Month: June 2014
Do Arabs like Obama?
Five years ago, President Obama promised in a landmark speech in Cairo to usher in a new chapter in America’s relationship with the Muslim world. On Tuesday, June 3, the Middle East Institute and the Arab American Institute co-hosted a discussion on how Arab attitudes have evolved in the five years following the speech. The panel included James Zogby, Marwan Muasher, Barbara Slavin, and Paul Salem, who moderated. The consensus: while expectations for the Obama presidency did not live up to reality, his policy of non-intervention remains popular in the region.
The discussion was based on the results of a May 2014 Zogby poll, which was conducted across seven countries in the Arab world. The survey examined a host of issues, including the Arab-Israeli conflict, US policy on Syria, and the Arab world’s view of Iran. Unsurprisingly, Palestine was seen as the key obstacle to stability in the Middle East, followed by a perception of American over-interference in the region. The US approval rating did not break 50% in any of the countries surveyed, but Zogby noted a considerable increase from 2011. All three panelists attributed the uptick in American popularity to Obama’s retreat from the military interventionism of his predecessor.
There was one notable exception in the trend: Saudi attitudes towards the US have fallen sharply since 2011, largely because of America’s perceived ambivalence towards the conflict in Syria. Likewise, support for Iran has also fallen, due its support of the Assad regime.
Obama’s favorability ratings were higher that the US’s favorability ratings. While the President’s lighter footprint in the world has softened Arab attitudes towards the US, America’s previous exploits in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been forgotten.
In every country polled, strong majorities said that maintaining good relations with the US is important. This suggests that there is no inherent ideological opposition to America. The majority of the Arab world’s qualms are with American policy.
Outside of the Gulf countries polled (Saudi Arabia and the UAE), Iran was not seen as a major destabilizing factor in the region. In fact, the President’s attempt to find a negotiated solution to the Iran nuclear impasse found a great deal of support outside the Gulf. According to Slavin, the insignificance of the Iranian nuclear issue in Arab public opinion is unsurprising, as Iran was never seen as a direct threat in much of the Arab world. In fact, she suggested that some derive a perverse satisfaction from the idea that a Middle Eastern country other than Israel might acquire nuclear weapons.
Muasher noted that the results of the survey highlighted an interesting paradox in Arab public opinion: while the Arab-Israeli conflict is cited as the primary challenge to US-Arab relations, it is followed closely by the perception that the US is overly meddlesome in the region. It was thus unclear how the respondents expected the conflict to be resolved, as an American-led resolution would necessitate American intervention. He also noted that support for US foreign policy was at its highest when it refrains from interfering in the region.
While an earlier poll found that in most Arab countrie, 65% or more opposed President Assad, this survey found little support for US intervention in the conflict, vindicating Obama’s policy of non-interference. Zobgy further suggested that support for Assad could in fact rise if the US chose to pursue a military option in Syria.
While American approval ratings are on the upswing, the poll found that both Iran and Turkey have lost the support they enjoyed earlier in the decade. Iran’s decline began with in 2006 and accelerated with the failed Green Revolution of 2009; however, all three panelists attributed the majority of the decline to Iran’s support of Assad. Turkey, which has dedicated the better part of the last twelve years to mending ties with its Arab neighbors, has seen its popularity fall in the wake of the Arab Spring. It was unclear why this started in 2011, as Erdogan’s heavy-handedness did not begin until 2012.
One unexpected finding was that only 21% of those polled in Lebanon thought the Syrian conflict was a pressing issue. Slavin suggested that this was due to the country’s diverse population, with close to two-thirds identifying as either Shiite or Christian and therefore more likely to sympathize with the regime and discount the conflict’s significance. Lebanon’s support for Iran also far outpaced the other countries in the survey, due to Iran’s generosity towards Lebanon following that country’s 2006 war with Israel.
Of all the countries polled, Palestinians were surprisingly the most likely to say that the US acted evenhandedly towards both Palestinians and Israelis (30%). According to Muasher, this is possibly because Palestinians are simply exhausted by the conflict and are willing to give the Americans the benefit of the doubt. Zogby added that Obama has gone further than other American presidents in emphasizing the importance of recognizing Palestinian rights.
