Month: April 2013
Civilians >> chemical weapons
The “Salon” I did with Stanford’s Lina Khatib yesterday on “Should the U.S. intervene in Syria?” focused mainly on chemical weapons, as all conversations about Syria yesterday did.
Lina, who had published a piece with Larry Diamond on Thursday making the case for military intervention (arms to the rebels plus a no-fly zone but no boots on the ground) in Syria, is concerned not only about chemical weapons use, the evidence for which she regards as “credible,” but about the fertile ground for Islamist extremists and the impact on the region. The longer the fighting lasts, the worse it gets.
I don’t disagree with any of that. But it doesn’t matter whether she and I think the evidence of chemical weapons use is credible. What matters is what the Russians, Chinese, Turks and others think. If there is going to be serious military intervention in Syria by the United States, it is going to need multilateral cover, preferably a UN Security Council resolution as well as an Arab League request. The standards the evidence is going to need to meet are high. The world is in no mood for another Middle East war based on flimsy claims related to weapons of mass destruction.
It is going to take time to assemble the evidence and convince skeptics. Once we are ready, Peter Juul proposes a reasonable course of action to mobilize the UN Security Council and NATO (for both military action and humanitarian relief). If that fails, the US will have to consider unilateral action without multilateral cover, but that is a course of action with many drawbacks.
There is also a credibility issue in the other direction: if the US doesn’t act against Syrian use of chemical weapons, why would the Iranians believe that we would take action against their nuclear program? This is a serious problem, but it should not drive the timetable. Being 100% certain, and trying to convince others, is more important than the timing.
That is a cruel thing to say. Syrians are dying every day. The average is climbing towards 200 per day, 6000 per month. The total by now is well over 70,000. Those are staggering numbers. Few of them are killed by chemical weapons. Bombing, Scuds, artillery and small arms fire are much more common:
The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter what the weapons used. Civilians are more important than the weapons that kill them. The standards of proof are easily met. The Syrian security forces and their paramilitaries are attacking and killing civilians daily with conventional weapons.
I would like to see the international community act on those grounds, rather than focusing on a limited (and difficult to prove) use of sarin gas. But this is not the unipolar moment of 1999, when the United States led a NATO intervention in Kosovo without UN Security Council approval. That is unlikely to happen. So we are heading down a long road of difficult proof.
Some, like Leila Hilal on Chris Hayes’ show last night, would prefer a negotiated solution. So would I. But it is not looking as if Bashar al Assad is hurting badly enough to yield to the transition plans that Russia and the United States agreed in Geneva last June. The mutually hurting stalemate that would provide the conditions for that will require that the revolutionaries do a bit better than they have managed so far. More international assistance is going to be needed.
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The referendum gambit
Serbian President Nikolic and his “progressive” party compatriot Deputy Prime Minister Vucic have been suggesting that a referendum might be called on the first Pristina/Belgrade “normalization” agreement. It would be held in northern Kosovo as well as Serbia proper only on condition that everyone, including northern Kosovo Serbs, promise to comply with whatever the result will be. It is not clear to me whether the Serbs living south of the Ibar in Kosovo would be able to vote.
The European Union and the United States do not want this to happen. The Serbian (and Kosovo) parliaments have already voted to approve the agreement. Adding another step to the process would not be welcome in Brussels and Washington, which want to pocket success and move on to implementation.
A referendum would certainly be a gamble. If the agreement were disapproved, the consequences for Serbia would be serious: an indefinite delay in getting a date to start negotiations on EU accession, including a delay in the financing that comes with the date decision. Disapproval would essentially lock Serbia into pursuing partition, making Belgrade non grata with the EU and the US.
If, however, the agreement were approved, that would presumably end resistance to implementation. It might even be the end of Serbia’s quixotic claim to sovereignty over Kosovo, since the agreement is clear about Kosovo’s territorial integrity and implies its sovereignty.
Vucic is betting that a referendum would approve the agreement and the northerners will therefore back off. He has threatened to resign if the agreement is not approved. Despite terrible socioeconomic conditions, he figures that most of Serbia is pleased with this government and in particular with him, as the leader of a popular anti-corruption campaign. Vucic has given the northerners until Tuesday to accept the agreement, or face a referendum 15 days later. That doesn’t sound practical to me, but maybe the election machinery in Serbia is better oiled than I imagine.
