Tag: Jordan
Game changer
Politics and Policy in the New Middle East: that’s what they are calling the Middle East Institute 2011 Annual Conference at the Grand Hyatt, 1000 H Street:
Wednesday, Nov. 16th
6:00pm: Kickoff Banquet: Keynote by Bill Burns, DepSecState; awardees Lakhdar Brahimi and Esraa Abdel Fattah
Thursday, Nov. 17th
Conference
8:45 – 9:00am: Opening Remarks: Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, President MEI
9:00-10:30am: After the Arab Spring: Assessing US Policy In the Middle East
10:45am-12:15pm: The Road Ahead for Emerging Arab Democracies
12:30-2:10pm: Keynote Luncheon: Samih al-Abed and Yossi Beilin
2:15-3:45pm: Shifting Regional Power Dynamics in an Era of Change
4:00-5:30pm: Economic and Development Strategies for a Middle East in Transition
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There are worse fates
The annual EU Forum, a confab sponsored by the Paris-based European Union Institute for Strategic Studies and SAIS’s Center for Transatlantic Relations, convened Thursday and Friday in Washington to focus American and European luminaries on the thing we all call the Arab Spring, even though we know it started last winter, varies from country to country and may not have results as upbeat as the appellation implies. Almost entirely missing from the day and a half conference were Arab voices. This was an opportunity for the “the West” to put its heads together, not for the revolutionaries or the oppressive regimes to offer their narrative.
They were nevertheless much present in the minds of the participants, who leaned towards enthusiasm for the values of the protesters, as well as their energy and determination, while worrying about the impact on Western interests. The three big areas of worry arise from
- the Islamists: what do they really mean by sharia law? will they really play fair in democracy?
- increased Arab support for the Palestinians: will it make the Israel/Palestine equation even more difficult to solve?
- sectarianism (will it lead to civil wars and possible spillover to other countries, especially in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen?
Underlying all was a sense that the West has precious few resources with which to respond effectively to the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, to the continuing repression in Syria and Yemen, or to the reforms in Jordan and Morocco, never mind the still solid autocratic regimes in the Gulf or the fragmented polity in Palestine. No one seemed to feel Western credibility or influence was strong, especially in light of the long-standing support (and arms) both Europe and the U.S. had given to Arab autocracies in the past (and continue to provide to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and others even now). And everyone was aware that the Chinese, Turks, Brazilians, Indians and other emerging powers will play increasing roles in the Middle East, offering contracts and aid on terms far less complex and burdensome than those of the West.
The Europeans nevertheless came with a strong sense that the Middle East is their “southern neighborhood” and they need to up their game in response to changes that will affect their interests directly, whether through immigration, economic interdependence, oil and gas supplies, contracts, investment and myriad other ties. Precisely what they are going to do about it was not clear, and there was a strong sense that European policy on the Arab Spring has been re-nationalized. The British and French in particular are carving out their own distinct approaches, taking advantage of their forward role in the NATO military action against Qaddafi, while other countries are lagging and the EU itself is still contemplating the interior walls of the Berlaymont.
The Americans would like to focus more on Asia, not only Afghanistan/Pakistan but also China and North Korea as threats to national security. It was clear to all that Europe would not share this Asian interest to the same degree, but yesterday’s talk of Chinese financing to back the euro might change a few minds on that score. The problem for the Americans is that the Asian challenge requires a very different set of policy instruments from the Arab Spring, which apart from Egypt and Yemen Washington might rather leave primarily to the Europeans (no one of course says this quite so bluntly, but if you follow the money that is what they mean). Everyone expects, though, that NATO will remain somehow important and in the end the only real military instrument capable of effective power projection available to the Europeans.
There were lots of other points made. Trade and investment are far more important than aid. We need to be talking not only with secular women but also with Islamist women. Liberal economic reform, associated in Egypt and other countries with the old regimes, is in trouble, at least for the moment. Civil society in the Arab Spring countries needs Western support, but it should not be done through governmental channels but rather by nongovernmental organizations like the American National Endowment for Democracy (and the talked about European Endowment for Democracy). Western conditionality should focus on transparency and accountability rather than specific policy prescriptions.
I could go on, but I trust the sponsors will be doing a far better job of writing up in due course, and tweets are available from EUISS for those really interested. Bottom line: the West is fading even as its values spread. There are worse fates.
