Month: April 2011
Overdue
Two things are overdue: a forceful international community reaction to the violent repression in Syria, and an agreement for President Saleh of Yemen to leave power.
The Syrian situation is getting downright ugly, with the regime claiming it is fighting terrorists. Tanks, machine guns and random sniper killings were the weapons of choice yesterday in Deraa, the epicenter of the protests so far. We can expect similar action to be taken elsewhere, if the regime has the military resources to deploy. Lots of protesters have been rounded up for interrogation. The pattern book here is Gaddafi’s, with echoes of Saddam Hussein: random violence to reinstate fear, which then keeps most people in line.
The State Department has urged all Americans to leave Syria. This may seem pro forma and irrelevant, but it isn’t: we saw in Libya how Washington hesitates to take vigorous action until U.S. citizens and embassy staff are safe. So far as I know, essential embassy staff are remaining in Damascus. The U.S. citizens in Syria will include not only tourists and Syrian Americans, but notably also Defense Department scholarship students studying Arabic at Damascus University.
The key to success for the protesters in Syria is their relationship with the security forces. The large army is mostly conscripts with short tours of duty. If they can get the security forces to hesitate in using violence, there is real hope of success. This will require a level of mass mobilization and nonviolent discipline that will be difficult to achieve. Protesters in small numbers are easy prey to regime violence, and attacks against the security forces will only bring massive violence in reprisal.
Washington is said to be working on “targeted” sanctions against individuals in the Syrian regime responsible for ordering the attacks on demonstrators. There are also signs of a condemnatory UN Security Council resolution in the works. Both are good ideas, even if late in the game. An International Criminal Court threat of indictment against the regime leadership seems to me less than credible, since Bashar al Assad will certainly not allow investigators into the country. More useful would be frank talk from Turkey, which has improved its relations with Syria of late and wants to play a peacemaker role in the Middle East.
The real game though is Iran, which now appears to be encouraging and assisting the crackdown in Syria. The day Tehran becomes convinced that the crackdown is counterproductive is the day it will end. We may have to wait for a long time for that day, or the day Bashar agrees to step aside, so the protesters need to get ready for a long and difficult haul.
In Yemen, the now negotiated agreement appears to provide for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down within 30 days, turning power over to a handpicked vice president while the president’s family members remain in their jobs, in exchange for immunity from prosecution for the president and his family. The most detail I’ve seen includes this:
The two-page draft deal, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, doesn’t mention defense or counterterrorism issues. People familiar with the document say the U.S. and Gulf Arabs expect that Mr. Saleh’s son and nephews—who run the country’s intelligence service, Republican Guard and elite Interior Ministry forces and are key counterterrorism liaisons for American officials—would remain in their positions until new elections….
According to the proposed plan, a vice president chosen by Mr. Saleh would take over after the 30-day period, running the country along with a parliament in which 50% of seats are controlled by the ruling party, 40% are controlled by the opposition, and the rest are reserved for undefined “others.”
This is the smooth transition the U.S. seeks to protect its interests in maintaining the counterterrorism campaign against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It sounds to me as if it more than adequately protects Saleh.
The protesters are now said to have agreed with the plan, which the political party opposition negotiated. The remaining question is when it will be announced officially, setting the 30-day clock in motion. That will require a push from the international community–Saleh won’t jump on his own. If this is the plan everyone accepts, best to get on with it.
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Embracing Solomon’s baby
As the Americans prepare to leave Iraq, most of the journalistic focus–insofar as it exists at all–is on the security situation there, which is far from completely calm. But that is not what most people who know Iraq well are most concerned about. They worry mainly about Kurdish-Arab disputes, which take many forms: quarrels about distribution of oil revenue, the authority of Baghdad’s government and courts, the degree of Kurdish control over oil development and the extent of the territory under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government, a sub-national entity with a wide degree of autonomy. It is all inter-connected. Whichever one you start with, you’ll end up discussing the others in due course.
