Tag: Russia
Lincoln was a lonely Republican
So Dana Milbank thinks the 50th anniversary did not live up to the original. I really can’t imagine how that would have been possible, but no doubt the Milbanks of 1963 gave the original a snarky review as well.
I enjoyed my couple of hours at the Wednesday event. Dana is right that John Lewis was better than the rest, but he is better than the rest most other days too. His consistency and persistence in advocating integration in every dimension of American life are welcome relief from the politicians who seek the next big thing. Not to mention his seemingly impeccable integrity.
If showing up is half the battle, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (I’m grateful to President Obama for giving up “Barry”) were winners. Bill did better: his declaration that it shouldn’t be easier to buy a gun in America than to vote is certainly a crowd pleaser on the left. The King family, unfortunnately, got the father’s desire to be heard but not his rhetorical gifts. But older sister Christine King Farris made a magnificent statement with her terrific hat.
The best part though was the music, which was a vital dimension in 1963 as well. I’m writing without the benefit of my program, so I won’t be able to cite singers and groups, but the church choir that was invoking the protection of God when I arrived about 2 pm was exactly what the occasion merited. The overly harmonized Star Spangled Banner wasn’t my thing, but the foxy (am I allowed to say that?) gospel singer who came on later was over the top.
As for the President, he made the appropriate allusions to progress and pushed for closing economic gaps, but he wasn’t all there. How could he be? Later in the day he made some of his clearest public remarks about Syria and what he might do, and would not do, to respond to Bashar al Asad’s use of chemical weapons. But there are a lot of other things on his mind as well: the impending Federal budget crisis, Congressional deadlock, and the slow economic recovery, not to mention tensions with Russia, the Iranian nuclear program, American withdrawal from Afghanistan and already bogged down talks between Israel and Palestine. I can’t imagine that he would have sat through an hour of others speechifying, except for this occasion.
The most important political signal of the day was who did not show up. The nation’s Republican leadership took a pass. This was not a good omen, as it confirms that the GOP is uninterested in minority votes. Blacks and hispanics would unquestionably be better off if both parties had to court their votes. I’d have expected at least George W. Bush, who appointed Condi Rice and Colin Powell to high office and had a position on immigration pretty close to that of Barack Obama. But today’s Republicans seem to be opting for disenfranchisement and gerrymandering of Congressional districts rather than an all-out effort to compete and break up the Obama rainbow coalition.
That’s too bad for minorities, but it is also a demographically fated strategy. Fifty years from now, we’ll only have a two-party system if Republicans change their approach. The only question is how long it will take them to turn around. Lincoln cannot be the lone Republican leader present at the 100th anniversary of the March on Washington.
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Needed: creative diplomats
An attack to punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons is on hold due to British parliament reservations. The American Congress also has reasonable questions it wants answered. The P5 (that’s the veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council, namely US, UK, France, Russia and China) met yesterday and failed to agree to a draft UK resolution authorizing all necessary means. President Obama is hesitating, or at least hoping for better conditions. He still has to present the case for military action to the American people, who haven’t forgotten the Bush Administration claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (and some even remember President Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin incident). The UN chemical weapons inspectors are scheduled to leave Syria this weekend. If military action is in the cards, the earliest it is likely to happen is next week. The President is supposed to be at the G20 summit in Saint Petersburg September 5/6. It might be the better part of valor to wait until after that.
So there is time for diplomacy. The deal President Obama should be offering to Moscow is this: agree to implement the Geneva June 2012 communique, which calls for Bashar al Asad to hand executive power to a government approved by both the opposition and the regime, and we will desist from a military attack. That would save Russia the embarrassment of another Western military intervention without UN Security Council approval.
Iran, where there is admittedly some concern about the use of chemical weapons, might still prefer a military attack, because it would give its military a good deal of intelligence on current American capabilities. But if Russia pushes Bashar aside, Tehran will want to shift its support to ensure continuation of its alliance with Damascus. More than likely, it will put its chips down on one of the security force commanders, hoping that he can maintain the autocracy even if Bashar is a goner.
The trick is that a credible offer of a political solution can only be made if the threat of military attack is real and imminent. Otherwise Moscow can simply ignore the deal. Nor can the threat of military attack be a one-off, limited strike of the sort President Obama seems to think appropriate. To get Bashar to step aside, or to get Moscow to push him aside, will require a near certainty that failure to do so will lead to a military attack that tilts the battlefield against him and guarantees that his days are numbered. The notion that diplomacy will work without an “existential” threat is delusional. Diplomacy and military strategy have to be fully synchronized.
