Category: Daniel Serwer
Vietnam in perspective
For Americans of my generation, it is hard not to note the end of the Vietnam war 40 years ago. But the most notable thing is how little difference that war makes in today’s world. A war that killed millions over two decades, including upwards of 58,000 Americans, left a big mark on the American psyche, but did little to change the course of world history. It didn’t even do permanent harm to the relationship between Vietnam and the US, which is today a friendly one only inches short of an alliance.
On a trip to Vietnam a few years ago, I discovered that the “American” war is remembered in the North for the bombing and in the South for the abandonment of our allies. One Northerner asked me why the United States opposed the independence and unity of Vietnam. When I responded that the Americans thought they were fighting against Communism, not the independence and unity of Vietnam, he looked puzzled. If that was the case, he admitted, maybe it was not such a bad idea. After all, antiquated Communist ideas and cadres are now regarded with disdain by many Vietnamese, even this Northerner whose parents were party members.
The Vietnam war may be but a blip in world history, but it changed (as well as ended) a lot of lives. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled. Over a million went through horrendous re-education camps, where torture and abuse were common. A generation of Americans found it difficult to find their footing, including many of those who served in the armed forces and many of those who didn’t. The American military professionalized, so it no longer relies on the draft. Many young Americans can’t remember that it ever did.
Once the Americans were gone, Vietnam invaded Cambodia to depose the Chinese-allied Khmer Rouge. China invaded Vietnam in response. The dominoes weren’t so much falling as scattering.
Even that proved ephemeral. Since the 1970s, Asia has seen a dramatic and sustained decline in both intra- and inter-state conflict. The reasons for this are much debated. Is it a successful process of state consolidation and even modest democratization? Is it Asia’s focus on economic development or its peculiar cultural characteristics? What role has the American security umbrella played? Will peace continue? Or does China’s rise inevitably mean maritime and other frictions with its neighbors (including the US) that will end the long Asian peace?
I don’t know the answers, but a great deal depends on them. While I have focused on the Balkans and the Middle East for many years now, I have to wonder whether war and peace issues won’t be shifting eastward along with world population, economic growth, international trade, military power and energy dependency. For the moment, state competition in the Asia Pacific is mainly non-military, with the important exception of Beijing’s claims in the East and South China Seas. But the Chinese seem no less anxious to avoid war than most of the rest of Asia, even if they don’t shy from occasional provocations.
Forty years is a long time. Vietnam looks very different at this generational distance. We should try to maintain that perspective when evaluating today’s events. They are likely to look very different 40 years from now.
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Bollywood diplomacy
Diplomacy is generally a conservative occupation. It tries to change little with the times. There is a reason diplomats were the last people on earth wearing top hats. They will be the last wearing ties and pin-striped suits too.
But in the age of social media diplomats are under pressure to adapt. Many do, though typically in pretty conservative ways. Their Twitter feeds are not generally full of clever repartee. Their Youtube videos are on the staid side.
But there are exceptions to every rule. Here is my colleague Michael Steiner, Germany’s ambassador to India, in a Bollywood production his embassy has put out:
I suppose this is a needed corrective to Germany’s button-down reputation. I’ll be curious to hear what peacefare.net readers think of the experiment.
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May their memory be a blessing
The confirmed killing of two aid workers in a January US drone strike in Pakistan is big news in Washington this morning. Warren Weinstein, 73, lived in this area. Giovanni Lo Porto, 39, was Italian.
Both had been doing the kinds of work many of my students at SAIS aspire to. Weinstein, a former political science professor, was working for a USAID contractor on rural development projects. Lo Porto, who studied peace and conflict issues at London Metropolitan University, was working for a German non-governmental organization on restoring drinking water in a flooded rural area. Experienced operators, they both nevertheless fell victim to kidnappings and ended up in Al Qaeda hands. Weinstein was taken in August 2011 in Lahore. Lo Porto in January 2012.
There was a time when aid workers of this sort might have been left alone by belligerents. No longer. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in particular, but also other “jihadi” groups, have made a thriving business of kidnap and ransom. The Italian government is widely believed to be prepared to deal, even paying substantial ransoms. The American government would like it believed it does not deal and in particular does not pay ransoms. Neither approach yielded the desired result in these two cases.
Kidnapping is not only a business. Increasingly, jihadi groups see aid workers as helping their enemies to establish legitimacy by providing services to the poor. The good works Weinstein and Lo Porto were undertaking might be welcome to the villages where they were undertaken, but not to those who want to undermine and destroy the Pakistani state. Many aid organizations are concerned about this and try to keep all belligerents at more or less equal arm’s length, but that is hard to do when it comes to belligerents who don’t acknowledge anyone as “neutral” or “humanitarian.”
The jihadi presence has caused a vast increase in the protection required to conduct humanitarian operations in today’s war zones, which in turn reduces the credibility of the humanitarian claim and raises your value as a target. If your warehouses, homes and offices all have to be protected 24/7 by armed guards, you start looking like just one more belligerent, or like one more extension of state power. As a non-governmental civilian, this makes me generally more comfortable in a conflict zone outside the envelope of visible security than inside it. Moving from one zone to the other–through checkpoints–is often your most dangerous moment.
