In October, Lebanon was elected to one of ten non-permanent member seats on the United Nations Security Council. Come January 2010, Lebanon will assume Asia’s “Arab League” seat, replacing Libya for a two-year term on the critical international body.

The UNSC seat was the brainchild of Lebanon’s president Michel Suleiman, who used his 2008 UN General Assembly address and his side meetings during the 2009 gathering to press Lebanon’s candidacy. The notion of a seat on the council reportedly appealed to Suleiman, who prides himself on returning Lebanon to the “international political arena.”

Washington quietly opposed Lebanon’s candidacy. Senior administration officials were concerned about potential problems for the bilateral relationship that could arise from Lebanon’s voting decisions. While the pro-West March 14 coalition won the June 2009 elections, it was clear—even prior to the formation of the government in November—that Hezbollah and its local and international allies Syria and Iran would exert preponderant influence within the new government and the state’s foreign policy. Indeed, in the current government as with the previous one, Hezbollah—via its subsidiary Shiite party, Amal—controls the foreign ministry.

It’s not difficult to envision the kind of problems that will ensue. In the coming year, for example, it is all but assured that a resolution to implement “crippling sanctions” against Iran will come before the Security Council. Given Hezbollah’s influence—and the ever present threat of violence—the best Washington could hope for during a UNSC vote would be a Lebanese abstention. More likely, under pressure from Syria and Iran, Lebanon might vote against such a resolution.

Worse still, if history is any indication, Lebanon’s ambassador to the UN, Nawaf Salam—who himself is sympathetic to March 14—could be ordered to abstain or oppose Security Council resolutions in connection to UNSCRs 1701 and 1559, if not the Hariri tribunal, which Hezbollah and its allies do not support.

An article from the Lebanese opposition daily Al-Akhbar published on November 17 hinted that a resurgent Damascus—whose influence in Lebanon, according to Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa, is stronger now than it was when it maintained troops in the country—would try to take advantage of Lebanon’s seat to promote its own interests in the Security Council. Here’s a translation of the short article:

On the sidelines of the summit that brought together the Lebanese President Michel Suleiman and Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus, Assad’s political and media advisor Buthaina Shaaban agreed with the delegation accompanying Suleiman to raise the level of coordination between Lebanon and Syria’s mission to the United Nation in New York, and that Syria will increase the number of its representatives (at the UN mission) to coincide with the Lebanese increase that came after Lebanon was elected a non-permanent member of the Security Council.

So in addition to flexing its muscle in Beirut, according to Al-Akhbar, Damascus is looking to control Lebanon’s UN mission more closely.

Given the potential pitfalls, Washington discouraged the government of Lebanon from moving forward, and reportedly even asked Riyadh to forward Saudi Arabia’s candidacy instead. Saudi Arabia wouldn’t bite, and Lebanon wouldn’t back down. So in January, Beirut will take its seat on the UNSC, a position that not only promises to annoy the administration and Congress—which has to sign off on the significant aid packages to Beirut—but also to be yet another source of increased tensions at home.

Despite the inherent problems associated with the Lebanese seat, Suleiman, not surprisingly, is exceedingly pleased. Some Lebanese scholars are, too. Carnegie’s Paul Salem recently told the Daily Star: “I’m very, very happy about it.… It boosts Lebanon’s presence in the UN and the Security Council… to push the items on its agenda.”

While Lebanon’s international profile might be raised, it’s hard to see how the benefits to Beirut outweigh the downsides.

As the Goldstone report on the Gaza war wends it way up the UN food chain, casting further opprobrium on Israel at each level, it is legitimate to question Israel’s handling of this challenge. Did the Israeli response lessen or aggravate the damage?

There are serious critiques that could have been levied against Goldstone’s mandate even before a single accusation was heard. UN investigations of wars, including this one, typically focus on jus in bello, on the laws of war on the battlefield, and ignore jus ad bellum, the justification for going to war in the first place. It can be argued with great cogency that it is unreasonable to judge the conduct of a war with little or no reference to its causes; echoes of this can be heard in Israeli complaints about the lack of attention to claims of self-defense.

A second critique is that international law has not kept pace with changes in warfare. Most contemporary armed conflicts involve what Rupert Smith has called “war amongst the people,” rather than classic set-piece battlefield scenarios from which laws on wartime conduct (jus in bello) were drawn. These laws seek, quite rightly, to minimize casualties among civilians, but how should they be applied when the very blurring of the military-civilian distinction is a basic strategic axiom of one party? Are insurgents entitled to more rather than less immunity if they refuse to wear uniforms (as required by conventional law)?

