. The 1979 Treaty of Peace between Egypt and Israel provided that the UN would do the peacekeeping operation. However, in May of 1981, it was clear that the Security Council could not agree on a mandate, the Soviet Union threatened to veto a mandate, so the two parties, together with the United States, got together in August of 1981, created a protocol to the peace treaty that set up the MFO, the Multinational Force and Observers, taking those words out of the treaty itself. That situation had been foreseen and President Carter had written letters to Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat in March of 1979 when the treaty was signed promising to help them set up an independent PKO if the UN couldn’t do the job. So the protocol and the treaty themselves, became the mandate of the MFO.

The mandate is a very strong one; it’s very clear and it built on the experiences both good and bad of the previous PKO’s in the region, including UNF and what happened in May and June of 1967. For example, there are two key sentences in the treaty and the protocol that I think give the flavor. First, in the protocol itself, it says that the task of the MFO is to supervise the implementation of the security provisions of the treaty and to employ best efforts to ensure no violations thereof. And going back to the treaty, in the portion that set up the liaison system, it said that the task of the liaison system was to resolve problems, assess the progress of implementation of the security provisions of the treaty, and to refer upwards any problems that they couldn’t resolve at that level. The protocol also set out a lot of details about operations, observation polls, checkpoints, very detailed intrusive verifications, including schedules for verification. It also became the constitution of the MFO because it gave it a legal personality, created the various jobs of the director general and the force commander, and it gave the director general basic plans and potentially power to do what the director general thought should be done, which turned out to be rather key at various times in the life of the MFO. Also in setting up the liaison system, it became a very critical part of the MFO, yet required that the parties set up liaison offices at specific locations designated and it designates senior officers who then would have to be in touch, would have to make themselves available to the other side of the MFO. They also enable the director general to convoke senior officials of both sides at a place that he chose within 48 hours, if necessary. It never was necessary to do that because of the way the liaison system worked. A very fundamental point and that is, as the other speakers referred to, Egypt and Israel want the MFO to work because they want their treaty to work.

The treaty in the security provisions based itself on the concept of providing a continued strategic depth for Israel as it left the Sinai. It basically set up three security zones in Sinai and one in Israel; for political reasons, there had to be one in Israel as well. Working from the West towards the East, Zone A in Sinai allowed one mechanized infantry division, 22,000 men and associated equipment. Zone B in the middle of the Sinai allowed no military, but four battalions of border guards. Zone C along the Israel border allowed no military, but only civil police. Zone D in Israel allowed four battalions, associate equipment, but no tanks, no artillery, except shoulder-fire and aircraft missiles. Also, the protocol set up a very detailed intrusive inspection system for verifications and confidence building and, as I said, mandated direct contacts between senior representatives of the two parties.

Just very briefly, the MFO set up headquarters in Rome because neither party wanted to be in the other country, and the Italians came forward and offered Rome. There’s a small headquarters there, 22 people led by the Director General. The normal people you’d expect: operations and planning, a general council, human resources, IT, engineering, and so forth. Twenty-two people, less than half the size as it was at the beginning. In Cairo and Tel Aviv, there were Director General representatives who represented on a daily basis the MFO to the host government and also maintained contacts with the eleven countries who had provided soldiers to the MFO and the four countries that provided additional financial support. Most importantly in some respects, they ran purchasing offices because the MFO spends about half of its budget purchasing items locally in Egypt and in Israel. The force in the Sinai in located in Zone C, with 22 fixed in place as headquarters in the North and sub-headquarters in the South. 1700 soldiers, eleven countries. Headquarters there is led by a force commander a two-star known Italian major general; the force commander is appointed by the director general, with approval of the parties. He has a staff of six branches, operations, liaisons, IT, HR, so forth, support as you’d expect, and three infantry battalions on the ground, a support battalion, including fixed-wing aviation, and a rotary ring aviation as well. The “O” in MFO, the observers, civilian observer unit: fifteen people, all Americans, as is Arab by the parties, about half seconded from the Foreign Service of the United States, State Department, and direct hire retired military people with direct experience doing the kinds of inspections that are done on a periodic basis. According to both of the parties, the MFO has met their needs. Very clearly, in 2001, when Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wanted to reduce the American participation in the MFO from about 800 soldiers to 27. Both governments pushed back at the administration, and over a period of a couple of years, finally a relatively small reduction in the American force was implemented but the US army is still 41% of the MFO.

Why has the MFO been so successful and able to do the job?

The most significant reason is because Israel and Egypt want the MFO to be successful. They want the security provisions of their treaty to work on the ground. It meets their national security needs; the MFO acts as a verifier, a witness, provides mutual assurance, facilitates problem solving and builds confidence.

Secondly, the MFO has a very strong and clear mandate, as I said, built on the experiences of earlier peace operations in the region.

Third, the MFO was independent; being not a part of the UN actually in context was very useful because it contains problems. The director general reports only to the parties, therefore, when there are issues, when there are misunderstandings, when there are things going on that perhaps shouldn’t be going on, it’s all contained internally within the family, which precludes a lot of political pasturing and the need to make grand statements that people have trouble backing down from afterward.

