Month: September 2013
To whom it may concern
The Egyptian April 6 Movement yesterday sent around this note, which merits reading:
To whom it may concern, April 6 movement is one of the first movements that fought against Mubarak regime and fought against political corruption and despotism since its inception in 2008 . It’s main purpose was to establish a state based on the principles of freedom, dignity, democracy, justice, equality and citizenship .
April 6 movement had a major role in the spark of January 25, 2011 and the revolution against injustice and corruption. April 6 Movement faced a great challenges and severe attack from the SCAF (Supreme Council of Armed Force) who took power after the resign of Mubarak. The conflict with us started when the movement criticized the ruling military council at that time, which led the military council to start a huge media campaigns and distortion against April 6 movement at that time. Read more
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Force and diplomacy aren’t antithetical
I’ve had a number of people ask in the past 48 hours whether proceeding on the diplomatic track to collect Syria’s chemical weapons will strengthen Bashar al Asad.
The answer in the short term is “yes.” Whenever the international community negotiates with a ruler whose legitimacy is in question, it shores up his hold on power. Especially so in this instance, as Bashar will soon be responsible for declaring, collecting and turning over Syria’s chemical weapons, making him appear indispensable to a process Russia and the United States have dubbed A number 1 priority.
Neither will want him pushed aside while this process is ongoing. If he were to disappear suddenly, the process would at best come to a halt and at worst disintegrate, making accountability for the chemical weapons difficult if not impossible. Even the Geneva 2 formula–full delegation of executive authority to a government agreed by both the regime and the opposition–might be a bridge too far so long as the chemical weapons are not fully under international control.
This of course means that Bashar, whether he intends to use the chemical weapons again or not, will want to prolong the process as much as possible. The opportunities for footdragging are many. He is already demanding that the US give up the threat to use force as a condition for his turning over the chemical weapons. He can delay his accounting for the weapons and their locations for a month under the convention he has said he will sign. He can stall the deployment of weapons inspectors. He can claim that security conditions make collecting the weapons, said to be distributed to 50 or so sites, impossible. He can make working conditions for the inspectors hellish.
It will be Moscow’s responsibility to deliver Bashar and ensure he performs. I really have no doubt about Russia’s ability to do this. Syria depends on Russian arms and financing. Even a slight delay in deliveries of either would put Damascus in a bind. But Moscow too will have reasons to delay and prevaricate. The Americans, if they are to get anything like full implementation of a serious agreement on chemical weapons, will need to keep alive a credible threat to use force if Bashar fails to meet expectations.
This push and shove between the diplomacy and force is the rule, not the exception. It went on for more than two years after the UN Security Council authorized the use of force in Bosnia. It went on for months in the prelude to the Kosovo bombing, with several diplomatic failures to end the ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo preceding the eventual use of force. Even in Afghanistan, the Taliban were given an opportunity to deliver Al Qaeda into the hands of the Americans. Force was used only after diplomacy had failed. President Bush’s supporters would claim this was also true for Iraq.
The problem in Syria is that the issues there go far beyond chemical weapons. In addition to the mass atrocities committed with conventional weapons, there are two vital US interests at stake: regional stability and blocking an extremist (Sunni or Shia-aligned) succession in Syria. Secretary Kerry is trying hard to keep the door to a Geneva 2 negotiation open, because only a negotiated political transition has much of a chance of avoiding state collapse, which will threaten regional stability, and extremist takeover.
Russia and the United States share these interests in a negotiated political transition, but so far Moscow has remained wedded to Bashar al Asad, no matter how many times Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov claim they are not committed to him personally. What Kerry needs to do is convince the Russians that Bashar remaining in power is a real and serious threat to Russia, as it will encourage jihadi extremists to extend their fight to the Caucasus and cause state structures in the Levant to fragment.
