Tag: Iran
Syrians need even more courage
AJ English is doing what it can to cover events in Syria from nonprofessional footage, as journalists have been kept out:
Brian Whitaker, whose al-bab.com is one of the best blogs covering the Arab world, is being widely cited today for saying about Syria:
For the regime, the only tool left now is repression, and in the long run that will seal its fate. The question is how long.
Of course in the long run we are all dead, but I wish I shared his confidence that repression will not succeed. One need only recall popular rebellions that did not succeed in Burma, Thailand, Belarus, Venezuela and elsewhere to be reminded that autocratic regimes sometimes do manage to repress their opponents. The outcome in Syria is not yet obvious to me, much as I might wish Whitaker correct.
As President Obama has suggested, Bashar al Assad is being egged on and assisted by Tehran, which will regard the Syrian repression as a quid pro quo for Saudi intervention in Bahrain. This is cynical and ugly, but sometimes cynical and ugly succeeds. As Babak Rahimi says in a piece for the Jamestown Foundation yesterday:
If successful in its reaction to the events in Syria, Tehran will be able to reinforce its national interests and expand its reach in the region. If Syria is unsuccessful in subduing its revolt and goes the route of Egypt, then Iran will lose a major strategic ally and access to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which could have a major impact on Iran’s position in the Middle East.
If Babak is correct, and I think he is, it is puzzling that the Americans have waited so long to express their displeasure with the repression in Syria.
Of course it may well be that the demonstrators are better off without overt American assistance, which the regime would no doubt use to tar them as foreign stooges. But that label for the moment seems more appropriate for Bashar al Assad, who is clearly getting Iranian encouragement and support.
The Syrian demonstrations yesterday were widespread, but not overwhelming in numbers, and the regime showed little hesitation in mowing down its opponents, killing upwards of 75. That however is a smallish number in the history of repression in Syria. Bashar is trying desperately to prevent Damascus from erupting. It is not pre-ordained that he will fail–a lot of people in Damascus owe their jobs to the regime, which has husbanded the spoils less greedily than Gaddafi in Libya.
Syrians still need to decide how much they want change, and how much change they want. No one should presume to tell its citizens that they have to risk their lives. That is for them to decide, I hope in numbers so large that the outcome Whitaker predicts will come sooner rather than later.
PS: Courage does not appear to be lacking. This crowd chanting “the people want to topple the regime” is in Zabadani, near the Lebanese border, tonight:
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DC lunch: women of courage
Yes, I did make it to both lunchtime events today, Mona Makram-Ebeid at the Middle East Institute and Shirin Ebadi at the Carnegie Endowment. Hard to beat that for a ringside seat to observe the changing Middle East.
A former member of the Egyptian parliament now at the University of Cairo, Professor Makram-Ebeid was at pains to underline the liberal, democratic, non-sectarian, non-religious character of the Egyptian revolution, which sought “dignity, justice, freedom and human rights.” The problem is that in the aftermath Egyptian institutions are still fragile, the constitution is still one that gives the president the power to eliminate freedom, and the forces competing for influence include the army, the Muslim Brotherhood and the various liberal democratic opposition forces, which are notably less strong and more fragmented than the other two.
The liberal democratic opposition wants a date certain for constitutional reform as well as a new electoral law that makes the system more proportional (rather than majoritarian). They did not like the army’s insistence on amending the old constitution and submitting it to referendum, but that is water under the bridge. What they need to do now is to prevent a “rift between the people and the army” while they prepare themselves for elections by unifying and attracting Muslim moderates. No strong liberal democratic force can emerge without Islamic elements within it. The older secular parties are weak. Turkey and Indonesia provide examples of democratic Islamic states, but Egypt will develop its own model.
The Muslim Brotherhood, she thought, would be more manageable within the system than outside it. The National Democratic Party of Hosni Mubarak is still a serious threat, as are the Salafists and jihadists who have suddenly emerged. The Army is the key to ensuring these elements do not disrupt the transition to democracy.
What does Egypt need from the U.S.? Moral support and economic assistance, the latter in the form of renegotiation of Egypt’s debt (with generous forgiveness) and retrieval of stolen assets. This will be larger than the official aid package, which should focus on promoting democratic civil society. Egypt will try to resuscitate tourism and hopes Egyptian expatriates will help. Cairo will have to be careful in rooting out corruption not to damage the productive economy.
Professor Makram-Ebeid finished with a flourish, quoting MLK:
The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.
The second game of my lunch time double header was a conversation with Iranian Nobel Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi. She would have appreciated that arc of history bending towards justice, but started off with another bon mot:
If you can’t eliminate injustice, at least tell everyone about it
Living now in exile in Atlanta, she has done just that in The Golden Cage. But today’s event was more about Iran than about the book.
