First the good news. The United States, Britain, and France are asking the UN Security Council to instruct UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to find ways to stop weapons flowing into Lebanon. The text they are proposing also calls on Syria to do more to control its border with Lebanon and for Iran to abide by an arms embargo on shipments to Lebanon.

Here is the critical paragraph:

The Security Council, in this context, expresses grave concern at persistent reports of breaches of the arms embargo along the Lebanon-Syria border. It expresses deep concern about reports, which have not been refuted, that suspected armed Hizballah elements are alleged to be constructing new facilities in the Bekaa Valley. The Council takes note of the detailed information conveyed by the Government of Lebanon about the dangerous activities of armed elements and groups, in particular PFLP-GC and Fatah Intifada, and reiterates its call for the disbanding and disarmament of all militias and armed groups in particular in Lebanon. It underscores the obligation of all member states, particularly the Syrian Arab Republic and Iran, to take all necessary measures to implement paragraph 15 resolution 1701 to enforce the arms embargo.

Now for the bad news.

First, the proposed action is a mere Security Council “policy statement”; it does not even have the force of Security Council Resolutions, which also typically languish unenforced.

Second, the statement itself must be agreed to by all fifteen members of the Council, which means that already weak tea is likely to be further watered down.

Third, the statement itself is already nonsensical in a characteristically nonsensical UN way. Calling on Syria to do more to control its border with Lebanon, and Iran to abide by an arms embargo, is like asking wolves to become vegetarians.

Fourth, the evil the statement aims to prevent appears to have already occurred. Over the past year, despite UN-imposed restrictions, Syrian and Iranian smuggling of rockets and missiles never ceased. This past Monday, the leader of Hizballah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, boasted that his group possesses an arsenal of projectile weapons that can reach all of Israel. Senior Israeli officials deny this, saying only that Hizballah’s missiles can reach northern Tel Aviv. Hizballah also boasts of possessing 33,000 shorter-range rockets of the kind that rained down on northern Israel last summer. Whether this number is an exaggeration or not is both unclear and irrelevant. Even if the tally is not 33,000, it is evident that Hizballah does have a huge number of rockets in its possession, many of them smuggled into Lebanon over the past year.

Fifth, the UN statement, for the sake of being balanced and evenhanded, will express concern over “the increase in Israeli violations of Lebanese air space.” But these alleged “violations” are one of the principal means by which Israel and the rest of the world have any measure of the scope of the smuggling that the UN will now ineffectually strive to halt.

In other words, the missile threat Israel is facing is likely to get worse, despite the best efforts of the UN, such as they are. MTHEL remains all the more urgent. Click here to find out about MTHEL.