Tag: Russia
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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Don’t bank on diplomacy yet
President Obama last night tentatively accepted Putin’s paddle and began his effort to paddle away from military action, which faced rejection in the Congress, towards a diplomatic denouement. This latest turn will disappoint and frustrate opposition Syrians who wanted a decisive military intervention.
But that was not in the cards, and the President’s move cheers those who believe that chemical weapons are the main issue Americans should be concerned about in Syria, as it offers a potentially better outcome than bombing. Certainly an endstate in which the international community gains control over Syria’s gigantic stockpile of chemical weapons (estimated at 1000 tons) and destroys them safely and securely is better than the uncertainty of a punitive bombing campaign, pinprick or not.
I see two problems with this approach:
- We are very unlikely to reach the desired endstate, which depends on Syria declaring all its chemical weapons, securely moving them to a relatively few destinations, and giving international inspectors unfettered access while a civil war rages. Remember what happened to the Arab League and UN observers? With no US boots on the ground, international control of Syria’s chemical weapons likely means mainly Russian control, which isn’t going to satisfy anyone in Washington. But it will make military intervention much more difficult.
- Chemical weapons are not all that is at stake for the United States in Syria. Continuation of the civil war there threatens the stability of Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey. The longer the fighting goes on, the more likely it is that Islamist extremists will eventually succeed and make Syria a haven for Al Qaeda’s ambitions. That will mean threats to Israel as well.
Thousands of civilians will die from conventional weapons in the next month or so, while the diplomats try to hammer out a solution. Read the latest report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry for the gruesome details.
If it is any comfort, this kind of diplomatic delay was also the rule rather than the exception in the 1990s, when NATO intervened from the air first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo. The decisive intervention in Bosnia came more than two years after the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to protect UN-designated safe areas. Prior pinprick attacks had little impact. In Kosovo, force was used only after months of diplomatic efforts (and without a specific authorizing resolution from the UNSC).
President Obama’s enormous reluctance to use military force in Syria is not, as some commentators would have it, a sign of weakness. It of course behooves us to pursue any diplomatic lead that might accomplish our ends without the use of force, which always causes collateral damage and unanticipated consequences. The only real signal of weakness came from the Congress’ apparent willingness to back military action.
Where I differ from President Obama is on the breadth of American interests in Syria as well as the odds of a favorable diplomatic outcome. Chemical weapons are a relatively small part of the problem there. The real issue is an autocrat who prefers state collapse–so long as he remains in power in Damascus–to stepping aside and allowing the democratic evolution that the nonviolent protests called for.
While he did not mention the Syrian opposition last night, I can hope that the President is quietly trying to ensure that the more moderate forces of the Free Syrian Army have the means to protect themselves and the civilians who live in liberated areas. The Russians have not hesitated to make sure that the regime is well equipped and armed. Without an effort to level the battlefield, diplomatic initiatives to end the war are doomed to failure. Military interventions after diplomatic failures need to be more vigorous, not less.
Give diplomacy a chance, but don’t bank on it yet.
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Putin’s paddle
Yesterday’s strange idea is today’s hot topic: the proposition that Bashar al Asad will destroy chemical weapons he refuses to acknowledge possession of. And it will have to do it under tight international control while continuing its slaughter of Syrians with conventional weapons.
There are a lot of things wrong with this idea, apart from those contradictions:
- Syria would have to declare all the sites at which chemical weapons and their precursors are held;
- Washington would need to be confident that chemical weapons and their precursors exist nowhere else in Syria;
- credible international observers would need to deploy to all the declared sites in significant numbers to ensure 24-hours per day that nothing is being moved;
- those observers would have to be housed and protected from the significant violence occurring every day in Syria;
- they would also need uninterrupted and reliable communications;
- if the chemical weapons are to be destroyed, the 1000 tons or so of material would need to be safely and securely transported to a specially constructed facility;
- the destruction would need to be carefully monitored.