Polling suggests 50-60% of Serbia supports the agreement, but those who oppose it are much more committed than those who are favorable and far more likely to go to the polls. A simple up or down referendum to approve the agreement could lose. A referendum on disapproving it might have a better chance (of failure), in particular if a “double majority” is required.
This was the requirement for Serbia’s 2006 constitutional referendum: 50% had to approve, and 50% of registered voters had to vote. There is no way the second requirement can be met if the Kosovo Albanian voters on the register are counted. They were not for the 2006 referendum, but the constitution was adopted anyway. I’ll be glad to hear from someone who knows whether the “double majority” requirement is permanent or only used for the constitutional referendum.
If the northerners call Vucic’s bluff, how the referendum question is formulated and the requirements for it to pass are going to be decisive. But I wouldn’t yet bet on a referendum being called.
PS: Milan Marinkovic provided some of the material in this post, but the views here are not necessarily his. They are mine.
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Iran’s nuclear program is no bargain
The Iranian government prohibits the media from publicly discussing the nuclear issue, thus suppressing a domestic debate on the rationale behind the nuclear agenda. A joint Carnegie Endowment-Federation of American Scientists report, Iran’s Nuclear Odyssey: Costs and Risks, attempts to tackle the unanswered questions regarding efficiency and security. This week’s panel discussion at Carnegie concluded that domestic nuclear enrichment is illogical and most likely unsafe. Domestically enriching uranium incurs high costs and uncertain benefits for Iran.
Despite Iran’s claims that the country’s future energy security relies on the ability to enrich uranium domestically, Iran currently has little need for nuclear fuel. In its fuel security assessments Iran has failed to consider both the scarcity and the low grade of its domestic uranium resources. Ultimately these limitations would force Iran to procure uranium from abroad, completely defeating the purpose of domestic enrichment capabilities. The IAEA doesn’t even rank Iran as one of the top 40 countries with uranium reserves. Why would a major oil and natural gas supplier hold its economy hostage to development of its unimpressive nuclear capabilities?
In their report Ali Vaez –Senior Iran Analyst, International Crisis Group–and Karim Sadjadpour–Senior Associate of the Middle East Program, Carnegie Endowment—conservatively estimate losses in foreign investment and oil revenue as a result of the nuclear program at $100 billion. The Bushehr reactor –one of the world’s most expensive–would provide only 2% of Iran’s electricity generation. To make matters worse, the reactor sits on the intersection of three tectonic plates. A non-signatory of the Convention on Nuclear Safety, Iran possesses some of the least secure nuclear materials in the world. James Acton, Senior Associate of the Nuclear Policy Program at Carnegie, characterized Iran’s “regulatory complaisance”’ as symptomatic of the hubris that caused the Fukushima accident.
The ideological drive behind Iranian decision-making serves a political, not an economic purpose. Financial economist Mohammad Jahan-Parvar argued economic decision-making at the macro level is limited to Supreme Leader Khomenei and his underlings. Khomenei’s policies center on promoting “progress” in the esoteric fields of “spirituality,” “wellbeing” (not welfare) and “chronic knowledge.” Khomenei’s “progress” in no way promotes economic development. Twenty per cent of development funds are allocated to the agricultural sector, which produces 12% of GDP and 7% of Iran’s employment. But the agricultural sector represents the regime’s greatest support base.
As the report’s cost-benefit analysis suggests, Iran has not embarked on its nuclear odyssey for peaceful nuclear enrichment. Thus it concludes:
- Economic pressure and military force will not lead Iran to abandon its “sunk costs” and halt the nuclear program.
- The nuclear issue cannot be resolved without a mutually agreeable diplomatic solution.
- Iran should pursue alternative energy options, including solar and wind power.
- Public and nuclear diplomacy should complement each other, with the West demonstrating that an integrated and prosperous Iran is everyone’s goal.
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Syria is not just about Syria
Lina Khatib and Larry Diamond have a good piece outlining the case for intervening in Syria over at theatlantic.com. They want the US to supply the opposition with weapons and to intervene from the air to redress the imbalance in favor of the regime, which is using its air force and Scuds to good advantage in preventing the revolution from consolidating (holding and building in COIN-speak) its control of liberated areas. Intervention would shorten the conflict and limit the damage to neighboring countries, which are suffering from overflow of both the conflict and refugees.
I buy their argument, but it is incomplete because it does not look at the bigger picture.
President Obama, as he pointed out some weeks ago in an interview, does not regard Syria as isolated from other issues, because it is not. The most important factors weighing against intervention have little to do with Syria and a lot to do with Russia.