The MFO has adequate resources and it’s used them very wisely. Annual audits by an outside auditor, which goes through and makes sure that the correct use of resources is being made, and for eleven years, the MFO was able to maintain a constant $51 million budget. It’s just gone up for two reasons: replacement of old helicopters with more complex Blackhawks and additional requirements on force protection.

The MFO has been flexible. Because it’s independent, it can set up its own rules, set up its own way of doing things. When there’s a need for a change, for example, when Israel and Egypt decided that border guards were needed in Zone C opposite Gaza when Israel left, Israel and Egypt sat down and worked out an arrangement that they agreed on that invited the MFO in to comment, make suggestions and then divvy up its marching orders on how to proceed. There was no need for a change in the treaty or the protocol; this was discussed in the parliaments of both countries and approved, and the MFO went to work.

Also, until recently, the MFO operate in a very benign environment: not a shot in anger fired by either of the parties of MFO and this meant that it was a very comfortable place for soldiers and civilians to work. Unfortunately, recently, you’ve all read about the terrorist attacks in the Sinai, a couple of which had actually been aimed at the MFO. Fortunately, no serious harm was done to the MFO itself, but this meant a redoubling of effort on that side of things.

Lessons to learn: commitment of the parties is critical, not only the commitment politically, but the ability and the will of compliance within their own countries. There’s also a useful aspect here because the fact that the PKO is there in this kind of environment also tends to take the subject matter off the political agenda in the countries involved. You need a strong and detailed mandate and also a strong and detailed concept of operations. That’s where I think they are in Beirut now; they take paragraphs eleven and twelve in 1701 and turn it into a concept of operations and that’s going to be very difficult, particularly given the compromises that are going to have to be made between the government of Lebanon proper and Hezbollah. Third, non-bureaucratic, flexible, nimble and very professional organization that can respond to situations as they change, the situation as it develops between the two treaty parties and to meet their needs, not simply to stick to the needs of the words in the protocol and the treaty, but to be responsive to the parties in what they need. As in the case of the MFO, I think it’s fair to say that the MFO has become a partner with the two treaty parties in implementation of the security provision of the treaty, building confidence and serving the cause of stability and peace between the two countries.

Thank you very much and I look forward to answering any questions you might have.

David Mack:

As the last speaker suggested, there may be some dissonance between the situation we face in the Lebanon-Israel context and the one that he was dealing with in the Egypt-Israel context. One of those differences is that the Lebanese government is weak. On the positive side, it’s not an autocratic government. What if we had a weak autocracy? Lebanon’s last elections were relatively free, it has a long history of constitutionalism, longer than any country in the Middle East, really, and it has a very strong, robust and dynamic civil society. One would think that this is that opportunity for freedom and democracy that the Bush administration and lots of Democrats as well have been longing for in the Middle East. Unfortunately, Lebanon has an even longer history of political instability, personal insecurity, and inability to control its borders. You put those factors together with some very intrusive neighbors, and it’s enough to give democracy a bad name.

Two days ago, President Bush said that Hezbollah suffered a defeat because there’s going to be a new power in the South of Lebanon, and that’s going to be a Lebanese force with a robust international force to help them seize control of the country. It’s doubtful that international peacekeeping, even the modest peacekeeping that’s suggested by the current resolution, is going to be sustainable, let alone a long-term peace between Israel and Lebanon that will be sustainable unless it is a first step that makes it possible to move on to some political agreements and to material support to build up stronger Lebanese government institutions. The Lebanese army is going to have to become much stronger, even to reach the level that we see in neighboring Syria, which manages to maintain control very well behind the UNOF Force in the Golan Heights, and has done that now for decades. I would suspect much for the mutual satisfaction of both Syria and Israel, even though they don’t like to express great pride in it publicly. The Lebanese government isn’t there, and the Lebanese government won’t get there unless they have some kind of Lebanese deal, an internal political accommodation. As has been noted by a couple of speakers, the Lebanese government is not going to go to war with Hezbollah. That won’t happen. It’s also clear that a strategy that relied upon making life so painful for Lebanese and destroying so much civilian infrastructure in Lebanon that this would somehow move the Lebanese in the direction of going to war with Hezbollah, that strategy has manifestly failed.

On the international side, Syria has been part of the problem, but it does not follow that Syria cannot be part of the solution, just as, in a way, Hezbollah can be part of the solution internally. The internal Lebanese deal, if there is one to be had, is going to amount to Hezbollah disarmament, more or less, at least disarmament of any blatant Hezbollah armed activities, and ceding to the Lebanese government the authority to exercise sovereignty in all matters regarding arms. They’re going to want something in return, and that’s going to be a greater share in power in the Lebanese government. They already have two Cabinet members, but to a certain extent, they have been marginalized in the current governing coalition.

