Category: Daniel Serwer
On to the slippery slope
Washington has reportedly agreed with Ankara to sweep Islamic State fighters from an important portion of Turkey’s border with Syria, de facto creating a “safe” zone something like 40 miles deep into Syria and extending from Aleppo to the Euphrates river. This move comes on the heels of Turkish agreement to allow the US to use planes based at Incirlik to bomb the Islamic State, whose attacks in recent weeks have reached into Turkey.
Differences in Turkish and American objectives remain. The Turks want the Syrian opposition to Bashar al Asad to control the zone, thus stemming the advances from the east of Kurdish forces that the Turks regard as hostile to Ankara and supportive of Asad. The Americans want to weaken the Islamic State, which has been bringing men and supplies across the Turkish border into Syria. But there may be enough overlap between these somewhat disparate goals for practical purposes.
The zone will not however be safe just because we call it that. The territory in question is strategically important to the Islamic State, the Syrian opposition, the Syrian Kurds and the Turks. It will have to be protected. Lack of a formal no-fly zone is not the problem. Syrian aircraft know to steer clear of zones where the Americans fly. The use of Incirlik will enable a much more visible and constant US presence. The Americans reportedly intend also to train spotters to direct their air attacks. But indirect fire from artillery as well as infiltration of suicide bombers and other individual operatives could still sabotage any effort to establish a “safe” zone. Security is job 1.
The area will also need to be governed. This is where the Islamic State has excelled. Its brutality has reestablished fear in the populations it controls and enabled it to govern with minimal resources. ISIS brooks little dissent. It is unified, purposeful and predictable. Its courts are merciless. Crime in the areas it controls is down. Many Syrians no doubt would prefer to avoid the mistreatment ISIS dishes out, but in a chaotic situation they may prefer to accept the devil they know.
The Syrian opposition, which both the Turks and Americans will want to put in charge of any area they clear, has been anything but unified, purposeful and predictable. It will need to learn, fast. Withdrawal of ISIS has not brought peace and tranquility to Tikrit, Kobane and other recovered areas. Like it or not, ISIS is more like an insurgency than anything else. Dealing with it requires the counter-insurgency not just to clear but also to hold and build. Neither in Iraq nor in Syria has this part of the job been done well.
The situation will be particularly fraught because of Turkish involvement, which is of course necessary. But the Syrian Arab opposition distrusts the Turks and the Syrian Kurdish opposition loathes them. It is difficult to picture those sentiments overcome easily, especially as Turkey will control the border across which all logistical support for a safe zone will need to come. Turkey, the US and the Syrians (Arabs and Kurds) will need to engage with each other much more intensely than in the past if the problems are to be overcome.
Meanwhile, there are also rumors of a “safe” zone in the south, where my former intern Ala’ Alrababa’h says it will imperil Jordan. He is correct: it will. The question is whether the risks are worth running in order to protect the relatively well-organized moderate opposition on the southern front, keep extremists off the Jordanian and Israeli borders, and eventually help the opposition to mount an offensive farther north.
From the American perspective, these “safe” area proposals, which I would prefer to call protected zones, put President Obama where he has consistently tried to avoid going: on the slippery slope toward greater US involvement in Syria. He knows, as I do, that the “safe” areas in Bosnia only worked by failing and bringing on stronger intervention. Odds are any “safe” areas in Syria will also fail, but this president has been very disciplined. It is unclear whether he would then intervene more strongly. The Syrian opposition had better get its act together and begin governing effectively wherever it can.
PS: Bassam Barabandi of People Demand Change sent this nice picture of the potential zone:
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Fear of diplomacy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_pBnwyxGo8&feature=youtu.be
Sorry I can’t embed John Oliver’s commentary here at peacefare.net, but it is worth a few minutes to go enjoy it over at Youtube.
I can however offer this
from Connecticut’s Senator Chris Murphy, who is less funny but easily more interesting. His talk this morning at the Carnegie Endowment put the nuclear deal in the context of a Washington that is shies away from diplomacy–too risky–and tilts instead towards war, for which America is amply well-prepared. He also suggested that rejection of the deal would leave the US no other serious alternative, as the multilateral sanctions, constraints on Iran’s nuclear program and international inspections would evaporate.
