Tag: Egypt
Glad tidings
I’m counting the glad tidings today:
1. Egypt: Egyptians are staying away from the polls in an election conducted under conditions that are far from free and fair. General Sisi will be elected, but without the acclamation he had once expected. Maybe he’ll feel he has to work for popular approval, which would be a big change in Egyptian political culture.
2. Ukraine: Ukraine pulled off its presidential election and appears to be gaining an upper hand over separatists who made the mistake of seizing the Donetsk airport, where newly elected Petro Poroshenko was intending to land. While Russian President Putin is still capable of rejecting Poroshenko’s legitimacy, I doubt he’ll do it. He needs Poroshenko to garner the Western support that will enable Ukraine to pay its debts to Russia.
3. Afghanistan: President Obama has decided to leave 9800 American troops in Afghanistan at the end of this year’s withdrawal, but they too are scheduled to come out within two years (end of 2016). That’s a whole lot faster than some people feel comfortable with, but it is presumably intended to give the new Afghan government incentive either to defeat the Taliban or negotiate a political settlement with them.
4. Middle East: I don’t really expect the Pope inviting Presidents Peres and Abbas to the Vatican to bring peace, but in my book he did the right thing to pray at the separation barrier as well as at the Wailing Wall. I have no objection to the Israelis protecting themselves from suicide bombings, but the wall should be on an agreed border, not built unilaterally and all too frequently on territory the Palestinians (and most Israelis) believe belongs within their state.
5. Europe: Yes, the European parliament election returned lots of xenophobes and extreme nationalists, but not so many that the European project is at serious risk of anything more than demands to be more responsive to popular opinion and more aware of resistance to bureaucratic arrogance. Whoever tweeted that those who want change won everywhere but in Germany, which is the only country that can really change things, got it close to right. The government parties did relatively well in Italy too.
6. India/Pakistan: Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif attended Indian Prime Minister Modi’s swearing in and both came away from their meeting sounding notes of hope and conciliation. They will need a lot of both to overcome the problems that divide the two countries, but it was at least a start.
None of this good news comes even close to making the world what it should be, and much of it might be reversed tomorrow. Syria in particular haunts me. I can’t bring myself to praise the UN Secretary General for proposing humanitarian assistance be authorized by the Security Council directly into liberated areas from Turkey, knowing full well that Russia will veto any such move. But when we have a good day or two somewhere in the world, we should acknowledge it.
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Restoration, not transition
I’ve got lots of friends looking for the silver lining in Egypt’s presidential election Monday and Tuesday. All agree General Sisi will win big. The Center for American Progress advises him:
Egypt needs to deal effectively with security threats without creating new ones, set out a clear and practical plan to right the Egyptian economy, respect basic human rights, and open up political space for all Egyptians.
Paul Salem suggests looking beyond the results to the integrity of the electoral process, turnout, the margin of victory and Hamdeen Sabahi’s campaign for hints of what lies in the future.
All that is well and good, but I fear none of it will count for much. What we are seeing in Egypt is not the continuation of a democratic transition. It is the restoration of military autocracy. The “deep state,” which reaches beyond the military into the judiciary and business, is back in charge. Sisi has declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group, jailed its leadership, and expropriated its property. The April 6 Movement, whose leadership denounced these and other violations of human rights, has likewise been jailed and disbanded. The press is under the thumb of the new authorities. Al Jazeera’s journalists are in prison. Thousands of Brotherhood demonstrators have been killed and hundreds condemned to death in one-day sham trials.
All the indicators point in a direction opposite the one CAP advocates. Political space has narrowed, human rights are not respected, nothing practical or clear has been done (or even proposed) about the economy, and the brutality of the crackdown is generating insurgency in the Sinai. The electoral process will be okay, because most of Sisi’s opponents will stay home. Still, turnout will likely not be any lower than is normal in Egyptian elections. Fifty per cent will be a triumph. The margin of victory will be large, but Sabahi will get enough votes to lend credibility to the exercise.
It is what Sisi does with the power Egyptians bestow on him that really counts. Nothing about his behavior since the July 2013 coup suggests he will govern openly and inclusively. He’ll likely keep his current “technocratic” government, or something much like it. It is loaded with holdovers from the Mubarak era. Power in Cairo may be a bit more dispersed, but it is unlikely that the parliamentary elections due in a few months will produce a serious opposition. The Brotherhood may be back some day, as Shadi Hamid suggests, but for now it will revert to its semi-clandestine status while serious advocates for human rights either rot in jail or find refuge abroad.
