Tag: Turkey
Step aside
I discussed current events in Syria and the Obama Administration call for Bashar al Assad to step aside, along with a bit of Libya, this morning on C Span’s Washington Journal:
Here are the notes I did for myself on Syria in preparation:
1. The contest continues:
- Military assault is undiminished, security forces still united
- Demonstrators trying to mark beginning of the end
2. The international community is speaking louder and with a more unified voice
- U.S. “step aside” echoed in Europe, Turkey had already given “final warning”
- Arab ambassadors withdrawn: Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi, Tunisia
- Europe getting ready to bar oil imports
- UN fact finding report “scathing”: torture, murder, disappearances, arbitrary arrests, supposedly going this weekend (Navi Pillay and Valerie Amos)
- IAEA found NPT violation
- Unrelated, I think, to current events: Syria disqualified from 2014 World Cup!
- Diplomatic observers possible
3. Bashar still has internal and external pillars intact
- Iran solid, Russia still protecting in UNSC
- Army and business community still backing him
- Republican Guard (10k) and 4th armored division show no signs of cracking: Deraa, Banias, Homs, Idlib
- Shabbiha still active
4. Opposition strong
- Widespread protests
- Still relatively weak in Aleppo and Damascus, but growing
- Good unity: several iterations, now Syrian National Council
- Good nonviolent discipline, though some arms
- Good planning
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Good show, now what?
While my twitterfeed remains skeptical that the U.S. has any leverage to get Bashar al Assad to step aside, I think the Administration put on a pretty good diplomatic show in the last day or two, with more to come. In addition to the US moves, the UN published a fact-finding report that Colum Lynch appropriately describes as “scathing.” The Europeans and Turkey seem to be lining up to say the right things.
More important is what Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Europeans do now. The Administration is hinting that the Europeans will block their own Syrian oil imports. This they can do because it is not much oil, but it accounts for more than a quarter of Syria’s revenue. Turkey’s National Security Council today called for democratic change in Syria, but that likely won’t have much impact as the Foreign Minister has already issued several final warnings to Bashar al Assad. What is needed is some action from Turkey in blocking trade or investment, which would signal clearly to Syrian businesspeople that the end is near. The Saudis can make life hard for Bashar in many ways, not least just by indicating that it supports the protesters, as the King did late last week.
New York will be the center of the international action the next few days. The Americans are pushing a Security Council resolution. The Human Rights Council is to meet Monday to discuss the fact-finding report. That should provide an occasion for lambasting the Syrian regime. Legitimacy counts, even for autocracies. When the UN is taking you to task for murdering your own citizens with their hands tied behind their backs, legitimacy comes into question.
Today in Syria is also key. Already this week there have been demonstrations in Aleppo, Syria’s largest and most important commercial city. A big turnout there and in Damascus would confirm that the judgment that it is time for Bashar to step aside. How widespread the demonstrations are will also count. The international moves may elicit a big response among the Syrians.
What we can’t really know is how all this will affect the small circle around Bashar al Assad. It would take only a few of them to abandon his cause for Syria to turn quickly in a new direction.
The problem is what to do with Bashar. Pressure is building for the Security Council to refer him to the International Criminal Court. I am not as opposed to an indictment as many diplomats, who believe it would only strengthen his resolve to hold on to power. That it may do, but it may also make those who work for him begin to wonder whether carrying out his orders to kill civilians is a smart thing to do.
I have my doubts though that evidence can be gathered in a time frame that would make an indictment meaningful. More likely, a referral would be followed by a long delay, which would make matters worse rather than better (remember the Hariri case, and the case against President Bashir of Sudan?).
So what happens next? Bashar al Assad won’t step aside until his security forces crack more dramatically than they have so far. I don’t know anyone who can even pretend to know when that will happen, but the American/Turkish/Saudi/European/UN pressure being brought to bear this week is pushing things in the right direction.
Paul Pillar, in a piece published yesterday by The National Interest focused on Gary Locke, the new American ambassador to Beijing, notes:
The incidental influence that the United States exerts simply through people around the world observing its behavior is consistently underestimated, just as the influence the United States can exert intentionally by exercising its economic, military, or other instruments of hard power tends to be overestimated.
My twitterfeed is underestimating America’s “incidental influence” on events in Syria. I don’t know whether it will be enough, but it will make Bashar al Assad very uncomfortable for the next few days, at the very least.
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The buck still stops with the Syrians
It has taken longer than Syria-watchers predicted, but President Obama today finally called on Bashar al Assad to “step aside” in Syria. This is an interesting formulation that implies he could remain nominally president but allow reforms to move forward. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon seems to have also taken that line yesterday with Bashar in a phone call.