Won’t a short, focused military attack do the trick? No, it won’t. President Reagan tried that to retaliate against Libya for a terrorist attack on American service people in Germany. It had no serious impact on Qaddafi, except to make him a a bit crazier. Nor did the Clinton-era attack on an Al Qaeda facility in Afghanistan do anything to deter Osama Bin Laden. Pin pricks can be useless at best, counter-productive at worst, if they signal weakness or precipitate escalation. Bashar al Asad may well react to a well-targeted and narrow attack by using more chemical weapons.
The diplomats should focus then on two things:
- Making the military threat as real, broad and open-ended as possible by close consultations with whatever coalition of the willing can be hammered together over the next week;
- Getting Moscow to realize that it stands to lose more by backing Asad than by pushing him aside.
I doubt an effort along these lines will succeed, mainly because of the difficulties in mounting a credible existential threat. But that’s where creative diplomats come in.
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Fight and talk
It appears we may be headed for American-led attacks to punish, degrade and deter Syria’s use of chemical weapons. There are still preliminaries to be accomplished: the Obama Administration needs to present the evidence it has collected in some form that is convincing at home and abroad. It needs to complete its consultations with individual members of Congress, which isn’t scheduled to be back in session until September 9.
The Administration also needs to rally a stronger international coalition. The British and French are on board, though the British are now asking for a UN Security Council discussion that is unlikely to generate a resolution that approves the use of force. This could sharpen the dispute with the Russians and Chinese. The Arab League, while denouncing the use of chemical weapons, has not asked for military intervention. The UN wants its chemical weapons inspection team out of Damascus before any military action.
Let’s assume that the Administration can get this all done between now and the time the President is supposed to appear in St. Petersburg for the G20 Summit September 5/6, which seems ambitious, or shortly thereafter, which might be wiser. What impact might bombing have on the course of the war and prospects for negotiations?
The history is not encouraging. Most of the interventions Michael Knights discussed yesterday did not aim at or lead to negotiated solutions.
The ones that did–Bosnia and Kosovo–are exceptions that prove the rule.
In the case of Bosnia, the 1995 bombing was undertaken in response to a Serb attack on the Sarajevo “safe area.” NATO ran out of primary targets quickly, as the Serbs parked their artillery and tanks near schools and the remaining mosques in areas under their control. Somewhere down on the list of targets were the communication nodes of the Bosnian Serb Army, which was relatively small and depended on rapid and secure communications to move its forces quickly wherever they were needed. The result was a rout: the Bosnian Army and the Croat Defense Force, with ample support from the Croatian Army, advanced quickly and created the conditions for a successful negotiation at Dayton.
In Kosovo, months of bombing focussed mainly on military targets about which Milosevic cared little, but he gave in because the 78-day, open-ended bombing, as well as the prospect of escalation, put him in a corner: he had no leverage over NATO, the Russians were abandoning him, popular opinion turned against him, concern about damage to infrastructure was rising, and a future invasion was possible. The negotiated outcome left him in place. It was about the best he could hope for.
The Obama Administration is not contemplating anything like the kind of open-ended commitment to bombing that would tilt the battlefield back in the direction of the Syrian opposition. To the contrary: rumint would have it that the Americans are focusing on hitting a limited set of targets associated with the launch of chemical weapons over a time frame fixed in advance.
There is nevertheless good reason to use the prospect of this military action to advance the diplomatic agenda. The State Department is rightly trying to do that. Their focus seems to be on the Russians and Iranians, not on Bashar al Asad himself. That too is correct: Bashar will be moved only by an existential threat, which limited bombing will not accomplish. But government failure in repressing an insurgency correlates with external support, because it may weaken or be withdrawn. The Russians have repeatedly said they are not immutably attached to Bashar al Asad, and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was busy yesterday denouncing the use of chemical weapons (which however Tehran attributes not to the regime but to “terrorists”).
The odds of diplomatic success are however low. The kind of limited bombing apparently being planned will be wholly insufficient to threaten Bashar al Asad’s hold on power. He may well respond by using more of his chemical weapons, lest he lose the capability to use them. That would certainly be cause for escalation on the US side, but that is precisely the slippery slope President Obama is trying to avoid. Nor will tightly limited bombing give the Russians and Iranians much reason to withdraw their support for the Asad regime, provided he does not escalate.
So the odds are bad for “fight and talk.” But that is no reason not to pursue a diplomatic solution, as President Nixon did for four years while fighting North Vietnam. If Moscow shows any inclination to convene the Geneva 2 talks that were postponed this summer, Washington should certainly be ready to deal, including with Tehran.
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Serious is as serious does
John Kerry can be downright eloquent when he wants:
…our understanding of what has already happened in Syria is grounded in facts, informed by conscience and guided by common sense….
President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people. Nothing today is more serious, and nothing is receiving more serious scrutiny.
His statement today is more than a red line that can be blurred depending on future circumstances. It is a clear pledge to do something serious about a red line already crossed.