This is the vital link in the logic that should lead to support for the deal even among those who don’t like it. Rob Satloff, whose writing I generally admire, argues that it is a false logic. The Congress can reject this deal, he suggests, and still get a satisfactory outcome. I find his argument thoroughly unpersuasive, stringing together an unlikely sequence of events that doesn’t even get us far into the future without resorting to war. Nor does he consider the reaction of the other countries that negotiated the deal.
Senator Murphy is far more realistic. He understands, I think, that rejection of this deal would be the equivalent in our time of Congress’ rejection of President Wilson’s League of Nations. It would put the US in the position of going to war as the only remaining resort rather than implementing an agreement four other permanent members of the UN Security Council find acceptable. Even Saudi Arabia and Israel, now strident opponents of the Iran nuclear deal, would not applaud the US as Iranian missiles rain down on Tel Aviv and the Kingdom’s oil fields. Instead they will be arguing for US ground forces to stop the barrage.
What happens if we reject the deal and refuse to destroy the Iranian nuclear program? Then Iran gets nuclear weapons quickly. Anyone worried about Iranian troublemaking in the region–an entirely well-founded concern–would then have a lot more to be concerned about. A nuclear Iran would no doubt throw its weight around more rather than less.
The Senator made a few other points worth mentioning in his post-speech conversation with Karim Sadjadpour. Even with the deal in force, he thinks the US will retain the right to impose sanctions on Iran for reasons other than nuclear issues. He suggested we would do so if Iran were to execute a terrorist bombing of Israeli tourists, for example. The Senator admitted that US companies are likely to be at a disadvantage in the competition for Iranian business. He thought US anti-bribery legislation would help to protect the business Americans do from capture by regime hardliners.
The Senator was hesitant on one issue: restoring diplomatic relations with Iran. That’s a long way off he suggested. He admitted that the US will need a real presence in Iran to ensure implementation of the agreement but was unwilling to commit to an interest section, suggesting instead that the IAEA inspectors might suffice.
In my view, they won’t, because their remit is entirely technical. I served seven years abroad in US embassies working nonproliferation issues. I think we need our own people in a diplomatically protected facility in Tehran, if only on two and three week trips. But maybe the time is not yet ripe for that proposal. Let’s get the agreement through the uphill fight in Congress first.
PS: If John Oliver didn’t satiate your taste for videos, try this less funny one from Jon Stewart last night (with President Obama).
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Bully is as bully does
Chuck Sudetic is at it again: he published the original allegations of murder and organ trafficking by Kosovar leaders with Carla Del Ponte in her memoir. He reiterated the allegations in the Washington Post in 2011, neglecting to mention the lack of forensic evidence dutifully noted in the Council of Europe report on which he relied heavily. Now he has gotten lots of former diplomats to make anonymous allegations against Kosovar “bullies,” though many of their allegations appear to be about corruption rather than murder and organ trafficking. It is about time someone worried who the bully really is.
Let me be clear: I have no idea whether there are Kosovar leaders guilty of the crimes alleged. I certainly won’t be surprised if some of them are corrupt. But I don’t even know if the alleged organ-trafficking and murder occurred.
I have been hearing the allegations since the early 2000s, when the journalist who discovered the story recounted it to me. He never published it because he thought he had insufficient evidence to meet journalistic standards, but he turned over what evidence he had to the EU rule of law authorities in Kosovo. They were unable to make a case and turned over what they had to ICTY, which allegedly lost whatever it was given, ironically during Carla Del Ponte’s time as chief prosecutor.
The Council of Europe and Dick Marty chimed in in 2010, with a report full of dramatic allegations but no forensic evidence and a sentence, never mentioned by Chuck, saying that no pronouncements of guilt are justified. Let me cite the precise language (para 175):
Our task was not to conduct an criminal investigation – we are not empowered to do so, and above all we lack the necessary resources – let alone to pronounce judgments of guilt or innocence.
The contradiction is not my invention; it is in the original document.