Obama does not want to lose Russian support for the Northern Distribution Network (NDN). It is vital to US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Moscow could shut it down, thereby prolonging the American presence in Afghanistan. That is something the Russians would like because they fear the post-2014 consequences of withdrawal. Without the NDN, we would again be at the mercy of the Pakistanis for maintaining the pace of the withdrawal. That is not a good place to be.
The President also does not want to lose support for the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran. The Russians have not only participated, they have also gone along with the sanctions that give the talks at least some slim hope of success. Of course they too don’t want Tehran to get nuclear weapons, but they might risk that if we act in Syria without their concurrence. Risking American prestige in an air war with Syria could also seriously diminish the credibility of any military threat to Iran, which is bleeding money and men in Syria without any risk to Americans.
Obama regards both the withdrawal from Afghanistan and preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons as higher priorities than ensuring Assad’s downfall.
The President also knows the American people will not be happy with another military intervention in the Middle East. This is not just because of war weariness, though that is real enough. Going to war while the sequester constrains the budget would cause serious strain on the Defense Department and likely end up crimping other priorities as well. If you are an advocate of a strong America, you should want to husband resources after more than a decade of war, not spend them in a place that is suffering mightily but is not a top American national security priority. An air war in Syria would also necessarily tip off the Syrians (and therefore also the Iranians and maybe also the Russians) to our latest and best technology, giving them a leg up in any future confrontation.
I can think of responses to all these issues, but if you don’t deal with them you haven’t made the case. Syria is not just about Syria.
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Pandora’s box opens also in Serbia
Yesterday’s House subcommittee hearing on Kosovo and Serbia focused mainly on Chair Rohrabacher’s strong advocacy of self-determination for everyone. Why, he asked repeatedly in many different ways, should we force people to live in a state where they don’t want to live? Isn’t self-determination fundamental to Americans? Why should we not want it for others? What is sacrosanct about borders drawn by dictators, monarchs and colonialists? Why shouldn’t everyone be able to choose the state in which they live? Why would we give that choice to Kosovars and not to others?
He was joined in these refrains by at least three of the four experts on the non-Administration panel of witnesses. I was the most vigorous of the dissenters, helped along the way by Democratic Representatives Engel and Keating. Any newbie watching the show might have thought that there is a real debate on this issue in Washington, and maybe even a partisan divide between Republicans who advocate self-determination and Democrats who want to trap people as minorities in states they do not want to live in.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Representative Rohrabacher is an outlier, not a trend. There is no real debate in Washington, where both Republicans and Democrats generally prefer the traditional position in favor of state sovereignty except where there is mutual agreement to divorce (e.g., Czechoslovakia, the breakup of the Soviet Union and Sudan’s partition). Even then, the preference is definitively in favor of changing the status of a pre-existing boundary (from an internal one to an international border) rather than moving it to accommodate ethnic differences.
Why is this the case? To make a long story short: it saves lives. Trying to move a border to accommodate ethnic differences is never simple or straightforward. There is always someone on the wrong side of the line. That someone will either try to move the line again, or the majority on his side of the line will try to move him, or both. This is how ethnic cleansing begins. It ends in death and destruction, sometimes on a genocidal scale.
Why then did some of us advocate Kosovo independence, which amounts to partition of Serbia?
First, it is important to note that the boundary between the former Yugoslav province of Kosovo and Serbia was not moved. In the eyes of those who recognized Kosovo’s sovereignty, the status of the boundary was changed to an international border, but it is drawn where Tito left it. This is not because we think there is something sacrosanct about former Yugoslavia’s internal borders, but simply because redrawing it is problematic and likely to lead to conflict. There are something like 10,000 Albanians who would like to return to homes north of the Ibar river. There are more Serbs who live south of the Ibar than north of it. They don’t want to leave–they’ve proven that by staying this long. If the border were redrawn at the Ibar explicitly to separate Serbs and Albanians, you’d have a lot of unhappy people unable to return or retain their homes.
Second, there really was no choice. UN Security Council resolution 1244 removed Kosovo (in principle all of it, including the territory north of the Ibar) from Serbian sovereignty in 1999. From then until Kosovo declared independence in February 2008, Serbia made no effort whatsoever to “make unity attractive,” in the phrase used in Sudan. In the meanwhile, the UN was relatively successful in building up democratically validated institutions in Pristina, which now enjoy substantial but not universal Serb participation.
