Tag: Iran
Oldtime revolutionary lore
As Tunisian flu has now spread from Egypt to Iran, Bahrain and Yemen, with a touch also in Algeria and now Libya, it might be wise to review what an old hand views as a few crucial points (I first sat down in front of the bayonet-armed and gas-masked Maryland National Guard in 1964 and got teargassed by the U.S. Army at Fort Dix in 1968, so I am claiming some seniority here). I was also an early and strong supporter of the Serb uprising that forced Slobodan Milosevic out.
One key point is nonviolent discipline, not because of the moral requirement but because it will make the demonstrations more effective. Another is clarity–and simplicity–of objectives.
Why is nonviolence important? Because you want the security forces to hesitate to crack down–they won’t hesitate if you are throwing rocks at them–they’ll fight back, and by definition they have greater firepower. Only if the security forces hesitate to crack down is autocracy in trouble, because it rules by fear. No crackdown, no fear, no autocrat.
The problem is that the security forces often use violence first, or maybe it will be the thugs allied with the regime (the basij in Iran, the club-wielders in Sanaa). The use of these people is already a good sign: it means the regime has doubts about the willingness of the regular security forces to do the dirty deed. The trouble of course is that the thugs can cause a lot of damage.
They will hesitate to use violence only if confronted with a great mass of disciplined people. Going out in groups of twenty to do pitched battle with thugs is no way to make a revolution–it only gets your head cracked. People often suffer the most harm when there were few demonstrators, and at night.
That is another reason for keeping things nonviolent–many people won’t come out for a riot. The attack on camels and horses in Cairo was a turning point: Egyptians were disgusted by a blatant attack on large numbers of ordinary, peaceful people. Had it looked as if the attack had been provoked by violent demonstrators, the effect would have been much less salutary from the protesters’ perspective.
What about objectives? Clarity and simplicity are important. The protesters in Egypt were clearly aiming ultimately for democracy, but the crowds rallied around the call for Mubarak to step down.
Now that he has, there are emerging differences among the many factions that united in the demonstrations–that is only natural. Some will think a constitutional route to democracy is best, others a non-constitutional route. Some will want higher wages, better treatment for workers, rights for minorities–only by suppressing for the moment these differences and focusing on a common objective can a motley crew be forged into a powerful mass movement. There will be time enough after the goal is reached for the protesters to fall out with each other and sow confusion by going their own ways.
Keeping people together, across secular/sectarian and religious or ethnic divides, sends a very powerful message and rallies more people to the cause.
One last note: Obama’s soft approach is the right one. Hillary Clinton’s more strident advocacy is not a good idea.
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The world beyond Egypt
I’ve been so caught up in Egypt for 10 days, and Tunisia before that, I’m feeling the need for one of those quickie updates, so here goes (even if there is relatively little progress to report):
- Iran: P5+1 Ankara meeting at the end of January went badly, some say because Ahmedinejad did not take advantage of what the Americans were offering. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of it.
- Pakistan: Messy (that’s what I call it when a President has to call for a roundtable conference), but no big crisis.
- North Korea: Quiescent for the moment, but mil/mil talks have stalled.
- Afghanistan: Lots of reports of military progress from David Petraeus, and some sign that the Taliban may be looking for negotiations, or at least that is how I interpret their putting out the word that they might break with Al Qaeda.
- Iraq: some Arab/Kurdish progress that will allow oil to flow north. My friend Reidar Visser doesn’t think that’s good, but I do.
- Israel/Palestine: Biggest news has been the Palestine papers, widely interpreted to suggest Palestinian weakness, ineptitude or both. I think they show the Israelis overplaying their hand to no good purpose.
- Egypt: Trouble. This is what I said at the end of the year: “succession plans founder as the legitimacy of the parliament is challenged in the streets and courts. Mubarak hangs on, but the uncertainties grow.” Did I get it right? All but that part about the courts anyway.
- Haiti: Presidential runoff postponed to March 20. President Preval’s favorite will not be on the ballot; former first lady Mirlande Manigat will face singer Michel Martelly.
- Al Qaeda: No news is good news.
- Yemen/Somalia: Yemen’s President Saleh has so far proved immune to Egyptian flu, but itmay not last forever. Parliament in Somalia has extended its own mandate for three more years, dismaying the paymasters in Washington and other capitals. Nice democracy lesson.
- Sudan: The independence referendum passed, as predicted (no genius in that). Lots of outstanding issues under negotiation. President Bashir is behaving himself, some say because of the carrots Washington has offered. In my experience indictment has that effect on most people.
- Lebanon: Indictments delivered, not published, yet.
- Syria: President Bashar al Assad is doing even better than Bashir of Yemen. No demonstrations materialized at all.
- Ivory Coast: Gbagbo and his entourage are still waiting for their first-class plane tickets. African Union is factfinding, in preparation for mediation. Could this be any slower?
- Zimbabwe: Mugabe continues to defy, sponsors riot in Harare. No real progress on implementation of powersharing agreement with the opposition.