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Lessons from Serbia applied in Middle East and North Africa
The press has caught on to some of the connections between Serbia’s Otpor legacy and popular rebellions in the Middle East and North Africa. Srdja Popovic is one of the links. Here is his presentation at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on April 1, 2011. A powerpoint is no substitute for Srdja, but I can’t figure out (yet) how to upload him to a blog post!
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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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Endgames: local legitimacy is key
It is easy to get caught up in the drama and thrill of events as people throughout the Middle East lay claim to inalienable rights, but we shouldn’t forget that revolutions don’t often end well. What can and should we be doing to try to ensure that the hopes and aspirations of so many don’t end up serving the interests of a few? And what vital U.S. interests need attention?
Libya. Hillary Clinton will be attending a meeting Monday in London to talk about the future of Libya, which is a particularly difficult case because the country largely lacks a state. What it has though is a strong tradition of local councils, most evident in Benghazi but also apparent in other places that have been liberated. If these local councils can gain a degree of legitimacy by being inclusive, they could become the foundation for a decentralized post-Gaddafi regime. My guess is that this would be far better than building the new Libya from Tripoli outwards, which won’t be possible in any event until Gaddafi departs.
As for U.S. influence, the most obvious way to guarantee it is to provide arms to the rebels, as Blake Hounshell suggests. There are many downsides, not the least of which is eventual misuse of the weapons to commit atrocities. Revenge killings are more than likely in the aftermath of Gaddafi’s fall, which is one of the reasons he and his minions hold on so tenaciously. That said, I would opt at least for the rocket-propelled grenades the rebels need to defend themselves against Gaddafi’s armor. The bigger question is whether supplying them is done
- without changing the existing UN Security Council resolution (1973) on grounds that they are part of the “all necessary means” required to protect civilians (either overtly or clandestinely), or
- by adopting a new UNSC resolution that recognizes Gaddafi’s failure to comply with 1973 and adopts additional measures required to unseat him.
If arms supplies are to get there in a timely way, the former is obviously preferable to the latter. But the latter is far better from the perspective of maintaining legitimacy of coalition operations against Gaddafi.
Yemen. President Saleh’s days are numbered, but he is insisting on an orderly transition of power. That is not a bad idea. It would certainly be preferable to the kind of mess we are seeing in Libya, and it really does not matter much whether it occurs this month or next.
To whom should Saleh hand over? The parliament is little more than a rubber stamp, some of the army leaders who have gone over to the protesters are arguably worse than Saleh when it comes to cozying up to terrorists, the political opposition is undistinguished and the protesters are still an amorphous mass. Here is both challenge and opportunity for the Americans, in whose interest it is to guarantee an orderly transition to someone who will be at least as good as Saleh in pursuing Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is not saying much. Here, too, they might look to grassroots tribal, religious, political, civil society and other leaders outside Sanaa for at least a validation of legitimacy. Part of the Yemen problem is that the current regime really has little or no support beyond the capital. Building a new regime that has serious representation from both north and south would be preferable to just finding another headman like Saleh.
Syria. It has indeed gotten serious, as I’ve already suggested, with widespread demonstrations yesterday met with regime live fire, killing how many dozens no one knows:
This time it will be hard for President Bashar al Assad’s spokesperson to claim that he ordered no firing on demonstrators, though that won’t stop them from trying, but the protests have so far stopped short of asking for his ouster. Bashar is still regarded by many Syrians as above the wrongdoing they associate with the regime, though it is hard to believe that his personal immunity will last much longer.
Bashar has been no friend to the Americans, even if Senator John Kerry thinks we owe him rather than the other way around (at least that is what he said in an appearance at Carnegie Endowment last week). But again orderliness is next to godliness, now that we’ve got the U.S. military preoccupied with two and a half wars. Bashar can still survive, but he needs to get serious about the reforms he promised this week, and stop the live fire on demonstrators. I can’t for the life of me think what it is about the events of the last couple of months that would convince an autocrat that firing on protesters would help him survive. It seems to me the evidence is all on the other side of the proposition: let them demonstrate and adopt reforms to meet their legitimate demands, then you might survive.
The others. The Moroccans seem to have understood that proposition, and until yesterday the Jordanians as well. The Bahrainis, with Saudi support, seem ready still to test the effectiveness of regime violence and in the process turn popular protests into sectarian strife between a Shia majority population and a Sunni regime. Their success is unlikely to be long lasting. It is hard to think of anything worse for Saudi Arabia than linking its fate to the survival of the Al Khalifa monarchy in Bahrain, but that appears to be what the Saudis are determined to do.
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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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