Tag: Syria
Half a loaf isn’t really enough
OK, this isn’t the most stirring announcement this month from the White House, but Michael Abramowitz is right to call attention to it. The full statement is worth a read.
What it does is to put the emphasis on anticipating mass atrocities and preventing them. This isn’t as hard as it sounds–those contemplating mass murder often announce their intentions, as Gaddafi did in preparing to take Benghazi and Hutu power advocates did in Rwanda. But it is difficult for a bureaucracy to focus on anticipating problems when it has a full plate already on the table. The Atrocities Prevention Board is an attempt to prioritize prevention.
Just as important is “the full toolbox”:
The President rejects the idea that, in the face of mass atrocity, our options are “limited to either sending in the military or standing by and doing nothing.” He instructs his Administration to undertake a 100-day review – to take an “inventory” of the full range of economic, diplomatic, and other tools available to U.S. policymakers; to develop the appropriate governmental organization to try to ensure early and less costly preventive action; to improve the collection and processing of indicators of mass atrocity; to provide a channel for dissent to be raised during a crisis; and to appropriately train and prepare our diplomats, armed services, development professionals, and others.
It would be easy to mock this as half a loaf, but I prefer to think it sounds like the beginning of a serious effort. I think we can rely on Samantha Power and others in the White House to make sure there is some real result. Too often, we’ve “missed the story,” in Roy Gutman’s journalistic but profound phrase.
The trouble is that history doesn’t wait for 100-day reviews. As misfortune would have it, atrocities have already reached truly alarming levels in Syria. The new ban on admissibility to the United States that the policy vaunts looks like a thin reed in the face of real horror. Are Bashar al Assad’s cronies going to behave differently because they miss their vacation in Florida?
Let’s get that old-fashioned oil embargo out of the tool box, with a UN Security Council resolution to back it up multilaterally. That would have a real impact. And let’s not wait for that 100-day review.
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Crouching tiger, hidden dragon
Now that the UN Security Council has at least condemned the regime violence in Syria, everybody is looking for President Obama to amp up calls for Bashar al Assad to step aside. The Administration, I am assured, knows perfectly well that an orderly transition to a less autocratic regime in Damascus would be a big improvement from the U.S. perspective.
But what if the President says Bashar has to go, and then he doesn’t? The U.S. hasn’t got lots of leverage, as it did over an Egyptian army that was heavily dependent on U.S. money, training and equipment. The most vulnerable sector in Syria is energy, where European rather than American companies are the critical players. Posing the President as a crouching tiger is better than exposing him as a paper tiger, especially after the week he has just gotten himself through.
And what if the transition is not orderly, but breaks down into sectarian and ethnic violence, with the risk of overflow into Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey? That could be a big mess, one we would regret for many years into the future.
The problem with this argument is that it suggests a quicker transition would be far better for the U.S. than one that drags on . Those who know Syria well are saying Aleppo and Damascus will turn against Bashar sooner rather than later. Sami Moubayed says unemployment, lack of moderate community leaders willing to calm the situation, and the influx of people from all over Syria into the two largest Syrian cities will ensure that the revolution eventually spreads there. In the meanwhile, the demonstrators are straining the security forces and beginning to bend them at the edges.
While Juan Cole is correctly disappointed in the wording and lack of teeth in the UN Security Council statement, I’m more philosophical about it. I see it as a necessary step along the way to ratcheting up pressure on Bashar. Its significance is that it happened at all, not the specific wording.
I wish we could wave a magic wand and make the Syrian army turn into pussycats, but we can’t. Only the demonstrators can make that trick work, by maintaining their nonviolent discipline and convincing some of the soldiers and police that their interests will be better served if they embrace the revolution rather than fight it.
While not often mentioned, it is important to keep an eye on the Chinese, who could either save the Syrian regime with cash for oil contracts or sink it by permitting more action in the Security Council and lining up with the Americans and Europeans. Syria doesn’t have enough oil to be of great interest to the Chinese, and a lot more of it is likely to flow once Bashar is gone. The hidden dragon may well be the deciding factor against the regime.
Meanwhile, the Syrian army has punched into the center of Hama, killing a few dozen more of its own citizens and making an orderly transition less likely. Bashar seems to have decided that he prefers to resist the inevitable, like Gaddafi in Libya and Saleh in Yemen, than give in like Mubarak in Egypt or Ben Ali in Tunisia. Yesterday’s scenes of Mubarak caged in a Cairo courtroom will not have encouraged him to rethink.
