Tag: Jordan
Believe what they do
While Eric Trager over at the Washington Institute continues to warn that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood seeks a monopoly on power, Carnegie Endowment yesterday hosted Islamist politicians–including an Egyptian adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood–swearing fealty to pluralism. The day-long event–of which I attended only the first session on “Building New Regimes After the Uprising”–started off with Islamists from Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and Jordan.
Tunisia
Sahbi Atig, a Tunisian National Constituent Assembly member representing Ennahda, said that Tunisians want is a “civil state” and protection of individual rights. The Tunisian revolution has been fortunate to have broken cleanly with the autocratic regime without much violence. The army stepped aside willingly and is now out of politics–soldiers cannot even vote. Tunisia has now conducted free and fair elections to a pluralist constituent assembly operating under a temporary constitution.
The constituent assembly seeks a broad consensus based on Islamic and Arab identity but also guaranteeing individual liberties through institutions like a constitutional court and independent electoral and media commissions. Women’s and minority rights will be respected. Sharia will be a basis for freedom and justice.
The current government is seized with economic issues: unemployment, foreign investment, the need for more development in the interior. Accountability and transitional justice will be important issues, but settled only by dialogue and consensus. Questioned about his 16 years in prison, Atig made it clear they had taught him to oppose torture and advocate for freedom.
Morocco
Mustafa Elkhalfi, now Minister of Communications, claimed that Morocco’s “third path” is working: meeting the demand for reform without instability. The King reacted promptly to the “February 20” movement, promising good governance, transparency, rule of law. There is now a new constitution, real elections have been held, there is an Islamist prime minister and a governing coalition that includes Amazighs (aka Berbers). The monarchy has provided unity, modern religious leadership, and preservation of pluralism. There is a dynamic and active civil society with more than 50,000 private organizations and a culture of integration that includes Amazighs as well as leftists, in addition to Islamists and other political forces.
There are four main challenges: implementation of the new constitution (especially its provisions for freedom press and expression, women’s equality and an independent judiciary); real decentralization of governance (including the Western Sahara); answers to economic and social challenges like poverty, electricity, health and education; and revived regional cooperation with Morocco’s neighbors.
Egypt
Abdul Maegoud Rageh Dardery of Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party (a Muslim Brotherhood outfit), suggested that Egypt had made mistakes in the past by either slavishly following European practices or trying to depart entirely from them. He would like to see Egypt respect its own traditions but learn from the Europeans.
Egyptians yearn to live free under the rule of law. They want a civil state with reference to Islamic principles (not rulings in the FJP view) as the main source of law. The new constitution will be written by committee chosen half from outside parliament, which includes 20 parties. The FJP refused to claim the chair of all the parliamentary committees, preferring to distribute responsibilities more widely. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is trying to hold on to its privileges but the FJP wants to avoid a military-industrial complex.
Dardery was at pains to underline that sharia simply means rule of law and jihad means exerting an effort. The FJP will take a pragmatic approach to alliances, making common cause with whoever supports its program.
Jordan
The tone got darker with Nabil Alkofahi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Jordan, which has undergone very limited reform. Elections in 2007 were fraudulent, he said, leading the Brotherhood to boycott them in 2010. The King is still stalling on reform, preferring to keep in place a constitution that gives him, his government and the military too much power. He uses the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the division between West Bankers and Jordanians, to distract attention and delay reform.
The King should be part of the solution, not part of the problem. The MB wants a constitutional, pluralist and civil state to conduct free and fair elections. There is no history of religious oppression in Jordan. But there is a need to eliminate military tribunals and the excessive role of the intelligence services. The MB itself is internally democratic, he claimed. Women participate.
Alkofahi was blunter than the others about Israel. While at pains to say that individual Jews and Christians should be treated correctly in Muslim countries, he underlined that Israel is occupying Palestine. Israel, he said, needs to end its aggression and respect Palestinian rights, including the right of return. But he promised a clear MB policy on the issues only when they gain power.
