Tag: Syria
Rumors of America’s demise are exaggerated
If you don’t want to be live-tweeted, don’t speak to a group in their 20s! My 5-7 minutes or so presentation at the G8 & G20 Youth Summits at George Washington University this morning generated close to two dozen tweets.
What I said, or should have said according to my notes, was pretty much this:
1. Contrary to what one often reads, my generation is not leaving the world worse off. It is leaving as a legacy a freer, wealthier and more peaceful world than the one it inherited.
2. But just because of that it is also a more uncertain world, where leadership is more difficult than when the United States and the Soviet Union faced off in nuclear confrontation. The demands made of leadership also shift in a more democratic and peaceful world, with greater emphasis on economic challenges and we hope less on security dilemmas.
3. Even if America’s relative weight in the world is declining by some measures, the much-rumored demise of America is greatly exaggerated.
4. The United States retains its inherent advantages: two large, protective oceans, two cooperative neighbors north and south, immense natural resource wealth, global military superiority, a dynamic economy and political system.
5. It also has other advantages that make it specifically well-adapted to the current world order: an ability to pivot (as it is currently trying to do, from the Atlantic to the Pacific) and a high degree of interconnectedness with the rest of the world. Anne-Marie Slaughter in particular has been vocal in point out how important interconnectedness can be.
6. Interconnectedness is an interesting source of power, because it works at both ends: I may be able to leverage my connection to you, but you may also be able to leverage your connection to me.
7. We need to learn to use this interconnectedness to strengthen each other, not to undermine each other, and to improve the world order.
In the Q and A, Barbara Slavin and I differed on Iran and Syria. I think President Obama is not taking military action on Syria because it would lose him Russian and Chinese participation in the P5+1 talks with Iran. Barbara thinks the U.S. is hesitating because of uncertainty about the consequences in a Syria with a divided opposition. We may also differ on Iran’s nuclear intentions, but writing about that I may get it wrong, so I’ll desist.
There were a lot of good questions, but the one that sticks in my mind is about how we will manage the rise of China. A great deal depends on which China rises. If it is an increasingly autocratic and militarized China, the task will be far more difficult. If, as suggested in recent remarks by Wen Jiabao (I was mistaken this morning when I cited Hu Jintao), China finds it needs democratic political reform to manage its own internal problems, things will be a lot easier.
Next generation: you were well-represented today!
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Slaughterhouse Syria
Gregor Nazarian, who has joined me for the summer as a Middle East Institute intern, writes:
Syria said yesterday that it would allow UN aid workers into the country, as required by the UN/Arab League Annan plan. This is good news, if it happens. But the presence of aid workers will not do much to discourage the Assad regime from continuing to commit atrocities.
The regime’s approach was clear in Assad’s speech on Sunday. He again blamed the violence on “terrorists.” He claimed the new constitution, recently chosen parliament and political dialogue would resolve legitimate issues but struck a defiant tone on armed conflict, declaring that the government would continue to kill its enemies.
There was nothing in the speech indicating any serious intention on Assad’s part to implement the six-point Annan plan. He mentioned it only once, claiming that the Houla massacre was committed by terrorists hoping to sabotage the plan on the eve of Annan’s visit to Damascus and thereby bring about NATO intervention. Syria’s expulsion of Western diplomats (in retaliation for the expulsion of Syrian diplomats) signals that Assad is not planning any near-term compromises.
The humanitarian access to four provinces Assad has announced falls short of the full access the Annan plan authorized. Like the release of 500 detainees last week (release of prisoners is another of Annan’s six points), it is designed only to provide a veneer of cooperation while military operations continue.
Annan’s plan also calls for freedom of access for journalists, freedom to protest peacefully, an inclusive political process, and an end to violence. Assad will likely address each with half-measures, sleight of hand and well-timed gestures. But he will give no ground on the military front. While conceding that some opponents have expressed legitimate concerns, Assad claims to have addressed them with recent window-dressing reforms. He will deal with international pressure in much the same way: by claiming to have addressed the issues, without however making any serious moves.