The diplomatic fur is flying fast and furious, according to the Secretary’s account. That’s as it should be. The Administration needs to construct as wide an international and domestic consensus for what it wants to do as possible, including Congressional backing and a UN Security Council resolution if possible. Speed is not as important as developing momentum. If President Obama wants to be taken seriously, whatever befalls Bashar al Asad and his regime now must be sufficient to prevent him from ever again even contemplating use of chemical weapons.
That should not however be the only goal. Bashar’s depredations against civilians are occurring every day, even when chemical weapons are not used. Syrian artillery and aircraft are attacking population centers, hospitals, schools and other civilian facilities. Each and every one of these attacks is a war crime. Very few of the 100,000 Syrians killed in the last 2.5 years have been victims of chemical attacks. Are the lives of those maimed and killed in bombings and shelling less valuable than those who suffered so horrendously from nerve agent? Is the international prohibition of attacks on civilians not as important as the prohibition on use of CW?
I don’t imagine that Bashar al Asad can necessarily be gotten rid of with American air attacks, which are as far as the Administration is prepared to go. But I do think the goal of whatever we do should be broader than accountability for gassing civilians. The playing field has tilted in recent months in favor of the regime, due mainly to Iranian, Hizbollah and Russian support for the Syrian security forces. It needs to be tilted back in the other direction if there is to be any hope of the negotiated outcome to which John Kerry is committed. Whether that is done with air attacks or with weapons and intelligence supplied to the opposition, it needs to be done.
We’ve seen this scenario before: air attacks in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan helped indigenous forces on the ground to at least begin to win the day, resulting in negotiated outcomes in Bosnia and Kosovo and regime change in Afghanistan. None of these outcomes would, however, have been sustainable without boots on the ground, including substantial numbers of Americans. That is almost unthinkable in Syria and certainly not what Americans or their President want, though some Americans to guard and dismantle the chemical weapons stocks may be necessary. So the Administration would do well to consider what is to be done if intervention succeeds in bringing about a political solution. What then? Who will stabilize Syria and ensure that the post-Asad period is not even more violent than the current civil war?
The UN has some pledges of troops if there is a peace to keep. But they are far short of the numbers needed for a country of 21 million people (before more than a million of them became refugees) suffering severe ethnic and sectarian cleavages after a more than 40-year autocracy. Rallying troop-contributing countries is going to be the Secretary of State’s next Sisyphean task.
Serious is as serious does, not only in warfare but also in peacefare.
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Peace picks, August 26-30
Still quiet in DC, but not for long:
1. Exploring Opposing Perspectives in Egypt
Wednesday, August 28 at 2:00 – 5:00pm
Johns Hopkins SAIS
1717 Massachusetts Avenue, NW ∙ Room 500
Salon 101: The antidote to the typical DC panel discussion.
With the Salon 101 series, IPSI and SAIS continue our thought leadership collaboration by providing dynamic and experiential events, bridging the gap between theory and practice. Participants at Salon 101 directly engage experts, ideas, and each other to explore diverse perspectives and pragmatic solutions to complex global events.
Exploring Opposing Perspectives in Egypt: Since the deposition of President Morsi, unrest in Egypt has dominated international news. The outpouring of public sentiment, mass rallies and protests, and conflicting ideologies have left observers scrambling for answers. In a situation characterized by extreme tension, charged opinions, and a lack of clear-cut responses, this Salon 101 event will bring together topic experts to grapple with participants for a way forward in Egypt’s current political crisis.
The featured panel of expert facilitators includes:
- Mohamed Elmenshawy Director of the Languages and Regional Studies Program, Middle East Institute
- Dr. Nancy Okail Director of Egypt Programs, Freedom House
- Dr. William Zartman Co-Founder & Chairman of the Board, IPSI; Professor Emeritus, Johns Hopkins SAIS
With special photo exhibit from 18 months in Egypt by Keith Lane.
Spots are limited and will fill up fast, so please RSVP with your name, affiliation, and one sentence on why you would like to attend.
2. The U.S.-Russia Relationship: What’s Next?
Summary
On August 7, the White House announced cancellation of the planned Moscow summit in early September between Presidents Obama and Putin, saying there were no prospects for significant progress on key issues at the meeting. The White House also said cooperation with Russia remains a priority, and on August 9 Secretaries Kerry and Hagel met with their Russian counterparts, Ministers Lavrov and Shoigu. While President Obama intends to travel to St Petersburg for the G20 summit on September 6 and 7, there has been no word on whether there will be a bilateral meeting with President Putin on the margins of the summit. Clearly, U.S.-Russian relations have entered troubled times.
On August 28, the Center on the United States and Europe will host a panel discussion to address these developments and future prospects for the bilateral relationship between Washington and Moscow. Brookings Senior Fellows Clifford Gaddy, Steven Pifer and Angela Stent will take part. Brookings Visiting Fellow Jeremy Shapiro will moderate. Following opening comments, the panelists will take questions from the audience.