Western minds find this scenario a difficult one to picture. We have a sense that there is a direction, a right and a wrong side, to history. Progress is in a democratic, liberal direction. It is natural, even inevitable. Anything other than that will run up against newly empowered citizens who won’t give up their hard-won freedoms.
It isn’t necessarily so. Egypt is an astoundingly poor country. Most of its citizens, who live on less than $2 per day, have to think first about their daily bread. Literacy is low and the middle class tiny. The “party of the couch,” who stayed at home during the street demonstrations, is far more representative of citizen sentiment than the April 6 Movement. Even the Brotherhood, which has deep roots, is not finding it easy to mobilize against the army’s determined effort to marginalize it. Liberal notions of freedom of speech, religion and association as well as equality before the law have little constituency in an Egypt that has basically known 7000 years of autocratic rule, in one form or another.
I don’t mean to suggest that Egyptians are incapable of liberal democracy. To the contrary, I think they are not only capable of it but would benefit enormously from it. But the social basis for it is narrow and the resistance to it among the elite strong. Sisi shows every sign of unwillingness to entrust his country’s fate to the will of its people. He is conducting a restoration, not a transition.
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Undaunted
America’s admirably frank ambassador to Libya Deb Jones answered a lot of questions at the Stimson Center this afternoon about Libya, where an American citizen militia leader, Khalifa Hiftar, has been whacking extreme Islamist militias he holds responsible for political violence in Benghazi and Tripoli. This comes on top of more than a year of struggle in the country’s parliament between Islamists and secularists, a semi-abortive election of a constitution-drafting committee, expiration of the parliament’s mandate, resignation of one prime minister and failure to confirm a new one…. The US military calls this a goat rope.
Deb though was undaunted. She refused to criticize Hiftar for his attack on extremists, among whom the United States counts many of its enemies in Libya. The Syrian war and chaos in Egypt are sources of trouble-makers in Libya (as presumably it is for them). She noted (but did not endorse) that Hiftar wants the parliament to step aside and the constitution drafting committee to take over. She hopes he will contain his political ambitions and satisfy himself with taking out the bad apples.
Beyond that she was reluctant to say what precisely Washington would like to see happen. Training of the General Purpose Force by the US, Italy and Turkey is continuing, but its relationship to Libyan governing institutions, which are still rudimentary, is not clear. The Libyans will have to decide what they want.
They have their share of issues to resolve, which Deb characterized along these lines:
- what to do about a “political isolation” law that prohibits former Libyan officials from the Gaddafi era from playing a political role, thus excluding a lot of competent people;
- how to deprive the militias of their political power (“neutralize” them, not in the physical sense);
- how to sort out the confusion of executive and legislative authority in the current constitutional declaration;
- what to do about decentralization of governing authority;
- how Libya’s ample oil and gas resources and revenue will be shared.
The Libyans are going to need help getting these things done, but their absorptive capacity is limited. As Deb put it, there were more people in the room at Stimson (fewer than 100) than there are Libyan officials able and willing to interact to good effect with foreigners. It would be easy to overwhelm them, to no good effect.
The US diplomatic effort she suggested is like a dentist’s drill: a big, complicated piece of (interagency) machinery culminating in a pointy end that has to be wielded with skill to have a good effect. Mixing metaphors: it would be easy to give Libya too much love. There are also pretty severe limitations on what the embassy can do. Its personnel do not visit Benghazi or Derna. Security is tight. Deb gets out, but the embassy is “lean.”
National political dialogue is what Libya needs. Several countries, including the US, have appointed special envoys to help with that process. The dialogue process launched under former Prime Minister Ali Zeidan is continuing. Some people believe it is too closely associated with him to have much good effect. But some process of that sort is necessary to resolve the two big issues that drove the Arab uprisings, not only in Libya: legitimacy and dignity. Restoring both and overcoming the legacy of humiliation by illegitimate regimes will be no quick or easy task.
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Still righting the balance
These are my speaking notes for the talk I gave last night at the DC World Affairs Council on my book,
Righting the Balance (Potomac, 2013). I’ve added a bit about Ukraine, which is in part an instance of state weakness. It also illustrates the limited usefulness of conventional military instruments in meeting asymmetrical challenges, a key theme in the book. Click there on the right to order your own copy!
1. It is truly an honor to present here at the World Affairs Council. The 98 World Affairs Councils throughout this country play a key role in generating and sustaining the kind of citizen engagement in foreign policy that I think is so important in today’s increasingly interconnected world.
