"Since September of last year, there have been repeated incidents by the S.P.L.A., including shooting at U.N. aircraft, as well as some direct threats to U.N. peacekeepers," said Kieran Dwyer, a spokesman for the United Nations peacekeeping division in New York.
"Peacekeeping" is a dirty word at the Rumsfeld Pentagon: its peacekeeping division was renamed the Office of Stability Operations, and its importance was downgraded, even after war created the need for such an operation in Afghanistan and then again, on an even larger scale, in Iraq.
In terms of international forces, Britain and Poland are now leading two foreign peacekeeping divisions, but General Abizaid said he would like Turkey to lead a third and for Pakistan to play an important role.
Though the UN's primary mandate was peacekeeping, the division between the US and USSR often paralysed the organization, generally allowing it to intervene only in conflicts distant from the Cold War.
At the moment the coalition most needs a boost, leaders of the powerful Turkish Army are now ready to provide a division of peacekeeping troops.
Lord Robertson, NATO's secretary general, ended a four-year term that included the alliance's response to the Sept. 11 attacks, peacekeeping in Afghanistan and deep divisions over the Iraq war.
Changing the Guard Later articles about the peacekeeping mission of the 49th Armored Division of the Texas National Guard will examine the changing role of its citizen-soldiers and the effect on the civilian lives they led.
Hundreds of soldiers from the 29th Infantry Division completed nine days of training on 16 June 2001 at Fort Polk, Louisiana, to prepare for their peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, as the second division headquarters to be deployed as a part of Stabilisation Force.
Douste-Blazy, for his part, reportedly argued that the division of the UN's peacekeeping department into two parts — which did take place the following year — would be "a catastrophe".
In 1976, with Lebanon racked by a bloody civil war, Assad dispatched several divisions to that country and secured their permanent presence there as part of a peacekeeping force sponsored by the Arab League.
If elected president, George W. Bush plans to tell NATO that the United States should no longer participate in peacekeeping in the Balkans, signaling a major new division of labor in the Western alliance, according to Mr. Bush's senior national security aide.