So Goldstone’s approach was already blinkered by the framework in which he, without audible complaint, was thrust. This was then compounded by the lack of an Israeli defense to the specific accusations that were brought. Having no “official” explanation that needed to be taken into account, as a straight-laced jurist he then not only accepted any claims of atrocities at face value but also attributed them to deliberate policy rather than the mistakes, negligence, and misconduct out of which most wartime violations are compounded.

Ruth Lapidoth, who has represented Israel in many international legal frameworks, and other leading Israeli jurists have argued that it was a mistake to leave Israel unrepresented in the presentation of evidence and argument before Goldstone. It may be that the final product would still not have been to Israel’s liking, but presenting one’s case in full force would make it more difficult to ignore the basic limitations of the framework (lack of attention to causes, unconventional warfare) and to assign to deliberate policy what could be attributed, in “the fog of war,” to deviations from the rules of engagement that the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) had in fact set out.

A second effective means of damage control would be to address forthrightly the specific cases in the Goldstone report and to draw the necessary conclusions: a clear statement of the facts if the accusation is not warranted, and appropriate disciplinary action if it is. In fact, in international law, taking this step would remove the threat of prosecution abroad that now appears to hang over the head of top-level Israeli military commanders. The army that can fight a bloody conflict in an urban setting, without any cases of misconduct among its ranks, has yet to be created.

According to recent report, it was Defense Minister Ehud Barak who prevailed on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to boycott the UN inquiry. If so, it is further testimony to Barak’s inability to learn from experience, and it comes as no surprise that the latest poll predicts that, if elections were held now, his Labor Party, once the dominant force in Israel, would be reduced to an abysmal seven seats.

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The opening of the UN General Assembly in New York provides advocates of human rights an additional forum to embarrass President Ahmadinejad of Iran for his serial violations of the rights of Iranians at home and abroad. A hunger strike by 36 Iranian dissidents, taken hostage by Iraqi forces, continues into its second month. Hundreds of hunger strikes continue by Iranian exiles in Washington, London, Ottawa, Berlin, The Hague, and Stockholm; an area near the UN could become a site of a hunger strike. Meanwhile, over a hundred strikers have been taken to hospitals worldwide.

As part of a book I am writing on Iran, I conducted interviews with Iranian dissidents, including hunger strikers in the area of the White House. Such interviews provide a glimpse of the nature of the protesters; what they seek and how their actions fit with the literature of social protest; and how sacrifice affects the policymaking process.

Among the many hunger strikers, I selected six who looked the most exhausted in the hot sun and high humidity of Washington. They were mainly entrepreneurs, U.S. citizens, fiercely pro-American, and gravely disappointed and puzzled that President Obama had neither responded to their presence nor to the plight of their colleagues. All had strongly supported presidential candidate Obama assuming that his call for “change” would mean recognition of their status as the main Iranian opposition group to counter the Iranian regime; protection of their hunger-striking counterparts who had been kidnapped in Iraq by Iraqi Security Forces acting on behalf of Tehran; and continuation of the “protected persons” status of the Iranian dissidents by U.S. military forces in Iraq or at least replacement of American forces with an international force.

Comparing their plight with the civil rights students in the American south, the hunger strikers often sing “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the civil rights movement. The counterpart of this song is the Persian chant of the Iranian dissidents: Mitavon va bayad, va hameh bayad, loosely translated into English as, “We shall overcome because we must overcome.”

One of the most articulate of the hunger strikers is Mehran Ebrahimi, a tall, handsome, entrepreneur from Reston Virginia, a bedroom suburb of Washington. He told me:

I was on my way to Disney World with my two grandchildren when I heard the news of the Iraqi attacks against our unarmed Iranian relatives in Iraq. I made it only to South Carolina and immediately returned to Washington to become a hunger striker. My sister is among those Iranians who were attacked in Iraqi forces. Just as our Iranian brothers and sisters sacrifice their bodies in Iraq, so too we shall sacrifice our bodies to protect theirs in Iraq.