Let’s look at the options from Bashar’s perspective. Egyptian President Mubarak stepped down and now finds himself on trial. Libyan non-president Qaddafi refused to step down and now is fighting a war he is likely to lose. Yemen’s President Saleh is recovering from wounds his opponents inflicted in retaliation for his military attacks on them, but he has managed to continue to dominate Sanaa from Saudi Arabia, using his son and other loyalists as proxies. Only former Tunisian President Ben Ali is managing an untroubled, but powerless, retirement somewhere in Saudi Arabia. None of those options looks as good as “step aside,” though I have my doubts the protesters would accept Bashar remaining even nominally in power for more than a brief transition period.
President Obama also signed an executive order that
- blocks the property of the Syrian government,
- bans U.S. persons from new investments in or exporting services to Syria, and
- bans U.S. imports of, and other transactions or dealings in, Syrian-origin petroleum or petroleum products.
The trouble of course is that there is little Syrian government property in the U.S., few new investments or service exports to Syria and almost no U.S. import of Syrian oil or oil products.
For President Obama’s new rhetorical line to be effective, other countries–especially Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Europeans–will need to play hard ball with the Syrian regime. Both the Turks and Saudis have sounded recently as if they are willing to do that, and the Europeans in their own complicated way seem to be moving in the same direction.
Diplomacy is getting other people to do what you want them to do. As many in the blogosphere are noting, Washington’s direct influence on events in Syria is small. President Obama himself said:
The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people. We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.
So that’s where the buck stops: with the Syrian people, who have shown remarkable courage and determination so far. Here they are in Aleppo yesterday:
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Qaddafi near the end, Bashar still bumping along
It’s only been a week or so since I published a Council on Foreign Relations paper on preparing for post-Qaddafi Libya. It looks as if we are going to be there before the end of the month, if not in Tripoli itself in most of the rest of the country. A high-level defection, talks in Tunisia between the regime and the rebels, an ineffectual Scud missile launch by Qaddafi’s forces and rebel penetration of more western Libyan towns all signal that Qaddafi is near the end of his road.
That will of course be cause for celebration, but the really tough challenge–a successful transition to a more democratic regime that can govern and defend united Libya while respecting the rights of all its people–lies ahead. The Transitional National Council (TNC) that Europe and the United States have recognized as the legitimate governing authority has good intentions and even some good plans, but implementation in the confused period after the fall of Qaddafi will be difficult at best.
It seems to me that the international community is already well behind the curve. It needs a new UN Security Council resolution laying out the goals, parameters and leadership for the post-Qaddafi period. The EU, preoccupied though it is with the problems of the euro, needs to be thinking about deployment of a paramilitary police force at TNC request to ensure public order in Tripoli, at least temporarily. Hoping it won’t be requested or needed is not a good plan.
The internationals are in worse shape in Syria, where they haven’t managed to pass even a Security Council resolution denouncing Bashar al Assad’s horrendous assaults on his own population. The Turkish national security council is planning to meet Thursday to consider “radical” moves on Syria. Foreign Minister Davutoglu has pronounced what he terms the “final word,” which presumably means that action is coming soon. Speculation centers on a Turkish military incursion across the border into Syria, presumably to protect civilians in neighboring villages. In that event, all Bashar has to do is concentrate his attacks on the population in areas the Turks would find it hard to reach.
The more important move could come in the form of Turkish economic sanctions that signal clearly to businesspeople in Damascus and Aleppo that they need to convince Bashar al Assad to stop. But that isn’t easy for the Turks, who are enjoying their role as the burgeoning economic power of the region and will not want to give anyone reason to think twice about doing business with Turkish companies. It would be far easier for the Turks if any economic sanctions were multilateral and decided at the United Nations.
I am in Istanbul this morning–it really is a thrilling city of fabulous economic activity. Turkish geopolitical confidence is growing, but taking on Syria either militarily or economically when your foreign policy is focused on “zero problems” with neighbors is not easy. Still, I have to hope Ankara decides this week to save Europe and the United States from their own ineffectiveness.
PS: A demonstration in Aleppo, this evening:
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Three blind mice
I first used this title 15 years ago in a piece for the Secretary of State’s Morning Summary about Presidents Tudjman, Milosevic and Izetbegovic. It drew a personal word of interest and praise from President Clinton. That doesn’t happen often, so a lowly office director tends to remember when it does. And maybe resurrect the charmed title at an appropriate moment.
Today’s three blind mice are chiefs of state Bashar al Assad, Muammar Gaddafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Syria, Libya and Yemen, respectively. While it is easy now to imagine that things will get worse in these three countries before they get better, it is clear enough that they would be better now if their chiefs had stepped aside long ago to allow orderly transitions. Sunday the Syrian armed forces made a clear summer day in Hama sound like this:
Bashar al Assad therefore rates a word of particular opprobrium: he and his brother Maher are showing themselves heirs to the blood-shedding tradition of their father Hafez. This should not surprise, but people have come to think Bashar is somehow better than the rest of his homicidal family. It just isn’t so.
