Month: January 2013
Egypt two years on
The Egyptian revolution will be two years young tomorrow. What has it accomplished? Where does it stand? Where is it headed?
The revolution’s greatest accomplishment occurred two years ago: the fall of Hosni Mubarak from power. There ensued a terrifically chaotic year and a half, best described by Marc Lynch as Calvinball: a game in which the participants constantly change the rules. The period of military rule was particularly shambolic, but Egypt did not stabilize immediately after the election in June 2012 of Mohammed Morsi as president.
In the subsequent months, he managed however to push the army aside, preserving many of its prerogatives but depriving it of governing power and accumulating it for himself. He also managed to push through a December referendum on a controversial new constitution that leaves openings for Islamist rule. Parliamentary elections are to be held at a still unspecified date in April, under an electoral law prepared by a Shura Council (upper house) that he controls.
Muslim Brotherhood expert Eric Trager thinks Egypt will emerge from this process as a “competitive theocracy.” The main rivals will be the highly disciplined and hierarchical Muslim Brotherhood and the more radical and fragmented Salafi fundamentalists. It is not clear which will have the advantage, as the Brotherhood’s discipline and hierarchy is less appealing to the young than the low threshold to entry into Salafist ranks.
This discounts completely the secularists and liberals who more or less united against the parliamentary referendum, which they lost, and are trying to hold together for the parliamentary elections as the National Salvation Front. Divided, they have so far fared poorly in Egypt’s several rounds of voting since the fall of Mubarak but hope to do better united against the now dominant Islamists.
President Morsi, while riding high on election and referendum victories, is proving less than effective in handling the economy, which is still in a nose dive, and the Americans, who distrust his attitude on Israel and find his past and present bad-mouthing of Jews offensive. But neither Morsi, who needs American support at the IMF and World Bank, nor his critics is interested in creating too big a breach. Washington needs Cairo to maintain the peace treaty with Israel, act as a brake on Hamas in Gaza and remain stalwart against Iran.
Democracy, as anyone watching the U.S. Congress knows too well, is like making sausage: unappetizing in the process, even if the product is highly palatable. Some think the Egyptians are just learning to be democrats. I’m inclined in that direction. But then an Egyptian friend comes to visit and worries about whether Morsi will be deploying religious police to prevent young men and women from holding hands in public. The Saudi precedent hovers.
The best that can be said about Islamist domination of the political spectrum in Egypt is that a) it reflects the will of the Egyptian people and b) it may not last, since the split between the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists is likely to continue. The April elections really are the secularist liberals’ last, best chance of gaining political traction for the next four years. If they fail, as seems likely, Egypt will experiment with a constitution that leaves a lot of room for Islamist maneuvering in a society that is more interested in economic results than theocratic correctness. But that is how most Iranians feel also, to no avail.
The Egyptian revolution is still young. The outcome remains in doubt. Morsi is no democrat: he has brought many more cases to court for supposed offenses to the president than Mubarak did. But Morsi is not alone in determining the outcome. The Salafists and the liberals will tug Egypt in other directions, as will the army and the business community. How these vectors sum to determine the ultimate direction will depend on many factors: election outcomes, the economy, the courts, relations among Egypt’s religious groups, threats to Egypt’s security, relations with its neighbors, the course of events in the region.
Ten years on we’ll have a clear picture. Tomorrow what we’ll see are massive demonstrations pulling Egypt in dramatically different directions.
PS: Bassem Sabry also still has hopes for democracy.
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What would a patriot do?
I have no way of knowing who is responsible for a series of incidents in Kosovo targeting Serbs. What I do know is that whoever does these things is no patriot.
There is, as usual, some background here. The removal last week of a monument to fallen Albanian insurgents against the Milosevic regime* that had been erected in the southern Serbian town of Presevo has angered Albanians in Kosovo, including some who have sought refuge in Kosovo from police harassment in Presevo. It was foolish of the Serbian government to bother about the monument, but it was smart enough not to destroy it. Instead it is said to have taken it to Belgrade, as evidence in a court case.