PS: AJ English continues to do a good job, with a lot of help from courageous friends at Shaam:
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Three blind mice
I first used this title 15 years ago in a piece for the Secretary of State’s Morning Summary about Presidents Tudjman, Milosevic and Izetbegovic. It drew a personal word of interest and praise from President Clinton. That doesn’t happen often, so a lowly office director tends to remember when it does. And maybe resurrect the charmed title at an appropriate moment.
Today’s three blind mice are chiefs of state Bashar al Assad, Muammar Gaddafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Syria, Libya and Yemen, respectively. While it is easy now to imagine that things will get worse in these three countries before they get better, it is clear enough that they would be better now if their chiefs had stepped aside long ago to allow orderly transitions. Sunday the Syrian armed forces made a clear summer day in Hama sound like this:
Bashar al Assad therefore rates a word of particular opprobrium: he and his brother Maher are showing themselves heirs to the blood-shedding tradition of their father Hafez. This should not surprise, but people have come to think Bashar is somehow better than the rest of his homicidal family. It just isn’t so.
Things are arguably worse in Libya and Yemen. A kind of multi-faceted tribal, regional and sectarian chaos reigns in the latter, on top of a popular protest movement that remains vigorous and terrorist bands who harbor in the hinterlands. In Libya, the killing by we know not whom of General Abdel Fatah Younes, a rebel military leader who came over from the Gaddafi regime, has raised lots of questions about the Transitional National Council (TNC) that leads the rebellion, which apparently had to fight off Gaddafi forces inside Benghazi over the weekend.
These three Middle Eastern potentates are blind not just to the interests of their countries but also to their own. A few months ago it would have been possible to arrange a decent exit for these embattled chiefs of state. Now the International Criminal Court has indicted Gaddafi, Saleh is nursing wounds in Saudi Arabia and Bashar al Assad cannot hope to escape responsibility for several thousand deaths of peaceful demonstrators. Only Saleh can hope to live out a peaceful old age, and only if he gives up on his ambition to return to Yemen.
What we are lacking here is the farmer’s wife, who is supposed to cut off their tails with a carving knife. By this I mean some international party that can persuade chiefs of state who have lost the consent of the people they govern to step aside. In the midst of this Arab spring Ban Ki Moon was reelected as United Nations Secretary General, but he has not been empowered to negotiate what the international community clearly seeks: abdication of these chiefs of state. He has a clear mandate only with respect to Gaddafi, and that is for a ceasefire and withdrawal rather than abdication.
Several “mediators” have sought compromise solutions. The African Union and Turkey have tried with Libya, Turkey has tried with Syria, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia and its wealthy monarchy friends) has tried with Yemen. None of this has worked so far. What we are witnessing is a failure of diplomacy, which should make us think harder about how to strengthen international norms and institutions that can deliver results more effectively.
That is precisely what is not happening, though I happily credit U.S. ambassador to Damascus Robert Ford (who testifies this week in Congress) for his courageous display of support to the demonstrators. Instead, the U.S. Congress is considering budgets that would slice diplomacy to the bone and limit contributions to international organization. I can’t really say there are 535 blind mice, since some members of Congress understand better than I do what is needed. But the collective decision is likely to disarm the farmer’s wife, leaving her standing there without even a carving knife to discipline the unruly despots of the 21st century.
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Have we got the Arab Spring right?
The Middle East Institute, which kindly lists me among its “scholars,” asked me to address the question of whether President Obama has established the right policy in his May 19 speech in his May 19 speech for reform and democracy in the Middle East and whether implmentation is adequate. This MEI meeting was part of a broader effort to look at the implications of the Arab Spring. Here are the notes I used yesterday to respond, slightly embellished with hindsight (see especially note 19).
Reform and Democracy
Middle East Institute
July 29, 2011
1. President Obama was clear enough in May: he said, “it will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy.”
2. And he added: “our support must also extend to nations where transitions have yet to take place.”
3. Nor was there any doubt what “reform” means: “The United States supports a set of universal rights…[including] free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly, the freedom of religion, equality for men and women under the rule of law, and the right to choose your own leaders.”
4. This he made clear is on top of our “core” interests in the region: “countering terrorism and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons; securing the free flow of commerce and safe-guarding the security of the region; standing up for Israel’s security and pursuing Arab-Israeli peace.”