Now we’ve got Chuck piping up again with a piece in which he admits Hashim Thaci spoke forcefully and publicly in the Kosovo parliament in favor of a special tribunal to examine the allegations, but instead of praising him for his courage and wondering if he might in fact be innocent Chuck smears as much mud as he can, using anonymously sourced statements from present and former diplomats.
Hmmm. I’m a former diplomat and pleased to be quoted by name whenever I am pretty sure I’m correct.
Is Hashim capable of saying one thing publicly while maneuvering to do another behind the Americans’ and Europeans’ backs? Any Balkans politician worth his salt can do that, but I’d like to see better evidence of it than Chuck puts forward.
I’m on record in favor of the special court that the Americans and Europeans are pushing on Kosovo to receive indictments and try cases arising from the allegations against Kosovo leaders. The Kosovo court system has not been prepared or willing to take on these cases. The juridical difficulties and likelihood of initimidation in tiny Kosovo justify a court that sits outside the country staffed by internationals. But the kind of bullying Chuck is doing is hardly conducive to getting the politicians of a newly independent (and not yet fully sovereign) country to swallow this bitter pill.
Accountability is important. So is responsibility. Serious allegations based on anonymous sources without corroborating evidence is irresponsible.
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Legacy
We all worry about our legacy. President Obama must too. But unlike most of us he has a lot of people telling the world what his will be.
The current favorite is the Iran nuclear deal. I doubt that. Does anyone even remember that it was Bill Clinton who made a nuclear deal with North Korea? It fell apart in George W’s administration. Even that is not remembered, I suppose because the list of his failures is long.
If the Iran nuclear deal falls apart soon, sure it will tarnish the Obama brand. But let’s assume the implementation of the Iranian nuclear deal goes reasonably well. If 10 or 15 years from now Iran makes a dash for a nuclear weapon, will anyone blame Barack Obama, or will they understandably blame his successor’s successor? And credit him with delaying what was inevitable.
There have been lots of “legacy” proposals these past six months. The two most prominent, quite rightly focused on domestic policy, have been
- Obamacare, which survived its test in the Supreme Court;
- gay marriage, another Supreme Court win.
They will no doubt be counted as important milestones on the way towards a more just society, but really not legacy-defining.
A far stronger candidate in my view is this:
source: tradingeconomics.com
That’s a rapid recovery from the 2008 economic implosion, followed by six years of relatively steady if modest growth, likely to be extended to eight years while much of the rest of the world continues to stagnate. Simultaneously, US government debt has leveled off:
source: tradingeconomics.com
This good economic news is important for American foreign policy. Without it, there would be little hope that Washington could muster the resources needed to engage–even to the extent it has–on major issues like Moscow’s military challenge in Ukraine and Beijing’s somewhat less military challenge in the South China Sea.
In addition, there is the good news about US energy production:
source: tradingeconomics.com
Combined with the decline in global energy prices, this dramatic shift is denying resources to some of our adversaries and providing a serious boost to the American economy.
All that good economic news–rarely credited today but likely to be all to obvious in the future–should not however obscure the very real bad news from the Middle East. Apart from the failure of the Administration’s efforts to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, we’ve got a civil war in Syria that has killed upwards of 300,000 people and displaced close to half the country’s population, sending 4 million abroad as refugees. We’ve also got a civil war in Libya, allowed to flourish in the aftermath of a successful intervention. And another in Yemen, where Washington is half-heartedly supporting a Saudi intervention that appears to be making things worse.
Just as important: the war against Islamist extremists that began in 2001 in Afghanistan has been notably unsuccessful. Fourteen years later, a few thousand extremists in two countries have metastasized to tens of thousands in more than a dozen countries, despite hundreds of drone strikes and air attacks.
Neither our military might nor our propaganda capabilities have succeeded in stemming the tide. They have arguably made things worse. The American non-governmental organizations are rightly protesting continuation of an approach that simply has not worked.