Mehran Ebrahimi hit the nail on its head in his motivation to inflict suffering on himself to highlight a cause. When individuals impose such suffering, it is an act of supreme sacrifice and political protest to bring attention to their cause. Hunger strikers understand their message must get on the radar screen of the media to have any effect on policy makers. Indeed, partly as a result of the Iraqi assaults and hunger strikes in Iraq as well as at the White House, there has been increased media attention, e.g., by Mohammed Hussein of The New York Times; editorial page editors of The New York Times; Lara Logan of CBS Television and Mark Knoller of CBS Network Radio; and by Robert McCartney of the Washington Post.

With the opening of the UN, there is an additional forum for communicating self-sacrifice. Hunger strikes are weapons of the weak to communicate injustice to the strong. By passively inflicting self-damage, Iranian dissidents reinforce the effects of active forms of protest, such as demonstrations near the United Nations. While the UN ponders, Iranian dissidents turn up the heat by signaling willingness to suffer. Suffering can become a source of influence by educating the international community to a cause about which they know little, signaling a sense of injustice to those informed of the facts but unconcerned with the issue of justice, and winning the attention of bystanders who may be recruited to help.

At issue is whether enhanced attention is likely to change UN policy of not interfering with the Government of Iraq’s responsibility for the fate of Iranian dissidents who had been protected by the American military. U.S. protection lapsed with the Status of Forces Agreement of January 2009 and withdrawal of Americans from urban areas; meanwhile, the UN has not assumed any such responsibilities.

But now that the Iraq Security Forces attack unarmed Iranian dissidents rather than protect them, the international community is deliberating how to handle this new situation. Dispersal of the Iranian dissidents within Iraq, repatriation to Iran, and a post-American UN force to provide protection are three prominent options.

Without the hunger strikes, it is unlikely that the United States will even contemplate meeting its international legal obligations to ensure Iranian dissidents are not dispersed within Iraq, where they likely would be kidnapped and taken to Iran; repatriated to Iran, where they are likely to be tortured or executed; or attacked again. Such alternatives can only be avoided if there is post-American UN force to provide protection. As the UN General Assembly opens, now is the time to consider the relevance of an international force to protect Iranian dissidents in Iraq against attacks on them, inspired by Tehran.

Israel America Academic Exchange (IAAE) is a new organization that sponsors educational missions to Israel for American scholars in the fields of political science, international relations, international law, international economic development, modern history, and Middle East studies. By special arrangement, participants in the inaugural mission (June 22-29) have been invited to guest-post their impressions and assessments. Michael Barnett is Harold Stassen Professor of International Affairs in the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Policy at the University of Minnesota.

From Michael Barnett

Prior to the trip, I was of the opinion (1) that it is increasingly unlikely that there will be a negotiated two-state solution, and (2) that in the remote chance that the parties do negotiate a settlement, it will lead not to peace but rather to a new phase of the conflict. I believed that the trends were moving in the wrong direction, but I hoped that the trip would alleviate my fears. Although we did not meet a representative sample of Palestinians or Israelis, I came away from my encounters more fearful and anxious than ever before.

The prospects for a negotiated solution appear dim, at best. I see little ground for optimism from the Israeli side. Although Israelis insist that they will always try to negotiate, even the most hopeful of them express little hope. The Israelis seem convinced that they have offered the Palestinians nearly everything they have demanded, but that the Palestinians still prefer to fight it out. Perhaps they do. (Or perhaps Israel has still not offered the best deal possible. In every negotiation, Israel has always claimed that it could do no more, yet it always had more to give: Israeli offers have inched closer to the Palestinian ideal point from Oslo to Camp David to Taba to the purported plan of then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.) Israelis also seem convinced that these failed negotiations represented nothing short of a “test” of the Palestinians’ sincerity regarding the possibility of a peaceful settlement. And Israel’s unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza have not brought peace, but rather allowed their enemies to get closer to Israel’s population centers.

Moreover, and in contrast to my previous trips, I was struck by the near absence of any kind of Israeli sympathy for the Palestinians. Whereas a decade ago I heard Israelis speaking about the rights of Palestinians, the need for justice, and a genuine sympathy for their plight and suffering, this time any sort of compassion was overwhelmed by sheer frustration. Why should the Israelis continue to feel badly for the Palestinians when the Palestinians do not seem prepared to do anything to help themselves?

Because Israelis do not believe that a negotiated two-state solution is likely (though a majority continue to support the idea), they identified a mish-mash of “Plan Bs.” In nearly all cases, though, these contingency plans appears to be a jumble of inconsistencies and logical contradictions: withdrawing alongside occupying, disengaging while engaging, believing that developing the Palestinian economy is the ticket to success despite evidence to the contrary, putting their faith in a wall when Gaza tells them that good fences don’t do much good. The only thing that the Israelis seem to agree upon is that they would like to be rid of the Palestinians.