5. So is the Administration living up to its own rhetoric? Is the policy framework right? Is the bureaucratic response adequate?
6. My view is that basically the policy framework is correct. As someone whose foreign service career was spent mainly in Europe, I in fact am a bit surprised that this was not the policy framework all along.
7. Values and interests have always been pursued in tandem in Europe, though not always without conflict and tradeoffs. I served 10 years in Italy, where we often compromised our values in favor of our interest in keeping the Communist Party out of power.
8. Of course there is more conflict between values and interests in the Middle East, especially when it comes to countries that have not yet seen much of the Arab Spring: the GCC countries in particular.
9. I see no sign that we’ve really adjusted our bilateral relationship with Saudi Arabia or United Arab Emirates to this policy framework.
10. Nor do I see signs that Saudi Arabia has embraced reform: this week’s Economist reports on efforts there to restrict new media by “inciting divisions between citizens”, “damaging the country’s public affairs”, or insulting senior clerics. The Shura Council is considering a draft anti-terrorism law that would criminalize “endangering national unity” and “harming the interests of the state,” imposing harsh penalties. Our embassy won’t be encouraged to reform by the fact that this proposal originates with Prince Nayef; repression can’t be more of a problem for us than for the Saudis.
11. As for other countries, I would hesitate to make the judgment on my own.
12. In Tunisia, we seem to be doing the right things. But the Project on Middle East Democracy/Boell Foundation report suggests effectiveness is spotty in a lot of other places:
- Aid is restricted by US policy concerns (Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, fifth fleet in Bahrain)
- Host government concerns (Yemen, Egypt)
- US aid is a declining percentage of the whole (Egypt $17B from Gulf)
- Indifference (Morocco)
- Violence (Yemen and Libya)
- Excessive focus on government bodies and not enough on real democratic development
14. I think part of the problem is the bureaucratic structure, which is not only fragmented but also too much under State Department and chief of mission control.
15. If you are going to get serious about supporting reform, especially in coutries where interests militate in the other direction, you are going to have to break the strait jackets diplomats put on you. I am not a fan of interagency mechanisms when it comes to democracy support.
16. We are going to see a whole lot more support for reform the more independent the sources of funding are—ask anyone (except George, who was disappointed in the results) whether Soros was effective in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
17. I would rate NED and its family of organizations as a preferable conduit for democracy assistance (relative to State or USAID), at least until the revolution has actually occurred. And yes, Fulbrights should be regarded as part of our democracy and reform support efforts.
18. In the end, though, the most important instrument for influencing the course of events in some countries will not be our democratization support efforts, but the U.S. military, whose training and assistance were certainly influential in Egypt and could be in places like Bahrain and Iraq.
19. It goes without saying that we can only be effective if there is an indigenous movement for democracy and reform, one that has taken on the responsibility of defining for itself what those words mean. We should not be imposing systems that we invent, but helping others to discover what will suit their needs for accountability, transparency and inclusivity.
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The rich get richer
Yesterday’s conference on investment prospects in the wake of the Arab Spring over at the World Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) was a lively couple of hours–these economic types are briefer and more to the point than their political counterparts–but the bottom line was gloomy: the GCC states and Iraq are likely to attract the lion’s share of investment while Egypt and Tunisia (Syria, Yemen and Libya weren’t even mentioned) go begging in the short term. There was disagreement on longer-term prospects, with Ian Bremmer registering a strong minority view that the geopolitics are unfavorable, both because of Iran and the Israel/Palestine conflict.
An upbeat and indefatigible Afshin Molavi started off underlining that we live in a world of surprisingly interconnected risk, that there is a lot of diversity in what we should not really label “Arab Spring,” and that the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) has a young population, many unable to get married because of the lack of jobs and looking for “dignity.” Growth has now slowed, hurting their prospects.
Citibank’s Hamid Biglari said investors have adopted a wait and see attitude toward the more revolutionary part of the region and are shifting their attention towards the GCC and Iraq, whose prospects are good if Baghdad can get security under control. Multinationals are not pulling out. Egypt is a larger and better known market than Tunisia, which however is more homogeneous, more secular, more middle class and better educated. Tunisia is more likely to succeed economically, but Egypt is the bigger prize. The immediate concerns of investors are about legitimacy and whether the new governments will treat the old elite decently, but it will be a decade before “equilibrium” returns.
Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group admitted enthusiasm for the Arab Spring (“it feels good”) but noted that Ukraine and Georgia felt good at first too. Tunisia seems to be moving in the right direction, Egypt less so but will likely muddle through. Iraq is the most exciting investment opportunity in the region. U.S. influence is declining, and Saudi influence is increasing. Saudi policy objectives and conditionality will differ from those of the U.S. Overall though the immediate political risks have been overvalued. The problem is in the longer term, both because of Iran and the Israel/Palestine conflict. Europe and the U.S. will increasingly be occupied with other problems.
Cairo-based Walid Bakr of Riyada Enterprise Development, Abraaj Capital, was more optimistic in the medium and long term. Egypt’s big market and tourist attractions are not going away. Half the population is under 24, well educated and internet savvy, with lots of entrepreneurial spirit. The revolution has unleashed strong feelings of national pride and dignity. Youth is the engine of growth and can contribute to the all-important creation of small and medium enterprises so vital to job creation and wealth distribution.
Dubai-based Yasar Jarrar of PwC Middle East underlined that we are still at the beginning of the changes in the Middle East, which suffered a long period of stagnation (not real stability). The GCC countries are moving well to kickstart job creation for youth, major infrastructure investments and dialogue between their governments and the citizens. But it is going to be a long spring in a region that really does matter. Philip Haddad of Mubadala Infrastructure Partners agreed that we need to take the long view, but in the meanwhile as much as $38 billion is being invested in infrastructure, which is not bad.
The Omani ambassador, Hunaina Sultan Ahmed al-Mughairy, led off with a very upbeat assessment of the Sultanate’s prospects. The message was “yes, we can” reform ourselves, if we put our minds to it. Jean Francois Seznec of Georgetown said he was very pessimistic about Bahrain, where the basic issue is governance. In recent weeks, only 5% of the hotel rooms in Bahrain have been occupied.
There was a good deal of agreement that the issue everywhere is at least in part governance. Citizens did not feel they were benefiting under the old regimes, because of a lack of accountability. Political and economic reform need to go together, but it is not clear that new parliamentary democracies will credit competence and choose economic reform, which is discredited because it is associated with the old regimes.
Wrapping up, Ravi Vish of MIGA confirmed the importance of governance, addressing social inequality and the income gap, and job creation, mainly through a stronger and more entrepreneurial private sector. He also reviewed MIGA’s portfolio of political insurance products, for which demand is naturally rising in the region.
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Nonviolent discipline is still vital
While I am afraid I’ve written this all before, it is important to reiterate now that sectarianism is rearing its ugly head in Syria: maintaining nonviolent discipline is vital. You can kill a few Alawites (the heterodox minority to which President Bashar al Assad belongs), but the regime can kill many more protesters.
There is nothing to be gained and everything to be lost from violence, especially if it is directed at the security forces. You want them to come over to your side. They won’t do that if they are being attacked. Instead, they’ll use the violence as justification for cracking down, and the uncommitted portion of the population will likely lean towards law and order.
What about the regime thugs? Don’t demonstrators get to respond to them in kind? Unfortunately for those of us who are not principled pacifists, the answer is no. Violence is their favored terrain; you want to contest them on terrain that favors you, not them. Best is in public, under the glare of TV cameras.
This is particularly difficult in Syria, which has managed to control the presence of international journalists and will presumably make life hard for those who report too enthusiastically about the demonstrations or too disapprovingly about the regime. One of the few ways to get a regime to rein in its thugs is international reporting on their abuses.
The Syrian protesters have demonstrated a remarkable degree of unity and cleverness in confronting a regime that has numerous advantages: it has no reason to fear military international intervention, it has Iranian backing, the Syrian middle class in Damascus and Aleppo has hesitated to go to the streets, the international community is reluctant to get involved, and the security forces appear to have backed the regime so far in all but a relatively few, isolated circumstances.
There is, nevertheless, a growing sense that Assad will not be able to restore the status quo ante. He is in trouble even if he manages to weather the current wave of protests, which still seems to be growing and spreading. On the merits, his regime should collapse soon. But if it fails to cooperate, the only option is to keep up the protests, and keep them nonviolent.
A demonstration, allegedly in Damascus yesterday (no sign of the security forces that I see). The Youtube caption reads: Chants of “Our Blood Won’t Be Sold” ring out through the Midan neighborhood of Damascus, Capitol of Syria as these youth march for the overthrow of the fascist Dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad on Saturday night, July 17, 2011:
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