I think it only fair to say that this is a very tall order of dubious virtue. Those who remember the difficulties nuclear inspectors faced before both Iraq wars should multiply by a factor of ten, or more. I can’t wait to hear the quarrels over whether this site or that one does or does not hold chemical weapons. The observers themselves would become clear markers of where the chemical weapons are, making the sites tempting targets for extremists.
Once we occupied Iraq, it still took a year or so and cost hundreds of millions to verify that there were no weapons of mass destruction. That’s when we could go anywhere, talk to anyone, read all the files and test anything we wanted. Or think about the more recent and ill-fated Arab League and later UN observers in Syria. They weren’t trying to do anything technically difficult. Just trying to monitor the military action and report. Both groups were withdrawn without being able to accomplish their objectives.
The numbers of Syrians killed by chemical weapons likely don’t amount to 2% of the total 100,000 killed so far. To allow the killing to continue while the international community invests many millions in securing, observing, collecting and destroying chemical weapons stockpiles would be not only hypocritical but also deeply offensive to the Syrians who suffer the depredations of the Asad regime.
But the Obama Administration finds itself up the creek without a paddle. Approval of a military strike in Congress appears less and less likely. Proceeding anyway after the Congress says “no” is possible legally, but politically it would be a disaster. So the President is going to have a hard look at this “diplomatic” proposition, whose origins lie not in John Kerry’s supposed inadvertent slip yesterday morning but rather, as the President acknowledged in his interview last night with Gwen Ifill, in conversations he has had with Vladimir Putin.
The idea should be dubbed “Putin’s paddle.” Mr. President, you may have to use it, but only because of the unfortunate situation you put yourself in. That’s not an endorsement.
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Crisis breeds strange ideas
Secretary of State Kerry today floated the idea that has been kicking around: Bashar al Asad can avoid an American attack if he gives up his chemical weapons, within a week. The Secreatary was quick to add that he does not expect Asad to do this. Now the Russians are suggesting that Syria’s chemical weapons be put under international control.
Does the idea have virtue?
Not on the face of it. There are lots of chemical weapons and precursors in Syria, perhaps as much as 1000 tons according to French intelligence. Moving even one ton of such material securely in the conditions that prevail in Syria at the moment would be a challenge. Moving hundreds of tons would take months. Where would you move them to? A special facility would have to be built to destroy the material. I somehow doubt any of the neighbors is prepared to host it, and store the stuff until the facility can be built.
The Russian proposal focuses not on moving the material but putting it under some as yet undefined international control. I suppose that means international observers or inspectors to watch the chemical weapons stockpiles and report if they are used. The difficulties of doing this even in peacetime conditions are apparent from the difficult history of nuclear inspections in Iraq. How would anyone know that all the chemical weapons stocks had been reported? But doing it under wartime conditions seems truly impractical. I don’t think I’d want to be the international inspector embedded with Syrian forces protecting the chemical weapons stockpiles and trying to ensure they are not used.
German intelligence is suggesting that Bashar al Asad did not himself authorize the chemical attack on August 21. But that contradicts what Bashar al Asad has said to Charlie Rose: Bashar claimed that any such chemicals, if they existed, would be firmly in centralized control. That is surely true, as these weapons exist above all to protect the regime and to strike at Israel in a regime-threatening situation. If control of the chemical weapons has loosened to the point they can be used without the regime’s approval, things are worse in Syria than we had imagined. Intervention might be justified on that score alone, though it could not be limited to air attacks.
The main virtues of John Kerry’s floated idea, and the Russian proposal, are to delay further the prospect of an attack and to demonstrate that the Obama Administration is prepared to go the extra diplomatic mile to avoid military intervention. The time may well be needed to twist arms in the House of Representatives, which is playing its assigned role by reflecting the reluctance in the American population. The extra diplomatic mile is needed to show that there is no alternative to military action, or to provide a face-saving alternative if the Administration fails to get Congressional approval.
On the diplomatic front, the US needs to go, once again, to the UN Security Council to lay out its case and seek its concurrence in military action. The Russians and Chinese will not go along, but there is really no harm in demonstrating to Moscow and Beijing, and to the world, that they do not control the use of American power any more than we control the use of theirs, which Moscow has used against Georgia and Beijing uses often to assert its territorial claims against American allies in the East and South China Seas.