2. As I am going to say some harsh things about the State Department and USAID, and even suggest they be abolished in favor of a single Foreign Office, I would like to emphasize from the first that I have enormous respect for the Foreign Service and the devotion of its officers to pursuing America’s interests abroad. I feel the same way about the US military.
3. But I don’t think the Foreign Service is well served by the institutions that hire, pay and deploy our diplomats and aid workers. And I don’t think our military should be called upon to make up for civilian deficiencies.
4. My book, Righting the Balance, is aimed at correcting those imbalances. But it does not start there.
5. It starts with the sweep of American history, which has given our military a leading role in America’s foreign affairs since at least the French and Indian war.
6. Americans think of their country as a peaceful one, but in fact we have had troops deployed in conflict zones for more than a quarter of our history—not even counting wars against native Americans and pirates—and every year since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
7. With each of those wars, we improved our technology and expanded our reach, becoming by the end of the 20th century the world’s only remaining superpower.
8. We have a strong, well-exercised military arm for projecting power. It is so strong that it is reaching a point of diminishing returns: every additional dollar buys miniscule improvement.
9. But our civilian capacities are more limited. This was glaringly apparent in Iraq and Afghanistan, where State and AID struggled, and all too often failed, to meet the requirements.
10. It has also been glaringly apparent during the Arab uprisings, which not only caught our diplomats by surprise but left them puzzled about what to do.
11. These failures are more important than ever before. The enemies who cause us problems today are not often states: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq fell quickly, as did the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
12. We won the wars. We lost the peace.
13. The main threats to America today come not from other strong states but from non-state actors who find haven and support in fragile, weak and collapsing states.
14. Even in Ukraine, the Russians are not using the full weight of their armed forces but rather relying on disruption in challenging the legitimacy of Kiev’s government and its control over territory in the east and south.
15. National security, always more than a military mission, now requires conflict prevention and state-building capacities that are sorely lacking in both State and AID. They have scrambled hard to meet the needs in Bosnia, Kosovo, South Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are not much better configured than when I arrived in Sarajevo for the first time in November 1994.
16. Some of you will be thinking, that’s OK, because we never want to do this state-building stuff again.
17. It’s not only my colleague Michael Mandelbaum who thinks that way. Each and every president since 1989 has resisted getting involved in other countries’ internal politics, and each one has discovered that it is far easier to go to war and kill enemies than it is to withdraw, leaving behind a collapsed state that will regenerate those enemies.
18. Unless you are willing to fight on forever—even longer than the “long war”—you need to build capable states that protect their citizens reasonably well.
19. We are discovering this today in Yemen, where the drone war appears to have created more terrorists than it has killed. This is one of the main reasons President Obama has avoided military intervention in Syria, but the post-war effort there will still be a major one, even if is not primarily a U.S. responsibility. The same is true in eastern DRC and in Colombia, where peace is threatening to break out after decades of war.
20. America won’t be able to avoid being engaged when North Korea or Cuba collapses. Nor will we stay aloof if nuclear-armed Pakistan starts coming apart. Let’s not even think about Iran. If Ukraine is to be kept whole and independent, it will need a far better state than the one that has performed so badly since the Orange Revolution of 2005.
21. So my view is that we need to prepare for the day, not continue to delude ourselves that we will never do it again.
22. But I would be the first to admit that post-war state-building, a subject I teach at SAIS, is hard and expensive. Anticipation is cheaper and better. We need civilian foreign policy instruments that will take early action to prevent states from collapsing and help initiate reforms.
23. We’ve been reasonably successful at allowing this to happen in much of Latin America and East Asia, where recent decades have seen many countries turn in the direction of democratic transition. Brazil, Chile, South Korea, Indonesia are sterling examples of transitions that the United States allowed, nurtured and encouraged.
24. That’s what we failed to do effectively in the Arab world, with consequences that are now on the front pages every day. We failed to anticipate the revolution in Tunisia. In Libya we failed to help the new regime establish a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence. That failure cost us an ambassador and three of his colleagues and has left Libya adrift.
25. In Egypt, we’ve been inconstant, supporting whoever gains power. The result, as I observed during the constitutional referendum in January, is a restoration of the military autocracy, with voters intimidated into staying home rather than voting against the new constitution and human rights advocates imprisoned along with the Muslim Brotherhood leadership.
