Tag: Russia
Peace Picks, September 23-27
1. Peace and War: The View from Israel
September 23, 2013 // 3:00pm — 5:00pm
Wilson Center, 6th Floor
The Middle East seems permanently in crisis. Join us for a analysis of Israel’s view of the region, its challenges and opportunities—and the U.S.-Israeli relationship from two former Israeli officials deeply involved in matters of negotiations and national security policy, with comments from Doran and Miller.
Event Speakers List:
Aaron David Miller // Vice President for New Initiatives and Distinguished Scholar Historian, analyst, negotiator, and former advisor to Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State on Arab-Israeli negotiations, 1978-2003.
Gilead Sher // Head of the Center for Negotiations, the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv and former Israeli Chief Peace Negotiator
Amos Yadlin // Director of the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv and former chief of Israeli military intelligence
Michael Doran // Roger Hertog Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center, Brookings Institution
RSVP: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/rsvp?eid=28667&pid=112 Read more
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Heartbreak and loveless marriages
Wedenesday morning’s event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was yet another panel focused on Syria, focused on the interests and perspectives of the domestic and international parties currently involved in the crisis. Moderated by Marwan Muasher of the Carnegie Endowment, the discussion included Ambassador Nasser al-Kidwa, deputy to Arab League Envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi, Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment, Paul Salem of the Carnegie Middle East Center, and Andrew Weiss also of the Carnegie Endowment.
Ambassador al-Kidwa focused his remarks on the future of negotiations in Syria. He believes the Geneva Communiqué drafted last June is still relevant today and provides practical solutions for Syria. The US decision not to strike on Syria but rather focus on placing Syria’s chemical weapons under international control shows its commitment to the Geneva Communiqué. The framework agreement on chemical weapons between the US and Russia is a positive development.
The UN is currently working on a resolution that will mostly likely incorporate much of the strong language used in the US-Russia agreement. Al-Kidwa believes that it will be adopted under Chapter 7 with some language regarding using necessary force if there is no compliance from the Assad regime. He sees a real possibility for negotiations between the opposition and the Assad government. He argues that regional players and the international community have an unusually important role. Read more
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Out in the cold
Reuters published this piece today, under the title “What is next for Syria’s opposition?”:
The Syrian regime is crowing victory. The Russians are satisfied at preventing an American military intervention. President Obama is glad to have avoided a Congressional vote against it. Israel is pleased to see Syria’s chemical weapons capability zeroed out, provided the framework agreement reached last week is fully implemented. Even Iran is backing it, while continuing to deny that the regime was responsible for using chemical weapons.
What about the Syrian opposition?
The agreement on chemical weapons leaves them out in the cold. Bashar al-Assad is now vital to implementation of the agreement and will procrastinate implementing it for as long as possible. While destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons capability is supposed to be completed by mid-2014, the logistical challenges involved are colossal. Just accounting for and collecting the 1,000 tons of material will be an enormous task, before getting to deployment of observers and physical destruction, which will likely require shipping the material out of Syria to Russia. Wartime conditions will double the difficulties and prolong the process, even if the regime decides to cooperate fully. That’s unlikely. Read more
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Peace picks, September 16-20
A busy week ahead in the Nation’s Capital:
1. Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and the American Strategy
Monday, September 16, 2013 | 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM EDT
Brookings Institute, 1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20036
Lying behind the turmoil over Syria is another, greater challenge. It is the challenge of a nuclear Iran, which already haunts our Syria debate. President Rouhani’s election has revived the hope of many that a negotiated resolution of this issue is still possible. However, the history of U.S.-Iranian relations leaves room for considerable skepticism. Should these negotiations fail too, the United States will soon have to choose between the last, worst options: going to war to prevent a nuclear Iran or learning to contain one. A nuclear Iran is something few in the international community wish to see, but many fear that a choice will have to be made soon to either prevent or respond to that reality. Can the U.S. spearhead a renewed international effort to prevent a nuclear Iran, or will it be forced to do the unthinkable: to determine how to contain a nuclear Iran?
In his new book, Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Kenneth M. Pollack tackles these daunting questions. Pollack delves deeply into what the U.S. can do to prevent a nuclear Iran, why the military options leave much to be desired and what the U.S. might have to do to make containment a viable alternative. On September 16th at 2:30pm, Foreign Policy at Brookings will host Senior Fellow Kenneth M. Pollack to discuss these sobering issues. Robin Wright, a United States Institute of Peace distinguished fellow and author of several highly-regarded books on Iran, will moderate the discussion, after which the author will take audience questions. Copies of the book will also be available for sale at the event.
EVENT AGENDA
- Introduction
Tamara Cofman Wittes
Director, Saban Center for Middle East Policy
Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy,Saban Center for Middle East Policy
@tcwittes
- Featured Speaker
Kenneth M. Pollack
Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy,Saban Center for Middle East Policy
- Moderator
Robin Wright
Distinguished Fellow, United States Institute of Peace
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Force and diplomacy aren’t antithetical
I’ve had a number of people ask in the past 48 hours whether proceeding on the diplomatic track to collect Syria’s chemical weapons will strengthen Bashar al Asad.
The answer in the short term is “yes.” Whenever the international community negotiates with a ruler whose legitimacy is in question, it shores up his hold on power. Especially so in this instance, as Bashar will soon be responsible for declaring, collecting and turning over Syria’s chemical weapons, making him appear indispensable to a process Russia and the United States have dubbed A number 1 priority.
Neither will want him pushed aside while this process is ongoing. If he were to disappear suddenly, the process would at best come to a halt and at worst disintegrate, making accountability for the chemical weapons difficult if not impossible. Even the Geneva 2 formula–full delegation of executive authority to a government agreed by both the regime and the opposition–might be a bridge too far so long as the chemical weapons are not fully under international control.