When it comes to foreign policy, these failures in the Middle East and in the fight against Islamist extremists are likely to be a bigger part of President Obama’s legacy than the nuclear deal. If he wants to worry about something, he should put these things at the top of his list. A serious effort now to enable Syrian moderates to begin governing inside Syria, coupled with a serious European effort to make sure the UN’s Libyan mediation unifies that country’s rival governments and parliaments, would do a great deal to fix the broken Middle East. These are largely diplomatic challenges, not military ones.
We would still be facing terrorist challenges elsewhere. If we want to deal with them, it is clear enough that military means will not suffice. We need a much stronger civilian mobilization, in partnership with other countries and international organizations. More on how to make that part of Barack Obama’s legacy in a later post.
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Netanyahu v Hammond
This is about as good an exchange as you are going to find on the Iran nuclear deal:
From my point of view, it is telling that Netanyahu says absolutely nothing about how multilateral sanctions, international inspections and technological constraints on Iran’s nuclear program would be maintained in the absence of a deal. He simply repeats that he wants maintenance of sanctions and a better deal, one that somehow ends burning of Israeli flags in Tehran as well as other odious Iranian behavior. I’d like a pony too.
Note also: Netanyahu suggests North Korea developed its nuclear weapons while under IAEA monitoring. That is not really true. Pyongyang ejected the inspectors and withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 2003. It first tested a nuclear weapon in 2006. Of course Iran could also withdraw from the NPT, but the agreement reached this week includes the following sentence:
Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.
You can believe it or not, but it certainly goes beyond previous commitments Iran has made in writing.
I’d score this bout a win for Hammond, but admittedly that is the direction in which I lean. There simply is no good alternative to an agreement. Whether this one is the best we could get or not, it is now the only one available. Netanyahu and other opponents will soon be screeching about the need to implement it to the letter and complaining about every conceivable Iranian deviation.
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Good news shouldn’t obscure deep problems
I try not to pay too much attention to the Balkans these days, as there are much more important things going on in the world. But today’s news that the European Union has brokered an agreement that will allow Macedonia to hold early elections by April 24 next year crossed my desk at about the same time as an IRI Poll illustrating all too clearly why European mediation was necessary.
Prime Minister Gruevski, who won big in April 2014 parliamentary elections, has seen his popularity evaporate quickly. Disapproval has reached 55%. Almost half of the citizens now think the country is moving in the wrong direction (compared to fewer than one-quarter who think it is moving in the wrong direction). The single most popular solution is resignation of the prime minister. Most think the government has no plan to solve the country’s economic problems and relatively few think it is even trying to deal with corruption.
One big cause of Gruevski’s decline is the wire-tapping scandal that has bedeviled the country this year. This has generated enormous distrust in the government and Gruevski’s political party. Forty-two per cent of the population believes one or the other paid or engaged armed Albanians to stage a rebellion in May. That notion may be ridiculous, but it certainly demonstrates the level of distrust Gruevski has engendered.
The prime minister will now be required to resign so that a new government, with a different prime minister chosen by his party, can be sworn in 100 days before the election. Even before then new Interior and Labor/Social Affairs ministers chosen by the main Macedonian opposition party will enter the government, along with deputy ministers in key ministries and a new Special Prosecutor. The opposition has committed to returning to parliament. Resignation of the government 100 days before elections is supposed to become a permanent feature of the political landscape.
The cherry on this cake will be a meeting of the EU’s heretofore moribund High-Level Accession Dialogue in September.
All of this makes eminently good sense, but none of it will mean much unless the real causes of Macedonia’s malaise are identified and resolved. I would count these as
- A government and governing parties used to doing as they please with a minimum of transparency or accountability.
- Media and civil society that suffer constant harassment and threats.
- Interethnic relations that encourage Macedonians and Albanians to live more apart than together.
- A judicial system under the thumb of politicians and unable to conduct proper investigations of corruption and other malfeasance at high levels.
- An EU accession process stalled by Greek refusal to accept Macedonia’s constitutional name.
Getting rid of Gruevski and holding new elections does little to respond to these issues. He may even do well in next year’s election, despite current polling. Nor do I have a magic wand that will solve these problems, but the EU needs to recognize that a bit of reshuffling of government positions won’t cure the diseases that plague Skopje.
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