Tag: Arab League
Bombing is not sufficient
To bomb or not to bomb was yesterday’s question. Now most of Washington is agreeing that to stop the Islamic State bombing is necessary. The questions currently asked concern how much, whether to do it in Syria as well as Iraq, the intelligence requirements and how many American boots needed on the ground, even if not in combat.
Bombing may well be necessary to stop extremist advances, but it is certainly not sufficient to roll back or defeat the Islamic State. If you think the United States is at risk from the IS, you will want to do more than bomb. Quite a few people are proposing just that, though the numbers of troops they are suggesting necessary (10-15,000) seems extraordinarily low given our past experience in Iraq. Presumably they are counting on the Kurdish peshmerga and the 300,000 or so Iraqi troops the Americans think are still reasonably well organized and motivated. How could that go wrong?
But the military manpower question is not the only one. The first question that will arise in any areas liberated from the IS is who will govern? Who will have power? What will their relationship be to Damascus or Baghdad? How will they obtain resources, how will they provide services, how will they administer justice? The Sunni populations of Iraq (where they are a majority in the areas now held by IS) and of Syria (where they are the majority in the country as a whole) will not want to accept prime minister-designate Haider al Abadi (much less Nouri al Maliki, who is still a caretaker PM) or President Asad, respectively.
Bombing may solve one problem, but it opens a host of others. This is, of course, why President Obama has tried to avoid it. He heeds Colin Powell’s warning: you break it, you own it. The governance question should not be regarded as mission creep, or leap. It is an essential part of any mission that rolls back or defeats the IS. Without a clear plan for how it is to be accomplished, bombing risks making things worse–perhaps much worse–rather than better.
Sadly, the United States is not much better equipped or trained to handle the governance question–and the associated economic and social questions–than it was on the even of the Afghanistan war, 12 years ago. Yes, there is today an office of civilian stability operations in the State Department, but it can quickly deploy only dozens of people. Its budget has been cut and its bureaucratic rank demoted since its establishment during George W. Bush’s first term. Its financial and staff resources are nowhere near what will be required in Syria and Iraq if bombing of the IS leads to its withdrawal or defeat.
The international community–UN, European Union, NATO, Arab League, Organization of the Islamic Conference, World Bank, International Monetary Fund–are likewise a bit better at post-war transition than they were, but their successes lie in the Balkans in the 1990s, not in the Middle East in the 2010s. They have gained little traction in Libya, which needs them, and only marginally more in Yemen, where failure could still be imminent. Syria and Iraq are several times larger and more complex than any international statebuilding effort in recent times, except for Afghanistan, which is not looking good.
Even just the immediate humanitarian issues associated with the wars in Syria and Iraq are proving too complex and too big for the highly capable and practiced international mechanisms that deal with them. They are stretched to their limits. We don’t have the capacity to deal with millions of refugees and displaced Iraqis and Syrians for years on end, on top of major crises in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and ebola in West Africa.
President Obama has tried hard to avoid the statebuilding challenges that inevitably follow successful military operations. He wanted to do his nationbuilding at home. We need it, and not just in Ferguson, Missouri, where citizens clearly don’t think the local police exercise their authority legitimately. But international challenges are also real. Failing to meet them could give the Islamic State openings that we will come to regret.
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An unhappy Eid
For most Muslims, today marks the begining of Eid al Fitr, the feast thats end the month of Ramadan. It won’t be an Eid Mubarak (Blessed Eid) for lots of people: there is war in Syria, Iraq, Gaza/Israel, Sudan and Libya, renewed repression in Egypt and Iran, instability in Yemen. The hopes of the Arab spring have turned to fear and even loathing, not only between Muslims and non-Muslims but also among Shia, Sunni and sometimes Sufi. Extremism is thriving. Moderate reform is holding its own only in Tunisia, Morocco and maybe Jordan. Absolutism still rules most of the Gulf.
The issues are not primarily religious. They are political. Power, not theology, is at stake. As Greg Gause puts it, the weakening of Arab states has created a vacuum that Saudi Arabia and Iran are trying to fill, each seeking advantage in their own regional rivalry. He sees it as a cold war, but it is clearly one in which violence by surrogates plays an important role, even if Riyadh and Tehran never come directly to blows. And it is complicated by the Sunni world’s own divisions, with Turkey and Qatar supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia opposing it.
