Unlike traditional peacekeeping, these new missions almost always involve tense situations liable to escalate in a few hours from food deliveries to a firefight. Governments are ill at ease in situations where a corporal's mistake can erupt into political disaster. The armed forces dislike peacekeeping because it dulls combat readiness. But nobody is getting out of the peacekeeping business. The armed forces need the work to preserve their dwindling budgets.
Politicians realize that such missions are popular, at least until they go wrong.
Most of all, governments have no other agency with the organization and means to manage crises of the sort that have erupted so often in this decade. We had a decade of failures,'' said a senior official, referring to Rwanda, the Central African Republic and other African trouble spots. In almost identical terms, other French speakers said that unilateral military interventions, using tactics short of war to intimidate troublemakers, could no longer maintain stability in France's old zone of influence in Africa. Deciding to cut its losses, France has closed all but three large bases, comprising 3,000 men for major emergencies, thus rolling up the network of prepositioned French forces that once were able to maintain order in African countries. The new French approach, in close coordination with U.S. policy, centers on helping create multinational peacekeeping forces from sub-Saharan African countries.