Tag: United States
Syrians helping Syrians
More than 350 airstrikes have been carried out against the Islamic State in Syria by the US and its allies since September 23. However, the recent focus on IS has kept the Assad regime, and its crimes, out of the spotlight. In opposition held areas, barrel bombings are a routine occurrence, and snipers target civilians indiscriminately. There is evidence for continuing use of chemical weapons – repeatedly challenging the “red line” laid out by President Obama two years ago. The destruction has left little infrastructure remaining.
For civilians living in the conflict zones, the result is a humanitarian disaster. In order to mitigate the suffering, local communities have begun to form volunteer-run organizations to perform basic civil functions and relief work. The United States Institute of Peace held a discussion on Wednesday with members of one such organization. Meet Syria’s Rescue Workers: Saving Lives, Building Peace, brought together two members of the Syrian Civil Defense Units: Raed Salah, Head of the Idlib branch, and Khaled Harah, member of Aleppo city branch, along with Samer Attar of the Syrian American Medical Society, and medical volunteer in Aleppo. Hind Kabawat, Senior Program Officer at USIP, moderated.
Opening the discussion with his experiences working as a doctor in opposition held areas, Attar outlined the difficulties faced by Syrian medical workers. Attar listed the major shortcomings of medicine in Syria as a lack of experienced personnel, of basic supplies, and capacity at treatment centers. With no end to the fighting in sight, these shortcomings will only to intensify.
Across Syria, many doctors have fled. Assad’s forces have targeted medical workers in rebel-held areas. Hospitals are regularly hit by barrel bombs, to the point that makeshift field hospitals are now codenamed and hidden. As resources have been used up or destroyed, the lack of supplies has become more acute. One effect of this is that Syrians no longer seek or receive medical attention for anything other than war wounds. Chronic conditions and routine health problems among those unable or unwilling to leave are not treated. This adds an unseen element to the suffering of Syrian civilians.
Raed Salah and Khaled Harah both spoke of their experiences in the “White Helmets,” volunteer Syrian Civil Defense Units. Salah also discussed the development and spread of the organisation.
The Civil Defense Units comprise localized groups acting as rescue workers to their own communities. The groups originated in refugee camps in Turkey, where refugees received training during relief projects undertaken there. This highlights the importance of continued training and education in the camps. Following Free Syrian Army gains in the north of the country, some refugees moved back, taking with them skills and organizational abilities they had learned. The Civil Defense Units have since grown and attracted numerous volunteers, leading to the formation of more regional units. Salah cites the number of volunteers as over 1000.
The community driven nature of these units has been important to their success. People who sign up work at their local center and undertake rescue work within fixed areas. Both Salah and Harah claimed that this provides a psychological boost and motivation, as they feel they are directly aiding their own community.
The neutrality of the Civil Defense Units was also stressed. Though their first members were Muslim, the first center was opened in a predominantly Christian area. The recruitment policy allows volunteers of all backgrounds. Salah stressed rescue workers do not discriminate politically or religiously when attempting to save people. This has meant that even in areas where conflict between the moderate opposition and jihadist groups, the Civil Defense Units have been allowed access to carry out their work.
Salah and Harah’s organization represents just one example of volunteers performing vital civil roles in the Syrian conflict. These organizations are vital for alleviating the humanitarian crisis, supplementing the work of foreign aid workers. Such groups may also have a role to play when it comes to rebuilding the country. Both men stressed the need for international support and funding for civilian projects like theirs. Though they cautiously supported the recent airstrikes on IS, they felt that by not putting more pressure on the Assad government the US has unintentionally aided the regime’s forces.
Concluding, Hind Kabawat called for the imposition of a no-fly zone to end the continuing bombings by the regime in civilian areas. She also noted that groups like the Syrian Civil Defense Units demonstrate that there is hope for Syria’s future.
A video of the event is embedded below.