What about the Palestinians? The Palestinian representatives are certainly more polished than ever. But it was not clear what the Palestinians would accept (or, rather, what the Palestinian leadership would try to sell to their public) short of their maximum demands. I left convinced that while Israel may not have offered the Palestinians the best deal imaginable, the Palestinians might not accept even that. There are lots of explanations for why the Palestinians seem incapable of saying “yes, but,” including principled beliefs, domestic politics, and a lack of Arab support. Perhaps the Palestinian “no” is overdetermined. However, I was impressed by the Palestinian failure to imagine the conditions under which they might accept less than they demand.

Assuming that the Israelis and the Palestinians will not be able to negotiate a two-state solution, and assuming that, as one Israeli negotiator aptly said, the longer we negotiate the more “complex” the situation becomes, what should be done? Until this trip, I supported the idea of an imposed solution, putting a deal on the table (Taba-plus) and telling the parties that they will be rewarded if they accept it and punished if they do not. Some Israelis suggested that the leaders would never be able to reach an agreement on their own and that the Americans would have to apply considerable pressure on both parties. I agree that American pressure will be necessary, but I do not think that American pressure, no matter how intense, can move both parties to peace. Assuming that an imposed solution ever was a viable option, I am not sure it is anymore.

Instead, I think the Israelis should follow the British colonial strategy: withdraw and hand off the problem to the United Nations. The Israeli situation appears eerily like the one confronted by the British mandatory authorities after the Second World War. In 1947, following decades of trying and failing to find a compromise between Jews and Arabs, the British announced their imminent withdrawal and informed the UN that Palestine was now its problem. Israel might do the same. It could tell the UN that it will be “consolidating” its settlements and retreating behind the separation wall (declaring it an armistice line and not a legal border). The Israelis also could announce that they are prepared to internationalize Jerusalem once the security situation has stabilized. In short, rather than another unilateral withdrawal, the Israelis might consider working closely and coordinating with the UN.

At this point, it would be up to the UN Security Council to decide how it wanted to proceed. Ideally, the United States would lead the Security Council to authorize a Chapter VII operation, working closely with the Palestinian Authority (thus giving the moderates considerable legitimacy), replacing the Israelis forces as they withdrew from the territories, and deploying to Gaza if and when the situation became less violent. The international authority would have to be ready, willing, and able to use force if and when necessary, and it also should come bearing a significant aid package. This “strategy” has its various problems, but at least it gives the parties something to look forward to besides mutual suicide.

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In the wake of the Gaza war, finding ways to provide much needed humanitarian support to the residents of Gaza—without inadvertently empowering Hamas—is of paramount concern. Unfortunately, problems remain with two of the primary vehicles the U.S. government intends to use to provide newly pledged aid, namely the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Today, the U.S. government announced that President Barack Obama has authorized the use of $20.3 million from the U.S. Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance (ERMA) Fund “to address critical post-conflict humanitarian needs in Gaza.” According to the State Department press release, of the $20.3 million in new ERMA funds, $13.5 million will go to UNRWA, $6 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and $800,000 to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Beyond the contributions to UNRWA, ICRC and OCHA, State’s press release noted, USAID “has provided more than $3.7 million for emergency assistance to Gaza.”

These may in fact represent the most appropriate of the available options to get humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, but in the cases of both UNRWA and USAID recent history highlights areas of particular concern.

UNRWA. The State Department noted that today’s new contribution to UNRWA augments the $85 million the United States contributed in December 2008 toward UNRWA’s 2009 appeals. UNRWA, State noted, “is the largest provider of humanitarian aid in Gaza, providing 70 percent of the population with emergency food assistance, essential healthcare, and primary education. We are working to develop a longer-term reconstruction/development effort with international partners.”

While State hopes to use UNRWA as part of the post-Gaza war solution, a new study by James G. Lindsay, an Aufzien Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the former legal advisor and general counsel to UNRWA, details how the agency remains a big part of the problem. A twenty-year veteran of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, Lindsay spent seven years with UNRWA and nine with the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) in Sinai. He is uniquely qualified to comment on UNRWA from the inside.