Event Agenda
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Moderator
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Visiting Fellow, Foreign Policy
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Panelists
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Nonresident Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe
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Protecting long-term US interests in Syria
Whatever you think of President Obama and his decisions, he knows what his job is:
We have to think through strategically what’s going to be in our long-term national interests, even as we work cooperatively internationally to do everything we can to put pressure on those who would kill innocent civilians.
So what are America’s long-term interests in Syria, where innocent civilians are being killed in increasing numbers every day?
Three things:
- Preserving the unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian state, as well as its neighbors;
- Preventing either Sunni extremists or Iranian allies from using Syria as a platform for international terrorism.
- Maintaining an effective prohibition on the use of chemical weapons.
It is all too apparent that continuation of the civil war will do damage to all three:
Sectarian divisions and the risk they pose to territorial integrity become more dramatic with every passing day. Many Alawites, convinced that the fall of Bashar al Asad will lead to mass slaughter comparable if not worse than what the regime is already doing to Sunnis, are concentrating themselves in the west and in certain neighborhood in Damascus. Christians and Druze are trying to duck and avoid direct engagement, but both groups have good reason to fear either regime survival or an opposition win. Kurds are looking for an opportunity to create their own federal unit, if not an independent state. Ethnic and sectarian cleansing and self-cleansing are separating Syria’s once mixed population in ways that will be difficult if not impossible to reverse, leading to a real risk of state collapse. Refugees threaten to destabilize Syria’s neighbors. Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria is aiming explicitly at destroying the state structure in the Levant.
Sunni extremists are increasingly present among the stronger fighting forces of the Syrian opposition. They are more experienced and better equipped and financed than the relative moderates of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). They are facing off against regime forces backed by Iran and Hizbollah that for the moment seem to have the upper hand around Homs and are fighting to loosen the opposition ring around Damascus. The longer this goes on, the less room there will be for the FSA, which depends on unreliable financing and supplies, mainly from Saudi Arabia but presumably by now also from the US. Continued fighting will strengthen Tehran’s hold on Damascus. A win by either Sunni extremists or the regime with support from Iran and Hizbollah will make Syria terrorism central.
If President Obama allows the red line he drew on use of chemical weapons to be crossed without consequences, the international prohibition may come to be seen as toothless. Bashar al Asad won’t be the only one to draw the conclusion that they may be used with impunity.
So ending the fighting quickly should be on the President’s mind, as continuation will be inimical to long-term American interests. How can the fighting be brought to a quicker end?
The short answer is anything that will end Asad regime advances and create a “mutually hurting stalemate” favorable to a negotiated solution, when both regime and opposition conclude they will be better off with a negotiated outcome than continuing the fighting. There is no guarantee that any particular intervention will create a mutually hurting stalemate, but it is clear enough that allowing the fighting to continue without intervention will be irreversibly inimical to long-term US interests.
What is needed is an intervention that changes Bashar al Asad’s calculation that he can stay in power because no one is going to do anything substantial to prevent it. There are two ways of achieving this: convince the Russians to end their military and financial support for him, or intervene militarily in favor of the opposition. The two options are linked: threat of the latter might well increase the probability of the Russians abandoning Bashar. And it is difficult to imagine they will stick with him if there is a successful American military intervention.
What kind of military intervention? Here the art of the possible enters into the calculation. America clearly has no stomach for another ground war in the Middle East, or even a weeks-long intervention like the NATO attack on Muammar Qaddafi’s forces in Libya. This rules out a no-fly zone as well as humanitarian corridors and safe areas, which would have to be enforced. The NFZ over northern Iraq cost many millions over more 11 years of implementation. Even vigorous intervention advocates agree there should be no American boots on the ground.
So the preferable military option, in addition to continued diplomatic effort with the Russians, is a stand-off attack with cruise missiles and smart bombs focused on Syrian missiles, artillery and air force as well as their command and control. I don’t really know how you measure proportionality to the apparent chemical attack that killed over one thousand people, many of them women and children, but a few days of well-targeted destruction would send a strong message.
The big question is whether to do something like this without UN Security Council authorization. President Obama is hesitant but does not rule it out:
…if the U.S. goes in and attacks another country without a U.N. mandate and without clear evidence that can be presented, then there are questions in terms of whether international law supports it, do we have the coalition to make it work, and, you know, those are considerations that we have to take into account.
Even the threat of intervention without UNSC authorization might bring the Russians around to restraint in their support for Asad, but he would be likely to stay in place and continue the fight for some time. An early end to this may depend on military intervention without UNSC authorization. I hope the lawyers are working on their briefs and the diplomats on the coalition needed “to make it work.”
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