Weinstein was reportedly taken in Lahore after his residential guards accepted an offer of a free meal. The circumstances of Lo Porto’s kidnapping are unclear to me. But the point is this: it could happen to any tens of thousands of aid workers in dozens of fragile states around the world. Few nongovernmental organizations can provide a level of physical protection to individuals that will foil a concerted kidnapping attempt by half a dozen toughs. Once taken, a victim in at least a dozen of these countries can be sold on quickly to Al Qaeda or the Islamic State.
The best defense is simply not to be at an expected place at the expected time. But strict adherence to that approach would make work on many development issues impossible. Everyone is working remotely to a greater extent than ever before, but it just isn’t possible to do a good job supervising or implementing aid projects, training people and providing advice without seeing the projects first hand and talking directly with the local implementers and beneficiaries.
It takes real courage and conviction to do what Weinstein and Lo Porto were doing. It should never be confused with careless adventure-seeking by those with no serious business in conflict zones. Nor should we blame for their deaths the drone operators and intelligence analysts who take on the enormous responsibility of trying to prevent collateral damage. It is the kidnappers who were responsible for Weinstein and Lo Porto being in the wrong place at the wrong time, no one else.
The people who do aid work in conflict zones merit our appreciation and support as much as those who serve in uniform. The risks they run and the sacrifices they make are far greater than they should be.
Zichronam Livracha
May their memory be a blessing.
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Why critics of the nuclear deal are wrong
Max Fisher offers Mike Doran a platform for his case against the nuclear deal with Iran. Here are ten ways in which Mike is mistaken:
1. MD: Detente is the strategic goal, and arms control is the means to achieve it.
President Obama has made it clear he would welcome a broader detente with Iran, but he has also made it clear the nuclear deal has to be judged on its own merits. I don’t see any evidence that he is prevaricating, but if that is Mike’s claim he should produce the support.
2. MD: I don’t think it [preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon] is achievable without a significant coercive component. I think this is one of the most faulty assumptions of the administration.
Trouble is, the Obama Administration does not make that faulty assumption. It has done much more than any prior administration to increase the sanctions pressure on Iran, far more than the Administration for which Mike worked.
3. MD: [The Iranians] want sanctions relief and they’re going to get it, and they see that they’re going to get it, and they will stick with this process as long as they get direct, immediate, and very desirable benefits from it.
That is precisely the point of the negotiations: to provide sanctions relief provided Tehran gives up its nuclear weapons ambitions for at least ten years and moves itself back from a “breakout” of two or three months to a “breakout” time of a year. This is not an argument against the deal. It’s an argument for it.
4. MD: In fact, the starting point is that the Iranians want hegemony in the region, and they’re reading American policy with respect to their regional aspirations. The goal of Iran’s nuclear weapons program is not to defend against the United States or Israel — it’s to advance its regional agenda.
That’s right, and it is also a very good reason for halting Iran before it gets nuclear weapons. Again: a very good argument for the deal.
5. MD: I’m in favor of a vigorous containment program across the board, and I’m also in favor of a policy that says we have all options on the table and we mean it. The president says all options are on the table, but he doesn’t actually mean it, and I think we should mean it.
This confidence that his opponents know better than what the president says is laughable. The debate over destroying the Iranian nuclear program has clarified the limited gains it would provide: only two or three years of setback and an enormous incentive for Iran to redouble its efforts. But the notion that showing resolution by sabre-rattling would improve the prospects for a good deal is simply wrong.
6. MD: For a time the Iranians certainly believed all options were on the table. They abandoned their weaponization program, or they put it on hold, in 2003. Well, what happened in 2003? The United States went into Iraq, and I think they were probably very concerned at that point about all options being on the table.
The Iranians were concerned then about an American invasion, which is no longer a viable threat no matter who is president. But they spent the rest of the Bush Administration building and spinning thousands of more centrifuges, a fact Mike conveniently forgets.
7. MD: The very process of the negotiation is destroying the sanctions regime we established, which is the greatest nonmilitary instrument we have for coercing them.
This is laughable. The process of negotiation is absolutely vital to building and maintaining the multilateral sanctions regime. Without negotiations, the Europeans, Russians and Chinese would not be on board for sanctions.
8. MD: Iran’s status in the international community is going to be greatly improved, and then there’s going to be an international commercial lobby and a diplomatic-military lobby, which includes the Chinese and the Russians, in favor of the new order in which Iran is a citizen in good standing in the international community that they can do business with.
This is true, but misleading. That “international commercial lobby” already exists. If no agreement is reached, the sanctions are mincemeat. The notion that we can continue to hold on to them indefinitely is nonsense.
9. MD: The key question in that regard is, “When did he start to see Iran as a partner in Iraq?”
When the whole question of the status of forces agreement in Iraq was alive in 2010, [former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon] Panetta and [Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus and everybody are saying, “Keep forces on the ground in Iraq,” and the president had a different inclination. Well, if the United States is not going to be directly involved in Iraq, then who is going to protect our interests and protect stability in Iraq? And I think that, although he’s never admitted this, he assumed the Iranians would play that role for him.