The military balance will be an important part of Russia’s calculations. While President Obama has stayed largely silent on support for the Syrian opposition, frustrating Senator McCain and other Republicans who have wanted to see intervention, there are lots of indications that he is ratcheting up a military supply and training chain that moved slowly over the summer. The faster the Syrian opposition can pose a serious military threat to the regime, the sooner Russia will be inclined to reexamine its support for Bashar and its hesistancy about Geneva 2.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Anything but Syria
Danya Greenfield, moderator of Thursday’s Atlantic Council event on Yemen, joked that it is nice to discuss something other than Syria. Panelists at the Rafik Hariri Center and Project on Middle East Democracy event included:
- Peter Salisbury from the Chatham House Yemen Forum,
- Christopher Jennings from USAID, and
- Fatima al Asrar, an independent policy analyst.
The discussion focused on the political and economic changes in Yemen since the mass protests of 2011 and the removal of Ali Abdullah Saleh from power in 2012 as well as the international community’s assistance role.
The ousted president, Salisbury said, used patronage to keep local authorities under his influence, resolve conflicts and maintain unity in a traditionally decentralized country. He allowed only those who pledged their allegiance to him access to businesses. Even after liberalization of the economy in the 1990s, only his allies could have businesses with access to foreign markets. Abdullah Saleh built a loyal political and economic elite.
This system left no money for infrastructure and development and most of the population in extreme poverty. Inequality became an issue when the opposition fielded an opponent in the 2006 presidential elections. But it was only after the 2011 uprising that the international community, concerned with security issues, got engaged.
Current President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi has removed top military officials and elites, destabilizing the country and putting more power in the hands of tribal militias. The opposition Islah Party and the ruling General People’s Congress have been unable to cooperate. The transition in Yemen will take years and even decades, with a real possibility of return to the old system of elite rule that existed under Abdullah Saleh.
Jennings discussed what USAID has been doing in Yemen to maintain security in the country. The 2011 protests brought real potential for change and reform. There is a real commitment to have an inclusive and transparent National Dialogue, which has been unique among the Arab transitions, and to democracy. USAID has attempted to move away from a “check-box” approach. It has focused on expansion of the political process to ensure the inclusion of groups such as women and youth. USAID programs are not just targeting the old elites under Abdullah Saleh but also working with local and district officials and civil society organizations, which however sometimes pursue the objectives of donors rather than their target constituents. Yemen’s stability depends on governance and economic reforms and the eventual writing of a constitution. Radicals hinder that process, but USAID is committed to maintaining the momentum of reform and completing the transition process.
Al Asrar sees a real opportunity for reform in Yemen. With Abdullah Saleh removed from power, the barriers to foreign aid are gone and the Friends of Yemen have promised $8 billion in aid, in accordance with a “mutual accountability” framework. Before the protests of 2011, Yemen was facing many economic challenges, which have exacerbated during the transition period. Al Asrar argues that the Yemeni government needs to take the lead and steer donors to its needs. Political and economic processes need to merge. The Yemeni government does not see its partnerships with the international community as being reliable because donors pull their aid at any sign of instability, leaving many Yemenis without essential resources. Yemen is a fragile state, but foreign governments need to find ways to give predictable aid.
Greenfield concluded that there is a consensus Yemen needs a long-term approach. There is reason for optimism – Yemen has not fallen to divisions and civil war like Syria. Yet, the transition period has still not met the demands of the youth that protested and demanded participation of all Yemenis in the political process.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Putin’s drivel
Vladimir Putin’s op ed in the New York Times was last night’s and this morning’s hot topic. It really doesn’t merit much attention, but last time I looked had acquired 1343 comments and a lot of electrons in cyberspace, so here goes.
The problems start in paragraph 2:
The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter.
I don’t really know whether in 1945 Roosevelt thought he had delegated decisions affecting war and peace to the UN Security Council and a (then-) Soviet veto, but I am certain few American presidents since have thought this. Nor have Moscow’s leaders subjected their war and peace decisions (in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Georgia or for that matter Syria) to UNSC votes.
Putin compounds the illogic with this:
No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.