Sean Kane at the United States Institute of Peace has chosen to take up Iraq’s “disputed territories,” arguably the toughest of the Arab-Kurdish issues, first. In a long and detailed disquisition, he demonstrates assiduously that quite a few of the territorial disputes are resolvable on the basis of voting patterns since 2005 as well as historical/cultural antecedents. The report will be presented and discussed at a webcast event this morning featuring also Emma Sky and Joost Hiltermann. One unusual feature of the report is the posting online of several Iraqi reactions to it. They make interesting reading.
Having disposed of some of the “easier” problems, Sean comes to the difficult core issue: Solomon’s baby in this context is Kirkuk, which is the object of Arab, Kurdish and Turkomen ambitions that appear irreconcilable. Here he proposes that either the entire province be given a “special” status (allowed under the Iraqi constitution) and shared between Erbil and Baghdad, or that much of the province be divided between the two and only Kirkuk City become a “common” city. These solutions bear a distinct resemblance to the so far successful effort to share the town and county (opstina) of Brcko in Bosnia between the two constituent entities of the Bosnian state. In practice, this has meant a special status now recognized in the Bosnian constitution. Something like this for either all of Kirkuk province or the town of Kirkuk would allow both sides to claim victory and neither to enjoy all of the spoils. In due course, the solution might be ratified, along with mutually agreed divisions of territory, in a referendum provided for in the Iraqi constitution.
All of this is eminently reasonable and notably helpful. Where things get more problematic is in drawing conclusions for American policy. There is the great temptation to condition American security assistance to the Kurds and Arabs on their respective good behavior with regard to their dispute. On some level, this will surely be the case: the United States will not want its materiel deployed in an intra-Iraqi dispute and will likely tie some strings to the relevant agreements to try to prevent that from happening. But it would be hard for the U.S. to yank its training of the Iraqi army, navy or air force in response to developments between Erbil and Baghdad. Washington sees that training–and the ample armament that goes with it–as vital to Iraq’s regional role, especially vis-a-vis Tehran. Washington is not going to cut off its nose to spite its face, or throw Baghdad into Tehran’s arms.
More promising is the positive incentive approach Emma Sky says has been used in the past to encourage peshmerga integration. She has proposed in the same paper (also published by USIP) conflict resolution, management and prevention mechanisms that merit more attention than they have so far gotten. As Emma knows better than most civilians, wishful thinking is not a plan.
But that does not mean the internationals necessarily need to keep their hands on this problem either–it could be that leaving the Kurds and Arabs to manage it themselves is not only feasible but preferable. What I haven’t seen is a careful, independent assessment of the different options. The U.S., UN and Iraqis need to get their heads together sooner rather than later on how to handle Arab-Kurdish disputes, especially as resistance to a continuing U.S. troop presence after the end of this year seems to be strengthening.
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Peace, justice or both?
President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen has reportedly accepted a Gulf Cooperation Council proposal that he step down within 30 days and turn over power to his vice president, in return for immunity from prosecution. While the opposition political parties seem inclined to accept, the protesters in the streets do not.
This is a classic peace or justice choice for the protesters. I’d be the last to suggest which way they ought to go. But it is not wrong to suggest that they consider carefully the question of maintaining unity. Saleh is wily. If he can split the opposition and the protesters, he may well still be around 30 days from now, bemoaning the lack of alternative to his continuing rule. He is already on BBC claiming that the protests are a “coup.” He sounds far from resigned to his fate. The worst outcome would be neither peace nor justice.
Is there any possibility of the best: peace and justice? I imagine so, but strategic patience and unity will be required to get there. If either one is lacking, it might be better to accept half a loaf.
Can half a loaf be satisfactory? It really depends on the circumstances. In Egypt, the protesters relied on an army that had been in many respects the mainstay of the Mubarak regime to guide the transition. Yet Mubarak is under arrest and being questioned, because the demonstrators maintained the pressure (and Mubarak did not negotiate immunity). Where Egypt will end up is still anyone’s guess, but at least restoration of the old regime looks impossible.
Yemen is in many ways a much more broken country than Egypt. It is running out of both oil and water even as it faces rebellions north and south as well as a desperately poor population addicted to qat. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is finding it a relatively welcome refuge, despite the American military campaign against it. There is certainly an argument for a transition that maintains whatever integrity the state may still possess.