The consequences for Arab civilians are dramatic. Well over 100,000 are now dead in Syria, half the population is displaced, uncounted more are dead in Iraq and millions more displaced. Egypt has largely reversed the liberation of its aborted 2011 revolution but still faces more violence than before it. Libya has been unable to tame or dissolve its militias, which are endangering its population and blocking its transition. While the total numbers killed in the Gaza war are far smaller than in Syria or Iraq, the percentage of civilians among the victims–and the broader impact on the civilian population–is causing anti-Israel revulsion worldwide.
Greg wants the United States to favor order over chaos. The trouble is it is hard to know which policies will do what. Will support for Iraq Prime Minister Maliki block the Islamic State, or will it incentivize extremist recruitment and make matters worse, perhaps even causing partition? The military government in Egypt, with which Greg thinks we should continue to engage, is arguably creating more problems with extremists in Sinai and the western desert than it is solving with its arbitrary and draconian crackdown against liberals as well as Islamists. The Obama administration is inclined to support America’s traditional allies in the Gulf, as Greg suggest, but what is it to do when Qatar and Turkey are at swordpoints with Saudi Arabia ?
Many Arab states as currently constituted lack what every state needs in order to govern: legitimacy. The grand failure of the Arab spring is a failure to discover new sources of legitimacy after decades of dictators wielding military power. The “people” have proven insufficient. Liberal democracy is, ideologically and organizationally, too weak. Political Islam is still a contender, especially in Syria, Iraq and Libya, but if it succeeds it will likely be in one of its more extreme forms. In Gaza, where Hamas has governed for seven years, political Islam was quite literally bankrupt even before the war. Their monarchies’ ability to maintain order as neighbors descend into chaos is helping to sustain order in Jordan and Morocco. Oil wealth and tribal loyalties are propping up monarchies in the Gulf, but the demography there (youth bulge and unemployment) poses serious threats.
The likelihood is that we are in for more instability, not less. Iran and Saudi Arabia show no sign of willingness to end their competition. They will continue to seek competitive advantage, undermining states they see as loyal to their opponent and jumping in wherever they can to fill the vacuums that are likely to be created. Any American commitment to order will be a minor factor. This will not, I’m afraid, be the last unhappy Eid.
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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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Par for the course
E-International Relations published this piece yesterday:
UN and Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi adjourned the so-called Geneva II peace talks on 31 January without any substantial agreement. He is hoping to reconvene the talks on February 10.
While the press has been bemoaning the lack of progress and the prospect of collapse, this session went about as well as could be expected. The homicidal Syrian government is finding itself cornered by a moderate opposition that went to Montreux and then Geneva fragmented politically, weakened on the battlefield and holding a losing diplomatic hand. But the opposition has managed to take advantage of Damascus’ unforced errors. The result is not peace. But it is a clear indication of who stands in the way of peace.
The basic problem with Geneva II was congenital. The meeting was born of a joint American/Russian desire to do something. But Moscow and Washington have been unable to agree on precisely what the something is. Washington thinks it is creation of a transitional government formed by mutual consent, which therefore excludes President Bashar al Asad from power. Moscow mouths agreement with the June 2012 “Geneva I” agreement that calls for such a transitional government with full executive powers but denies that this means Asad has to step aside.
Neither Moscow nor Washington has been prepared to yield on this fundamental point. Moscow, while claiming not to be wedded to Bashar al Asad, continues to supply him with vital weapons, financing and diplomatic support. Washington might like to find a compromise. President Obama regards the Syrian conflict as a distraction from his main objective: blocking Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. But the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC) that Washington supports and nurtures insists that Bashar al Asad step down, aside or out. So too do the opposition fighters. Even if the SOC were to compromise, the fight would go on.