When Belgrade approved the new Serbian constitution in 2006, it needed a “double majority” (50% of those voting had to approve and 50% of registered voters had to vote). It got the second majority only by crossing off the Kosovo Albanian names on the voter registration lists, thus denying Kosovars the right to block adoption of the constitution by not voting in the referendum. This for me was the last straw. It meant that Belgrade did not regard the Kosovars as citizens of Serbia. Therefore they had to be citizens of a different state. That state is now the Republic of Kosovo.
The Kosovo situation is not, as US government officials often claim, “unique.” There are certainly parallels and worse in Kurdistan. But the Kurds, for their own reasons, have not yet chosen to declare independence, knowing full well that the US, Turkey and Iran lean heavily against. That 17% of Iraq’s oil revenue also weighs heavily against. The fact that the boundary between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq is not yet agreed would make a Kurdistan declaration of independence a sure-fire way to start a debilitating conflict in a country that is now the world’s third largest oil exporter. That conflict would likely spread to “Eastern” Kurdistan (which is inside Iran) and to Turkey.
Redrawing the border between Kosovo and Serbia would likewise ignite regional conflicts. Albanian nationalists would see it as triggering their right to unite with Albanian communities in Serbia, Macedonia and Albania, a right explicitly denied in Kosovo’s constitution. Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated 49% of Bosnia and Herzegovina, would seek either independence or union with Serbia.
That is enough to deter me, but I’ve saved the worst for last: Serbia itself would be put at risk. Its Vojvodina province, or part of it, might well be inspired to seek independence or union with Hungary. Bosniak-majority municipalities in Sandjak would certainly want to join Bosnia, never mind that they are not contiguous with it.
I trust this “Pandora’s box” scenario is one the international community will choose not to trigger by redrawing Kosovo’s borders. But I fully anticipate that Albanians in southern Serbia, Bosniaks in Sandjak, Hungarians in Vojvodina and perhaps other minorities elsewhere in Serbia will start asking for the same rights Serbia has gotten in the Belgrade/Pristina agreement for the Serb-majority municipalities in northern Kosovo. I’ll be interested to hear whether those who want everyone treated equally will advocate for them, or side with Belgrade when it denies them the right to govern themselves, including choosing their own police chief and having a special appeals court panel.
Pandora’s box opens also in Serbia. Best to keep it closed.
PS: Here are the videos of the hearing.
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Cultivating the grassroots
The latest protests against the “cleansing” of Egypt’s judiciary branch represent only one of the country’s daily political agonies. Free Egypt Party founder, Amr Hamzawy, discussed Egypt’s political stakes and the role of the opposition at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace this week. Hamzawy identified two related obstacles blocking political progress: polarization of the leadership and the opposition, and Egypt’s increasing ungovernability.
Trends and Implications
Egypt’s social and economic indicators are pointed in the wrong direction. Hamzawy predicted that at Eqypt’s current borrowing rate the country will accumulate $60 billion in foreign debt–20% owed to Qatar. Increasing insecurity in the Sinai and growing sectarian tensions betray the government’s inability to provide security in problem areas. Islamist suspicions of conspiracy as the cause of sectarian violence echo the excuses offered by the Mubarak regime.
Ten months after his election, Morsi has yet to introduce a major policy reform or formulate a clear vision for his government. Egyptians across the political spectrum remain disenchanted with the president’s performance on economic and social issues, particularly on human rights. Hamzawy cautioned that should Morsi and his cabinet continue in this direction, Egypt will hold early elections—an undesirable development.
The polarization between the leadership and the opposition is, to say the least, debilitating. Hamzawy predictably laid blame on Morsi, accusing the president of ignoring the opposition. Morsi has been deaf to the National Salvation Front’s calls for negotiation on the constitution. He unilaterally set up a committee to amend the document. Hamzawy argued that Morsi’s failure to demonstrate in actions a true willingness to listen has kept the opposition from participating in his various national debates. Hamzawy suggested the opposition pursue youth participation and localize its politics, engaging people all across Egypt, not just Cairo. He suggested combining development and capacity building into an innovative form of constituency work aimed at engaging the impoverished populations.
Conclusion
The Muslim Brotherhood’s strong Islamist support and its post-revolutionary electoral success give Morsi the impression that compromise with secularists is unnecessary. In response, the Egyptian opposition aims to increase its political weight through grassroots constituency work—a promising sign for democratic development, though not a quick fix.
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