But going that route requires prior approval of military action in the US Congress. That seems a tall order at the moment. John Kerry is trying to convince us that the effort will be a small one:
We will be able to hold Bashar al-Assad accountable without engaging in troops on the ground or any other prolonged kind of effort in a very limited, very targeted, short-term effort that degrades his capacity to deliver chemical weapons without assuming responsibility for Syria’s civil war. That is exactly what we are talking about doing – unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.
The trouble with that argument is it is inconsistent with going to Congress for approval and with the notion that Syria’s use of chemical weapons puts American security at risk by breaking an international taboo. Nor is there any guarantee that things can be kept small. The enemy has a vote. If Bashar escalates, we’ll need to respond.
Bashar giving up his chemical weapons, putting them under international control, a small intervention to solve a big problem. Crisis breeds strange ideas.
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Too narrow broadens
The Syria war resolution approved in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee goes a long way to correcting the problems in the original draft. The too narrow definition of American goals has been broadened to include changing the momentum on the battlefield. It looks as if the Administration has the votes to get this version approved in the Senate, provided it is not filibustered.
The question will be whether the broader definition of American goals is just too much for the House, where the increasingly isolationist Tea Party is strong among Republicans and more liberal Democrats likewise oppose getting involved abroad. It is one of the ironies of this Administration that it is paying the cost of George W. Bush’s mistake in going to war in Iraq. The House Republican leadership, while supporting the resolution, will not impose party discipline to ensure its passage, leaving voting entirely up to individual members. Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who has come out swinging for the resolution, faces a tough uphill battle to get an overwhelming majority of Democrats to support the resolution. That won’t be easy.
My guess is that the key to success or failure lies with, whether you like it or not, Israel. Some think the Israelis are ambivalent about removing Bashar al Asad. Their politicians may be. But their intelligence apparatus has concluded that Bashar has to go sooner rather than later, to better the odds of preventing an extremist takeover. The Israelis have been smart to keep their mouths shut in public, but they are no doubt lobbying hard in private for vigorous military action that would reinforce the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons as well as help to end the war. Failure of the US Congress to approve military action, or hesitation by the President to take it, would reduce the credibility of an American military threat against the Iranian nuclear program, as Secretary of State Kerry made eminently clear in his testimony in the Senate.
The President can take military action without Congressional approval, but failure of the Congress to act would make an already messy process incomprehensible to most of the world and further reduce the likelihood of finding support among friends and allies. The Arab League, while denouncing the use of chemical weapons, has so far not called for military action. With the United Kingdom restricted from participation by its parliament and Germany and Italy reluctant as usual about military action, European support essentially comes down to France and maybe a few smaller countries. Plus Turkey, whose interests clearly lie in the earliest possible end to the war in Syria.
Russia remains adamantly opposed to military action, even if President Putin is sounding Moscow’s usual meaningless grace notes about not necessarily standing forever with Bashar al Asad and wanting to discuss the matter with President Obama. Iran is in an tough spot. It is a diehard opponent of chemical weapons use, as Saddam Hussein gassed Iranian forces in the 1980s, during the Iraq/Iran war. But its high officials, echoed by Moscow, are still insisting the August 21 attack came from the Syrian opposition, not the regime. This creates an opening. If the Americans can present Russia and Iran with detailed, incontrovertible evidence that the regime was responsible, logic would dictate that they at least stop their extensive military support to Bashar al Asad and his Hizbollah allies. But of course logic doesn’t necessarily govern situations like this one.
The action this week will be first and foremost in the House and then in Saint Petersburg, where the world’s major economic powers will be meeting at the G20 Summit. If and when a resolution passes in the House, there will be a moment–likely less than a day–for a quick diplomatic maneuver by Russia and Iran to agree to a diplomatic conference that would remove Bashar and save Moscow and Tehran from the embarrassment of an American air attack like the ones in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan that altered the military balance on the ground. If the diplomacy fails at that point, it will have another chance, but only after whatever happens happens. The law of unanticipated consequences will then be in full force.
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