This of course means that Bashar, whether he intends to use the chemical weapons again or not, will want to prolong the process as much as possible. The opportunities for footdragging are many. He is already demanding that the US give up the threat to use force as a condition for his turning over the chemical weapons. He can delay his accounting for the weapons and their locations for a month under the convention he has said he will sign. He can stall the deployment of weapons inspectors. He can claim that security conditions make collecting the weapons, said to be distributed to 50 or so sites, impossible. He can make working conditions for the inspectors hellish.
It will be Moscow’s responsibility to deliver Bashar and ensure he performs. I really have no doubt about Russia’s ability to do this. Syria depends on Russian arms and financing. Even a slight delay in deliveries of either would put Damascus in a bind. But Moscow too will have reasons to delay and prevaricate. The Americans, if they are to get anything like full implementation of a serious agreement on chemical weapons, will need to keep alive a credible threat to use force if Bashar fails to meet expectations.
This push and shove between the diplomacy and force is the rule, not the exception. It went on for more than two years after the UN Security Council authorized the use of force in Bosnia. It went on for months in the prelude to the Kosovo bombing, with several diplomatic failures to end the ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo preceding the eventual use of force. Even in Afghanistan, the Taliban were given an opportunity to deliver Al Qaeda into the hands of the Americans. Force was used only after diplomacy had failed. President Bush’s supporters would claim this was also true for Iraq.
The problem in Syria is that the issues there go far beyond chemical weapons. In addition to the mass atrocities committed with conventional weapons, there are two vital US interests at stake: regional stability and blocking an extremist (Sunni or Shia-aligned) succession in Syria. Secretary Kerry is trying hard to keep the door to a Geneva 2 negotiation open, because only a negotiated political transition has much of a chance of avoiding state collapse, which will threaten regional stability, and extremist takeover.
Russia and the United States share these interests in a negotiated political transition, but so far Moscow has remained wedded to Bashar al Asad, no matter how many times Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov claim they are not committed to him personally. What Kerry needs to do is convince the Russians that Bashar remaining in power is a real and serious threat to Russia, as it will encourage jihadi extremists to extend their fight to the Caucasus and cause state structures in the Levant to fragment.
The military balance will be an important part of Russia’s calculations. While President Obama has stayed largely silent on support for the Syrian opposition, frustrating Senator McCain and other Republicans who have wanted to see intervention, there are lots of indications that he is ratcheting up a military supply and training chain that moved slowly over the summer. The faster the Syrian opposition can pose a serious military threat to the regime, the sooner Russia will be inclined to reexamine its support for Bashar and its hesistancy about Geneva 2.
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Putin’s drivel
Vladimir Putin’s op ed in the New York Times was last night’s and this morning’s hot topic. It really doesn’t merit much attention, but last time I looked had acquired 1343 comments and a lot of electrons in cyberspace, so here goes.
The problems start in paragraph 2:
The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter.
I don’t really know whether in 1945 Roosevelt thought he had delegated decisions affecting war and peace to the UN Security Council and a (then-) Soviet veto, but I am certain few American presidents since have thought this. Nor have Moscow’s leaders subjected their war and peace decisions (in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Georgia or for that matter Syria) to UNSC votes.
Putin compounds the illogic with this:
No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.
Russia has done more to weaken the UNSC by refusing to allow any resolution on Syria to pass than military action by the US would do. By neutering the UNSC Moscow is risking precisely the fate of the League of Nations.
I happen to agree with Putin on the potential regional risks arising from Syria, but he is wrong to attribute these exclusively to a US strike. Continuation of the war even without military intervention will lead to all these bad things: more innocent victims and escalation, a new wave of terrorism, difficulty resolving the Iranian nuclear and Israel/Palestine issues as well as regional destabilization.
Putin continues:
Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are few champions of democracy in .
It should surprise no one that the President of Russia can’t recognize a genuine democratic movement when he sees one. He is blind to that sort of thing even in his own country. All he sees are the extremists and the need for a thorough crackdown.
Russia he claims has been advocating for peaceful dialogue from the first. True enough, but at the same time it has been arming, equipping and financing a regime committing massive human rights violations. Putin nevertheless asserts Russia’s allegiance not to Asad, but to international law, which apparently in his library does not include the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. It only includes that same hackneyed refrain about the powers of the Security Council:
Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.
Tell that to the Czechs and Hungarians and watch them laugh.
This is also risible, if it weren’t so sad:
No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack — this time against Israel — cannot be ignored.
Human Rights Watch, and reportedly also the UN, have concluded that the August 21 attack was launched by regime forces. This mythology of people who kill their own to precipitate foreign intervention was a standard refrain also in the Balkans in the 1990s. Never demonstrated, always asserted.
Putin goes on to opine:
But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.
For sure there are big problems in all those places, but there are also pluses that he skips over, just as he fails to mention Russia’s use of extreme force in Chechnya (to what Putin would claim as good effect) as well as in Georgia, where Russia now occupies the territory of a neighboring state.
He then pitches not the chemical weapons proposal under negotiation today in Geneva but rather a far more general point:
We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.
This notion that the language of force is inconsistent with diplomacy is wrong, as recent Russian and Syrian behavior demonstrates all too well.
Putin’s closing isn’t so much wrong as hypocritical:
There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
A president who not only countenances but encourages distinctions among people based on sexual orientation has certainly forgotten that God created us equal.
The only comfort I have reading this drivel is that the American PR firm that wrote it has extracted a substantial sum from Moscow for its obviously shoddy work.
PS: The PR firm involved is Ketchum.
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