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International Military Intervention: A Detour on the Road to Israeli-Palestinian Peace

(Washington Institute for Near East Policy) - Robert Satloff In recent months, a wide array of interested parties has called for consideration of international intervention to impose calm between Israel and the Palestinians. These include UN secretary-general Kofi Annan; two influential Republican senators, Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner and Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar; French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin; and Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Sha'ath. Moreover, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and NATO secretary-general Lord Robertson have both raised the possibility that NATO itself might consider sending alliance troops to the West Bank and Gaza. The key ingredient for a successful peace effort is not an international intervention force (IIF) - regardless of how robust its presence or how broad its mandate - but rather the willingness of each side to honor its commitments to prevent violence. Deployments of international forces in the Arab-Israeli arena have succeeded only when the two parties themselves have been strongly and actively committed to implementing their own previously reached peace agreement. Given the experience of recent interventions around the globe, a deployment to the Israeli-Palestinian arena would require sufficient resources and a strong enough mandate to pursue rejectionist militants for an indefinite period; even so, it is unlikely that such intervention would resolve the "final status" political issues at the heart of the conflict or redress the intercommunal hostility that has worsened considerably in recent years. In a purely military sense, there is little reason to believe that an IIF would do an appreciably better job than the IDF at fighting terrorism or ensuring security. The deployment of an IIF would almost surely delay the day when peace itself would become possible. Such intervention would imply that outside parties could be goaded into shouldering the responsibilities that Palestinians themselves must assume as a prerequisite for peace.
2003-10-01 00:00:00
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