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The NFL and foreign policy
Some of you are not going to like this post, which will draw the invidious parallel between America’s excessive reliance on military force in international affairs with the National Football League’s reliance on violence, both on and off the field. But I do think there is something in it.
NPR this morning delved into the NFL’s problems.* It has two:
- violence by its players against women and children off the field
- violence on the field that is causing serious health problems.
The former has been grabbing lots of headlines lately. The latter is the long-term threat to the game. Like boxing, football depends on hits so strong that many of its greats are ending their lives either disabled or early. Knowing this, it is difficult to understand any parent who allows a child to play the tackle version of the game.
Sport as a metaphor for life is not a new idea. The popularity of professional football in America has grown enormously in recent decades. It would be surprising if that did not manifest itself in other spheres. I once asked a foreign minister who had played football for Tulane what he had learned from the game that was applicable to diplomacy. “Hit the opponent hard,” he said. That lesson is being applied increasingly not only in football but also in the other game that has grown enormously in popularity in recent decades: basketball is now a contact sport. Soccer, sad to say, is also headed in the same direction, though it is far behind football and basketball.
Let me be clear: I am not against physical competition. But there is relatively safe physical competition (basketball and soccer still fall in that category) and relatively dangerous physical competition. Football is over my threshold, as is boxing. Both reward maximum damage to the opponent, so long as it is delivered in a licit fashion. Neither basketball nor soccer does that, yet.
In international affairs, there are opponents who merit maximum damage. The Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIL) is one of them. I am not among those who advocate negotiations with mass murderers. But even in the war on ISIL, we need to be careful not to rely exclusively on kinetic effects (that is what the military calls shooting at people and other targets). ISIL was successful in Iraq because the Sunni community there actively and passively supported it, preferring the jihadists to the Iraqi army and other security forces. Anyone who understands why a virtually all-white police force in Ferguson, Missouri is likely to be ineffectual should understand why mostly Shia security forces in virtually all-Sunni provinces of Iraq would also be ineffectual.
The military traditionally regards efforts to influence people other than by kinetic effects information or psychological warfare intended to win “hearts and minds.” But the material aspects are increasingly important: winning a war now means not only defeating the enemy but somehow restoring services to the people he governed. Otherwise, you end up spawning more conflict, or terrorism. It was above all failure to delivery security to Sunnis that created the conditions in which ISIL flourished in Anbar and Ninewa provinces.
There is no equivalent in American football to service delivery and winning hearts and minds. If you want to win, you score more points than your opponent, delivering in the process as many hard blows as possible, within the ample range of the permissible. Intellect plays an important role in football, as the choice of plays and when to run them is critical to strategy. But what we cheer and admire on the field is mainly the kinetic aspect of the sport. And we unfortunately do the same with our foreign policy.
PS: Here is the NPR piece:
PPS: For those who are still doubting that violence on the field causes serious health problems: Scientists Dissected the Brains of 79 NFL Players. What They Found Is Disturbing. | Mother Jones.
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Peace Picks September 29-October 3
A busy Monday and Tuesday over at USIP, as Washington focuses on extremism and what to do about it:
- MENA Region in Crisis: Islam, Democracy and Extremism Monday, September 29 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am US Institute of Peace; 2301 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington DC REGISTER TO ATTEND Rached Ghannouchi, President of the Ennahdha Party of Tunisia, will discuss the current political and security crisis in the region, including how Tunisia’s democratic transition and experience can be drawn upon when seeking solutions to the protracted crises ongoing in the Middle East and North Africa. He will also consider how dialogue and compromise can pave the way for national unity and reconciliation. Ghannouchi will be joined by Robin Wright, journalist, and fellow at USIP.