- Balkans: Bosnia stuck on constitutional reform, Kosovo/Serbia dialogue blocked by government formation in Pristina, Macedonia still hung up on the “name” issue. See a pattern here? Some people just recycle their old problems.
- Tunisia: At last some place where there is progress: the former ruling party has been shuttered. Don’t hold your breath for that to happen in Egypt!
PS: on Algeria, see this interesting piece.
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Darkest hour before dawn, or just a flop?
Laura Rozen reports in detail on the failure to make progress on nuclear issues in the P5+1 talks with Iran in Istanbul. The press will no doubt say this is a flop.
I certainly wouldn’t argue it is success, but note the absence of more threatened sanctions, the “open door” to further, unscheduled discussions, and the updated fuel swap proposal left on the table for the Iranians to take back to Tehran. This smells to me like the beginning of a negotiation, not the end of one, at least on the P5 end.
The sticking point seems to be recognition of Iran’s “right” to enrich uranium. This is a complicated legal issue that I won’t pretend to elucidate. Suffice it to say that I don’t know of any country that has given up enrichment technology once it has acquired it, even if it may have stopped enrichment or limited its extent. We may not worry anymore about Brazil or Japan acquiring nuclear weapons, but it is not because they have given up their enrichment technology.
Iran won’t either–that is quite clear. The P5+1 are trying to finesse this issue with the avowedly pragmatic swap agreement, which would remove stocks of enriched uranium from Iran and limit the extent of enrichment. But the Iranians are wanting an acknowledgment of their “right” to enrich even as they give up the enriched material. This doesn’t strike me as an insoluble problem–and it has appeared in the recent past that Hillary Clinton was flexible on the issue.
That said, the P5+1 will want to be certain that Iran has seriously abandoned its nuclear weapons program before agreeing, either explicitly or implicitly, to Iran’s continuing to enrich. That would require more intrusive inspections and a more serious statement by Tehran of its commitment. Other countries have moved in this direction–Argentina, Brazil, Libya and South Africa are not such bad analogues.
It is impossible to be hopeful that Tehran will go in their direction. Two factors weigh heavily in the direction of keeping the Iranian nuclear weapons option open: a fragmented but nationalist political leadership that makes it difficult for any one component to compromise without being sharply criticized by others; real regional incentives to gain the power and prestige that some think would accrue to Iran as a nuclear weapons state, or even as a potential nuclear weapon state.
Tehran also had reason to be belligerent and recalcitrant during this particular meeting. The murders of its nuclear scientists, the apparently successful Stuxnet attack on its centrifuges, and Israel’s apparent assessment that Iran would not be able to get nuclear weapons until 2015 have combined to lessen the likelihood of a military attack.
That said I doubt this is the end of the negotiations. Too much is at stake for Iran, Israel and the P5. Before reaching any solid conclusion, let’s wait for Acting Foreign Minister Salehi’s reaction to what the Iranian delegation brings back from Istanbul.
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Dominoes anyone?
The metaphorical game in international relations is often chess, or escalation, or maybe just the adjectival “great” game. But these days we seem to be playing that old standby, dominoes, more than anything else: will Iran getting nuclear weapons lead to others getting them? will Tunisia’s revolt spread? will North Korea’s erratic behavior precipitate in one way or another refugee flows into China that Beijing will want to prevent?
As Stephen Walt points out, revolutions don’t usually spread like wildfire. The demonstration effect of what happens in Tunisia may be strong, but it is uncertain what the outcome is and therefore what events there will “demonstrate.” I still wouldn’t call it a revolution, since the prior regime is very much in place, not only in the salubrious sense that the constitution is being implemented but in the less salubrious sense that the old guard remains in key offices. Only the President and his coterie are gone. Tunisia is looking for the moment more like a palace or military coup in response to popular uprising than like a real revolution. I can imagine that being imitated in more than one Arab country.
With respect to Iran and nuclear weapons, Johan Bergenas argues his case against the dominoes falling well, but unfortunately the argument against a nuclear Iran remains strong even without the worst case scenario, as he acknowledges. While diplomats, spooks and geeks (or maybe I should say spoogeeks?) in the U.S. and Israel are chuckling over Stuxnet’s damage to Iranian centrifuges, the problem remains as great as always. We just have more time to find, or not to find, a solution. I’m no fan of Hillary Mann and Flynt Leverett’s triumphalist version of today’s Iran, but I also don’t buy Tehran Bureau’s defeatist version. President Ahmedinejad still looks pretty strong, having managed his personnel challenges to the Supreme Leader as well as his economic reforms and their political impact better than many expected.
China’s willingness to save our bacon with North Korea is but one of the Washington myths that Mort Abramowitz pooh-poohs, suggesting that if we had a clearer and more consistent policy of our own we might be better off than relying on Beijing to do the right thing. In any event, the Chinese seem to be finding the discomfort that North Korea causes “not unwelcome,” as the diplomats say, and they fear more refugee flows arising from the regime change Washington might like than anything else.
