Analysis: The Later the Better for An International Force

23 years later, the attack remains the deadliest on Americans overseas since World War II.

On the morning of October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber - smiling, according to one survivor, and widely believed to have been dispatched by Hezbollah - smashed his yellow Mercedes truck through the barbed wire fence of the US Marines compound near Beirut International Airport and detonated some 5,400 kilograms of explosives in the lobby of the four-story headquarters building.

When the last body had finally been extricated from the rubble days later, the toll of the dead was 220 Marines, 18 US Navy personnel and three US soldiers.

Just seconds after the first blast, a similar bombing was carried out at the barracks of the Sixth French Paratroop Infantry Regiment. In this case, the bomber drove into the underground parking garage and blew up the building, killing 58 paratroopers.

The twin Beirut bombings essentially spelled the end of the last attempt to maintain a multinational force in Lebanon. Now, with US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair endorsing the idea, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is back in Jerusalem trying to begin the process of setting up another such force.

If a ceasefire comes sooner rather than later, purported "good news" for international diplomacy would likely turn out to be very bad news indeed for the international troops left to grapple with a defiant, even victorious Hezbollah.

The current international force in the area, UNIFIL, patently posed no obstacle whatsoever to Hezbollah's accruing of power. Even a genuinely robust international force, with a genuinely robust mandate, would be immensely vulnerable to anything but a Hezbollah overwhelmingly degraded by the ongoing attentions of the IDF.

For Israel, however, the concerns are still more acute. Whenever the fighting ends, it will be the task of the international force to assist the Lebanese army, a goodly part of it pro-Hezbollah, in bringing its sovereign force all the way down south, at the expense of Hezbollah. It will be the task of the international force to assist the Lebanese army in destroying what remains of Hezbollah's missile capacity. And it will be the task of the international force to deploy at key border positions and take the other necessary steps to prevent the rehabilitation of Hezbollah via military supplies from Iran and Syria.

This adds up to an extraordinarily complex mission. The precedents are grim indeed.