- Security and Justice in Post-Revolution Libya: Dignity, Dawn, and Deadlock Tuesday, September 30 | 10:00 am – 12:00 pm US Institute of Peace; 2301 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington DC REGISTER TO ATTEND With Libya’s state security and justice institutions now largely nonfunctioning, some communities have turned to vigilante justice, tribal leaders and elders, or resorted to self-help when faced with conflicts and disputes. USIP will host a discussion to address how this situation arose, and what can be done to change it. Naji Abou-Khalil, Project Manager at Altai Consulting, along with Senior Program Officers at USIP Fiona Mangan and Christina Murtaugh, will form the panel.
- Meet Syria’s Rescue Workers: Saving Lives, Building Peace Tuesday, September 30 | 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm US Institute of Peace; 2301 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington DC REGISTER TO ATTEND Some 600 Syrians known as “White Helmets” or Syrian Civil Defense units, are organized volunteers who act as rescue workers in areas like Aleppo and Idlib provinces in the country’s northwest. They are unarmed and impartial, and operate on principles of solidarity, humanity and impartiality. In the last six months, they have recorded more than 2,500 lives saved. The United States Institute of Peace, The Syria Campaign and the Syrian American Medical Society bring together two such rescuers, Raed Salah and Khaled Harah, to discuss the future of peacebuilding in Syria. They will be joined by Samer Attar, member of the Syrian American Medical Society. The panel will be moderated by Hind Kabawat, Senior Program officer, USIP.
- Exploring ISIL: Context and Repercussions Tuesday, September 30 | 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm World Affairs Council; University of California Washington Center, 1608 Rhode Island Ave NW, Washington DC REGISTER TO ATTEND World Affairs Council will hold a discussion about ISIL, one of the most momentous and imposing insurgent groups in the world today. The panel will discuss the group’s background, the US response to it, and how both will impact the security of the region. Speakers include Shadi Hamid, fellow at the Brookings Institute, Thomas Sanderson, co-director and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic International Studies Transnational Threats Project, and moderator Kate Brannen, senior reporter at Foreign Policy.
- Countering ISIS: An Evening with Ambassador Jeffrey, Former US Ambassador to Iraq Thursday, Oct 2 | 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm Elliott School of International Affairs; 1957 E Street NW, Washington DC REGISTER TO ATTEND Ambassador James F. Jeffrey will discuss ISIS as an organization, the international community’s current plan to counter ISIS, and offer his own opinions and critiques on these plans, in an open discussion with all those in attendance.
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Peace picks, September 23-26
- Religious Peacebuilding: The Approach of the U.S. Institute of Peace Tuesday, September 23 | 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm Rumi Forum; 750 First Street NE, Suite 1120, Washington DC REGISTER TO ATTEND The Religion and Peacebuilding Center at the U.S. Institute of Peace was launched in July 2000 to analyze religious dynamics in conflict and to advance the peace-building roles of religious actors and organizations in conflict zones. For the past 14 years, the U.S. Institute of Peace has been organizing programs to address zones of conflict from a religious perspective. This presentation will present some of the lessons learned from this effort. Speakers include David Smock, director of the Religion and Peacebuilding Center and vice-president, Governance, Law & Society; Palwasha Kakar, Senior Program Officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace; and Susan Hayward, Senior Program Officer focussing on conflict prevention, resolution, and reconciliation.
- Libya’s Civil War Wednesday, September 24 | 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; 1779 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington DC REGISTER TO ATTEND Frederic Wehrey will present the findings of a new paper on the institutional roots of Libya’s violence and present options for how the United States and the international community can assist. Wolfram Lacher, associate in the Middle East and Africa research division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Faraj Najem, director of Salam Centre for African Research in Tripoli, Libya, and a professor of public administration at Benghazi University, and Dirk Vandewalle professor of Government at Dartmouth College and the Carter Center’s field office director in Libya, will act as discussants and share their own insights. Michele Dunne, senior associate in Carnegie’s Middle East Program, will moderate.
