Month: August 2013
Lemonade
President Obama has had more than his share of lemons lately:
- the British parliament defeat of participation in military action against Syria,
- Russian President Putin calling the conclusive report of the US intelligence community indicting Bashar al Asad for chemical the August 21 chemical attack “utter nonsense,”
- Congress asking good questions and pestering for more consultations, and
- the UN Secretary General asking that he await the report of the chemical weapons inspection team.
He has now surprised us all with the oldest trick in the book: when you have nothing but lemons, make lemonade.
This makes a lot of sense. Insisting on a Congressional resolution of approval puts the Congress on the hook and meets the letter and spirit of the law, which is what a University of Chicago constitutional law professor should want to do. A successful resolution will quiet his critics and compensate for the loss in London, putting the Brits and opponents in Congress to shame. The UN time line for completing its technical work seems to be less than two weeks, so its conclusions should give the lie to those who claim chemical weapons were not used. An opportunity to upbraid Putin during the G20 Summit in Saint Petersburg September 5/6 should be welcome.
Trouble is, lemonade is not what is needed in Syria. Bashar al Asad may well read delay as lack of resolve and even use chemical weapons again. What does Obama do then? Rush the resolution through Congress, or go ahead without waiting? The part of the Syrian opposition most friendly to US interests may be disquieted, while extreme Islamists profit from the US delay by pointing to American unreliability. While the President said nothing about it in the Rose Garden, he should be accelerating assistance to the Free Syrian Army in ways that give it more confidence of US backing.
Lemonade is also not what US credibility needed. This may be a temporary problem, so long as the Congress approves military action and the Administration delivers a serious blow. But friends and enemies in the region and beyond will be calculating what this means for them: the Israelis first and foremost, but also the Turks, Iranians, Russians and North Koreans. Friends will be discomforted. Enemies may take heart.
The President is also at risk. If the defeat in the British parliament dealt a blow to David Cameron, a defeat in the US Congress would pull the rug out from under Barack Obama. I trust he is confident he can win, but until he does his prestige is on the line. A loss would leave him hurting just as Congress turns to a budget fight that promises to be a real bruiser.
So turning to Congress is smart, even ingenious, but not without serious risks. But proceeding apace without satisfying Congress had serious risks as well. So lemonade is on the menu, whether it is what you wanted or not.
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This is awkward
British parliament disapproval of participation in a military attack on Syria leaves the US with only France and Turkey as seemingly willing allies in punishing Bashar al Asad’s regime for the use of chemical weapons. The rest of the world seems content to sit back and watch, commenting all the while and reserving the option to hiss and boo if things go badly and to applaud if they go well.
At the same time, there is a growing view in the commentariat that military intervention will have little positive impact, and may even cause Asad to escalate his chemical attacks, or lash out in with terrorist attacks. Narrowly targeted military action to deter use of chemical weapons in the absence of a broader political strategy is likely to be ineffective at best, counter-productive at worst. Even if it deters further use of chemical weapons, the regime has ample alternative means with which to kill Syrians, as it has demonstrated for more than two years.
The UN chemical weapons inspection team is returning from Damascus and will need to prepare a report on its findings. These will presumably demonstrate unequivocally that chemical weapons were used but likely not who used them, as that was never part of the inspectors’ mandate. The Administration therefore needs to clarify for the American public, which is thoroughly unconvinced of the need for the US to take military action, and the international community, including the UN Security Council, why it thinks the regime was responsible. I personally don’t have any doubt, but others do and are entitled to answers from a government that has proved unreliable, even untrustworthy, more than once (read “Gulf of Tonkin,” “WMD in Iraq”).
It will be early next week before a case can be made in the serious way the situation requires. At that point it makes more sense to wait until after Presidents Obama and Putin have a chance to discuss the issues on the margins of the G20 Summit (September 5-6) in Saint Petersburg. An American-led attack on Syria will be a serious embarrassment for Moscow, which will squeal loudly about the horrendous consequences for the Middle East and world peace but will mostly be chagrined that it has once again failed to block the Americans. If Moscow will agree to push Bashar al Asad aside, that would be reason enough to hesitate more.