So dominoes don’t look like such a good game, and in my experience they are not, being a Vietnam generation fogy. That said, I feel reasonably certain that our weak response to North Korea’s nuclear testing has in fact encouraged the Iranians to move ahead to acquiring whatever technology they think they need to become at least a virtual nuclear power. Did we ever deprive Brazil of its technology after it forswore nuclear weapons and signed the Treaty of Tlatelolco? Or South Africa?
That is the thing about dominoes. When they fall, the consequences are often irreversible, and the directions they fall in unpredictable. I hope that the outcome of last week’s events in Tunisia is not only democratic but relatively liberal and Western-oriented. Many of us–I include myself–will regret the cheering we did from the sidelines if Al Qaeda in the Maghreb finds haven in North Africa, where its recruiting efforts are already strong.
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Fire burn and cauldron trouble in Arabia
Yesterday I tweeted two pieces on events in Tunisia: one by Juan Cole calling the events there the first revolution in the Middle East since 1979, the other by Brian Whitaker calling it a moment in history but hesitating to use the R word. So which is it, revolution or not?
Ten hours or so later, I think Brian Whitaker has the edge still, though it may still bend Juan Cole’s way. The flight of a president may be the first stage of a revolution, but it really depends on what comes thereafter. The regime has not fallen, yet. The prime minister claims to be holding on to power, whether constitutionally or not is unclear. Can he continue to do so? Will he be forced into making fundamental changes? Or will he be able to reestablish order without promising anything significant? Will he in turn be chased out?
This morning, Ben Wedeman of CNN is broadcasting that the anticipated “jasmine” revolution looks more like a military coup, at least on the streets of Tunis, where the soldiers have restored a modicum of calm. A great deal depends on what happens today and tomorrow, and in particular whether the demonstrators reappear and whether they attack the army or maintain nonviolent discipline. Violence at this stage is likely to harden the response of the security forces and end any hope for fundamental change in a more democratic direction.
How will events in Tunisia affect the rest of the Arab world? This is a big question, which Marc Lynch asked several days ago. Algeria has already seen similar demonstrations precipitated by rising food prices and unemployment. It is easy to imagine that Egypt, facing a problematic succession, might see something similar, as its regime is a sham democracy/kleptocracy similar to Tunisia’s. How about Jordan?
Also interesting is that no one is asking these questions about Iran, which recently reduced food and fuel subsidies and suffers many of the same ills–underemployment and unemployment in particular–that plague Arab countries. President Ahmedinejad appears to have planned and executed his price-increasing economic reforms relatively well, cushioning them with welfare payments. And if Iran is a bridge too far out of the Arab world, what about Syria, whose regime isn’t even a pretend democracy? No sign of protest there, or in Libya, at least for the moment.
Two other, unrelated but interesting, bits of news from the Arab world and its environs: the Hariri government in Lebanon has fallen and South Sudan has successfully completed its independence referendum, with a minimum of violence and disruption.
I confess to finding it hard to get excited about Lebanese politics. It is small and its unusual ethnic makeup makes it unique. But Hizbollah, which precipitated the government’s fall because it didn’t get the guarantees it wanted from the prime minister concerning the Special Tribunal’s much-anticipated indictments of Hizbollah leaders for the murder of his father, is a force to be reckoned with, not only inside Lebanon. How far will it go in pushing to end confessional representation in Lebanon and demanding Shia rights to govern there?
The South Sudan referendum is the success story of the week. As it ends today, it seems the referendum has met the requirement that 60 per cent of registered voters vote, and the vote is assumed to be heavily in favor of independence, since no one seems to have found a South Sudanese who would vote for anything else. Definite results will not be certified for some time. The week was relatively violence free. The longer term consequences may, however, still present serious problems: there are many issues to be settled between north and south before the July declaration of independence, and Khartoum may well take a sharp turn in the Islamist direction as it loses a good part of its non-Muslim population. Khartoum shares many ills with its Arab neighbors to the north.
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Iran’s hyperactive president
President Ahmedinejad may have fired a lot of advisors, but someone is working overtime in Tehran. Today there is news of Iran’s invitation to Russia, China, the European Union and others in the Arab and developing world to tour its nuclear sites, before the late January meeting with the P5+1 in Turkey.
There is no real, substantive significance in a visit by non-technicians to a nuclear facility. Even a well-trained and equipped physicist can be led around by the nose and shown geegaws of all sorts that may or may not have the significance attributed to them by the tour guide. And of course the Iranians will show their visitors whatever they want, and not show them whatever they don’t want.
But you’ve got to admire the pace and daring. Here is Ahmedinejad seemingly locked in a power struggle with the Supreme Leader (what about that appellation does he not get?), firing the foreign minister and a baker’s dozen or more advisers, removing oil product price subsidies, executing supposed miscreants and still able to stage a show visit to Iranian nuclear facilities for gullible foreigners. Can he get away with all this in an Iran that is resistant to newcomers and change? Or is comeuppance around the next corner? Are we seeing the emergence of a much stronger president, or his last hurrah?
Before answering, let’s remind ourselves that Ahmedinejad is a millenarian who believes the twelfth imam is not far (and probably regards himself as a deputy empowered to help make his return possible). No need to watch all of this, the millenarian vision gets really clear about 5:15:
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