Assad treats the violence as a separate question. The military conflict is between security forces and terrorists armed and supported by Syria’s enemies abroad:
Terrorists are concerned neither with reform nor with dialogue. . . Not distinguishing between terrorism and the political process is a great error made by some people.
Assad cannot prevent images and videos of atrocities from reaching the outside world. Denying the violence is impossible, so he laments it, blames the terrorists for atrocities and claims to be fighting them. He repeated numerous times in his speech that reasonable political demands had been met, but that terrorism continues unabated and would be fought to the bitter end.
The most striking image in Assad’s speech was that of the Syrian state as surgeon:
Do we condemn the surgeon because his hands are bloodstained or do we praise him for saving a human being’s life?
Of course there was blood on his hands, Assad said, but the killing was for the good of the country. Like a surgeon covered in the blood of his patient, Assad will make the people bleed as he cuts away the tumor of international terrorists from the body politic. Supporters and critics alike, he suggested, should thank him for it.
The rhetorical separation of the political process from the military conflict suggests that Assad will use small political concessions as cover for a continuing military crackdown. Even as we see some progress on the Annan plan, we may not see an end to the real problem: the continuing slaughter of Syrians.
PS: Don’t watch this if you’ve just eaten or don’t want to see the truly atrocious consequences of a war against ordinary people, including many children:
The caption on Youtube reads: “This footage, uploaded by Syrian democracy activists on May 25, 2012, depicts the aftermath of a massacre of around 32 children under the age of 10. They were allegedly murdered by forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad in the town of Al-Houla in Homs. Dozens were killed by tank and artillery shelling, while according to survivor testimony dozens more were shot or stabbed by Syrian security forces. The relative proportions of each category remain disputed.”
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Intervene now or later?
Joshua Landis, who knows the Syrian regime as well as any American, warns vigorously against military intervention: we’ve failed at nation-building elsewhere, the effort would be difficult and expensive, our military is overstretched, the Syrians are fractious. He argues further:
In all likelihood, the Syrian revolution will be less bloody if Syrians carry it out for themselves. A new generation of national leaders will emerge from the struggle. They will not emerge with any legitimacy if America hands them Syria as a gift. How will they claim that they won the struggle for dignity, freedom and democracy? America cannot give these things. Syrians must take them. America can play a role with aid, arms and intelligence, but it cannot and should not try to decide Syria’s future, determine winners, and take charge of Syria. If Syrians want to own Syria in the future, they must own the revolution and find their own way to winning it. It is better for Syria and it is better for America.
Convinced of the strategic significance of depriving Iran of its Syrian ally, Jamie Rubin takes the opposite view.
The rebellion in Syria has now lasted more than a year. The opposition is not going away, and it is abundantly clear that neither diplomatic pressure nor economic sanctions will force Assad to accept a negotiated solution to the crisis. With his life, his family, and his clan’s future at stake, only the threat or use of force will change the Syrian dictator’s stance. Absent foreign intervention, then, the civil war in Syria will only get worse as radicals rush in to exploit the chaos there and the spillover into Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey intensifies…
Arming the Syrian opposition and creating a coalition air force to support them is a low-cost, high-payoff approach. Whether an air operation should just create a no-fly zone that grounds the regimes’ aircraft and helicopters or actually conduct air to ground attacks on Syrian tanks and artillery should be the subject of immediate military planning. And as Barak, the Israeli defense minister, also noted, Syria’s air defenses may be better than Libya’s but they are no match for a modern air force.
The larger point is that as long as Washington stays firm that no U.S. ground troops will be deployed, à la Kosovo and Libya, the cost to the United States will be limited. Victory may not come quickly or easily, but it will come. And the payoff will be substantial. Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East. The resulting regime in Syria will likely regard the United States as more friend than enemy. Washington would gain substantial recognition as fighting for the people in the Arab world, not the corrupt regimes.