Fixing UNRWA: Repairing the UN’s Troubled System of Aid to Palestinian Refugees is a must-read and covers a broad range of issues. Of immediate concern, however, especially to those striving to find a way to address the acute humanitarian needs of Gazans without strengthening or inadvertently funding Hamas, is the question of UNRWA’s patent failure to live up to its legal responsibilities under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to “take all possible measures” to prevent U.S. contributions from going to “furnish assistance to any refugee who is receiving military training as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army or any other guerilla type organization or who has engaged in any act of terrorism.”

The most immediate concern, related to today’s pledge and Hamas’s continued control of Gaza, is the fact that UNRWA does not sufficiently vet its employees in the West Bank and Gaza (in contrast to UNRWA staffing in Jordan and Syria, where both countries employ vetting processes for prospective area staff members applying to work within their borders). The problems are many, including this one, as noted by Lindsay:

UNRWA’s 29,000 area staff members are overwhelmingly composed of agency registered Palestinian refugees—an oft-criticized arrangement. There are several obvious downsides to UNRWA using staff members drawn from the beneficiary population. At worst, such staff may be more concerned about beneficiaries’ objectives than UNRWA’s. They can also be manipulated more easily than staff who are not beneficiaries, whether by argument or threat, to distort the agency’s objectives.

These are not hypothetical concerns. Back in October 2004, then-Commissioner-General of UNRWA Peter Hansen unapologetically admitted to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that the UN employs members of Hamas. “Oh, I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll,” Hansen stated, “and I don’t see that as a crime.” According to Hansen, “Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant, and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another.” In his comments to CBC, Hansen also insisted that UNWRA staff members, “whatever their political persuasion,” are required to “behave in accordance with UN standards and norms for neutrality.”

But as I wrote at the time, this does not always appears to be the case:

Building on Peter Hansen’s statement that the behavior of all UNRWA employees must conform with “UN standards and norms for neutrality,” the United States should work with the UN to develop, apply, and monitor a set of professional standards to ensure that UN offices, equipment, and personnel are not exploited for terrorist purposes. A logical starting point would be to ask employees to sign an antiterror pledge such as the “Certificate Regarding Terrorist Financing” already required by all recipients of U.S. Agency for International Development funding. As a member of the Quartet, the UN has a special obligation to uphold the commitment outlined in the Roadmap to dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructure. In an effort to insulate good works from terrorist infiltration and exploitation, Washington should stand ready to help the UN live up to this obligation by funding an “Office of Professional Standards” for the UNRWA and similar agencies.

USAID. According to the USAID website, the agency “plays a vital role in promoting U.S. national security, foreign policy, and the War on Terrorism.” Toward these goals—and considering that several agency-approved aid recipients have been linked to terrorist groups in recent years—USAID’s proposed partner-vetting system (PVS) was a welcome and overdue development. Unfortunately, it remains unimplemented.

An aid organization by nature and design, USAID is focused more on dispersing aid than on vetting the partner and sub-partner organizations through which that aid is distributed on the ground. As a result, its otherwise laudable record is tainted by a series of awards to entities with established ties to terrorist groups, including Hamas-controlled zakat (charity) committees and the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG).

For example, documents made public in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation and several of its leaders—ultimately convicted on all counts related to their providing material support for Hamas—reveal that as recently as December 2002, USAID “cleared” several charity committees to receive funding despite information publicly tying them to Hamas. These included the main committees in the West Bank towns of Jenin, Qalqilya, Hebron, Tulkarem, and Nablus, as well as the al-Tadhoman committee, also in Nablus. But a year earlier, in a November 2001 memorandum sent to the Treasury Department, the FBI had cited detailed information documenting Hamas links among the first five of these committees. Documents seized from Palestinian offices by Israeli forces in March 2002 and made public shortly thereafter revealed further links.

In March 2007, then-USAID administrator Randall Tobias was called before Congress to explain why the agency had provided more than $140,000 to the Hamas-controlled Islamic University of Gaza. In response, he described the “very thorough vetting process that takes place.” But despite State Department assertions that the USAID vetting process is thorough, several deficiencies explain how funding mistakes still occur.

In its most significant shortcoming, USAID often ran trace requests on individuals and organizations without sufficient identifier information such as date and place of birth (DPOB) or government-issued identification numbers. According to a 2006 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, “until June 2006, the [Tel Aviv] mission did not routinely collect detailed identifying information on individuals, such as [DPOB], or verify that information.” At the embassy in Tel Aviv, several interoffice memoranda documenting trace requests concluded that “no derogatory information was uncovered” despite acknowledging—in bold font—that “these trace requests are less than comprehensive.” The memoranda (made public in the Holy Land case) added that “without additional information on individuals (DPOB, ID number, full name) our reviews will be less than complete.” Despite this disclaimer, the individuals and organizations in question were approved to receive USAID awards.

