And why are the Irish miffed at Israel?
This is a bit of wordy UN uselessness. The force is officially called the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNFIL), and was established in 1978, after Lebanon’s Civil War spilled over into Israel, who then invaded southern Lebanon. UN resolutions 425 and 426 called for the UNIFIL to
1) oversee the withdrawal of IDF from southern Lebanon,
2) the more lofty restoration of international peace and security, and
3) to help the government in Beirut reclaim the southern end of the country with the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF).
The UNIFIL has always been a rolling contingent of international troops, and has never been particularly Irish - those are just the ones who were in the path of the IDF this time.
So, was the 1978 mandate a success?
1) Twenty-two years after the UN mandate to roll back the Israelis, the IDF withdrew on their own in 2000,
2) well…
3) Hizbullah is now larger than the LAF.
After the 2006 Israel v Hizbullah war, the UN expanded UNIFIL’s mandate to keep doing whatever the hell it says it’s doing with UN Resolution 1701, which were much like the previous resolutions, but bigger - now deploying around 10,000 UN troops and a naval component to stop arms shipments to Hizbullah. One aspect of the new mandate is to clear the area between the Israeli border and the Litani River - which is where Hizbullah has been firing missiles daily since for a year now. Still, per the UN itself, UNIFIL is “an essential component of maintaining relative calm” along the Lebanon-Israel border.”
In its defense, the UNIFILs it is a force that is so hampered by UN rules of engagement that it is basically a brigade of riot-control police who’ve been told not to get in the way of the angry mob. Enforcement doesn’t appear to be the actual point of the exercise, but a mere show of presence.
And while the 4717 likes a tidy finish on these dispatches, there doesn’t appear to be one.
Perhaps the UN can pass a resolution.