Bottom line: Iran is like the fire under embers.
By which I took her to mean that it may burst into flame at any moment, even though it seems under autocratic control at the moment. She still believes, and works for, the motto of the revolution: “independence and freedom.” But that is not what the current government is delivering. Iranians have lost freedom since the time of the Shah. They don’t freely elect their representatives and their government is busy helping Bolivia and rebels in Senegal, things that have nothing to do with the welfare of Iranians.
Women, who have a high level of culture in Iran and constitute 65% of university students, face discrimination: the testimony of two women is required in court to equal the testimony of a man, their lives are compensated at half the rate of a man’s, they need written permission of their husbands to travel. It is no surprise that many women are found in the Green Movement opposition.
She prefers nonviolence as the means in Iran; the goal is democracy and human rights. It is not yet clear whether this can be achieved within the current constitutional regime or will need a new one. Many rights are guaranteed in the constitution in word, but not implemented in practice by the government. The government uses violence against the citizens; governments that do this will fall.
Asked whether she would opt for peace or justice in a post-revolution Iran, she replied it would depend on circulstances. She was vigorous in denouncing the Iraqi government’s attack on the Mujahadeen el Khalq (MEK) at Camp Ashraf, insisting they are refugees and should not be forced back to Iran, where they would be mistreated. She refused to be drawn out on whether the MEK is a terrorist organization, saying only a court could decide that.
U.S. sanctions, she thought, are not really “sanctions,” i.e. punishments. The U.S. has the right to regulate its trade. Iran may not like it, but Washington is within its rights.
The nuclear program is not a particular source of pride for Iranians, who view it as hurting them because of sanctions and in any event don’t want to see another Fukushima reactor incident in Iran. Besides, they’ve got more important things to worry about. Like private internet access, which is nominally allowed by the law but not yet implemented.
She was in no mood to give advice to President Obama (and I imagine would prefer to give it privately), but did say that she appreciated his Nowruz (New Year’s) message, which had the right approach.
I admit: lunch took more than an hour. But it was worth it! It would be hard to find two more eloquent exponents of a revolution in progress and one not yet quite started.
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Riyadh and Washington try to get it together
With King Abdullah back in the saddle throne since late February, after months abroad for medical treatment, it seems to me that Saudi diplomacy has gone into relative overdrive. Their biggest move was troops into Bahrain, to free up the Bahraini security forces to beat up demonstrators, but now they appear to be taking an active role in arranging for the departure of President Ali Abdullah Saleh from his post, if not from the country. I imagine they’ve decided now he is more liability than asset, something most Yemenis seem to have concluded weeks ago.
The Americans are also in overdrive, with Defense Secretary Gates and National Security Adviser Donilon wearing out the flying carpet to Riyadh. This is likely in part damage limitation–the Saudis aren’t happy to see the Americans plumping for transition in the democratic direction in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain. It must be difficult to convince them that somehow we’ll manage to stop the process before it gets to the Kingdom, which has largely pacified its own population and cracks down hard when soft power fails to do the job.
But it looks as if there may be more on the agenda: the Iranian challenge looms large for both Washington and Riyadh, and both have taken to implying that the Iranians are up to no good in Bahrain, though there is little evidence that the protests were fueled by Tehran. This I suppose is where the Saudis would like the Americans to draw the line: democracy is good, but not if it threatens to bring a Shia majority into power (as it did of course in Iraq, and the Saudis were not pleased).
This leaves Libya and Syria. I see no real unhappiness coming from the Saudis about what is going on in Libya, and it is difficult to imagine that the United Arab Emirates would lend its air force to the cause if the Saudis were not prepared to go along. Gaddafi is not a Saudi kind of guy, and of course there is no Shia threat there. Syria is harder to read: are the Saudis backing Bashar al Assad, who runs an Alawi (sort of Shia) regime, or not? Riyadh and Damascus have in the past competed with him for influence in Lebanon. Would the Saudis prefer a Sunni regime in Damascus? Or does the preference for stability prevail? So far, the latter.
Saudi influence is likely one of the reasons the Americans haven’t been as welcoming of the protesters in Syria as might have been expected. Both Washington and Riyadh are worried about chaos in Syria, and how that might affect Iraq and Jordan. This is odd, of course, since Damascus is allied with Tehran and Bashar al Assad has not hesitated to make trouble for the Americans in both Iraq and Lebanon. I wonder if things started really coming apart in Damascus whether the Saudis would reconsider.
Now if you’ve got a headache from all this diplomatic mumbo jumbo, I’m not surprised. But the world really is complicated, the Middle East more than most other regions. And if something happens in Saudi Arabia to disrupt its giant oil production and exports, that $4 gasoline is going to start looking cheap.