Someone in Kosovo seems to think the right response is violence against Serbs and Serb property. That is not just foolish but positively counter-productive, as it will be taken by some as proof that Albanians aren’t civilized and don’t belong in Europe. It would be far wiser for those concerned to protest peacefully and prepare to argue their case in Serbia’s courts. The right response in Kosovo is for the government to arrest those responsible and charge them. Impunity for crimes against Serbs besmirches the Kosovo state and reduces its claim to being just.
People in Kosovo might also give a bit of thought to their own monuments, which tend to glorify Albanian history in general and the Kosovo Liberation Army specifically. We are all entitled to our heroes, but a bit of sensitivity to the other side in a war now almost 15 years past is in order. After all, the Presevo Albanians were asking that the Serbian government put up with a monument to insurgents who had killed Serbs. Where in Kosovo can I find monuments to Serbs? This may be asking too much, but at the very least Kosovo Albanians need to respect Serb cemeteries and leave them undisturbed.
That’s what a patriot would do.
*PS, added January 24: This is inaccurate and misleading. The Liberation Army of Preševo, Medveđa and Bujanovac was active also under the democratic regime that came after Milosevic’s fall in October 2000.
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Today’s hearings
Secretary of State Clinton answered questions for umpteen hours today in the House and Senate on the September 11 attack on the U.S. facility in Benghazi. It was not only a waste of time. It will have a negative impact on American diplomacy for months, if not years, to come.
This was not for lack of skill on the Secretary of State’s part. She was sharp, intelligent and trenchant. Blood clots haven’t fogged her thinking at all. Yes, she said, she knew armed militants conducted the attack and said so the next day in public. No, she had not seen the ambassador’s request for better security. Yes, State is resource-constrained in meeting security requirements. No, the Libyan government had not provided the kind of security the facility required, due to incapacity rather than bad intentions.
The questioning was almost entirely hostile from the Republican side of the aisle and almost entirely benign from the Democratic side. I imagine no Republican wants to have it remembered three years from now that he was soft on Hillary Clinton, as she is widely regarded as a strong candidate for the presidency. No Democrat wants to be seen as piling on.
This wouldn’t matter much except that it will spook the Foreign Service. Ambassadors are already far too risk-averse, because that’s what gets you ahead in the State Department. Of the 1.4 million cables the Secretary said she receives each year, hundreds (maybe thousands) will ask for more security. Virtually none will ask for less. This hearing–and of course the incident itself–will reinforce risk aversion.
The problem is that you can’t do diplomacy in dangerous places and also reduce risks to zero. Weak states–Libya is certainly that after the revolution–are risky places. Ambassador Chris Stevens was doing precisely what I would want our ambassadors doing: getting out of the capital, talking with Libyans who knew more than he did, and trying to understand a complicated and difficult situation. He knew the risks and thought them worth taking. That’s what ambassadors get paid the big bucks for.
But hearings like today’s make our diplomats hunker down, sit behind 20-foot high walls with barbed wire on top in Baghdad and travel in armored convoys that frighten the locals and create enormous resentment. You just can’t do the real work of diplomacy that way. To its credit, the Accountability and Review Board report on the Benghazi incident said this up front, but all its recommendations went in the other direction.
We are going to end up with diplomats who spend their careers cooped up in fortresses. That’s not going to help us maintain a leadership role in the world. Risk means something will happen now and again. Someone has to say it out loud: Chris Stevens was unlucky, but he was doing what diplomats should do.
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Next steps in Syria
Many observers regard appointment of an interim government by the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as a key next step in trying to supplant Bashar al Assad, who shows no signs of stepping aside. I would not ordinarily count appointment of a committee to consider the matter and report back in ten days as progress, but all things in diplomacy are relative. Maybe it is. The National Coalition reports after its most recent General Assembly meeting:
The General Assembly of [the] coalition agreed to form a committee to communicate with political and revolutionary forces inside Syria, and with international organizations and governments to assure support for the interim government. The chair of this committee is Mr. Ahmed Maaz Al-Khateeb, president of the National Coalition Syrian, and includes Mr. George Sabra, Mr. Mustafa Sabbagh, Professor Bourhan Galion, Dr. Ahmed Syed Yusuf and Mr. Ahmed Al-Jerba. The Committee was asked to complete its mission in 10 days and send a report to the General Assembly. A decision to form the interim government will be made then.