Things are arguably worse in Libya and Yemen. A kind of multi-faceted tribal, regional and sectarian chaos reigns in the latter, on top of a popular protest movement that remains vigorous and terrorist bands who harbor in the hinterlands. In Libya, the killing by we know not whom of General Abdel Fatah Younes, a rebel military leader who came over from the Gaddafi regime, has raised lots of questions about the Transitional National Council (TNC) that leads the rebellion, which apparently had to fight off Gaddafi forces inside Benghazi over the weekend.
These three Middle Eastern potentates are blind not just to the interests of their countries but also to their own. A few months ago it would have been possible to arrange a decent exit for these embattled chiefs of state. Now the International Criminal Court has indicted Gaddafi, Saleh is nursing wounds in Saudi Arabia and Bashar al Assad cannot hope to escape responsibility for several thousand deaths of peaceful demonstrators. Only Saleh can hope to live out a peaceful old age, and only if he gives up on his ambition to return to Yemen.
What we are lacking here is the farmer’s wife, who is supposed to cut off their tails with a carving knife. By this I mean some international party that can persuade chiefs of state who have lost the consent of the people they govern to step aside. In the midst of this Arab spring Ban Ki Moon was reelected as United Nations Secretary General, but he has not been empowered to negotiate what the international community clearly seeks: abdication of these chiefs of state. He has a clear mandate only with respect to Gaddafi, and that is for a ceasefire and withdrawal rather than abdication.
Several “mediators” have sought compromise solutions. The African Union and Turkey have tried with Libya, Turkey has tried with Syria, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia and its wealthy monarchy friends) has tried with Yemen. None of this has worked so far. What we are witnessing is a failure of diplomacy, which should make us think harder about how to strengthen international norms and institutions that can deliver results more effectively.
That is precisely what is not happening, though I happily credit U.S. ambassador to Damascus Robert Ford (who testifies this week in Congress) for his courageous display of support to the demonstrators. Instead, the U.S. Congress is considering budgets that would slice diplomacy to the bone and limit contributions to international organization. I can’t really say there are 535 blind mice, since some members of Congress understand better than I do what is needed. But the collective decision is likely to disarm the farmer’s wife, leaving her standing there without even a carving knife to discipline the unruly despots of the 21st century.
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While we weren’t watching
I admit it is hard to shift attention away from the consequences of Osama bin Laden’s death. America and Pakistan have embarked on a great debate. Sticking with the claim that they knew nothing about either OBL’s whereabouts or about the American operation to kill him, Pakistan’s government now has to explain its apparent incompetence. The Obama Administration has to explain why we should provide billions in assistance to a country that incompetent, or worse, one that harbored OBL.
These debates will go on for some time but is unlikely to change much. Congress will fulminate, but President Obama will not want to reduce aid, for fear of making the situation worse, and he will stick to his drawdown schedule in Afghanistan, starting small. Maybe in Pakistan the debate will have a broader impact: its military and intelligence services deserve a thorough airing out, though they are likely to survive with their prerequisites intact.
More interesting for the long term are the things that were, and were not, happening in the Arab world while we weren’t watching.
In Syria, the crackdown is proceeding, with hundreds more arrested in apparently indiscriminate security sweeps of major provincial centers of unrest. Bashar al Assad shows every sign of continuing. Aleppo and Damascus, Syria’s two biggest cities, remain relatively quiet. Friday will tell us whether the repression is succeeding.
In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has managed to slip out of an agreement negotiated with the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia plus other oil-rich gulfies) to step down in 30 days. It is unclear whether the GCC, the political opposition or the protesters can do much at this point to resurrect the agreement, so it is likely both demonstrations and repression will continue.
In Libya, a kind of tottering stalemate has developed, with Gaddafi continuing to pound the western town of Misrata and to hold off the rebels in the east. Turkey has turned against the Colonel, but it is unclear whether that will make much difference. For all the much-vaunted rise of Turkey as a regional player, Ankara seems to have trouble making its weight felt with either Bashar al Assad or Muammar Gaddafi.
In Bahrain, repression is also in full swing, with the Americans seeming to bend to Saudi pressure not to object too strenuously. The regime there, in the past one of the milder ones, has been arresting doctors and nurses who provided medical treatment to protesters.
So it looks as if counter-revolution is succeeding for the moment across the region. It would be ironic if OBL’s death were to coincide with failure of the protests that showed promise of harnessing the discontents that used to be channeled into terrorism. Mr. Obama, where was that right side of history last time we saw it?
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