US says UN force must go to Lebanon urgently

WASHINGTON, Aug 15 (Reuters) The United States urged the United Nations today to speed up its military planning and get more peacekeepers into southern Lebanon on an ''urgent basis'' rather than within months.

The United Nations must act quickly to deploy more peacekeepers to Lebanon following Friday's Security Council resolution to end the fighting between Hizbollah guerrillas and Israeli forces, said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

''Nobody believes that deploying the force in months is acceptable. This needs to be done on a much more urgent basis than that,'' he said.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told Israeli television earlier it would take weeks or months to deploy peacekeepers to beef up the current small UN Interim Force in Lebanon.

Maj. Gen. Alain Pellegrini, the commander of UNFIL, told France's Le Monde newspaper it would take a year for an expanded force to reach its full strength.

Asked about Pellegrini's estimate, McCormack said: ''In terms of how long it takes for this force to get in place, we'll see. Again, I said that this can't be a business-as-usual kind of operation.'' A fragile truce agreed to over the weekend between Lebanon and Israel has largely held and Israeli forces have begun to withdraw from Lebanon.

McCormack reiterated that Israel's withdrawal must be done ''in parallel'' with the arrival of international forces as well as the 15,000 troops promised by Lebanon.

''There has to be a rough balance there, because, otherwise, you just create the same sort of imbalance, the same sort of vacuum that we want to avoid,'' McCormack said.

American military experts will be in New York this week to help with UN planning for the new force, said David Welch a senior State Department official who is the key US negotiator between Lebanon and Israel.

It is still unclear which countries will contribute to the UN force, expected to total some 15,000 troops, although France, Turkey are likely candidates so far.

The United States will not offer troops, but has said it will provide military training to help Lebanese forces in southern Lebanon and assist with planning and logistics of a new UN force.

Both President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been making phone calls to encourage more nations to contribute their forces, said the US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton.

Asked whether France would lead a new UN force, Bolton said the French government had not yet made a decision on how many troops to contribute and therefore its leadership role was not yet clear.

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