Nonetheless, the speakers noted that if America remains unable or unwilling to negotiate a two-state solution, then it should step aside and allow someone else to take the lead—perhaps the EU, or the UN. America’s window of opportunity in this regard is closing fast. At some point it will taken out of the game, whether it chooses or not.
Ultimately, five years after his Cairo speech the sentiment is that Obama has not lived up to expectations. Nonetheless, public opinion has rebounded somewhat from its nadir in 2011. This is primarily due to America’s policy of non-interference in the Middle East, and in spite of its failure to mediate a solution to Arab-Israeli crisis.
“We are living in the house that George [W. Bush] built,” Zogby said. Had America not exhausted its resources and goodwill in Iraq, it might have been able to pursue other issues, including the peace process, more successfully.
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Bosnia and Herzegovina adrift
I spoke last night at the Austrian Cultural Center in New York City, in an event presided over by Tim Judah, who has been covering Ukraine lately but cut his teeth in the Balkans. The panel included Damir Arsenijevic, Atilla Aksoj, and Wolfgang Petritsch. Here are my talking notes:
1. I confess I’ve been tempted to do a John Cage this evening, but that would require I stand here for four minutes and thirty-three seconds completely silent, as the composer once did.
2. I haven’t got that kind of discipline. So you’ll have to settle for something less edifying and not much longer: warmed over ideas from someone who can’t remember when he last had a good one on the subject.
3. Let me start with the conventional wisdom, which I think is correct: Bosnia is stuck because the Dayton agreements, while ending a war, ensconced ethnically nationalist political parties and politicians in positions of power from which only more nationalist parties and politicians are be able to remove them.
4. The fault lies in the country’s constitution. Dayton ended the war but failed to provide Bosnia with a functional governing structure capable of negotiating and implementing the requirements of NATO or European Union membership.
5. This didn’t matter much for the first decade after the war. There were lots of things that needed doing. NATO and EU memberships were not much of an issue.
6. But in 2005/6 a team of Americans, with European support, tried to start fixing the constitutional problem by facilitating preparation by the Bosnian political parties of constitutional amendments later known as the April package.
7. The package clarified group, individual and minority rights, as well mechanisms for protecting the “vital national interests” of Bosnia’s constituent peoples. It also included reforms to strengthen the government and the powers of the prime minister, reduce the president’s duties, and streamline parliamentary procedures.
8. The April package narrowly failed in parliament to achieve the 2/3 majority required by two votes. The responsibility was clear: one political party that had participated fully in the negotiations blocked passage, in order to ensure its leader election to the presidency.
9. Whatever the faults of the April package, its passage would have opened the way for a different politics in Bosnia, one based less on ethnic identity and more on economic, social welfare and other issues of common concern to all its citizens.
10. I confess I thought its defeat would only be temporary. For sure the package would be reconsidered the next year and passed.
11. I failed to understand that the moment was not reproducible. Damage was done. Defeat of the April package ushered in a period of virulent ethnic polarization. Over the past eight years, the situation has deteriorated markedly. Only one constitutional amendment has passed during that period, under intense international pressure, to codify the status of the Brcko District in northeastern Bosnia.
12. Meanwhile, the country has fallen further and further behind most of its neighbors in the regatta for EU membership and now looks likely to end up in last place, with little hope of entering the EU before 2025 or later.
13. Those who advocate, as I trust Wolfgang will, that the High Representative responsible for interpretation of the Dayton agreements be removed and Bosnia’s problems be left to the EU accession process for resolution have little evidence that mechanism will work.
14. All the leverage of EU accession did not work to get Bosnians to align their constitution with a decision of the European Court of Human Rights. Nor has it accelerated the adaptation of Bosnia’s court system to European standards.
15. So what is to be done?
16. I think there is no substitute for the Bosnians solving their own problems, even if the internationals helped to create them. The recent “Bosnian spring” plenums are for me a positive sign. So too is the interethnic cooperation in response to the recent floods, which demonstrated clearly that Bosnia’s many governments are unable to serve its citizens well.