- Iraq After America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance Wednesday, September 24 | 12:15 pm – 1:45 pm New America Foundation; 1899 L St., NW, Suite 400, Washington DC REGISTER TO ATTEND US Army Col. Joel Rayburn will discuss his book, Iraq After America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance. In it, he notes that the authoritarianism, sectarianism, and Islamist resistance that dominate Iraq’s post-U.S. political order have created a toxic political and social brew, preventing Iraq’s political elite from resolving the fundamental roots of conflict that have wracked the country before and since 2003. Rayburn will examine key aspects of the US legacy in Iraq, analyzing what it means for the United States and others that, after more than a decade of conflict, Iraq’s communities have not yet found a way to live together in peace.
- The Legal Basis for Military Action against ISIS Thursday, September 25 | 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm Heritage Foundation, Lehrman Auditorium; 214 Massachusetts Ave NE, Washington DC REGISTER TO ATTEND Charles Stimson, Manager of the National Security Law Program will host a conversation concerning the legality of the Obama Administration’s strategic plan to degrade and destroy the Islamic State. Key to the discussion will be whether the President should request a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) specific to ISIS, or whether the administration can rely either on AUMFs issued previously in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, or on the President’s Article II powers alone. Joining the discussion will be Steven Bradbury, Partner at Dechert LLP, Robert Chesney, Charles I. Francis Professor of Law, University of Texas at Austin School of Law, and Steven Vladeck, Professor of Law at The Washington College of Law, American University.
- Is There a Role for Religious Actors in Countering Radicalization and Violent Extremism? Friday, September 26 | 10:30 am – 12:00 pm US Institute of Peace; 2301 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington DC REGISTER TO ATTEND USIP will host an event featuring three panelists from its recent Symposium, who will present insights drawn from the workshop and their own experiences of combatting extremism. Violent extremism is a pressing issue today, affecting many regions and the wider global community, and efforts to counter such extremism require strategic and sensitive approaches. While civil society has an important role to play in countering extremism, religious actors are well positioned to address some of its root causes, particularly in areas in which extremism is couched in religious terms. Moderating the discussion is Georgia Holmer, Deputer Director, Rule of Law Center. She will be joined by H. E. Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah, President of Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, Pastor Esther Ibanga, President, Women Without Walls Initiative, and Vinya Ariyaratne, the General Secretary at Sarvodaya.
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Demonization obscures a good argument
Eric Edelman, Dennis Ross and Ray Takeyh write in the Washington Post:
The Islamic Republic is not a normal nation-state seeking to realize its legitimate interests but an ideological entity mired in manufactured conspiracies. A persistent theme of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s speeches is that the United States is a declining power whose domestic sources of strength are fast eroding. In today’s disorderly region, Iran sees a unique opportunity to project its influence and undermine the United States and its system of alliances.
This is nonsense. Ideology and conspiracy theories hardly distinguish Iran from other nation states, including many that are friendly to the US. Nor do speeches by a leader claiming the United States is a declining power whose domestic sources of strength are fast eroding. That is a view many of our friends as well as our enemies hold. Iran’s effort to project its influence and undermine the United States and its system of alliances is the very definition of a state pursuing what it believes are its legitimate interests. Iran may be an an enemy, but it is still a normal nation-state.
This demonization of Iran and its anti-US policies is combined with much more powerful and important arguments against cooperating with the Islamic Republic: its goals are inconsistent with US goals, and such cooperation would reduce the likelihood of gaining the Sunni Arab cooperation necessary to defeat the Islamic State (IS).
The inconsistency of ultimate goals might be overcome. After all, the US cooperates with many countries whose ultimate goals it does not share, provided their cooperation brings net benefits. This is true not only for unavoidable powers like China and Russia, but also for friendly but problematic countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Right now every IS fighter Iran’s proxies in Hizbollah do away with is one less for American allies in Iraq and Syria to deal with. If Hizbollah is going to weaken the IS and do away with a few of its own fighters in the process, realists in Washington should count the result as positive.
