The French They Are A Useless Race, Parlez-vous

They said they would send five thousand troops to Lebanon to keep the "peace" between Israel and Hezbollah. Then they said, "Oh, five THOUSAND? We thought you meant two hundred!" Then they got shamed in to re-anteing back to at least four figures. And now, after "persuading" Israel to lift its air/sea blockade of the Lebanese coast in favor of French naval forces, the cheese-eating surrender monkeys have declared that they might as well be sending a flotilla of rowboats, because they won't use force to interdict incoming Iranian arms shipments:

France announced on Friday that the international naval force designated to patrol Lebanon's territorial waters would not be authorized to employ force to stop ships from entering or leaving Lebanon.

A spokesman for the French defense ministry said that the international craft would only provide assistance for Lebanese ships, and would not interfere with other nations' boats, Israel Radio reported.

Earlier Friday, Israel began to remove its naval blockade of Lebanon, imposed almost two months after Hizbullah launched its cross-border raid and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. Major-General Alain Pellegrini, the French commander of UNIFIL, said government officials informed him Friday afternoon that the blockade was being lifted. Government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said she didn't have immediate confirmation that the final order had been given to lift the siege, but said earlier Friday that the blockade would be ended within hours.

Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema, meeting with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, announced that a multinational task force, commanded by an Italian admiral, had begun patrolling Lebanese territorial waters.

Cap'n Ed asks why the French and Italians are even bothering with the going through of these pointless motions. The answer, it seems to me, is that empty artifice is the essence of international "peacekeeping," where process will always trump substance. My question is why Israel is yielding its national right to self-defense (under Article 7 of the UN Charter, ironically enough) to countries that don't give a kosher rat's ass whether the entire global Jewish population lives or dies.

I've always said that the Israelis do not indulge in the sort of self-delusion that permeates the rest of the Western world because living under more than a half-century of daily siege from a billion-strong enemy determined to destroy them has deprived them of the luxury of such foolishness. The Battle of Lebanon and its aftermath marks the Rubicon beyond which that enforced hard-headed realism so critical for the Jewish state's national survival had been interred.

How mordantly appropriate that French perfidy is the vehicle for first of many bitter lessons to come.