The bottom line: It was good to hear these rising political figures deal forthrightly with the issues Americans have on their minds, well-posed by Carnegie’s Marwan Muasher. But ultimately we’ll need to assess what they do, not just what they say. Trager’s warnings should not be ignored.
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Geography and oil are fate
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki seems for the moment to be winning his high stakes bet on hosting the Arab League summit this week in Baghdad. The first bar is set pretty low: if the meeting comes off without any major security incidents or diplomatic kerfuffles, Iraq will be able to herald it as a successful milestone marking the return of Baghdad to regional prominence and a renewed role in the Arab world.
It could amount to more. It already says something about the Arab League that a Kurdish president and a Shia prime minister are leading an Arab League summit. Maliki has successfully courted improvements in relations with Sunni-dominated Egypt, Algeria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in the last couple of months. Some are hoping he might use the occasion to tilt Iraq away from Iran, perhaps even capturing a significant role with Russia in the effort to manage a negotiated transition in Syria.
Of course the whole thing might still blow up, too. Either literally, if Al Qaeda in Iraq slips through Baghdad’s well-manned but still porous security cordons, or figuratively, if heads of state decline to attend or the Syria issue leads to a serious diplomatic breach with the Sunni Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar that would like to boot Bashar al Assad.
A successful Arab League summit could significantly improve Maliki’s standing at home, where he has also been doing some fence mending. His big achievement was passing the budget in parliament. His Sunni and Kurdish putative allies in parliament might still like to bring him down, but they have been unable to mount a serious threat and have not managed even to suggest an alternative majority. Besides, they like their cushy jobs.
Maliki may be mending his fences, but they are still fences. His majority is increasingly dependent on support from the Sadrists, whose reliance on Iran will limit his room to maneuver.
What does this mean for the U.S.? The most immediate issue is Syria: Washington would like Baghdad to help get Bashar to walk the plank. Tehran will resist that mightily, and if it happens will redouble its effort to create in Iraq any “strategic depth” it loses in Syria. Maliki can only gain from an end to the Assad regime if it gets him serious support from the Kurds and Sunnis within Iraq, as well as the broader Arab world. I’d like to believe that would happen, but he is unlikely to have enough confidence it would.
The longer-term issue is the political orientation of Iraq. Will it stand on its own and develop strong ties with the West, as well as with the Arab world and Iran? Or will it tilt inexorably in Iran’s direction, risking internal strife as well as its own independence? The Arab League summit is unlikely to have much long-term impact in determining this question. Iraq’s Sunnis are convinced Maliki is an Iranian stooge. The Americans still hope he’ll come around in their direction.
One major factor determining the outcome is rarely discussed, even in expert circles: how Iraq exports its oil and eventually also its gas. If it continues to put the vast bulk of its oil on to ships that have to pass through the Gulf and the strait of Hormuz under Iranian guns, Tehran’s influence will grow. But there is an alternative. If Baghdad repairs and expands the “strategic” pipeline to enable export of large quantities of oil (and eventually gas) to the north (to Turkey) and west (to Syria or Jordan), any government in Baghdad will see its links to the West as truly vital. Maliki’s government has been doing the needed feasibility studies, but it is not yet clear that it is ready to make the necessary decisions, since export to the north and west would mean crossing Kurdish and Sunni controlled territory.
Iraq once seemed hopelessly divided. But those divisions can be bridged, if there is political will to do so. Geography and oil are fate.
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Negotiation time
With all the jabber the last few days about the use of force against both Syria and Iran, media attention is not focused on the prospects for negotiated settlements. But there are such prospects still, even if the odds are getting longer by the day.
