The essential ground rules under which such forces operate is the mutual consent of the potentially antagonistic parties. Their mission is to provide an element of confidence and security to these parties. Through patrol and observation, they provide (when they are deployed) a buffer effect against incursions or incidents that might lead to an accidental conflict, undesired by any of the parties. They cannot compel peace upon a party that is bent upon war, or which is willing to engage in confrontational policies that might lead to war--once such confrontational policy being precisely a demand for the removal of peacekeepers from a potential conflict zone. Therefore, we cannot measure the effectiveness of United Nations peacekeeping forces in the Arab-Israeli conflict zone by the wars that have taken place since UNEF I was deployed, but by considering what additional wars or military actions might have taken place had such forces never been in place. The level of tension which has generally prevailed between Israel and various of its Arab neighbors suggests that much more fighting might well have taken place in the absence of United

The other shortcomings of UNIFIL are perhaps more important in evaluating the prospects of the peacekeeping role, because they point out the extreme difficulty of keeping peace when a state of anarchy prevails. The Lebanese civil war, which broke out in 1976, effectively terminated government in most of Lebanon, and various militias emerged to fill the vacuum. These militias secured outside support from various parties (Israel, Syria, and Iran), but they were and are themselves ethnic or religious--essentially tribal--in character. The patrons of these militias have discovered that they have only limited control over them. Peace is almost impossible to preserve when forces are at large for whom no authoritative negotiator can answer. The most that can be said for UNIFIL is, perhaps, that without it the endemic conflict in southern Lebanon might have been even more serious than it has been, and might have escaleted into general war between Syria and Lebanon.

After the 1973 war was ended by truce, another observation element, the United Nations Disengagement Observer Forces (UNDOF), was deployed in the zone of contention between Israel and Syria, neighboring the occupied Golan Heights in mid-1974 (Durch, 1993, pp. 152-62). As its name suggests, its mission more nearly resembles that of UNTSO than of UNEF I or UNEF II. However, the number of blue-helmet troops deployed is considerable in proportion to the area to be patrolled, so its presence on the ground may be regarded as approaching that of a true peacekeeping force.

The first true United Nations peacekeeping force in the region, UNEF I, has already been alluded to. Its zone of operation was the Sinai Peninsula, and its removal under Egyptian pressure in 1967 was soon followed by war. Although this outcome could not be called a failure of the peacekeep