I would say it was the Bush invasion of Iraq that gave Iran its big opening in Iraq. But leaving that aside: George W. Bush, not Barack Hussein Obama, negotiated the agreement for the complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. It was signed before he left office. What Mike is talking about here is an attempt to renegotiate that agreement, which the Obama Administration did pursue. But the Iraqis weren’t willing to give the US juridiction over its troops in Iraq and we weren’t willing to stay without it.
10. MD: If the Iranian regime — and I do believe they are rational — were truly put before the choice, if Ali Khamenei was put before a choice of “Your nuclear program or absolutely crippling, debilitating economic sanctions,” he would think twice. I think if he were put before a choice of “Your nuclear program or severe military strikes,” he would think twice.
So how do you get those crippling economic sanctions, whichc have to be multilateral, if you are not also negotiating with Iran? Absolutely no realistic proposal.
Here at last, the true agenda: get us into war with Iran, but note no mention of the only temporary setback to the Iranian nuclear program (and consequently the need to intervene repeatedly every couple of years), no mention of the likelihood the Iranians would redouble the efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, no consideration of the impact on the world economy, or secondary consequences (relations with China, Russia, the Europeans, Iranian responses in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, maybe also Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE).
Here is the kicker: if you really want to go to war with Iran, you’ll be much better off doing it because they violated an agreement than just doing it. So a nuclear deal is a good idea if that is your objective as well.
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The Greece-Macedonia name dispute
I spoke at Harvard Friday about the Greece-Macedonia name dispute, along with Matt Nimetz and Boshk0 Stankovski. Here are the speaking notes I used.
1. Thank you for that kind introduction. The opportunity to speak at Harvard Law School is truly an honor. Harvard’s Project on Negotiation is a mecca for all who would like to see disputes managed peacefully.
2. That is what Matt Nimetz has done for more than 20 years. I am honored to meet him. We should not minimize his extraordinary achievement: an issue that in the early 1990s threatened to throw Macedonia into the Balkans cauldron with Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo has steadily lost its saliency.
3. I confess that I’ve even referred to it as the most boring dispute in the Balkans and therefore promise to speak less than 20 minutes more about it.
4. Let’s start with the obvious: this dispute is not really about the name. If it were, Greeks would long ago have accepted my citing the 1257 places in the United States that use the name “Macedonia” as dispositive. They would celebrate, not denigrate, the compliment from their neighbor.
5. Washington, DC was founded explicitly as the “new Rome.” I’ve never met an Italian who objected. The Italian government has even donated a few statues to beef up that image.
6. There were, however, already a lot of Americans dressed in togas adorning statuary hall in the Capitol, a building that is a blatant 18th-century attempt to imitate the glory of the ancients. Not to mention the National Gallery’s rip-off of the coffered ceiling of the Pantheon.
7. No, if this dispute were about the name and the statues, Greeks would be pleased that a non-Greek people who have come to occupy land that was once ancient Paeonia have adopted Greek antecedents as their ideal.
8. But if it is not about the name, what is it about? Read more
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This war isn’t over yet
The big news from Iraq today is the alleged death in Tikrit of “King of Clubs” IzzatIbrahim al-Douri, who is believed to have led the Ba’athistNaqshbandi Army. He was a key figure in the alliance of the Ba’athists with the Islamic State. It’s anyone’s guess how his death will affect that alliance. It is even possible he is not yet dead. It wouldn’t be the first false report of its type.
If he is dead, it is reasonable to hope that tension will grow between two groups with different goals: the Ba’athists aim to restore dictatorship in Iraq, while the Islamic State aims to destroy Iraq and install on the territory it takes there and elsewhere an Islamic caliphate. Those goals may overlap for a time, but ultimately they are incompatible. Rumors of tension were already rife. Might al-Douri’s death aggravate the friction between the two groups?
It’s possible, but rarely has the disappearance of one leader or another in the recent Middle East wars meant a decisive turn. The Islamic State (then in Iraq) survived the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006 and eventually revived. The later years of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship had already seen a good deal of Islamicization. The Islamic State long ago adopted Saddam’s “Republic of Fear” strategies: killing, often without reason, to cow the general population into submission.
It is also possible that the Ba’athists and Islamic State will recognize the threat that disunity poses, reconsolidate their alliance and reconfigure their forces to defend better the territory they still control. ISIS forces are even advancing on Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province and an important outpost still under Baghdad’s control. Whether they succeed in that effort or not, the Islamic State and its Ba’athist allies are still far from defeat.
The center of gravity in this war is still the Sunni population. ISIS and Ba’athist success would not have been possible without both passive and active support from Sunnis in Ninewa, Anbar and Salahuddin provinces. Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi in Washington this week has done his best to reassure the Obama Administration that he understands that, but he also remains heavily dependent on Shia “popular mobilization” forces, who fight harder and better than the Iraqi Army and are linked to political parties that support Abadi’s coalition government. But using Shia forces in predominantly Sunni Anbar and mixed Ninewa will push Sunnis there in the direction of ISIS and the Ba’athists.
This war isn’t over yet.
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