A few good Frenchmen

REACTING TO UNIVERSAL DISMAY at his irresponsibility, French President Jacques Chirac on Thursday belatedly pledged a total of 2,000 soldiers for the expanded United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon authorized by the Security Council on Aug. 11. It’s still a stingy commitment, but the hope is that it may galvanize other European nations to follow suit after two tense weeks in which French dithering threatened to turn the deployment of peacekeepers into a march of folly.

What was so exasperating about France’s initial offer of only 200 new peacekeepers (engineers, at that) was that it was France, in an unusual entente with the U.S., that spearheaded the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1701, calling for deployment of a 15,000-member United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon to help that nation’s army police the cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah fighters.

We’re not sure how to say “bait and switch” in French, but that is the only way to describe a sequence of events in which France’s foreign ministry promoted Resolution 1701 as an adequate mandate for French and other international forces, only to have the French defense minister publicly criticize the mandate as “fuzzy.” In a televised speech, Chirac suggested that he was dramatically increasing France’s commitment because the U.N. had clarified the rules of engagement for the force, which, according to a document circulated last week, would allow peacekeepers to use deadly force in self-defense, to protect Lebanese civilians or to help the Lebanese army block weapons from coming into the country.

This sounds like an attempt to paper over differences within the French government. Resolution 1701 already said that the expanded U.N. force could “take all necessary action ... to ensure that its area of operations is not utilized for hostile activities of any kind.”

Because of its authorship of the resolution and its historical ties to the region, France was the presumptive leader of the peacekeeping force, but Italy now has a stronger claim to that responsibility. In any event, European foreign ministers meeting today in Brussels need to make up for lost time in assembling and dispatching the peacekeepers. Europeans love to complain about the United States acting unilaterally in the world, but those complaints will ring awfully hollow if they can’t step up and do their part.