The Syrian government tried hard in its overly lengthy and aggressive opening statement last week to change the subject. It wants Geneva II to focus on terrorism, by which it means any armed resistance to its brutal attempts to crack down on dissent. Meanwhile, Asad is preparing the way for spring elections in government-controlled areas guaranteed to return him to office. Iran is backing him to the hilt. Excluded from the Geneva II meeting, Iran’s President Rouhani took advantage of the annual Davos conclave to project his moderate image. But Tehran continues to provide both Revolutionary Guard Corps advisers and Hizbollah fighters to make up for the Syrian regime’s dwindling army and other security forces.
The fractious opposition had a hard time agreeing to go to the Geneva II talks and arrived there without command and control over most of the forces fighting the Asad regime (and each other). But by insisting on the transitional governing body as the subject of the conference, the opposition hit the Syrian regime at its most sensitive point. Damascus is unwilling to negotiate any transition away from Bashar al Asad. That makes it the main obstacle to a political solution and the peace that would presumably ensue.
UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi at one point was meeting separately with the delegations in Geneva. This was interpreted in the press as a setback, because the original plan was for them to meet in the same room but talk separately to Brahimi. But from a diplomatic perspective, meeting separately with Brahimi, a procedure known as “proximity” talks, is preferable. That way he can probe each side out of the hearing of the other on their bottom lines and on what each might be able to offer to save the talks from collapse.
A one-off prisoner exchange and local ceasefires are the most likely candidates. The intelligence value of prisoners declines rapidly after their capture. Even if their treatment is abysmal, they still need to be guarded and fed. Failing to provide them with minimal sustenance brings the wrath of the international community. So getting rid of prisoners you are holding is a plus in wartime, especially if you can get some of your own people released in exchange, thus alleviating pressure from your own side.
Local ceasefires are far less likely to be successful. Where they have occurred, the Syrian regime often disrupts them with shelling by artillery, rockets and bombs. International monitors are lacking. There is no third party to assign responsibility for breaches or to facilitate communications. Sustained ceasefires are therefore unlikely, though short-term humanitarian windows for delivery of humanitarian supplies or evacuation of vulnerable people may sometimes be possible.
At this stage, the talks cannot achieve much more. The Asad regime thinks it is winning and wants to continue the fight, even if it is unlikely to be able to put all of Syria back under Asad’s control. The opposition is battered and weary, but still willing to do battle. It may look like a stalemate to outsiders, but it has not reached the “mutually hurting” stage: “ripeness” requires that both sides have to conclude that they will do better by ending the fight rather than continue it.
When all else fails, an agreement to meet again is trumpeted as success. The important thing is that if talks collapse, or fail to agree anything substantial, they do so in a way that causes little harm and leaves open the possibility of reconvening. Even if reconvened talks lead to prisoner releases and local ceasefires, the fighting will continue, as should the talking. This is par for the course. If peace agreements were easy, we wouldn’t have wars.
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Peace Picks, January 27-31
1. War Crimes, Youth Activism & Memory in the Balkans
Monday, January 27 | 12pm – 1pm
Woodrow Wilson Center 6th floor, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Past post-conflict justice processes in the Balkan region were comprised of a variety of protagonists, such as governments, international institutions, and civil society. Mechanisms to cope with mass atrocities committed during the conflict in the 1990s included international trials in The Hague, domestic trials in many of the former states of Yugoslavia, and several truth commission attempts. In recent years there has also been a rise in youth activism to confront war crimes. However, literature in transitional justice that addresses this phenomenon remains underdeveloped. This research draws on over two-dozen in-depth interviews with youth activist leaders across the former Yugoslavia focusing on their performance-based campaigns. Additional data was collected from online prosopographic analysis—which consists of studying common characteristics of these activists by means of a collective study of their lives and careers. In his findings, the author explains why the emergence of transitional justice youth activism in the Balkans falls short of the significant institutional reforms of earlier youth movement mobilizations in the regions. He also throws light on why their performance activism is distinct from practices of older, established human rights organizations in the region. Notwithstanding, he argues that this performance-based advocacy work has fueled the creation of a new spatiality of deliberation—so called strategic confrontation spaces—to contest the culture of impunity and challenge the politics of memory in the former Yugoslavia.
SPEAKERS
Arnaud Kurze: Visiting Scholar; Center for Global Studies, George Mason University
John R. Lampe: Senior Scholar Professor Emeritus; Department of History, University of Maryland – College Park Read more
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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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