Both Landis and Rubin try to make the choice sound easy. It is not. What could go wrong with American intervention ? Remember Iraq and Afghanistan. What could go wrong if we don’t intervene, or if we delay? Remember Bosnia and Rwanda.
Rubin has conveniently forgotten that the Kosovo intervention that he cites as the right way to do things did eventually involve American boots on the ground. Units of the National Guard are still there 13 years later. But he is right that a successful intervention resulting in a pro-Western Syria would reduce Iran’s influence. If you don’t count firefights among militias at the international airport, you can count Libya as the kind of success Rubin would like in Syria.
The trouble is that an intervention without Russian concurrence, which as Rubin notes will not be forthcoming, would end the P5+1 talks with Iran and wreck any possibility of a united Security Council to deal with its nuclear program. If your primary strategic objective is not limiting Iran’s influence but rather preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons, preferably by diplomatic means, that would be a big loss. Intervention in Syria could even hasten Iran’s pursuit of nuclear capability.
Whatever the merits, I don’t think the intervention is going to happen any time soon. Neither does Bashar al Assad, whose speech to Syria’s puppet parliament yesterday gave no indication that he expects to face international intervention. He seems to have not even mentioned the Annan plan or the international observers (but I confess I am still trying to get hold of a full English translation). Bashar remains confident he can weather the storm.
I’m not certain he is wrong. Many people are saying that he will never be able to regain control of Syria because he is now illegitimate. But was he ever really legit? The difference is that the state he presided over, which once more or less functioned to preserve his hold on power, is now broken, perhaps even failed.
There is little chance that Syria after the civil war in which it is currently engaged will be able to pick itself up, dust off and proceed peacefully to democratic rule, or stable rule of any sort. Those who hope for a “managed transition” are likely to be disappointed. Even a coup will not be clean and easy. Bashar could even stay for years.
But the day is likely to come when the battered Syrian state fails utterly. The international community may then want to intervene to prevent the civil war and refugees from overflowing into Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq. It may also want to prevent the slaughter of the Alawite sect that provides the foundation of the Assad regime, along with Christians and others who have supported Bashar and his father. If so, it will require boots on the ground.
The question is whether to intervene now, or later.
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The Syrian people still hold the key to Syria
Randa Slim writes:
During the recent discussions in Baghdad between the global powers and Iran, the United States rejected an Iranian proposal to add Syria and Bahrain to the discussion agenda. It might be worth pursuing this proposal at the next round of talks in Moscow. Time and again, Iranian senior officials have stressed the need for a political resolution to the Syrian crisis. They have been reaching out to different groups in the Syrian opposition. As the Western community keeps searching for a political solution in Syria, Iran might have some ideas about how to bring it about.
Iran will no doubt have ideas about Syria, but they won’t be ideas that Bashar al Assad’s opposition (or I) will like. The Iranians will want to get in Syria compensation for whatever they give the P5+1 (that’s the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany) on nuclear issues.
Bahrain is a red herring. The Iranians don’t really expect the Americans to yield anything there, because it hosts the American Fifth Fleet. But the refusal of the Americans to yield to the Shia majority in Bahrain is a good analogy from Iran’s perspective to Tehran’s refusal to yield to the Sunni majority in Syria. Tehran will want to know: if majority rule is good for Syria, why isn’t it good for Bahrain?
From the perspective of Americans sympathetic with the rebellion, it would be best to keep the Syria issue separate.
If the impending American election is what restrains President Obama from taking action more vigorous action on Syria, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney loosened the constraint a bit last weekend by criticizing the President for not doing enough and calling for arming the opposition. The trouble with that proposition is that it is already happening and won’t likely alter the balance much. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are providing arms to what the Americans think are reliable recipients. It is unrealistic to expect that the violent side of the Syrian uprising will win the day, but it can likely sustain an insurgency indefinitely.
