Euro Chicken Hawks

Well, well, well. After all the feather-ruffling and bluster, our always-reliable friends, the French, are backpedaling on their commitment of troops to help the Lebanese Army clear the south of that country of Hezbollah murderers and criminals. Looks like the Italians and Finns are following along. When the rubber meets the road, looks like the Euros are prone to burn rubber in the opposite direction. Little Green Footballs hits the nail on the head:

The only purpose of this cynical charade was to enable France to improve their image in the Islamic world, at Israel’s expense. They never intended to follow through.

We'd expect no less of the French.

However, there is a fairly plausible reason for this backpedaling says lgf, citing a seemingly reliable report in the NY Times:

Some countries, like Australia, which has placed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, have flatly refused to commit troops. “We have no intention of making any significant contribution,” said a senior Australian government official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “We don’t have any confidence in it. It is not going to have the mandate to disarm Hezbollah.”

Well, yes, and this is an intriguing point. The "mandate" to disarm Hezbollah was never particularly clear in the U.N. resolution with regard to how this might be done. This, of course, was to provide political cover for the extraordinarily weak Lebanese government as well as the over-romanticized (by the west) mass-murderers who head up Hezbollah which, along with its masters in Tehran, have no intention of disarming anyway as that would rob them of their raison d'etre, if you'll forgive the phrase.

But the reason why the mandate was not clear was because the French betrayed the U.S. at the last moment by forcing a watering-down of the stronger resolution that had originally been offered.

Bait and switch. Par for the course in a nation that once boasted Vercingetorix and Charlemagne as heroes and role models.

Like that old Midas muffler commercial used to say: "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later." The implication here was that stalling a repair until later would be a whole lot more expensive than dealing with the problem right now. And you'd still have to deal with it anyway. No escape. It's the same deal here. History tells us we can never escape dealing decisively with murderous thugs, lest we be overcome by them. And history also teaches us that postponing the day of reckoning makes it a lot more expensive later. When will they ever learn?