26. In Syria, we failed to support moderates, only to see them displaced and replaced by extremists. The result is a daily catastrophe of truly genocidal dimensions.
27. The specific areas I describe as lacking in today’s State and AID are these:
• Mobilizing early, preventive action
• Reforming security services
• Promoting democracy
• Countering violent extremism
• Encouraging citizen and cultural diplomacy
28. These are all efforts at the periphery of traditional diplomacy, and I readily admit that the last three are better done mainly outside government while the first two are more inherently governmental.
29. But I don’t think we can get them done with our current institutions, which were designed for different purposes in other eras. Inertia and legacy are too strong.
30. The State Department, originally the Department of the State, is now a conventional foreign ministry with a 19th century architecture: most Foreign Service personnel serve abroad in static embassies and other missions servicing agencies of the US government other than the State Department. Legacy and inertia, not current needs, dictate where it has people stationed and a good deal of what they are doing.
31. USAID was founded with a poverty alleviation and economic development mission to help fight the Cold War. Few of us still think that US government programs can fix poverty at home, much less overseas.
32. There have been a lot of proposals for reform. Let’s recall Condoleezza Rice’s transformational diplomacy and Hillary Clinton’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, now being reprised. None of these efforts have gained more than temporary traction.
33. What we need to do is conduct what scientists call a thought experiment: knowing what we do about the challenges we now face, what kind foreign policy instruments do we need?
34. The answer is nothing like what we’ve got.
35. My book doesn’t offer a detailed design, but it does suggest that we need a single Foreign Office with a national security focus as well as a much-enhanced nongovernmental effort, operated at arms’ length from officialdom but with much greater Congressional funding than it has today.
36. I am not however prepared to propose, as so many have before me, that this new Foreign Office be funded by passing up an F22 or two. I think State and AID have the resources needed, but unfortunately tied up in those elephantine embassies supporting other US government agencies.
37. Shrinking these dramatically would provide the funds for a much sleeker and more effective Foreign Office, including a corps of several thousand people able and willing to deploy, with or without US troops, to difficult environments to take on the hard work of conflict prevention and state-building where required.
38. What we need is a far more agile, anticipatory and mobile Foreign Service, one built for a world in which virtually everyone will soon be connected to worldwide communications at reasonable cost and ordinary citizens, including you, count for much more than ever before in world history.
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Freedom of the press in 2014
Today is World Press Freedom Day. So here is an appropriate post:
Thursday morning Freedom House released Freedom of the Press 2014, its annual report assessing media freedom around the world. The event featured a panel discussion with Karin Karlekar (Freedom of the Press project director), Scott Shane (New York Times national security reporter), and Sue Turton (Al Jazeera correspondent). Jim Sciutto, CNN chief national security correspondent, moderated.
Jim Sciutto asked panelists why they thought global press freedom has fallen in the past year. Karin Karlekar said that technology can be a source for good that enables a large audience to publish and access information. However in many countries, particularly ones with authoritarian governments, governments are increasingly cracking down. In some cases governments have used new tactics. In others, their methods are just an extension of the traditional media censorship methods they have used in the past. Governments are using tools that are supposed to empower people to track and follow them instead.
In China, some of the search engines and social media outlets employ more people to censor them than they do to produce them. They have a large, widespread mechanism for controlling online content. But even governments that don’t have that technological capability have found ways to clamp down online. They pursue people after the material has been produced. That has been the case in some countries like Ethiopia, where they just imprisoned 6 bloggers.
Sciutto asked Scott Shane to put into context leaks and prosecutions. How much of that is a threat to freedom of exchange in the US and how the White House is covered?
Scott commended Freedom House for being objective on the issue of press freedom. It saddened him to see the US downgraded from 21 points last year to 18 points in this year’s report. This has to do with the fact that in all of American history until 2009, there were three government officials prosecuted for leaking classified information to the press. We are now up to eight with Obama. This affects the willingness of government officials to talk even on unclassified but sensitive issues. It affects the reporting that national security journalists do. The US is now ranked lower in press freedom than Estonia and the Czech Republic.
Sciutto: Has it reached a point where our leaders are not under the same level of oversight we expect them to be or that they were ten or twenty years ago?
Shane: In 1971 the New York Times Washington bureau chief Max Frankel wrote a memorandum about the Pentagon Papers arguing that covering secret, classified information is critical to informing the public. Some people take the attitude that it is secret; therefore, it should not be talked about. But that would make the White House and diplomacy impossible to write about.
