OPINION:
The United Nations peacekeeper is a lot like the constable in a town with one stoplight. He looks sharp only when nothing is happening. This “peace” is about to end soon on the Golan Heights, the mountainous buffer between Israel and Syria. Iran is sending forces into Syria to back Damascus in its civil war, and a long period of relative quiet along the border is likely to be shattered. The U.N. is forewarned that the day is coming when there’s no more peace to keep.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Congress last week that “Iran’s goons in Gaza, its lackeys in Lebanon, its revolutionary guards on the Golan Heights are clutching Israel with three tentacles of terror.” Alliteration makes his warning easy to remember, and some may think it’s fanciful as well. But it isn’t. Iranian officers are leading a force of 10,000 volunteers recruited from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, assembling now only six miles from the Golan, purportedly to drive back Sunni rebels threatening the capital. But the strife in Syria provides Tehran with an excuse to concentrate troops and weapons near the Syrian border and the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, tells NBC News that the Netanyahu government “should be annihilated.”
The soldiers in helmets of pastel blue, the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, is waiting on the Golan, 1,200 men from Fiji, India, Ireland, Nepal and Netherlands — not exactly Patton’s Third Army or Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Their mission is maintaining a cease-fire, in effect since 1974, which is intended as a trip wire to warn of an approaching force. Heavily restricted in the use of force and armed mostly with binoculars, the U.N. force is not designed for fighting, and its more speed bump than trip wire.
The peacekeepers have been harassed by Muslim skirmishers and in August, the Nusra Front, linked to al Qaeda, seized a border crossing point, sending a group of observers fleeing and taking 45 Fijians hostage. The captives were released unharmed two weeks later, but taken together with three similar incidents since 2013, it’s clear that the U.N. force is no credible deterrent to an Iran-orchestrated incursion into Israel.
The Israel Defense Forces have begun to build up their own defenses along the border to accomplish what the pastel-blue helmets cannot. An Israeli missile attack on vehicles, which killed an Iranian general and Hezbollah fighters just inside the Syrian side of the border in January, aptly proved Israel’s determination to prevent its archenemy to operate with impunity in the shadows. A deadly rocket attack on an Israeli convoy a week later showed that Tehran is not afraid to flex muscle far from home.
The U.N. troops could simply watch, but that’s not peacekeeping. The absurdity of refereeing a fight without the capability to stop it was highlighted during the Bosnian War in 1993 when the Dutch were powerless to prevent Serbian paramilitary forces from capturing Srebrenica in a so-called “safe area,” where they slaughtered 8,000 Bosnian men and boys.
An American intercontinental ballistic missile is called “Peacekeeper,” and so is a celebrated Colt .357 magnum revolver. They’re formidable against evildoers who despise the peace. Like those deterrents, a genuine peacekeeper would be packing the weaponry capable of striking fear into the heart of an invading force. Unless the U.N. has a Plan B to properly arm its peacekeepers on the Golan Heights, they might as well pull them out of harm’s way. The playground is too dangerous for the unarmed, no matter how well-meaning.
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