Obviously appointment of the interim government is not proving easy. It can’t be, since it will determine an initial distribution of power that may be hard to overturn. The luminaries named to the committee are key leaders of various opposition efforts, past and present. They are also notably all male.
But the idea of consulting before acting is not a bad one. One of the supposed advantages of the National Coalition over the previous umbrella opposition organization, the Syrian National Council, is its connections to the revolutionary forces inside Syria. If an interim government fails to acquire legitimacy there, including with the Free Syrian Army factions, it won’t be worth much.
Where progress is even less evident is in Washington. There are lots of ideas being put forward for more vigorous action on Syria. Here’s my informal tally sheet:
- Use the Patriot missile batteries in Turkey to enforce a no-fly zone inside Syria along the border.
- Send U.S. military and intelligence equipment and/or training to the opposition.
- Outreach to Alawites and other minorities, to compensate for Sunni domination of the Coalition.
- Intensified engagement with the Russians to convince them to abandon Assad.
- Increase assistance to local liberated communities, especially those willing to help find and neutralize chemical weapons.
- Deploy air and other military assets prepared to strike or seize chemical weapons depots.
But if President Obama is seriously considering any of these, he did not give a hint of it in his Inauguration speech. Nor did I detect any sign of it meeting last week with Syria-focused people in the U.S. government.
The Russians though have begun to evacuate some of their citizens. This is a preliminary signal. A more definitive one would be closing of the Embassy in Damascus. Tehran is also sounding alarmed, and Bashar’s mother is thought to have left Damascus.
The regime still shows no sign of crumbling, only cracking. The opposition reports today the defection of 450 soldiers, but high-level defections (especially of key Alawite officers) are few and far between. A stalemate seems to be emerging. A “mutually hurting stalemate” is precisely the precondition for a negotiated outcome. A good negotiated outcome would be one in which Bashar al Asad steps aside and the regime gives up power, not one in which it is given another lease on murdering Syrians. UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is presumably hard at work trying to get to yes on that.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testifies today in both the Senate and the House on the Benghazi attack in September that killed the American ambassador to Libya and three of his colleagues. She has reason to be relieved that Syria is not the focus, since the Administration has so far failed in its indirect efforts to collapse the Asad regime. Maybe tomorrow’s Senate confirmation hearing for Senator John Kerry will provide an opportunity for questioning about that. Or is the American political class going to skip altogether opportunities to examine whether we could, and should, be doing more to stop a slaughter that has now taken more than 65,000 lives?
PS: The Benghazi incident evoked this rather trenchant response from the Secretary this morning:
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Not a foreign policy Inaugural, but…
President Obama said little about foreign affairs in his Inauguration speech, but what he said bears more attention than it is getting. After a tribute America’s armed forces (and mention that we are ending a decade of war), he went on to say:
But we are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends, and we must carry those lessons into this time as well.
We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully — not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear. America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe; and we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad, for no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation. We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom. And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice — not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.
This is extraordinarily general, or maybe tantalizingly vague. I think I know what it means for Iran: continuation of negotiations, at least for a while. But what does it mean for the brave Syrians who are fighting what is proving to be a frighteningly violent regime? It certainly aligns America with support for the Arab awakenings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya, but what does it mean for Bahrain? Or Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states? Or, even more importantly, for China, where “those who long for freedom” are increasingly speaking out?
What we know from Obama’s first term is that he balances ideals and reality in each case based on specific circumstances. He is lawyerly in approach, treating each contingency on its merits rather than laying out a more generally applicable “Obama” doctrine (other than support for democracy and concern for the disadvantaged). This is very different from his predecessor, who set out general principles and tried to apply them to specific cases without much regard for the particular circumstances, with disastrous results.
My guess is that circumstances will force the President to say and do a great deal more about Iran, Syria, China and other situations in short order. His reference to American alliances and “those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad”–that’s presumably the UN, OSCE, OAS and the rest of the alphabet soup of international organizations, including non-governmental ones–is a clear indication that he will be looking for help from others when he decides to act internationally.