My colleagues Ed Joseph and Elizabeth O’Bagy have tried to sketch what a serious diplomatic initiative might look like, putting the emphasis quite rightly on security. But they wave their magic wand and create UN peacekeepers who are nowhere on the horizon in the truly vast numbers that would be required (100k at a minimum). They also rightly (if regrettably) suggest some degree of sectarian and ethnic separation, which is occurring in any event. The trouble is that the confrontation lines in many parts of Syria are still intertwined and contorted. It will take a lot more violence to straighten them out. Doing it at the negotiating table will be an even lengthier process.
President Obama is an awkward spot. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. It sure would be nice to find a diplomatic way out.
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Lincoln was a lonely Republican
So Dana Milbank thinks the 50th anniversary did not live up to the original. I really can’t imagine how that would have been possible, but no doubt the Milbanks of 1963 gave the original a snarky review as well.
I enjoyed my couple of hours at the Wednesday event. Dana is right that John Lewis was better than the rest, but he is better than the rest most other days too. His consistency and persistence in advocating integration in every dimension of American life are welcome relief from the politicians who seek the next big thing. Not to mention his seemingly impeccable integrity.
If showing up is half the battle, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (I’m grateful to President Obama for giving up “Barry”) were winners. Bill did better: his declaration that it shouldn’t be easier to buy a gun in America than to vote is certainly a crowd pleaser on the left. The King family, unfortunnately, got the father’s desire to be heard but not his rhetorical gifts. But older sister Christine King Farris made a magnificent statement with her terrific hat.
The best part though was the music, which was a vital dimension in 1963 as well. I’m writing without the benefit of my program, so I won’t be able to cite singers and groups, but the church choir that was invoking the protection of God when I arrived about 2 pm was exactly what the occasion merited. The overly harmonized Star Spangled Banner wasn’t my thing, but the foxy (am I allowed to say that?) gospel singer who came on later was over the top.
As for the President, he made the appropriate allusions to progress and pushed for closing economic gaps, but he wasn’t all there. How could he be? Later in the day he made some of his clearest public remarks about Syria and what he might do, and would not do, to respond to Bashar al Asad’s use of chemical weapons. But there are a lot of other things on his mind as well: the impending Federal budget crisis, Congressional deadlock, and the slow economic recovery, not to mention tensions with Russia, the Iranian nuclear program, American withdrawal from Afghanistan and already bogged down talks between Israel and Palestine. I can’t imagine that he would have sat through an hour of others speechifying, except for this occasion.
The most important political signal of the day was who did not show up. The nation’s Republican leadership took a pass. This was not a good omen, as it confirms that the GOP is uninterested in minority votes. Blacks and hispanics would unquestionably be better off if both parties had to court their votes. I’d have expected at least George W. Bush, who appointed Condi Rice and Colin Powell to high office and had a position on immigration pretty close to that of Barack Obama. But today’s Republicans seem to be opting for disenfranchisement and gerrymandering of Congressional districts rather than an all-out effort to compete and break up the Obama rainbow coalition.
That’s too bad for minorities, but it is also a demographically fated strategy. Fifty years from now, we’ll only have a two-party system if Republicans change their approach. The only question is how long it will take them to turn around. Lincoln cannot be the lone Republican leader present at the 100th anniversary of the March on Washington.
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Needed: creative diplomats
An attack to punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons is on hold due to British parliament reservations. The American Congress also has reasonable questions it wants answered. The P5 (that’s the veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council, namely US, UK, France, Russia and China) met yesterday and failed to agree to a draft UK resolution authorizing all necessary means. President Obama is hesitating, or at least hoping for better conditions. He still has to present the case for military action to the American people, who haven’t forgotten the Bush Administration claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (and some even remember President Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin incident). The UN chemical weapons inspectors are scheduled to leave Syria this weekend. If military action is in the cards, the earliest it is likely to happen is next week. The President is supposed to be at the G20 summit in Saint Petersburg September 5/6. It might be the better part of valor to wait until after that.
So there is time for diplomacy. The deal President Obama should be offering to Moscow is this: agree to implement the Geneva June 2012 communique, which calls for Bashar al Asad to hand executive power to a government approved by both the opposition and the regime, and we will desist from a military attack. That would save Russia the embarrassment of another Western military intervention without UN Security Council approval.