Russia has done more to weaken the UNSC by refusing to allow any resolution on Syria to pass than military action by the US would do. By neutering the UNSC Moscow is risking precisely the fate of the League of Nations.
I happen to agree with Putin on the potential regional risks arising from Syria, but he is wrong to attribute these exclusively to a US strike. Continuation of the war even without military intervention will lead to all these bad things: more innocent victims and escalation, a new wave of terrorism, difficulty resolving the Iranian nuclear and Israel/Palestine issues as well as regional destabilization.
Putin continues:
Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are few champions of democracy in .
It should surprise no one that the President of Russia can’t recognize a genuine democratic movement when he sees one. He is blind to that sort of thing even in his own country. All he sees are the extremists and the need for a thorough crackdown.
Russia he claims has been advocating for peaceful dialogue from the first. True enough, but at the same time it has been arming, equipping and financing a regime committing massive human rights violations. Putin nevertheless asserts Russia’s allegiance not to Asad, but to international law, which apparently in his library does not include the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. It only includes that same hackneyed refrain about the powers of the Security Council:
Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.
Tell that to the Czechs and Hungarians and watch them laugh.
This is also risible, if it weren’t so sad:
No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack — this time against Israel — cannot be ignored.
Human Rights Watch, and reportedly also the UN, have concluded that the August 21 attack was launched by regime forces. This mythology of people who kill their own to precipitate foreign intervention was a standard refrain also in the Balkans in the 1990s. Never demonstrated, always asserted.
Putin goes on to opine:
But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.
For sure there are big problems in all those places, but there are also pluses that he skips over, just as he fails to mention Russia’s use of extreme force in Chechnya (to what Putin would claim as good effect) as well as in Georgia, where Russia now occupies the territory of a neighboring state.
He then pitches not the chemical weapons proposal under negotiation today in Geneva but rather a far more general point:
We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.
This notion that the language of force is inconsistent with diplomacy is wrong, as recent Russian and Syrian behavior demonstrates all too well.
Putin’s closing isn’t so much wrong as hypocritical:
There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
A president who not only countenances but encourages distinctions among people based on sexual orientation has certainly forgotten that God created us equal.
The only comfort I have reading this drivel is that the American PR firm that wrote it has extracted a substantial sum from Moscow for its obviously shoddy work.
PS: The PR firm involved is Ketchum.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Don’t bank on diplomacy yet
President Obama last night tentatively accepted Putin’s paddle and began his effort to paddle away from military action, which faced rejection in the Congress, towards a diplomatic denouement. This latest turn will disappoint and frustrate opposition Syrians who wanted a decisive military intervention.
But that was not in the cards, and the President’s move cheers those who believe that chemical weapons are the main issue Americans should be concerned about in Syria, as it offers a potentially better outcome than bombing. Certainly an endstate in which the international community gains control over Syria’s gigantic stockpile of chemical weapons (estimated at 1000 tons) and destroys them safely and securely is better than the uncertainty of a punitive bombing campaign, pinprick or not.
I see two problems with this approach:
- We are very unlikely to reach the desired endstate, which depends on Syria declaring all its chemical weapons, securely moving them to a relatively few destinations, and giving international inspectors unfettered access while a civil war rages. Remember what happened to the Arab League and UN observers? With no US boots on the ground, international control of Syria’s chemical weapons likely means mainly Russian control, which isn’t going to satisfy anyone in Washington. But it will make military intervention much more difficult.
- Chemical weapons are not all that is at stake for the United States in Syria. Continuation of the civil war there threatens the stability of Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey. The longer the fighting goes on, the more likely it is that Islamist extremists will eventually succeed and make Syria a haven for Al Qaeda’s ambitions. That will mean threats to Israel as well.
Thousands of civilians will die from conventional weapons in the next month or so, while the diplomats try to hammer out a solution. Read the latest report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry for the gruesome details.
