Tag: United Nations
Shut out
Max Boot in the Washington Post today makes the case for U.S.-led military intervention in Syria. Zack Beauchamp at foreignpolicy.com makes the case for relying on diplomatic, political and economic tools. Zack wins. The score isn’t even close.
Boot
Boot dismisses most of the downsides of military intervention without serious discussion. He cites Syria’s lack of air defense effectiveness against Israel in 1982 (sic) and in 2007, when the Israelis achieved strategic and tactical surprise in a one-time raid on a single target. The inapplicability of these instances to a major, fully anticipated air campaign against multiple targets in urban areas in 2012 should be obvious. An American-led air war in Syria is going to be difficult and kill a lot of civilians.
Likewise, Boot writes off the large Syrian army as mostly conscripts and unmotivated. But it has also proven cohesive during a year of attacking Syrian cities. There have been few defections compared, for example, to Libya. The notion that only Alawites will fight for Bashar al Assad, as Boot implies, is just wrong.
Boot also writes off the argument that we don’t want to get into a proxy war with Iran, claiming that the Iranians are already fighting a war with the U.S., or with Russia, saying Moscow won’t fight for Bashar. But he doesn’t even consider the political and military risks to our ability to attack Iran, if that proves necessary to prevent it from building nuclear weapons, arising from a prior attack on Syria. The Obama Administration is not making a mistake to keep its powder dry if it wants to maintain a serious military threat against Tehran’s nuclear program.
Claiming that we have not even provided communications capabilities to the Syrian opposition, which is surely untrue, Boot says Syria is already in a civil war and doesn’t bother considering whether foreign military intervention could make things worse rather than better. After all, our other Middle Eastern military adventures have gone swimmingly over the past 10 years, without any blowback that undermines U.S. national security?
Our military intervention will also somehow prevent Syrian chemical weapons from falling into the wrong hands. The evidence on this question in Libya is still not in, but I’ll bet we haven’t prevented it entirely there, where our assets were much stronger than what they are likely to be in Syria.
Beauchamp
Zack doubts that airstrikes can have the desired impact in urban areas. He also notes the strength of the Syrian army (relative to the Libyan one) and the divisions in the opposition (also relative to the Libyan one). “Safe zones” would be target-rich environments for the Syrian army and difficult to defend for those intervening. Ground troops would be required. As for chemical weapons, Bashar might well use them in the event of an international military intervention, making things much more deadly than they would otherwise have been.
Beauchamp also considers the negative implications of a U.S.-led military intervention without Security Council approval. It would, he says, stiffen Indian, Brazilian and other resistance to “responsibility to protect,” undermining its usefulness in the future. Certainly there is ample reason to believe this.
Instead, he suggests we rely on diplomatic, political and economic pressure: referral of Bashar al Assad to the International Criminal Court (ICC), assurances to the Russians that their interests will be served in a post-Assad Syria, and consideration of renunciation of any debt Bashar incurs now as “odious,” i.e. not to be repaid. These are, admittedly, not strong options: the Security Council referral to the ICC is unlikely, assurances already offered have not yet moved the Russians, and anyone who still thinks Bashar’s debts are going to be repaid in full if the opposition wins is smoking something.
Shut out. These are, nevertheless, the right approaches to a problem for whose solution there are no good options. A U.S.-led military intervention without a UN Security Council resolution or even an Arab League request is a non-starter. I’d call this one four or five to zero for Beauchamp. And he didn’t even know what game he was playing: his piece is mostly about R2P and how it is properly applied to Syria. He’s right on that too.
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What now?
Bashar al Assad and his opponents have now both rejected Kofi Annan’s mission impossible. On behalf of the UN and the Arab League, he sought a ceasefire, followed by humanitarian aid and dialogue on a political solution.
This failure was not surprising. His was always a low-probability proposition. But the rejection came faster than I anticipated. I’d have guessed that Bashar would see some benefit in stringing Annan along.
Instead he slapped Annan’s proposition down without hesitation, grabbing some World Health Organization support for a Syrian Red Crescent mission to assess health needs in conflict areas. Not bad: wage war against your own population, then get the internationals to pay for your own cronies to assess the damage.
Bashar is feeling his cheerios. Russian support is holding. Arab threats to arm his opponents seem not much more than hot air at this point. Lots of small arms are getting in to Syria, but they won’t do much against Bashar’s armor and artillery. Defections are growing, but the numbers are small and they still have not reached into the inner circle.
It is a bit harder to explain the attitude of the opposition, which is feeling abandoned by the West and not much supported in the East. They’d have gained more from supporting Annan’s initiative, and then having Bashar reject it, than by opposing it from the first. They want Bashar out before dialogue can take place, which I understand perfectly well. But they just don’t have the horsepower at the moment to make it happen.
Many, though not all, in the opposition want arms for the Free Syrian Army, the network of defectors who have refused to fire on demonstrators and taken up the cudgels against Bashar. The problem is that arming the opposition will prolong the civil war and make it ever more sectarian, which is precisely what the West does not want.
The opposition’s main hope is international military intervention against Bashar, which still seems to me a distant prospect. An American military attack on Syria without Security Council approval and in the midst of a high-stakes diplomatic duel with Iran over its nuclear program is unlikely. Washington will want to keep its powder dry for the main battle. Europe is absorbed in its defense of the Euro.
A combined Turkish/Arab attack on Syria is theoretically possible. But without Security Council approval and extensive U.S. support, it risks political and military failure. There are already far too many hints of a broad and prolonged Sunni/Shia war in the Middle East. Do we really want to throw fuel on that fire?
