It would be funny as a Feydeau farce, were it not so serious. Sometime soon -- imminently, we are assured -- France will lead a beefed-up UN peacekeeping force into Lebanon. Beefed-up, because there have been 2,000 ineffective blue helmets on the Israeli-Lebanon border since 1978.

To the Israelis, at least, UNIFIL -- the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon -- is a diplomatic joke and a military irrelevance. Tragically, the new, expanded UN peacekeeping force is unlikely to offer much new. More tragically, it is bound to fail.

In the aftermath of the recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, there were overwhelming demands for the rapid deployment of UN peacekeepers armed with a "muscular mandate." They would separate the belligerents, prevent ceasefire violations and avoid a return to war. In practical terms, that means disarming the Hezbollah jihadists, removing them from southern Lebanon and preventing future supplies of Iranian materials from reaching them via Syria.

None of this is likely to happen. The reason, in a word, is France. It was France, with ambitions of rekindling its influence in the Middle East, which dictated the terms of the UN resolution that created the peacekeeping force. It was France, still pursuing la gloire, that appointed itself leader of the pack. And it was France, recalling the slaughter of its peacekeepers by Hezbollah in Beirut 23 years ago, that announced it would commit just 200 troops to the proposed 15,000-strong force.

France has since been shamed into expanding its troop contribution, but it has also drastically limited the operational parameters of the force: It will not disarm Hezbollah fighters, remove them from the border area with Israel, or interdict fresh supplies of weapons to replace Hezbollah's recent losses.

What it will do, say the French, is support the desperately weak Lebanese government. And Fouad Siniora, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, has already declared that while he will deploy units of his army in the south, he will not seek to curb Hezbollah.

France's narrow interpretation of the peacekeepers' mandate has placed the Israelis in an awkward position. Its military brass will not hang around while Hezbollah re-groups, reorganizes and rebuilds its extensive network of underground tunnels, fortifications and military supplies in preparation for the next round.

Israel's military posture is likely to be one of deterrence. In the absence of a UN force that draws Hezbollah's teeth, Israel can be expected to adopt a robust military strategy that is based on relentlessly degrading Hezbollah's capacity: its leadership, its fighters, its stock of materials and its infrastructure. Only now Israel will be faced with an additional complication; it will have to thread its way through a thicket of European-led peacekeepers, with potentially devastating diplomatic consequences.

Sadly, there is worse to come. Politics abhors a vacuum, and Syria had neatly filled Lebanon's gaping power vacuum -- until, that is, the anti-Syrian former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut last year.

His death should have consolidated Syria's presence in Lebanon; instead, a UN investigation into the killing implicated key members of the Syrian regime. In the face of the subsequent "Cedar Revolution" (with France among its principal cheerleaders), Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was compelled to make a hasty and humiliating retreat. Never mind. He may soon erase that unhappy memory.

Syria has solid geopolitical and geostrategic interests in Lebanon. For one thing, the ruling Baath Party is ideologically committed to a vision of "Greater Syria," which includes not only Lebanon but also Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. For another, it needs to retain an unrestricted link to Hezbollah, Syria's proxy force against Israel. This is vital both for Syria's lucrative alliance with Iran and for Bashar's own interests. For yet another, Bashar has to show his military, who had grown rich on the proceeds of drug-smuggling and corruption in Lebanon, that he has the cojones.

He could live with a 2,000-strong UNIFIL presence confined to southern Lebanon; a 15,000-strong UN force, however emasculated, that is deployed throughout the country poses a challenge to Syria's freedom of movement. Moreover, a substantial foreign force in Lebanon, even a relatively toothless, French-led UN force, comes at the expense of Bashar's own prestige in what he considers to be Syria's natural area of influence.

Bashar inherited the leadership of Syria's minority Alawite sect from his father, Hafez, who ruled Syria for 30 years until his death in 2000. Like his father, the London-trained ophthalmologist has produced little for his countrymen by way of liberalizing reforms, either political or economic. After coming to power, Bashar toyed briefly with reformist ideas in 2001, but just when Syria's reformists felt emboldened to raise their heads above the parapet, Bashar chopped them off.

In the absence of domestic benefits, Bashar's legitimacy, like that of his late father, rests on foreign achievements. That is why he gives house room in Damascus to the Islamist Hamas leader, Khaled Mashaal; why he supports the most extreme elements of the Palestinian nationalist movement; why he facilitated the passage of mujahedeen to the battlefields in Iraq; why he maintains close ties with Hezbollah; why his secular socialist republic values its unholy alliance with the Islamic revolutionary republic.

Hostility toward Israel remains the foundation of Alawite power -- and the standard excuse for Syria's political and economic failures. But it will be a long time before Bashar is able to achieve what his father called "strategic parity" with the Zionist enemy. Meanwhile, Lebanon, and its Hezbollah jihadists dedicated to Israel's destruction, offer the prospect of instant gratification.

Bashar has caused havoc for American troops in Iraq. He is likely to repeat that -- this time against the French in particular and other constituents of the UN peacekeeping force in general. That is why he will support and facilitate -- through Hezbollah and other proxy elements in Lebanon -- any action that undermines the UN peacekeepers.

By declaring a hands-off policy toward Hezbollah, France might have hoped it could placate Damascus and avoid a repetition of Hezbollah's October, 1983 suicide truck-bomb attack that wiped out 58 French peacekeepers in Beirut and caused the mission to be aborted.

But just as threatening to Syria is the French pledge to strengthen the Lebanese government, which would diminish Bashar's room for manoeuvre. The difference between 1983 and 2006, says Francois Heisbourg, a senior analyst at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research, is that "the situation is much worse now."

There is little the French can do to mollify Bashar, who, in any event, has a score to settle with Paris over its support for the campaign to evict Syria from Lebanon last year. "There should be no illusions," notes Dennis Ross, former Middle East co-ordinator in the Clinton administration and veteran of two previous ceasefire agreements between Hezbollah and Israel. "History is full of good resolutions on Lebanon that have not been implemented because the Syrians had the power to block them."

The best assessment now is that Syria's president will initially attempt to undermine the fragile Lebanese government by stoking sectarian tensions and fomenting enough carnage to persuade the peacekeepers that the game is not worth the candle. If that does not work, he is likely to resort to attacks, via his Lebanese allies, on the peacekeepers themselves. The ensuing chaos and the departure of the UN force could, conceivably, provide the pretext for Bashar's triumphal return to Lebanon as peacemaker, champion of Hezbollah and unambiguous hegemonic power.

The French must know that Syria's combat strength has deteriorated drastically since the collapse of its Soviet patron. Its military equipment has become increasingly obsolescent, poorly maintained and short of spare parts. Even so, given the willingness of Syria's proxies to die on command, the French will have little cause for optimism. That goes some way to explaining why, having cynically made the diplomatic running at the Security Council in New York to impress its Arab friends, France has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Lebanese imbroglio.

By Douglas Davis
National Post

Douglas Davis, a former senior editor of The Jerusalem Post, is a member of the Middle East Writers' Group.