This paper examines the factors that make peace enforcement politically and operationally complicated and undermine the will, the resources and the parliamentary consensus to undertake missions of peace enforcement. The author outlines two phases of the peace-enforcement process: one is a combat phase, the application of armed force to suppress hostilities. Phase two, presumptively a far harder, longer and more complex undertaking, is to try to rectify the causes of the violence, to provide a stable administration of the area and bring about some degree of economic and social recovery.