The more important constraint on President Obama is the need to keep the Russians on board for the p5+1 nuclear talks with Iran. Any overt American military move would likely cause Moscow to scuttle those talks and leave the Americans with the unhappy choice of military action or nothing in dealing with the Iranian nuclear program. Stopping Iran short of a nuclear weapon is one of America’s top foreign policy and national security priorities. It is unrealistic to expect the president to put it at risk with a military strike on Syria.
The fact is that no one has come up with anything demonstrably better than pursuing the Annan plan for Syria, though Andrew Tabler’s suggestion of an arms quarantine against the regime certainly merits consideration as a supplement. The key to making the Annan plan work is moving Bashar al Assad out of power so that work can begin on a political process. The Iranians and Russians will do this once they see him teetering on the brink. He is not far from that point. I still think the best way to put him there is through nonviolent means, like the general strikes that have recently plagued Damascus and other cities. It is very hard to crack down on large numbers of merchants for not opening their shops in the souk.
The Syrian people still hold the key to Syria.
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Annan needs to keep at it
With the toll from Friday’s attack on the Syrian village of Houla mounting well over 100 (including dozens of children), it is tempting to denounce the UN’s Annan peace plan as a dead letter. The European edition of the Wall Street Journal this morning headlines, “Syria Massacre Upends Fragile Hopes for Peace.” Others are even more explicit that Annan has failed, and have been saying so for months.
That is a mistake. The UN observers Annan directs did their job at Houla, verifying the incident and assigning blame to the regime. That is precisely what they are there to do. Unarmed, they have no capacity to intervene with force. The Security Council yesterday issued a statement, approved by Russia and China, condemning the Syrian government for the massacre. Minimal as it is, that counts as progress on the diplomatic front. Weaning the Russians from their client, Syrian President Bashar al Assad, is an important diplomatic objective.
The clarity of the UN observers may push the diplomacy further in the right direction. Moscow and Washington are apparently discussing a plan similar to the Yemen transition process, which involved a resignation of the president and a transition guided by the vice president. I have my doubts this particular scheme is viable in Syria, but there may be variants worth discussing that would provide reassurance to the Alawites while initiating a political process that will move the country definitively past the Assad regime.
That is the essential point. It is hard to picture the violence ending and politics beginning without dealing somehow with Alawite fears that they will end up massacred if Bashar al Assad leaves power. That would be a tragedy not only for the Alawites but for the Middle East in general. Let there be no doubt: past experience suggests that those who indulge in abusive violence often become the victims of it when their antagonists get up off the ropes and gain the upper hand.
It would be far better for most Alawites, the relatively small religious sect whose adherents are mainstays of the Assad regime, if a peaceful bridge can be built to post-Assad Syria. They will not of course trust those who have been mistreated not to mistreat them in turn. This is where the diplomats earn their stripes: coming up with a scheme that protects Alawites as a group from instant retaliation while preserving the option of eventually holding individuals judicially accountable for the Assad regime abuses. It is hard to picture a case more difficult than Syria, where the regime has managed to keep most Alawites loyal and used some of them as paramilitary murderers.
There really is no Plan B. The Americans cannot act unilaterally on Syria without losing Russian support in dealing with Iran on its nuclear program. President Obama’s top priority is stopping that program from advancing further toward nuclear weapons. While some think the American elections are a factor restraining the president on Syria, I don’t think he is likely to change his mind even if he wins. Only if he decides that the effort to stop a nuclear Iran has failed will he be tempted to cut the chord with the Russians and lead a military response to Bashar al Assad’s homicidal behavior, thus ending Syria’s alignment with a potentially nuclear Iran and shoring up the Sunni Arab counterweight. But he would only do that in the narrow window before Tehran acquires nuclear weapons, not afterwards.
The observers are supposed to be laying the groundwork for a political solution. Their mandate expires in July. That is the next big decision point. Annan needs to keep at it for now, hoping that the Russians and Americans come to terms and open a window for a political solution that ends the Assad regime.