Iran, where there is admittedly some concern about the use of chemical weapons, might still prefer a military attack, because it would give its military a good deal of intelligence on current American capabilities. But if Russia pushes Bashar aside, Tehran will want to shift its support to ensure continuation of its alliance with Damascus. More than likely, it will put its chips down on one of the security force commanders, hoping that he can maintain the autocracy even if Bashar is a goner.
The trick is that a credible offer of a political solution can only be made if the threat of military attack is real and imminent. Otherwise Moscow can simply ignore the deal. Nor can the threat of military attack be a one-off, limited strike of the sort President Obama seems to think appropriate. To get Bashar to step aside, or to get Moscow to push him aside, will require a near certainty that failure to do so will lead to a military attack that tilts the battlefield against him and guarantees that his days are numbered. The notion that diplomacy will work without an “existential” threat is delusional. Diplomacy and military strategy have to be fully synchronized.
Won’t a short, focused military attack do the trick? No, it won’t. President Reagan tried that to retaliate against Libya for a terrorist attack on American service people in Germany. It had no serious impact on Qaddafi, except to make him a a bit crazier. Nor did the Clinton-era attack on an Al Qaeda facility in Afghanistan do anything to deter Osama Bin Laden. Pin pricks can be useless at best, counter-productive at worst, if they signal weakness or precipitate escalation. Bashar al Asad may well react to a well-targeted and narrow attack by using more chemical weapons.
The diplomats should focus then on two things:
- Making the military threat as real, broad and open-ended as possible by close consultations with whatever coalition of the willing can be hammered together over the next week;
- Getting Moscow to realize that it stands to lose more by backing Asad than by pushing him aside.
I doubt an effort along these lines will succeed, mainly because of the difficulties in mounting a credible existential threat. But that’s where creative diplomats come in.
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Fight and talk
It appears we may be headed for American-led attacks to punish, degrade and deter Syria’s use of chemical weapons. There are still preliminaries to be accomplished: the Obama Administration needs to present the evidence it has collected in some form that is convincing at home and abroad. It needs to complete its consultations with individual members of Congress, which isn’t scheduled to be back in session until September 9.
The Administration also needs to rally a stronger international coalition. The British and French are on board, though the British are now asking for a UN Security Council discussion that is unlikely to generate a resolution that approves the use of force. This could sharpen the dispute with the Russians and Chinese. The Arab League, while denouncing the use of chemical weapons, has not asked for military intervention. The UN wants its chemical weapons inspection team out of Damascus before any military action.
Let’s assume that the Administration can get this all done between now and the time the President is supposed to appear in St. Petersburg for the G20 Summit September 5/6, which seems ambitious, or shortly thereafter, which might be wiser. What impact might bombing have on the course of the war and prospects for negotiations?
The history is not encouraging. Most of the interventions Michael Knights discussed yesterday did not aim at or lead to negotiated solutions.
The ones that did–Bosnia and Kosovo–are exceptions that prove the rule.
In the case of Bosnia, the 1995 bombing was undertaken in response to a Serb attack on the Sarajevo “safe area.” NATO ran out of primary targets quickly, as the Serbs parked their artillery and tanks near schools and the remaining mosques in areas under their control. Somewhere down on the list of targets were the communication nodes of the Bosnian Serb Army, which was relatively small and depended on rapid and secure communications to move its forces quickly wherever they were needed. The result was a rout: the Bosnian Army and the Croat Defense Force, with ample support from the Croatian Army, advanced quickly and created the conditions for a successful negotiation at Dayton.
In Kosovo, months of bombing focussed mainly on military targets about which Milosevic cared little, but he gave in because the 78-day, open-ended bombing, as well as the prospect of escalation, put him in a corner: he had no leverage over NATO, the Russians were abandoning him, popular opinion turned against him, concern about damage to infrastructure was rising, and a future invasion was possible. The negotiated outcome left him in place. It was about the best he could hope for.
The Obama Administration is not contemplating anything like the kind of open-ended commitment to bombing that would tilt the battlefield back in the direction of the Syrian opposition. To the contrary: rumint would have it that the Americans are focusing on hitting a limited set of targets associated with the launch of chemical weapons over a time frame fixed in advance.