Syria
International Crisis Group is out yesterday with a “now or never” manifesto rightly focused on prospects for UN/Arab League envoy Kofi Annan’s efforts:
Annan’s best hope lies in enlisting international and notably Russian support for a plan that:
Arming the Syrian opposition, which is happening already, is not likely to improve the prospects for a negotiated settlement along these lines. To the contrary, Western contemplation of safe areas and humanitarian corridors, loose Arab talk about armed the Syria Free Army, the occasional Al Qaeda suicide bombing and a Russian blank check for the regime to crack down are combining to plunge Syria into chaos. Someone may think that deprives Iran of an important ally, but it also spells lasting (as in decades-long) trouble in a part of the world where we can ill afford it.
The Americans have been mumbling about how arms will inevitably get to the Syrian opposition. This is true enough. But some visible support for Annan, and a behind the scenes diplomatic game with the Russians, would be more helpful to the cause of preventing Syria from becoming a chronic source of instability in Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Jordan.
Iran
Netanyahu came but this time did not conquer. He needed President Obama to be forthcoming on an eventual military action against Iran as much as Obama needed him to refrain from aligning with Republican critics. It fell to Senator Mitch McConnell to crystallize the emerging U.S. position: if Iran enriches uranium to bomb grade (at or above 90%) or shows signs of having decided to build a nuclear weapon (design and ignition work), then the U.S. would respond with overwhelming force. This is the proposed “red line.”
We should not be fooled by McConnell’s belligerent tone. Even assuming very strict verification procedures, the line he proposes is a relatively expansive one that leaves Iran with enrichment technology and peaceful uses of atomic energy, which is what the Islamic Republic claims is its red line.
While the press was focused on belligerent statements, the P5+1 (US, UK, France, Russia, China + Germany) have apparently responded to Iran’s offer of renewed negotiations. Iran has also told the International Atomic Energy Agency that it can visit a previously off-limits nuclear site believed to be engaged in weapons research, but procedures have not yet been worked out.
Bottom line
I wouldn’t get excited about the prospects for negotiated solutions in either Syria or Iran. But if ever there was a time to negotiate, this is it. By fall, both situations will likely be too far gone, with serious consequences for the United States, the Middle East and the rest of the world.
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Arab world: positive balance, still teetering
I need a scorecard to keep track of political change in the Arab world, so here it is:
- Egypt: New Egyptian parliament led by Muslim Brotherhood met for the first time yesterday. It needs to choose a commission to write the new constitution and call elections for president in June. Other powers are uncertain. Supreme Council of the Armed Forces still running things and holding on to perks and power.
- Yemen: President Saleh has left for the U.S. for medical treatment. I still find it incredible he would come here given the risks of a court deciding to hold him accountable for crimes for which he has immunity in Yemen. A single-candidate “election” February 22 is scheduled to elevate his vice president to the presidency. It is unclear to me what good this will do. Protests continue, his relatives cling to power and dissident parts of the armed forces control parts of the capital.
- Libya: Demonstrators in Benghazi Sunday attacked National Transitional Council offices in a protest over lack of transparency in deciding the electoral law to be used in May elections and in disbursing money. That’s the good news. Occasional strife among the armed militias is the bad news.
- Syria: The Arab League, much criticized because its human rights observers have failed to stop the violence, proposed a serious transition plan, which the Syrian National Council accepted and the Assad regime rejected. The Russians are saying that their patience has run out. A strong UN Security Council resolution would be a fine way to show that they mean what they say.
- Saudi Arabia: The Kingdom is cracking down hard on demonstrations in the majority Shia, oil-producing east.
- Bahrain: Despite the Bassiouni report‘s frankness about human rights abuses during last year’s repression of protests, the monarchy shows no sign of letting up and the Americans, anxious to keep the Fifth Fleet there, aren’t complaining too loudly.
- Morocco, Algeria, Jordan: All attempting various degrees of reform to forestall revolution. Largely succeeding so far. In forestalling that is. Reforms are modest.