As an example Shane mentioned how in 2011 the US deliberately hunted down and killed an American citizen in Yemen, the Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al Awlaki. There was a long legal opinion justifying the unilateral killing of an American citizen. That was classified opinion, so Shane made a Freedom of Information Act request for that document in 2010. Four years later, after filing a lawsuit, an appeals court ordered the government to release it. If he is lucky, Shane says he might receive a redacted form of this legal opinion 5 years later. When the president has the right to order the killing of an American citizen is a fairly fundamental question. Americans, Shane argues, have the right to know the legal basis.
Torton explained that she is being tried in absentia for aiding and abetting the Muslim Brotherhood. She left Cairo on November 6, which was a month and a half before the Muslim Brotherhood was accused of terrorism. Her Al Jazeera colleagues were arrested three days after the Muslim Brotherhood was proscribed a terrorist organization. They have been in jail for 126 days. Originally, she believed that the three judges were independent of the state and that they would see the situation for what it is. It is a politically motivated trial and she hoped they would throw the case out. As the sessions go on, however, and the judges refuse bail, she is frightened of the outcome.
Sciutto: Did the Arab Spring fail on the issue of freedom of information?
Turton: Each country has its own situation and different outcomes. Broadly speaking, the Arab Spring did not deliver what Western governments were probably hoping it was going to, which was perfectly packaged democracy. Access to information and the media is freer in some countries. Tunisia has had a sophisticated reaction to the Arab Spring. Libya is still a mess. At the beginning, optimism was enormous and the situation improved, but since then Libya has backtracked. But Egypt has failed. Talking to people on the ground, you get a sense that conditions are worse than under Mubarak.
Sciutto: How much of its moral high ground in terms of pushing for internet freedom has the US lost with the existence of the NSA and other interference on the internet?
Karlekar: I think it is affecting our moral high ground. Many governments use surveillance and other repressive tactics. The US used to be able to say that they should not be doing that. Now it is becoming much more difficult to say that. It is particularly ironic because the US government is trying to sell itself as an open, transparent government, but it is not.
Sciutto asked, are your Al Jazeera colleagues more scared now when they work?
Turton: We have had to change how we operate. This is not just Al Jazeera; it is the media in general. In Egypt it is not just journalists being thrown in jail, but anyone with opposing views.
Sciutto: When you get into issues like coverage of leaks and you worry about your sources and your own legal situation, does that affect the overall quality of reporting?
Shane: I think it has chilled reporting on national security. What is interesting is the crackdown under Obama. There seems to be a random quality to it. All of the cases have involved electronic trails; emails or Internet chat logs. In the past the FBI would say that they would like to investigate this leak, but there are 1,000 people with security clearance. They had no good way of finding out who was responsible. Now, they can go into the government email system and find out exactly who has been talking to the reporter whose byline is on that story.
In fairness, technology is driving leakers as well. Two of the cases, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, are unique in American history. The volume of classified information out there is unprecedented. If our government is tracking leaks to the press in the US, it is obviously happening on an exponentially greater scale in countries like China or Russia.
Karlekar: The fear is that these issues will lead to self-censorship. What stories are not getting covered out of fear?
The entire Freedom House report can be viewed here.
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Triage, not retreat
I spent yesterday morning at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) annual shindig on the Middle East, “Allies, Adversaries and Enemies.” It began with a big-think panel on American foreign policy since 9/11: Robert Kagan, Walter Russell Mead and Leon Wieseltier. FDD President Cliff May moderated. The luminaries skipped any serious discussion of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Nor did they mention the drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen. The consensus was plainly and vigorously anti-Obama: he is shy of using force and leading an American retreat from the world that will get us into deeper trouble in the future. Congressman McKeon (R-CA) makes a similar argument in today’s Washington Post.
This is not my natural habitat, so I’ll try to give an account of the local fauna before launching into a tirade against them.
The panel hit President Obama hard and fast. Wieseltier criticized him for portraying all the alternatives to his policies everywhere as war. Spooked by Iraq, he trumps up phony dichotomies. The truth is he is looking for ways to pull the US out of overseas engagements, especially in the Middle East. As a result, all our friends need reassurance. His policy is one of introversion and absence. The President doesn’t see US power as a good thing and doesn’t recognize that even multilateralism requires US leadership. He wants no more land wars and is trying to ensure that with cuts at the Pentagon, an idea he admittedly inherited from Donald Rumsfeld.