What he did not say–but none of us should forget–is that America’s financial situation and its internal politics will constrain what it can do internationally for at least the next four years. We are broke, as the Republicans like to say. But we’ll have to wait at least for the State of the Union message if not longer to see what the Inaugural message means for resources to support both our military and civilian efforts abroad.
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Peace picks this week
A light week after the Inauguration, with back-to-back discussions Thursday of the Israeli elections:
1. Legacies of a Lost Empire: Unresolved Territorial and Identity Problems in the Post-Soviet Era
Date and Time: Tuesday, January 22 / 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Address: Woodrow Wilson Center
1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20004
Speaker: Pilar Bonet (Chief Correspondent in Moscow, in charge of the Russian Federation, CIS countries, and Georgia, El País)
Description: More than twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, a number of frozen conflicts dating from the collapse persist to this day. They endure as hostages to geostrategic thinking, and are fueled by ethnic and identity contestation on the ground. Pilar Bonet, Chief Correspondent, Moscow, El Pais, former Title VIII-supported Research Scholar and Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar has covered many of these conflicts, and will concentrate her discussion on the cases of Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia.
Register for this event here: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/legacies-lost-empire-unresolved-territorial-and-identity-problems-the-post-soviet-era
2. Libya: A State in Search of Itself
Date and Time: Thursday, January 24, 2013
6:30 PM – 7:45 PM
Address: Lindner Family Commons, Room 602 , 1957 E Street NW
Speakers: Mary-Jane Deeb (Chief, African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress), Karim Mezran (Senior Fellow, Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East, Atlantic Council)
Moderator: Ambassador Edward Skip Gnehm, Director, Middle East Policy Forum
Description: Despite successful parliamentary elections in July 2012, Libya faces numerous obstacles to state development. Rife with internal divisions and regional tensions, Libya struggles to achieve national cohesion and advance the political process. Moreover, the country’s fractious and divisive political environment inhibits institution building and complicates efforts to restore internal security. In light of Libya’s institutional and security challenges, the panelists will discuss current developments and prospects for Libya’s political future.
Register for this event here: https://docs.google.com/a/aucegypt.edu/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFJiRVdla1I1R2k2NE53NUYyaEhnc0E6MQ
3. The Israeli Elections: What Do They Mean for the United States?
Date and Time: January 24, 2013, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Address: Brookings Institution, Saul/Zilkha Rooms
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Speakers: Martin S. Indyk and Natan B. Sachs
Moderated by: Daniel L. Byman
Description: Israelis head to the polls next week, just one day after President Barack Obama’s second inauguration as the peace process remains stalled and changes sweeping the Arab world introduce new challenges for Israel. The tense relationship between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, the projected winner of next week’s elections, raises questions as to how the two countries will cooperate in dealing with these challenges, and others, including Iran’s nuclear program. What do the election results tell us about Israel’s trajectory in the coming years? How will the United States and the region react to a new Israeli government? On January 24, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings will host a discussion on the election outcomes and their meaning for Israeli domestic and foreign policy and for the incoming Israeli government’s relationship with the United States. Panelists will include Brookings Fellow Natan Sachs, who has spent the last four weeks in Israel observing the election campaign, and Vice President Martin Indyk, director of Foreign Policy at Brookings and former U.S. ambassador to Israel. Senior Fellow Daniel Byman, Saban Center Research Director, will provide introductory remarks and moderate the discussion.
Register for this event through sending an email to: events@brookings.edu
5. Elections in Israel
Date and Tme: Thursday, January 24, 2013 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Address: Lindner Family Commons, Room 602 1957 E Street NW
Speakers:Yoram Peri (Abraham S. and Jack Kay Chair in Israel Studies, University of Maryland) , Ilan Peleg (Charles A. Dana Professor of Government & Law, Lafayette College) , Gershon Shafir (Professor of Sociology, University of California, San Diego), Jonathan Rynhold (Schusterman Visiting Professor in Israel Studies, GW)
Moderated by: Marc Lynch
Description: Three leading political scientists will discuss the outcomes and implications of Israel’s January 2013 parliamentary elections.
Register for this event here: http://tinyurl.com/cqzscq3
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