This was the commitment made by the EU member states to give meaning to the "Common Foreign and Security Policy" enshrined in the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam.

Such a European army would have been almost tailor-made for the current crisis in Lebanon and the evident need for a robust multinational force to police the stricken border lands of southern Lebanon.

It is one tragedy of the EU that such a force, despite promises and good intentions, does not exist and has little prospect of coming into existence in this decade. It is another tragedy of the EU that even if such a force were available and ready, there is not enough of a consensus among the EU states to agree on its mission.

The French want an immediate cease-fire, and are content to sort out later the political details of the return of prisoners and the timetable to train and strengthen the Lebanese army so that it can replace Hezbollah as the effective military arm in south Lebanon. But the French are prepared, with the right U.N. resolution, to commit some troops to a putative multinational peacekeeping force.

The British agree with the Americans that an immediate cease-fire might sound attractive, but would leave Hezbollah in place and simply store up more trouble for the future. Moreover, Israel's promise of a 48-hour suspension of air attacks amounts to very nearly the same thing. And whatever happens, old boy, terribly sorry but Her Majesty's forces are a little too stretched in Iraq and Afghanistan to be able to send any troops to Lebanon. Some other army can take the strain this time.

The Germans, as usual, fall between the British and French positions. Chancellor Angela Merkel insists that Hezbollah started this latest crisis, and that Israel has a right to defend itself, but that Israel's response has become disproportionate and the sooner a cease-fire was agreed, the better. And, rather like the British, Merkel told Germany's Bild am Sonnstag newspaper that the German army was "largely exhausted" with its current missions in Afghanistan, the Balkans and supervising the elections in the Congo.

And none of the other European countries is clamoring for a chance to do its internationalist duty in the Middle East. The Spaniards, Poles, Italians and Dutch and Swedes all have sizeable forces, but none is exactly eager to commit them to the minefields on southern Lebanon. They remember what happened to the U.S. and French Marines, blown up in their barracks, in the earlier Lebanese deployment of 1983.

Moreover, like military men everywhere, they have been sobered by the heavy casualties the highly-trained Israeli troops have taken in attacking the nests of bunkers and tunnels and booby-traps that Hezbollah has constructed in southern Lebanon. So understandably, the various European defense ministries have little desire to deploy their own troops on a mission that would require cleaning out Hezbollah's dug-in fanatics so that the Lebanese army might eventually come in and replace them.

So far, the only verbal commitments to provide troops have come from France and Russia, and both countries have said that some conditions would first have to be net. Initial suggestions that Turkey, Pakistan, Algeria or Egypt might provide some forces have died away, in part because of the evident ferocity with which Hezbollah is defending its positions, but also because of the growing mood of outrage and pro-Hezbollah sentiment among the broader Arab public.

French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, who is being welcomed Monday in Lebanon even though U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was turned away, warned in an interview with Le Parisen that Lebanese conflict was becoming "a confrontation between a Muslim world that feels it has been and is being humiliated and a dominant West."

As a result, the French foreign minister says it is out of the question to deploy a NATO force into the region, since "it would be seen by Arab public opinion as a Western army, and that risks escalating the conflict into a war between cultures, into a clash of civilizations."

But at the same time, a United Nations force might not be tough enough and sufficiently well-equipped to do the job, so Douste-Blazy suggests "a multinational force under a U.N. mandate -- but we are not there yet."

Indeed we are not. While the diplomats at the United Nations may be nearing agreement this week on a resolution, the military men and defense officials of the potential peacekeepers are nowhere near agreement on the Rules of Engagement, the command structure, the order of battle, and all the other essential preliminaries to any multi-national peacekeeping mission.

So while the latest tragedy of Qana with the bombing of so many children and civilians may have looked like a morally pivotal moment in the Lebanese crisis, it could be one of those turning points at which history somehow fails to turn. However great the global outrage, however tragic the TV scenes of Qana's agony, it would be unwise to expect any speedy deployment of peacekeepers.

The diplomats remain divided, the military men are being cautious, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says his forces need just 10 to fourteen more days to break Hezbollah's hold on southern Lebanon. From the current snail's pace of diplomacy and the reluctance of generals to send their troops into Hezbollah's bunkers, the Israeli troops may well be granted that time.

But however long they get, they are unlikely to destroy Hezbollah, and unlikely to make Israel more secure. That is Israel's tragedy. And had the EU fulfilled its promises to build its own European rapid reaction force, it could have been deployed already and the slaughter of Qana might have been avoided. That is a rather wider tragedy, that says as much about the empty vanities of Europe as it does of the Middle East's unending capacity for awfulness.

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