Cooperation with Iran could however have a negative impact on the Sunni communities in Iraq and Syria as well as the Sunni participants in the international coalition against IS. That is a strong argument against aligning openly with Iran, even if IS is also their enemy. We would not want a victory for Bashar al Asad in Syria or for Shia militias in Iraq. If Sunnis mistakenly came to believe that we do, they would be far less inclined to fight IS or to support the coalition the US is trying to cobble together.
Secretary Kerry Friday left the door open to contributions from Iran. That would better be done in private than in public, but it is unavoidable. Tehran has compelling interests in helping its friends in Baghdad and Damascus to fight the IS. Washington can’t stop it any better now than it could when it occupied Iraq. But the Americans would be wise to ensure that Syrians and Iraqis of all sorts view the US as helpful, not only in the effort to defeat the IS but also in efforts to rebuild legitimate and friendly democratic regimes in both places. That is where American interests diverge from Iran’s.
Iran has tried for decades to portray the United States as the Great Satan. We are not, and neither are they.
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Wrong lessons learned
ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. It has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.
Thus President Obama misdiagnosed the problem in last night’s rallying cry for a military effort to degrade and destroy the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
ISIL is certainly an organization that uses terrorist means, but it is also more than that. It now controls and even governs a swath of territory in eastern Syria and western Iraq populated by millions of people. While it slaughters its enemies with ferocity, it is wrong to say it has no other vision. Its vision is the destruction of the states of the Iraqi and Levantine states (at the least Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, as well as Israel and Palestine), as well as the recreation of a caliphate governed under its peculiarly harsh notion of sharia.
This misdiagnosis is leading President Obama to repeat the mistakes of his predecessor, George W. Bush, in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to avoid them. The United States won the wars in it fought in those two countries in 2002 and 2003 respectively. What it lost was the post-war transitions, for which it did little to prepare.
In Afghanistan, the intention was to “kill Al Qaeda and get out,” as Republican advisor Phil Merrill told me at the time. He found ludicrous the notion that we would worry about how justice is administered after we had succeeded. Twelve years later, it is clear that the Taliban took advantage of this failure to re-establish itself, especially in the eastern and southern provinces, while Al Qaeda took refuge in Pakistan.
In Iraq, General Tommy Franks, the American military commander of the invasion, refused to plan for “rear area security,” which is the military euphemism for law and order in the areas liberated from the enemy. The planning for civilian administration, one of three pillars of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), was weak to non-existent. ORHA floundered, then got displaced by Gerry Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, which managed to create the conditions for the Sunni insurgency by disbanding the Iraqi army and barring many Ba’athists from senior positions.
ISIL is a direct descendant of that insurgency. It began its notorious existence as Al Qaeda in Iraq and played a major role in the Iraq civil war of 2006/7. The American counter-insurgency campaign against it was at least partially successful with the support of Sunni tribesmen, but ISIL rose from the ashes in the last few years partly due to the war in Syria and partly due to Nouri al Maliki’s exclusion of Sunnis from real power (not from positions–there were as many Sunnis or more in his governments than in the current one Secretary Kerry has labeled “inclusive”). There is no reason to believe ISIL won’t revive again, unless there are states in Syria and Iraq that have legitimacy with their Sunni populations.
The failure of the President to take into account the requirements and costs of post-war transition once ISIL is defeated in Iraq and Syria means that he is underestimating the risks of his decision to go to war. The costs need not all be American, and they don’t necessarily require American troops. But there has to be a plan for the UN, Arab League, EU and others to support state-building once the anti-ISIL war is won.
The notion that we can kill ISIL and get out, without any attention to what follows, is the same mistake George H.W. Bush made in Somalia (with the result that we are still fighting there more than 25 years later), Bill Clinton would have liked to make in Bosnia (but fortunately was convinced that he could not withdraw US troops within a year), and George W. Bush made in Afghanistan and Iraq. It won’t happen. We’ll get stuck with bills and tasks that we might have preferred to avoid, and for which we fail to prepare.
PS: I discussed some of these issues on WSJ Live this morning:
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