Dissenting sardonically from the view that Obama is a Kenyan socialist, Mead offered a slightly more generous appraisal: Obama believes that as the US withdraws a balance of power will emerge, one that costs the US less than at present. This is a 1930s-style policy close to what most Americans want. But it won’t work, even if the limits of public opinion are real. We’ll get clobbered somehow. The president should harness pro-engagement sentiment and lead more forcefully. Only a balance of power under US hegemony can be stable and reliable.
Kagan concurred, remarking that Americans (unfortunately) have a high tolerance for a collapsing world. But the issue really is military power and America’s willingness to use force. We are on a slippery slope. The Obama doctrine is simply to avoid using force, which is undermining the world’s confidence in our ability and willingness to defend the liberal world order. That is the key objective for American foreign policy. We lost Iraq when Obama withdrew the American troops. The same thing could happen in Afghanistan. Nuclear Iran will be a big problem, but not a threat to the liberal world order, which is more threatened by the waxing military dictatorship in Egypt and the rebellion it will trigger in the future.
Doutbts about whether the US would attack Iran, or let Israel do it, wafted through the room. General Michael Hayden in the next session threw cold water on the idea that Israel either could or should undertake a military strike on its own. No one bothered to consider what would happen in the aftermath of a massive US strike on Iran. Would that stop or accelerate their nuclear program?
The only part of the panel presentations I would happily agree with is the well-established reluctance of the American public to be overly engaged abroad. It was notable that the panel offered not one example of something they thought Obama should do now to respond to the crises in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Egypt or lots of other places. They were full of examples of what he should have done in the past, and absolutely certain he would not do the right things in the future, including decisive military action against the Iranian nuclear program.
Time and energy don’t allow me to respond to all of the points above. Let me comment on three countries I know well: Iraq, Ukraine and Syria.
The notion that it was President Obama who decided to withdraw troops from Iraq is simply wrong. Here is a first-person account from Bob Loftis, who led the failed negotiations on the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA):
[The decision to withdraw US troops] happened in mid-2008 [during the Bush Administration]. My team and I were instructed to work on an agreement that would allow a long term US military presence. At no time did the issue of withdrawal arise, even when the term “SOFA” became politically toxic in Baghdad. SOFA talks were suspended in May 2008, with the focus placed on negotiating the Strategic Framework Agreement (which would have some vague references to “pre-existing arrangements” (i.e. certain parts of CPA17). I then heard in September 2008 that…there were new SOFA talks which were about withdrawal. The “Agreement Between the United States of America and the Republic of Iraq On the Withdrawal of United States Forces from Iraq and the Organization of Their Activities during Their Temporary Presence in Iraq” was signed on 17 November 2008 by Ryan Crocker: Article 24 (1) states “All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.”
People will tell you that President Bush thought the agreement would be revised in the succeeding administration to allow the Americans to stay in some limited number. But that doesn’t change the fact that it was Bush, not Obama, who decided on US withdrawal. Once in office, Obama did try to negotiate permission for the Americans to stay. Prime Minister Maliki didn’t want to give up jurisdiction over crimes committed by US troops. Hard for me to fault the President for not yielding on that point, especially in light of the arbitrary arrests and detentions Maliki has indulged in since. Nor do I think US troops in the mess that is today’s Iraq would be either safe or useful.
Ukraine loomed large over this discussion. No one on the panel had a specific suggestion for what to do there, except that Kagan demurred from the President’s assertion that we have no military option. Of course we do, he said. We have absolute air superiority over Ukraine if we want it. That may be true. But it would require the use of US bases in Europe and Turkey. How long does Kagan think US leadership and the liberal world order would last after war between the US and Russia?
On Syria, I dissent from the President’s policy as much as any of the panelists. But I have specific suggestions for what he should at least consider doing: recognize the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC) as the legitimate government of Syria, overtly arm its affiliated fighters and destroy as much of the Syrian air force and missile inventories as possible. I suppose big thinkers like Wieseltier, Kagan and Mead don’t trade in such small beer, but those of us who treasure concreteness think they should.
It seems to me what the President is up to is not retreat but triage: he is focusing on Iran’s nuclear weapons and the Asia Pacific because he thinks the issues there threaten vital US interests. Syria for him falls below the line. For me it is above: the threat to neighboring states in the Levant and the growth of extremism put it there. But that simple and entirely understandable distinction would not inspire the kind of disdain that the panelists indulged in and the audience applauded at yesterday’s event.
PS, May 6: For the skeptical masochists among you, here is video of the event, which arrived today:
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