From it's first job in 1956 as a peacekeeping force in the Sinai Peninsula, in which it remain for 10 years, to today... has the UN had more successes than failures?

Middle east
Somalia
Bosnia
Rwanda
East Timor
Sierra Leone
Republic of the Congo
Afghanistan
and others...

and, which of these efforts can really be seen as successes?

The trouble with peacekeepers is they don't really have any power. They might look reasonable enough, but they can't enforce the peace, only try and maintain it by putting a neutral face on things. The other side of the coin would be what the UN describes as Peacemakers, which are altogether almost unheard of. I see this as the major flaw in the UNs search for peace, it is doing its best to show that world peace is high on the agenda, but refuses to adopt the notion that sometimes peace does need to be forced, and that sometimes to be taken seriously you need military might. At the same time if we look at military occupations by countries, they have succeeded just as much as the UN in my view as peace is never around for long in debatable territories.

I don't see the force for peace being one way (peacekeepers) or the other (military occupation) but more a middle ground, like for example what is happening in Iraq with the occupation of the willing. A compromoise between policing capability and world opinion, rather than national opinion, is in my view the only way peacekeeping will come close to being succesful. To make matters complete it would be nice to see nations working together to enforce peace and stability under the banner of the UN, but then I think I dream too much of a world where the governments of the world don't behave like they are in a school playground.

I'm a former member of the guard, and part of the problem is the term peacekeeper is used in many places where there is no peace to keep. The US soldiers in Iraq right now aren't peace keepers, they're an army of occupation. The soldiers in Kosovo and Bosnia are real peace keepers. Peacekeeping is supposed to work like this. Both sides WANT peace, but neither side trusts the other not to attack if they let their guard down. So we go in and drive around in Bradleys and up armored Humvees and make it very clear that taking a shot at a US soldier is a very good way to equally distribute your molecules over a 40 square yard grid. Then both sides swallow their bride and bury their AKs, knowing that the other side has to do the same.

Now that is hard enough to do, believe me. But when both, or even one side wants to keep on fighting, you're not peace keepers. You're an army of occupation charged with suppressing resistance from everyone else in the region. Thats damn near impossible.

One note, the US soliders and marines in Korea operate under a 50 year old UN mandate. Since 1953 they've kept the peace by making war between the Koreas too costly for everyone in the region. So technically the UN has kept the 4th largest army on earth bottled up for 50 years. Thats not too shabby. But in reality it was a US and not UN adventure since 1954. But hey the UN would be nothing without semantics.

UN peacekeepers often have to the job of doing "something" rather than of succeeding. They are under trained and set up to fail. Thats why everyone always wants the US/UK/France to handle things. We're the only ones, with the possible exceptions of the South Africans since 1990 and Nigerians, that ever seem to get the job done even half right.

If we really wanted to keep the peace they should institute an immediate worldwide ban on the manufacture and trade of the Soviet 7.62mm short cartidge. If they could pull that off 90% of the wars would run out of bullets in 10 years. But thats a topic for another thread I suppose.