Day: November 2, 2011
Yemen’s loss
I did not know Chris Boucek, who died today at 38, well. We crossed paths at a few meetings, and I always found what he said interesting. But we only occasionally exchanged a few words, not much more than hello really. But I regarded him as among the most interesting, amiable and perceptive people in a community of frequently interesting, mostly amiable and highly perceptive people.
The best memorial I can think of on peacefare is a quote from a piece dated October 27 on the Carnegie Endowment website:
The three biggest things that the United States can do to help Yemen and reduce the threat of terrorism are increasing access to water for all Yemenis, helping fight corruption, and supporting land reform….There needs to be a better balance in U.S. support and more attention paid to prevent terrorism before it gets worse. It’s shortsighted to only rely on counterterrorism efforts and more work needs to be done to ensure that the ungoverned spaces in Yemen don’t get any bigger.
Yes, he also discussed al-Awlaki, President Saleh and other matters, but it is striking and characteristic that Chris could not finish an interview on Yemen without this thoughtful attention to the less obvious but critically important issues of water, corruption and land.
Yemen has lost a good friend. America has lost a fine mind. I hope his family can take some comfort from knowing that even those of us who did not know him well treasured his contributions.
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Best in show
Why would Syria accept the Arab League plan with “no reservations”?
Try this: because it requires nothing verifiable of Damascus except to talk with its opposition. Bashar al Assad has said he is willing to do that from the first. But there aren’t many protesters willing to do it, unless there is a prior agreement that they are talking about transition arrangements. If the protesters refuse the dialogue, Bashar will continue the crackdown.
Even better from Bashar’s point of view if some of the protesters accept and others do not. Then he will have succeeded in splitting them. He’ll get some nice photo ops with the dialoguers while going after the others again. The opposition was already having troubles unifying its disparate forces. Accepting the Arab League plan is a neat maneuver to make that even more difficult.
What could the Arab League have done if it wanted its efforts to bear fruit? The protesters were asking that it suspend Syria from membership and ask for international community support for the demonstrations. Fat chance.
It might have asked to deploy international observers to verify withdrawal of the Syrian military forces, apparently promised in the Arab League agreement, from population centers. That would have been something worth the paper it was written on, and a good deal more. Maybe they can still move in that direction, though nothing in the history of Arab League initiatives suggests they will.
Meanwhile, over at the Syrian national news agency Sana the focus is on Syria’s pavilion at the Tehran media fair. It was best in show!
PS, 10 am November 3: Here are Bashar’s tanks shelling Homs this morning, after the agreement is supposed to have gone into effect.
I imagine there is some Syrian government explanation for this, but they haven’t bothered posting it on their website, which doesn’t mention that the Arab League agreement calls for military withdrawal from Syrian cities. Then again, we don’t really know whether it does, since no one seems to have come up with a copy of the actual agreement.
Follow updates on the situation at The Guardian.
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