So what once looked like a wave of Arab spring protest has now broken into rivulets moving in many different directions as they hit harder and softer obstacles. A few regimes are gone, but most are still holding on, in some cases just barely. Tunisia is the great success story, so far.
There are quite a few shoes that haven’t dropped yet, but likely will: Egypt’s economy is devastated, shoulder launched antiaircraft missiles are circulating in and beyond Libya, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula may well expand further in Yemen, sectarian war threatens in Syria. The new regimes, especially in Egypt, look likely to be tougher-minded towards Israel, even if domestic issues predominate in the short term. 2012 is likely to be even more challenging than 2011.
Still: the overall direction is clear enough. There will likely be more freedom of speech and expression in much of the Arab world once this tide goes out. There will also be more Islamists in power and fewer supposedly secular and pro-Western autocrats. There will likely be more political competition, though how long it will be permitted to last is uncertain. It is also unclear how much governance will improve, in particular whether accountability and transparency will triumph over cronyism and corruption, and whether human rights–especially minority rights–will be respected. The balance for the year is positive, but there are still a lot of things to sort out.
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Context matters, and so does U.S. support
I gave a talk yesterday at West Virginia University’s Law School on U.S. policy towards democracy-seeking rebellions. The star attraction at the conference was Erica Chenoweth, co-author of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Some of you will have seen my tweets summarizing her talk, which I won’t try to reproduce here. Suffice it to say that she provides hard statistical evidence that nonviolent civil resistance really does work, even against the most repressive regimes, and she gives a coherent rationale for why. She also notes that foreign monetary assistance does not appear to work well.
I was asked to address the U.S. policy response, in particular to the Arab Spring. Here are my speaking notes, which of course do not represent exactly what I said:
West Virginia University
November 10, 2011
1. While I am an admirer of Dr. Chenoweth’s quantitative methodology, I am going to rely today on the much less impressive techniques of the historian and diplomat: stories, I would call them, rather than “cases.”
2. Arab spring is far from over yet, but I’ll try to focus on the transition phase: that is, the phase after a regime falls and before a new one has yet emerged.
3. I am thoroughly convinced of the efficacy of what Dr. Chenoweth calls civic resistance in the earlier phase.
4. But things get much more complicated when that resistance has to turn into something more constructive.
5. There are three cases already in the transition phase, more or less: Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Each is quite different.
6. In Tunisia, the autocrat left the scene quickly and the regime was pushed aside fairly easily. First elections have already been held and there is a clear roadmap ahead. A classic, fairly smooth case, with no sign of counter-revolution on the horizon. Good chance of consolidating a democratic regime.
7. In Egypt, the autocrat also left pretty quickly, but the regime was not pushed aside easily and the protesters called on the army to manage the transition. It is doing so, but in a way that consolidates its control over some aspects of governance (security, foreign policy) and a big piece of the economy. I’d say much less likelihood of success in the transition. Might be rather like Serbia, where a similar deal was made with the security forces and the transition has been slow and halting as a result.
8. In Libya, there was a violent revolution that has the advantage of having swept the old regime away completely, with foreign help. There has been good leadership, decent planning and ample resources. I give the Libyans a decent chance at success in consolidating a democracy, albeit less probability than Tunisia.
9. What of Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, all of which are still in progress?
10. Yemen has turned violent, even if the protesters themselves have stuck with nonviolence. The odds of successful transition to democracy seem to be small, because the opposition to Saleh most likely to take power is the violent one, which is no more inclined to democracy than he is.
11. Syria could be headed in the same direction, though there is still some hope of keeping it on a nonviolent course. That’s vital for success. Violence will lead to sectarian and ethnic breakdown (similar to Iraq) that will be difficult to overcome.
12. Bahrain is an odd case. The protesters have been nonviolent, but the crackdown was effective, unlike Syria and Yemen. A lot depends on the Bassiouni commission report: will it revive nonviolent resistance, or will the regime be able to keep the lid on?