If it is any comfort, this kind of diplomatic delay was also the rule rather than the exception in the 1990s, when NATO intervened from the air first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo. The decisive intervention in Bosnia came more than two years after the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to protect UN-designated safe areas. Prior pinprick attacks had little impact. In Kosovo, force was used only after months of diplomatic efforts (and without a specific authorizing resolution from the UNSC).
President Obama’s enormous reluctance to use military force in Syria is not, as some commentators would have it, a sign of weakness. It of course behooves us to pursue any diplomatic lead that might accomplish our ends without the use of force, which always causes collateral damage and unanticipated consequences. The only real signal of weakness came from the Congress’ apparent willingness to back military action.
Where I differ from President Obama is on the breadth of American interests in Syria as well as the odds of a favorable diplomatic outcome. Chemical weapons are a relatively small part of the problem there. The real issue is an autocrat who prefers state collapse–so long as he remains in power in Damascus–to stepping aside and allowing the democratic evolution that the nonviolent protests called for.
While he did not mention the Syrian opposition last night, I can hope that the President is quietly trying to ensure that the more moderate forces of the Free Syrian Army have the means to protect themselves and the civilians who live in liberated areas. The Russians have not hesitated to make sure that the regime is well equipped and armed. Without an effort to level the battlefield, diplomatic initiatives to end the war are doomed to failure. Military interventions after diplomatic failures need to be more vigorous, not less.
Give diplomacy a chance, but don’t bank on it yet.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Putin’s paddle
Yesterday’s strange idea is today’s hot topic: the proposition that Bashar al Asad will destroy chemical weapons he refuses to acknowledge possession of. And it will have to do it under tight international control while continuing its slaughter of Syrians with conventional weapons.
There are a lot of things wrong with this idea, apart from those contradictions:
- Syria would have to declare all the sites at which chemical weapons and their precursors are held;
- Washington would need to be confident that chemical weapons and their precursors exist nowhere else in Syria;
- credible international observers would need to deploy to all the declared sites in significant numbers to ensure 24-hours per day that nothing is being moved;
- those observers would have to be housed and protected from the significant violence occurring every day in Syria;
- they would also need uninterrupted and reliable communications;
- if the chemical weapons are to be destroyed, the 1000 tons or so of material would need to be safely and securely transported to a specially constructed facility;
- the destruction would need to be carefully monitored.
I think it only fair to say that this is a very tall order of dubious virtue. Those who remember the difficulties nuclear inspectors faced before both Iraq wars should multiply by a factor of ten, or more. I can’t wait to hear the quarrels over whether this site or that one does or does not hold chemical weapons. The observers themselves would become clear markers of where the chemical weapons are, making the sites tempting targets for extremists.
Once we occupied Iraq, it still took a year or so and cost hundreds of millions to verify that there were no weapons of mass destruction. That’s when we could go anywhere, talk to anyone, read all the files and test anything we wanted. Or think about the more recent and ill-fated Arab League and later UN observers in Syria. They weren’t trying to do anything technically difficult. Just trying to monitor the military action and report. Both groups were withdrawn without being able to accomplish their objectives.
The numbers of Syrians killed by chemical weapons likely don’t amount to 2% of the total 100,000 killed so far. To allow the killing to continue while the international community invests many millions in securing, observing, collecting and destroying chemical weapons stockpiles would be not only hypocritical but also deeply offensive to the Syrians who suffer the depredations of the Asad regime.
But the Obama Administration finds itself up the creek without a paddle. Approval of a military strike in Congress appears less and less likely. Proceeding anyway after the Congress says “no” is possible legally, but politically it would be a disaster. So the President is going to have a hard look at this “diplomatic” proposition, whose origins lie not in John Kerry’s supposed inadvertent slip yesterday morning but rather, as the President acknowledged in his interview last night with Gwen Ifill, in conversations he has had with Vladimir Putin.
The idea should be dubbed “Putin’s paddle.” Mr. President, you may have to use it, but only because of the unfortunate situation you put yourself in. That’s not an endorsement.
RSS - Posts
