Inside Track: NATO’s West Bank Nightmare

by Ted Galen Carpenter
(vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute)

"Washington is sending up a trial balloon about stationing NATO troops as peacekeepers on the West Bank. The Jerusalem Post reports that former NATO supreme commander General James Jones, now the Bush administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, is floating the idea to various European countries.

It is a spectacularly bad idea. If there is a silver lining to Jones’s initiative, it is that U.S. policy makers are at least not contemplating including American troops in such a force.....

The United States discovered that reality to its sorrow in Lebanon during the 1980s. American troops initially intervened as part of an accord to enable Israeli forces to end their siege of West Beirut....Soon a U.S. battleship began shelling hostile Muslim villages, and American troops engaged in skirmishes with Muslim militias. Those actions led to retaliation, and the spiral of violence culminated in the truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Marines......"