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Sure non-violent resistance can work in Iran
Problem is, there is no telling when.
The question “Can Non-Violent Resistance Work in Iran?” was posed Friday by Karim Sadjadpour to a panel at the Carnegie Endowment featuring former Italian ambassador in Tehran Roberto Toscano and Iranian political philosopher (and former political prisoner) Ramin Jahanbegloo.
No surprise the panel thought non-violent resistance might work and is not naive. Jahanbegloo emphasized that it is a strategic (not a moral) imperative, in particular if civil society is to win the day. Regime oppression of the Green Movement is a sign that it is a real threat.
Toscano agreed, saying that violence and politics are alternatives. Violence may achieve quick results, but at the cost of longer-term problems, because it undermines the legitimacy of the revolutionary movement. Violence divides people, and the resulting revolution has to defend itself from those who did not support it. Nonviolence enhances legitimacy by widening support. Iran, Toscano underlined, is autocratic, not totalitarian, rather like Italian Fascism.
Jahanbegloo thinks the Green Movement still has a good deal of capability, as it is a civic movement with real, indigenous, grass roots support. It needs to focus on undermining media and military support for the regime. Because of its dispersed leadership, the Movement is hard to decapitate. Women have been particularly important among the Greens, and more of them are in prison than men.
Agreeing that the lack of a clearly defined leadership structure strengthens the movement, Toscano noted that the regime also lacks a single target–it is an oligarchy that relies increasingly on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its recycled alumni, and far less than in the past on the clerical establishment, who are not united in supporting the theocracy. The Greens need to build a more democratic political culture–to some degree they already have–by emphasizing human rights.
Jahanbegloo noted that the Greens have lost the enormous mass support that they had in the past. They need to rebuild, maintaining nonviolent discipline and establishing a better rapport with the security forces. They are also lacking support from “the bazaar,” business interests. But they are correct to define themselves as a broad civic movement and need to learn from their failures, as the Czechs did.
What can outsiders do to help the Greens? They need to maintain a consistent, principled approach and target human rights violators. At the same time, they have to realize that on the nuclear issue and on Iran’s regional role as a great power, the Greens do not disagree fundamentally with the regime.
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Jon Stewart’s freedom packages
If you didn’t see it on TV, and you are not among the 156,073 people who have viewed it on line since Monday night, this is well worth all 6 minutes and 49 seconds.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| America’s Freedom Packages | ||||
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Implosions, more and less advanced
While the rest of the world catches up with the question of “how does Libya end,” which I dealt with yesterday, let’s take a look ahead. Today’s big news was not the explosions in Libya, but rather the implosion in Yemen, where President Saleh is now facing an opposition strengthened by defections from his army, government, parliament and diplomatic corps. He is appealing for “mediation” by the Saudis, which is being interpreted in some circles as a plea for Saudi guarantees if he agrees to step down in six months. He had already agreed to step down at the end of his present term in 2013.
It very much looks as if Washington may lose its spear carrier in the fight against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). This is a problem, since no one–including Saleh–seems to think AQAP is a serious threat to Yemen, which it uses as haven and launching pad. No one in his right mind would want to try to govern it.
Washington will have to convince whoever takes over–the betting seems to be on General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, but these things are inherently uncertain–that AQAP merits his attention. This will be difficult: Yemen is a place with a lot of problems. Water and oil are running out, there are more or less perennial rebellions both north and south, the population is high half the day on qat, and the authority of the government barely extends to the outskirts of Sanaa, the capital.
In Syria, the process of popular protest is far less advanced, but firing on demonstrators by the security forces has reaped an increase in demonstrations in the south. No telling whether the Syrians have the stomach to go all the way to revolution, and Bashar al Assad is a clever autocrat. But he too is lacking resources and tied to Iran in ways that make it difficult for him to do what most Syrians want: an opening to the West and foreign investment, which necessarily entails reducing ties to Iran and Hizbollah and settling up somehow with Israel. Syria also has ethnic and sectarian issues: Kurdish citizens treated as second class and a Sunni majority governed by an Alawhite (more or less Shia) but secular majority.
Bahrain, now under Gulf Cooperation Council protection, seems to be doing its best to turn its rebellion into sectarian strife, which is not how it began. It is hard to believe that is in the interests of the (Sunni) Khalifa monarchy, which governs a less than prosperous Shia majority. But when Saudi Arabia decides to embrace you, I guess you have to hug back.
It has already been an extraordinary few weeks in North Africa. While the monarchies in Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia seem to be learning how to keep the lid on, the pot is boiling over in Yemen and may still do so in Syria and Bahrain. It would be nice if the heat rose under the Iranian pot, but that does not appear to be happening, no matter how often the Secretary of State and the President wish it so.
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