13. What of the other monarchies: Morocco and Jordan? Saudi Arabia and Oman?
14. These four, each in its own way, is attempting to preempt resistance with reform, albeit minimal reform in the case of Riyadh. So far, they are largely succeeding.
15. I do think the monarchies have some advantage in this respect: not because they are somehow nicer, but because their legitimacy is understood not to derive from elections but rather from heredity.
16. It is much harder for a republic to claim that there is no need to change who is in power in order to reform the system.
17. But that does not mean the monarchies will succeed forever. The fact that all Saudi Arabia experts agree that it can’t happen there, that the succession is ensured, is a clear earlier indicator that it may well happen there.
18. If I were advising the Saudis and the other monarchies, I would suggest they get ahead of the curve and stay ahead, by taking truly meaningful steps to redistribute power and ensure that their security services are shifting from protecting the rulers to protecting the ruled.
19. If there is one mistake common to all the Arab Spring successes so far—and also to those places where rebellion is still in progress—it is the use of regime violence against the population.
20. These guys need to learn that legitimacy comes from the people, who will be much more inclined to confer it on those who protect them than on those who attack them.
21. We should also be thinking about how we can encourage security sector reform in advance of rebellion and revolution—it would be far cheaper and more effective than doing it after the fact.
22. America should certainly be supporting those who demonstrate nonviolently for their rights, but I confess to doubts that it should be done through embassies.
23. Robert Ford, our ambassador in Syria who has bravely gone to “observe” demonstrations, is the exception that proves the rule.
24. The rule is that embassies need to stay on good terms with the host government, even if it is an autocracy. They cannot be implicated in support to revolutionaries.
25. Assistance to democracy and human rights advocates should flow not through embassies but through nongovernmental organizations, including the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute as well as non-American counterparts.
26. The more these can be made distinct from our official representation, the better.
27. America is condemned to spreading democracy. If you really believe that all people are created equal, you have no choice but to sympathize with those who claim their rights. But the specific modalities for when and how to do it depend a great deal on context.
PS: In answer to a question, I said yes it can happen in Iran, but American efforts to support it there are problematic because of our fraught relationship with Tehran, which includes both concern about nuclear weapons and attempts to foment ethnic strife inside Iran. In the end, I think Obama got the reaction to the Green Movement about right in the end: rhetorical support without repainting it red, white and blue.
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Best freebie next week
Game Changer: Policy and Politics
For a New Middle East
The Grand Hyatt Hotel
1000 H Street NW
Washington, DC 20001
Thursday, November 17, 2011
8:45am-5:30pm
Conference Schedule
8:45am-9:00am – Opening remarks
Ambassador (ret.) Wendy Chamberlin, Middle East Institute President
9:00am-10:30am – After the Arab Spring: Assessing US Policy in the Middle East
Steve Clemons, New America Foundation, The Atlantic
Ambassador (ret.) Daniel Kurtzer, Princeton University
Ambassador (ret.) Ron Schlicher, Former US Department of State
Tamara Cofman Wittes, Deputy Assist. Secretary of State-NEA
10:45am-12:15pm – The Road Ahead for Emerging Arab Democracies
Esraa Abdel Fattah, Egyptian Democratic Academy
Michele Dunne, Atlantic Council
Larry Diamond, Stanford University
Radwan Masmoudi, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy
2:15pm-3:45 pm – Shifting Regional Power Dynamics in an Era of Change
Abdelkhaleq Abdalla, UAE University
Jamal Khashoggi, Al-Arab TV
Haim Malka, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Mohsen Milani, South Florida University
Paul Salem, Carnegie Middle East Center
4:00pm-5:30pm- Economic and Development Strategies for a Middle East in Transition
Adel Abdellatif, UN Development Programme
Odeh Aburdene, OAI Advisors
Iman Bibars, Ashoka/MENA
Ambassador William B. Taylor, US Department of State
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