Lester Pearson didn't invent peacekeeping. There were tons of ideas floating around New York at the time about putting a neutral force in-between countries, armies, that are fighting. He richly deserved the peace prize because he stickhandled through the General Assembly—not the Security Council—the approval to deploy the force between countries, Egypt and Israel. It's no longer countries, fortunately, that are going at each other; it's these factions. From the point of view of our getting involved and taking a leadership role, let's just consider for a moment that in the days that we had a leadership role, in 1992, we were 1% of the world's population doing 10% of the world's peacekeeping.
We are now being asked to join forces of 12,000, 16,000, or over 100,000 deployed worldwide. The only time the UN, up until the end of the Cold War, really screwed up and didn't do conventional peacekeeping was when it went into the Congo in 1960, and 250 peacekeepers were killed. It's no longer conventional peacekeeping because, fortunately, countries aren't invading each other all that much these days and calling for the UN to come to give them a pause.