Almost two months after Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers at a cost of nearly 1,400 civilian lives, the French are pleased to announce that they have arrived in the area backing UNIFIL.
A force mainly made up of engineers is hitting the coast today, this afternoon into tonight they will link up with the UNIFIL brigade, the longest serving peacekeeping troops in the world.
And what can they expect. Well a less than clear mandate has almost ruled out disarming Hizbollah, that -it seems- is still down to the Israeli Defense Force. This is the same 'Defense' force that has invaded other countries; fighting various proxy wars both for and with the might of American weapons.
It is a veritable testing ground for inventions such as the cluster bomb which has been largely condemned for ever being invented. An issue that came up in a recent debate was to what extent are the UNIFIL force going to patrol the border with Syria. The Syrian president, another Israeli enemy, has said that the original outline for the UNIFIL force would be regarded as a something of a hostile act. But do they care, judging by recent events if Syria so much as sneezed in the direction of Israel they to, would be digging graves for 1,400 of their own women and children.
A report on Today, interviewed a number of Lebanese civilians. All of them lambasting the current situation. When they were asked wether they thought the ceasefire would hold one woman turned round and said: "They need to name it Israel or America, just so we know." One man stopped his car to come across and give his opinion .
"They didn't do anything in this conflict" he said of the UN force and the Lebanese army, one of whose generals is facing charges of treason, after being pictured drinking tea with an Israeli general, moments before the IDF drove it's tanks through the front gate to their compound. Flags of Hizbollah flying high in villages are a sure sign of who the people support, and it is not only the military side that Hizbollah are winning, their pledge to rebuild the damaged homes of the Lebanese have hit the UNIFIL force hard.
The great British slogan, winning hearts and minds may have no standing here as our army is already entangled in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hearts and minds are never things which forget easily, ask anybody who has ever been heartbroken and they will be probably be able to remember the name, phone number and address of who did it. The Lebanese people as they were stuck under the missiles were praying for the second chance, the chance that all those promises over all those years might avert a second attack on Qana. And to that dinner date we never turned up, meanwhile the Hizbollah did and they picked up the civilian population when it was on the rebound, drunk on death and needing protection.
If any body in the UN thinks this is going to be easy look at Afghanistan, get in the popcorn for George W's next press conference its going to be a sell out, just like almost everything else.
