Line of the day:

The French want Israel to stop attacking Hezbollah communication lines within Lebanon. It believes that force should only be used "proportionately" in times of war, which explains why they lost to Germany in 1940 despite having a larger army. The great lesson of the last century has been that anyone wishing to win a war should avoid taking advice from France, and it's comforting in a strange way that France has decided to extend that axiom into the 21st century.

For the record, I've been watching Israel take care of Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel shared lessons with the US that it learned in entering Jenin (which was reported as a massacre, until official numbers showed a very different picture). Those lessons helped shape the Iraqi invasion, and made it possible to topple Saddam in three weeks, compared to the two weeks it took to liberate Kuwait ten years earlier.

Unless the UN has changed how things work, it doesn't allow itself to send peacekeepers until both sides agree that they want peace. That was one of the big reasons the UN took so long to go to Rwanda, and why the UN basically never did anything in Sierra Leone. It's also why the US is more likely to support ECOWAS peacekeepers in Africa than UN peacekeepers. Of course Lebanon will accept a UN mission, but I'm sure Israel's not going to for a few months.

UPDATE Turns out the UN already has peacekeepers in Lebanon -- UNIFIL, which hasn't done much in the last thirty years to keep peace.