But there is no reason for people who have put their lives on the line in the streets to go home thoroughly dissatisfied. The choice is theirs, provided they can maintain the unity and massive presence that have brought the situation to its present juncture.
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Syrians need even more courage
AJ English is doing what it can to cover events in Syria from nonprofessional footage, as journalists have been kept out:
Brian Whitaker, whose al-bab.com is one of the best blogs covering the Arab world, is being widely cited today for saying about Syria:
For the regime, the only tool left now is repression, and in the long run that will seal its fate. The question is how long.
Of course in the long run we are all dead, but I wish I shared his confidence that repression will not succeed. One need only recall popular rebellions that did not succeed in Burma, Thailand, Belarus, Venezuela and elsewhere to be reminded that autocratic regimes sometimes do manage to repress their opponents. The outcome in Syria is not yet obvious to me, much as I might wish Whitaker correct.
As President Obama has suggested, Bashar al Assad is being egged on and assisted by Tehran, which will regard the Syrian repression as a quid pro quo for Saudi intervention in Bahrain. This is cynical and ugly, but sometimes cynical and ugly succeeds. As Babak Rahimi says in a piece for the Jamestown Foundation yesterday:
If successful in its reaction to the events in Syria, Tehran will be able to reinforce its national interests and expand its reach in the region. If Syria is unsuccessful in subduing its revolt and goes the route of Egypt, then Iran will lose a major strategic ally and access to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which could have a major impact on Iran’s position in the Middle East.
If Babak is correct, and I think he is, it is puzzling that the Americans have waited so long to express their displeasure with the repression in Syria.
Of course it may well be that the demonstrators are better off without overt American assistance, which the regime would no doubt use to tar them as foreign stooges. But that label for the moment seems more appropriate for Bashar al Assad, who is clearly getting Iranian encouragement and support.
The Syrian demonstrations yesterday were widespread, but not overwhelming in numbers, and the regime showed little hesitation in mowing down its opponents, killing upwards of 75. That however is a smallish number in the history of repression in Syria. Bashar is trying desperately to prevent Damascus from erupting. It is not pre-ordained that he will fail–a lot of people in Damascus owe their jobs to the regime, which has husbanded the spoils less greedily than Gaddafi in Libya.
Syrians still need to decide how much they want change, and how much change they want. No one should presume to tell its citizens that they have to risk their lives. That is for them to decide, I hope in numbers so large that the outcome Whitaker predicts will come sooner rather than later.
PS: Courage does not appear to be lacking. This crowd chanting “the people want to topple the regime” is in Zabadani, near the Lebanese border, tonight:
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Not so Good Friday
I had originally said it was best in Syria, but as the news of dozens of deaths at the hands of security forces comes out that would be wrong. The demonstrations were not massive (thousands rather than hundreds of thousands) but widespread. Wissam Tarif circulated this from Zabadani, a Damascus Suburb, with demonstrators chanting “people want to topple the regime”:
President Bashar al Assad seems unlikely to fall right away, but the protests have already gone farther in Syria than many people anticipated. As I noted originally, what they lack still is mass–they are too small for safety, which of course discourages more people from joining them. The security forces have already killed a dozen or more today. PS (note added at noon): it looks like at least two dozen now. PPS (note added at 3:30 pm): it looks like more.
In Yemen, President Saleh is still playing rope-a-dope, seeming to accept proposals for transition while imposing conditions he knows the opposition won’t accept. The GCC is proving ineffective in mediating, but there is no surprise in that. But the demonstrations today are big in both Sanaa and Taiz.
Today’s big news in Libya is the American introduction of Predator drones into the fight, a unique capability some believe will make a difference by enabling more precise targeting in built-up areas. I do hope it will work, but Admiral Mullen is talking stalemate. Jeffrey White at the Washington Institute argues well that stalemate favors Gaddafi. NATO needs to end this war successfully, and soon.
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Has the time come for Syria?
It is hard to do better the day before a showdown in Syria than spending an hour with Joshua Landis and Ammar Abdulhamid of the Tharwa Foundation:
Landis has not been thinking the regime would crumble now. But these things are difficult to predict. Ammar is right that nonviolence is the way to go.
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