There is nevertheless good reason to use the prospect of this military action to advance the diplomatic agenda. The State Department is rightly trying to do that. Their focus seems to be on the Russians and Iranians, not on Bashar al Asad himself. That too is correct: Bashar will be moved only by an existential threat, which limited bombing will not accomplish. But government failure in repressing an insurgency correlates with external support, because it may weaken or be withdrawn. The Russians have repeatedly said they are not immutably attached to Bashar al Asad, and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was busy yesterday denouncing the use of chemical weapons (which however Tehran attributes not to the regime but to “terrorists”).
The odds of diplomatic success are however low. The kind of limited bombing apparently being planned will be wholly insufficient to threaten Bashar al Asad’s hold on power. He may well respond by using more of his chemical weapons, lest he lose the capability to use them. That would certainly be cause for escalation on the US side, but that is precisely the slippery slope President Obama is trying to avoid. Nor will tightly limited bombing give the Russians and Iranians much reason to withdraw their support for the Asad regime, provided he does not escalate.
So the odds are bad for “fight and talk.” But that is no reason not to pursue a diplomatic solution, as President Nixon did for four years while fighting North Vietnam. If Moscow shows any inclination to convene the Geneva 2 talks that were postponed this summer, Washington should certainly be ready to deal, including with Tehran.
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An argument I would expect to lose
As the President contemplates the military options for Syria, advice from the commentariat is disparate. Richard Haass would like targeted and time-limited strikes. Eliot Cohen wants a much broader and sustained attack. The difference is all about goals, as Rob Satloff rightly says, and I imagine most of the discussion inside the Administration is also.
While much of the news coverage is concerned with which weapons will be used against which targets and when, the military options need to serve broader goals. Here are the obvious possibilities:
1. Punish the Asad regime for its use of chemical weapons and deter it from another chemical attack.
Punishment and deterrence are on almost everyone’s list. The problem is that we don’t know what it will take to deter the regime from even greater use of chemical weapons. Escalation is a serious possibility. It was Milosevic’s initial reaction to the NATO bombing in 1999. He accelerated ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo. Bashar al Asad might do likewise, even attacking Israel or just throwing as many chemical weapons at his opponents as possible, in an effort to use them before losing them. To achieve the goal, President Obama has to be prepared to escalate in return if that happens.
2. Restore and enhance American credibility, not only as seen from Damascus but also as seen from Tehran.
Enhancing credibility requires something more: Tehran would need to see the attacks not only as punishing but also as highly effective in hitting the right targets, even when they are well hidden or under ground. Shock and awe will not be sufficient. Accuracy and effectiveness will be needed. Otherwise the credibility of an American attack on the Iranian nuclear program will suffer, making it far less likely that a negotiated solution will be found.
3. Tilt the battlefield back toward the Syrian opposition, enabling it to hold its own against regime security forces so a negotiated end to the war has some chance of success.
Tilting the battlefield is a far broader goal requiring a willingness to attack many more targets (Syrian air force, Scuds and command, control and communications) and to continue for as long as it might take. Some argue that it can be achieved more readily by arming the “right” opposition, but that has proven cumbersome and difficult. It will be difficult to know when the goal has been achieved, as declarations by the regime of willingness to negotiate are already cheaper by the dozen. It will also be difficult to followup a successful negotiated outcome in a way that serves US interests.
4. Enable the opposition to win.
This would require an open-ended commitment, like the one NATO eventually made in Libya to destroy the Qaddafi regime. Bomb until he is gone. Few are arguing for this in Washington, even if many hope it will happen.
Everything depends on a clear directive from the President (known in this context as the National Command Authority) specifying what the United States is trying to achieve. That will shape the diplomacy, consultations with Congress, public affairs, choice of weapons, targeting, duration, and willingness to escalate, as well as the cost, collateral damage, damage to relations with Russia and China and other negative consequences.
So far as I am able to tell, the President has not yet made this vital decision, but he clearly leans in the narrower, shorter, direction. 1 and 2 are likely the most appealing to him. It wouldn’t be worth doing anything without achieving those goals. His past reluctance suggests he won’t go for 4, which would be hard to sustain and even harder to follow up if it were achieved.
The big question is 3, which the State Department will argue for but the Pentagon will likely say is a bridge too far, and a hard one to target at that. I’d lean with State, because long-term US interests in Syria require that the war end sooner rather than later, but I would anticipate losing the argument.
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