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Revolution, conspiracy or civil war? Yes
After a spectacular clear morning walking in the older parts of Istanbul and a visit to the Grand Bazaar, I took in a discussion of Syria this afternoon at Bahçeşehir University moderated with distinction by Samir Aita of le Monde Diplomatique, who noted the key role of the youth movement in Syria, whose cohort faces a disastrous job market with no more than one in five finding even inadequate employment. Control of the Syria by a small, rich rent-seeking elite is no longer acceptable to the younger generation.
He wanted to know whether Syria is experiencing a revolution, a conspiracy or a civil war? Will there be a military or a negotiated solution? If the latter, who should negotiate, how will they attain a modicum of unity and what roles should international powers play, in particular Qatar, Russia and Turkey?
I am not going to identify the respondents by name, even though this was a more or less public event. I don’t want my reports in someone’s file.
A young Syrian activist confirmed it was a revolution but suggested that the civil (nonviolent) revolt needs to split from the military (violent) rebellion, because a democratic outcome requires the former and not the latter (which will lead to civil war). Military intervention will not bring what the Syrian opposition wants. Success in Syria means a democracy established without international intervention.
Confusion reigns in Syria. The Syrian National Council (SNC) has been fragmented among ethnic/sectarian communities in a way that does not reflect Syrian reality. The regime has built a strategy quickly that divides the opposition and drives it in a violent direction. The opposition will be willing to negotiate with secondary members of the regime as well as with Russia and Iran, who are mainstays of the regime, but not with Bashar al Assad.
A Lebanese political scientist living in Paris suggested the Syrian revolution is undergoing three simultaneous processes: militarization of the rebellion because of regime violence (which will create big demobilization challenges in the post-Assad period), territorialization (which will create big governance issues after Assad) and regionalization, with spillover and external interference that makes the conflict increasingly a proxy war among foreign powers (which may ignite a regional conflagration). For the Iranians, the conflict in Syria is now an existential one and they will continue to support Bashar al Assad, but only up to a point, when they feel they have to abandon him to limit their losses. Israel would have preferred that Bashar stay in power, but they have now concluded that the best solution is to replace him with a strong military regime, to block jihadists from taking over.
Negotiation will eventually be necessary, but only on the conditions of the regime’s surrender, in particular amnesty, and an exit for Iran and Russia from their support to Bashar al Assad. There is also a need for negotiation within the revolution on a minimal united front: the role of Islam in the future of Syria, the position of minorities, and international guarantees and assistance.
For the moment, the Annan plan is the only political game in town. To succeed it needs some sticks for use against the regime and as many as 3000 monitors (there are currently fewer than 300) as well as a clear commitment to transition away from Bashar al Assad. If the Annan plan fails, there will be civil war.
A Syrian Kurd underlined that the Kurds have suffered 60 years of oppression in Syria and want to see a real revolution. But the regime is trying to make the rebellion into a sectarian and ethnic conflict. The Kurds fear their efforts will be viewed as separatism. There really is a conspiracy, by the regime, to make the revolution into a civil war. That is increasingly successful, with the conflict framed as Islamists against the Alawites. There will be no military solution without a political one. The Kurds are willing to participate in a unified opposition, but they want to hear an answer to the plan that they have already put forward. They want to see a tolerant society emerge from this revolution.
Another young Syrian activist underlined that the student movement has been in existence since 2001, when Bashar al Assad came to power. The goals have always been freedom, dignity and citizenship. The demonstrators often chant “We are all Kurds, we are all Arabs, we are all Syrians.” The Free Syria Army cannot win a war with the regime. The international powers all have their own agendas, the U.S. with Russia and China and Qatar wanting to export gas to Europe via Syria.
Little did I expect at the end of the presentations to find the session hijacked by hostile remarks from Turks in the audience on the Kurdish question. I should have known. The questioners had heard little about Syria, only about how the Kurds would get what they wanted from the Syrian revolution. The news was not welcome. One of the Syrian Arabs was unequivocal in reply: the Kurds will decide their own destiny.
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