On the Syrian side, as I say, it simply doesn’t follow that Syria, which has played bad roles in the past, that it cannot be part of the solution. In fact, I would maintain that it has to be part of the solution, if it’s going to be a sustainable solution. There are some things that Syria wants, objectives, in regard to Lebanon, that are quite different from Iran’s, far more defensive in nature. Syria wants to see Israel’s eventual withdrawal from the Golan. Syria desires better relations with the United States. Syria needs a Lebanese neighbor that is not hostile to Syria’s economic security interests. Within a diplomatic process, which currently doesn’t exist, these factors can be motivations for Syrian cooperation in impeding the re-supply of arms to Hezbollah. The public threats and a futile effort to isolate the Syrian government have been unhelpful, aside from gratuitously hobbling the effectiveness of US diplomacy in this crisis. Whatever the rationale for Syria’s decision to cede to Lebanon its claim over the Shebaa Farms area, this has provided an additional opportunity to build up the reputation of the Lebanese government. Hezbollah has tried for a decade to liberate the Shebaa Farms, at least almost a decade, and manifestly has succeed in doing so. If there isn’t an international agreement involving Syria, as it would have to in some way but particularly key to this is Israel. If there’s an international agreement for the withdrawal of Israeli forces and Lebanese forces to take control of the border in the Shebaa Farms area that would obviously build up the reputation of the Lebanese government of Prime Minister Signora. It would demonstrate that international diplomacy succeeded where terrorism had failed, just as Anwar was able to demonstrate that international diplomacy enable Egypt to regain the Sinai Peninsula.

Aside from the Israeli occupation, one of the reasons why Hezbollah emerged in 1982 and flourished politically in the following two decades was the failure the government of Beirut to provide economic and social safety net for the deprived elements of Lebanon’s Shi’a plurality. Instead, it was Hezbollah that took upon itself this role. The race is now on between the international community, with a scheduled donor conference in Stockholm at the end of the month, and Hezbollah, with Iranian financial backing. Who is going to become the hero of the post-war period for one million internally displaced Lebanese? One would have to say that at this point in that race, Hezbollah is clearly in the lead. All you have to do is look at the front pages of today’s New York Times and Washington Post. Aside from humanitarian aid, the Lebanese economy has been dealt a body blow and the billions of dollars required for economic reconstruction are not going to be coming, in the short term at least, from private Lebanese capitalists. That’s another challenge for sustainable peacekeeping.

Before we move to the question period, there is somebody in the audience who has been involved in many more Lebanese-Israeli crises than me, and he’s also a former president of the US Institute of Peace. Sam, would you have any words to offer at this point? Why don’t you come up here and you can use the microphone, Sam. This is former ambassador Samuel Lewis.

Samuel Lewis:

Thanks, David. I want to say first that I think Jim Dobbins said most of what I would want to hear. If you listen carefully to his speech, you really heard what you need to know about the dilemma everybody’s in. I was struck by his comment about the French being very conservative in Bosnia in their use of force. I was ambassador to Israel during the first Lebanon-Israeli war, one of the more unpleasant parts of my life. Before that, I had been ambassador during the peace treaty with Egypt and Israel, one of the happier times of my life. But one has to remember that UNIFIL has been there since 1978 – it’s not a new invention – and has a plethora of experience of how a UN force, undermanned and with a very weak peacekeeping-type mandate, can do in that situation that’s been well-described in the press and here this morning. But one thing has been forgotten is that the French were first commanders of UNIFIL and they had a very tough para (?) with Algerian experience as head of it. He started out with robust peacekeeping in mind, and in the first clash with the PLO irregulars who were the problem for UNIFIL in that era; he launched quite a lot of retaliatory attacks on PLO bases. They fought back shortly thereafter and so severely wounded him that he had to be withdrawn back to France, and the moment of French robustness in peacekeeping came to an end with that event in Lebanon. So there’s a long history to the French being quite careful about how much violence they use against irregular forces, and I think we’ll see that replicated if they lead the force in south Lebanon.

Second is that as I read that resolution - obviously a complicated compromise and a diplomatic triumph in some ways against great odds even to get it done - the peacekeeping mandate is actually almost identical to the mandate that UNIFIL has had for the last 26 years or however long they’ve been there. There really is not much difference except it’ll be bigger – instead of 2,000 you’ll have 15,000. But the dependence on helping the Lebanese government was intrinsic to the initial mandate of UNIFIL. So it all comes back to what you think the Lebanese government will really try to do in south Lebanon, and for reasons that have been well-discussed, the Hezbollah is so embedded in Lebanese society, civil and governmental at this point; they’re also negotiating today, I gather from the newspapers, for an arrangement under which they will withdraw some fighters maybe up North and the Lebanese army will be permitted to come into that area so long as they don’t dig around and look for any arms catchers and get too curious about what’s being left behind. If that’s the deal, and I suspect it will be the deal, the Israelis, needless to say, aren’t going to be very reassured by the robustness of this international force. And the fact that the international force won’t have a mandate to do anything but help defend itself, of course, and help the Lebanese do something they would not be trying to do makes me pretty pessimistic about the future peacekeeping inside Lebanon. Above all, as both my friend Art [Hughes] and Jim [Dobbins] have said, the key is if the two parties want to keep the peace, a UN peacekeeping force can be very effective. If either one of them doesn’t, it’s a very nasty job to give anybody.