A random probability sampling conducted by GAO revealed that 94 percent of all memoranda “characterized the vetting based on only the four-part name as less than comprehensive.” USAID did not even establish procedures to verify the accuracy of individual’s names, such as requiring some official identification document.

Moreover, in March 2006, the USAID mission in Tel Aviv eliminated a requirement to periodically reevaluate aid recipients after initial clearance. Terrorist associations often develop gradually, however, and this procedural change made it impossible for USAID to identify late-emerging links on its own. According to the 2006 GAO report, officials in the Tel Aviv mission claimed that “new information in 2005 showed possible links to terrorists, including Hamas, for six organizations that previously had been cleared.” Indeed, it should come as no surprise that terrorist elements might deliberately seek to penetrate previously cleared organizations.

In addition, USAID’s dollar-threshold policy leaves some recipients subject to no vetting at all. From 2001 to 2003, the threshold was $25,000—grantees awarded anything less than that sum were not vetted. In July 2003, the Tel Aviv mission raised the threshold to $100,000, in part because it feared that vetting requirements hampered its ability to deliver urgently needed humanitarian aid. As a result, according to the GAO report, no vetting was conducted on foreign organizations and individuals tied to thirty-four contracts totaling some $2.1 million between August 2003 and February 2006. The threshold was changed back to $25,000 in March 2006.

The GAO report also revealed that foreign service nationals—local, non-American embassy employees—had access to unsecured vetting data and, in at least one case, developed the database for recording and tracking vetting results. The database had several flaws, including important fields left blank or filled with inappropriate information.

As I wrote in August 2007, the proposed partner-vetting system is necessary to remedy flaws such as those found in Tel Aviv. It would require applicants for USAID funding to submit identifying information on principal officers and other employees. As recent failures make clear, effective screening is impossible without sufficient identifier information. But even with sufficient information, meaningful traces must be run not only against the full range of publicly available information—clearly not done with the IUG and Hamas charity committees—but also against classified intelligence and law enforcement databases. Improved information sharing between USAID and security agencies will be critical for this to succeed. U.S. law, including Executive Order 13224 and existing statutory requirements for USAID vetting, demands the implementation of a reliable system.

Aid organizations may protest the extra administrative burden, but the critical need to provide humanitarian aid in conflict zones must be balanced with the inherent risk that terrorist groups will try to benefit from that aid. A truly robust system of vetting USAID partners is vital to promoting U.S. foreign policy and facilitating continued U.S. aid in places such as the West Bank and Gaza. The proposed PVS deserves public and private sector support and should be fully implemented as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, while USAID first published the proposed rule for the PVS in July 2007, and a final rule was just published in the Federal Register on January 2, 2009, the proposed vetting system is still being vigorously opposed within USAID and other parts of the U.S. interagency. President Obama, however, will have the opportunity to rectify USAID’s vetting shortcomings. As the final notice in the Federal Register notes, “The decision as to whether to implement PVS will be made by the incoming Obama Administration.” The final rule is scheduled to go into effect February 2, 2009.

Both UNRWA and USAID do important work, and in the current environment are especially important players. That they both need significant improvement should be reason for increased focus and attention, not despair. There is no better place to start than with the implementation of the new USAID Partner Vetting System and the many detailed policy prescriptions offered in James Lindsay’s excellent study on UNRWA.

Last week, as Israel conducted countrywide civil defense and military exercises, UNIFIL increased its patrols on the Israeli-Lebanese border. The Beirut Daily Star reported:

On the Lebanese side, hundreds of UNIFIL and LAF [Lebanese army] patrols—on land and in the air—were met with the complete absence of Hizbullah fighters. But Hizbullah was present everywhere one looked, with banners, mock rockets, flags, and posters of “martyrs” reminding everyone who reigns down South.

Click on the thumbnail image just above for the current UNIFIL deployment map (March 2008), or download a pdf version here. (And there is more on Hezbollah’s war preparations here.)

This new map, prepared by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), illustrates the disposition of Iraqi IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) and refugees, as of last September. Click on the map to see it in larger (legible) size.