17. But the plenums have so far focused on local issues, not national ones. At some point after October’s elections, Bosnians will have to try to fix its constitution. They could do worse than return to the April package and get on with the process of constitutional revision.
18. I also think there are directions that would not be fruitful. Some would like to see even greater group rights and ethnic separation than provided for in the Dayton agreements. That is not in my view a fruitful direction. Apart from its impact on Bosnia, it would have the undesirable effect of encouraging separatism in Ukraine and elsewhere.
19. Others would like to further weaken the central government or allow the entities to negotiate separately their entry into the EU. Those in my view are not fruitful directions.
20. There is a simple test for any proposal for reform in Bosnia: will it make the government in Sarajevo more functional? The corollary question is whether it will accelerate Bosnian entry into NATO and the EU.
21. The April package would have done that. The time is coming to return to it and get the difficult job of constitutional reform done.
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Parody as tragedy
Usually I wait until after an election to comment, as the shelf life of pre-election posts is so limited. But I breached that practice for Egypt, since the outcome was not in doubt. I’ll breach it also for Syria, as the result is again apparent. The only thing uncertain about tomorrow’s election is what numbers Damascus will claim for turnout and for the votes of the two unknowns supposedly running against Bashar al Asad. High turnout and some substantial number of votes for his opponents would help the regime claim that the election provides a measure of legitimacy, which is the purpose of the exercise.
More than three years of attacks on the civilian population, the displacement of perhaps one-third of the population and the flight of more than three million people to other countries tell a different story. Syria is today a disaster, one that will almost surely have broader impacts in the years to come. Thousands (maybe 10,000?) foreign jihadis are fighting each other, the more moderate factions of the opposition and sometimes the regime. Still more radicalized Syrians are involved. If you want to re-establish an Islamic caliphate, Syria and Iraq are attactive places in which to do it, since the Umayyad caliphs originally made their capital in Damascus and the Abbasids in Baghdad.
The West is denouncing Syria’s election as a parody of democracy. But it is not a funny parody. It is a tragic one with wide implications. Those foreign jihadis will no doubt return home some day, not only to America but also to Europe and Russia. The massive refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey cannot be emptied so long as Asad holds power in Syria. Lebanon, which has not wanted camps, is now burdened with more than a million Syrians, causing serious strain on its education and health systems. Overflow of the Syrian war into Iraq has contributed to sectarian strife in a country already suffering severe centrifugal strain.
President Obama at West Point last week indicated he would be increasing the supply of arms to more moderate rebels in Syria. That may be necessary to rebalance the military situation and create conditions for a negotiated settlement. But much more is needed. Moderates won’t win out in Syria unless they can respond to the dramatic needs of the population and govern effectively on liberated territory. The worst outcome in Syria would be a failed state. The situation is already perilously close to that–the regime is losing its capacity to govern in the territory it controls and extremists are gaining the upper hand in the territory it has lost.
Preventing a failed state will require a much more substantial state-building effort than we have engaged in so far. All American presidents want to avoid such enterprises. They are difficult, expensive and unfulfilling. But a Syrian state is necessary if we are to avoid a major rearrangement of borders in the Middle East. Once that starts, it will spread to Lebanon and Iraq for sure, and possibly Jordan and Turkey. You don’t have to like the Sykes-Picot borders to realize that rearranging them will be violent, killing even more than the 150,000 Syrians who are already dead and creating resentments that could embroil the region in war for a decade or more to come.
So when we hear tomorrow that Bashar al Asad has been re-elected with perhaps 70-80% of the vote, we need to remind ourselves that this parody is occurring under tragic conditions and will be prelude to more mayhem unless something more effective is done to create the conditions for a negotiated solution. There are many in the opposition ready to talk. They were well-represented at the
Geneva 2 conference by the Syrian Opposition Coalition. The regime needs to be convinced that it cannot continue to gain militarily and needs instead to come to the negotiating table.
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