This leaves us with few alternatives other than continuing to support the opposition, to isolate the Syrian regime and to press the Russians and Chinese to stop shielding Bashar from even a mild UNSC resolution. The only big question is whether the support should include whatever the opposition needs to take up arms. This includes not only the arms themselves but also intelligence support and training. The opposition lacks real-time information on the disposition of the army and its checkpoints, a deficiency that is too often deadly to militants trying to move around Syria.
I’ve opposed arming the opposition, on grounds that doing so militarizes the fight and shifts it to means that favor the regime. The same argument does not work for intelligence support, which is vital to protecting the opposition whether it takes up arms or not. Our overhead capabilities are stunning. If the opposition can organize itself to make effective use of real-time intelligence data to protect its adherents, we should be providing it.
I am at a loss as to what to recommend beyond that. This is one of those situations where there are bad options and worse ones. I don’t see a route out of the current impasse, other than the one Annan failed to sell to both sides.
What is happening in Syria is extraordinarily cruel and ugly. Bashar is mowing down people who are asking for no more than the freedom to decide their own fates. His moment of accountability will arrive, but for the moment we don’t seem to have a way of making it arrive sooner rather than later.
PS: Annan declared himself optimistic after a second meeting with Bashar al Assad today (Sunday). Hard to know what to make of that. The Arab League seems to have softened its demand that Bashar step aside, leading the Russians to sound a bit more helpful. The opposition should be getting ready to have its arm twisted to talk with the regime before Bashar is removed. Meetings at the UN Security Council this afternoon and tomorrow are likely to lead in that “optimistic” direction.
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Negotiation time
With all the jabber the last few days about the use of force against both Syria and Iran, media attention is not focused on the prospects for negotiated settlements. But there are such prospects still, even if the odds are getting longer by the day.
Syria
International Crisis Group is out yesterday with a “now or never” manifesto rightly focused on prospects for UN/Arab League envoy Kofi Annan’s efforts:
Annan’s best hope lies in enlisting international and notably Russian support for a plan that:
Arming the Syrian opposition, which is happening already, is not likely to improve the prospects for a negotiated settlement along these lines. To the contrary, Western contemplation of safe areas and humanitarian corridors, loose Arab talk about armed the Syria Free Army, the occasional Al Qaeda suicide bombing and a Russian blank check for the regime to crack down are combining to plunge Syria into chaos. Someone may think that deprives Iran of an important ally, but it also spells lasting (as in decades-long) trouble in a part of the world where we can ill afford it.
The Americans have been mumbling about how arms will inevitably get to the Syrian opposition. This is true enough. But some visible support for Annan, and a behind the scenes diplomatic game with the Russians, would be more helpful to the cause of preventing Syria from becoming a chronic source of instability in Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Jordan.
Iran
Netanyahu came but this time did not conquer. He needed President Obama to be forthcoming on an eventual military action against Iran as much as Obama needed him to refrain from aligning with Republican critics. It fell to Senator Mitch McConnell to crystallize the emerging U.S. position: if Iran enriches uranium to bomb grade (at or above 90%) or shows signs of having decided to build a nuclear weapon (design and ignition work), then the U.S. would respond with overwhelming force. This is the proposed “red line.”
We should not be fooled by McConnell’s belligerent tone. Even assuming very strict verification procedures, the line he proposes is a relatively expansive one that leaves Iran with enrichment technology and peaceful uses of atomic energy, which is what the Islamic Republic claims is its red line.
While the press was focused on belligerent statements, the P5+1 (US, UK, France, Russia, China + Germany) have apparently responded to Iran’s offer of renewed negotiations. Iran has also told the International Atomic Energy Agency that it can visit a previously off-limits nuclear site believed to be engaged in weapons research, but procedures have not yet been worked out.
Bottom line
I wouldn’t get excited about the prospects for negotiated solutions in either Syria or Iran. But if ever there was a time to negotiate, this is it. By fall, both situations will likely be too far gone, with serious consequences for the United States, the Middle East and the rest of the world.
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Partial success or eventual failure?
Noah Pollak of the Emergency Committee for Israel tweeted today:
Obama policy = preventing Iran from getting nuke. Israel policy = preventing capability to build nuke. There’s the rub.
That is indeed the rub, but there is vast ambiguity hiding behind both equations. What does “getting” a nuke really mean? What does “preventing capability” really mean?
In short, building a nuclear weapons requires two of three things:
- Enrichment technology, or
- Plutonium production capability, and
- Specific design and ignition capabilities for nuclear weapons
Enrichment and plutonium production are “dual use,” that is they can be used for both peaceful and weapons purposes. Iran already has enrichment technology enabling it to enrich to 20%. That program is more advanced than its plutonium efforts. Moving beyond 20% enrichment is not a big technological step. What would it mean to take away this capability?
I suppose there is someone who thinks it means killing whichever Iranian nuclear scientists provide this capability. But realistically speaking that won’t be possible. The centrifuge enrichment technology that Iran has acquired is not a big mystery. There must be dozens if not hundreds of Iranians now capable of carrying the effort forward. To my knowledge, no state that has acquired enrichment technology has every surrendered it, though Libya may have come close. But Libya is not Iran, and what happened to Qaddafi would not encourage Supreme Leader Khamenei to go down the same road.
The only realistic approach to denying Iran nuclear weapons capability is to put its entire nuclear program under strict safeguards, with verifiable guarantees that it won’t enrich beyond current levels. Iran would also have to give up working on specific design and ignition capabilities. That is the direction President Obama is pointing when he says there is still a diplomatic solution.
The real question is whether Israel and its supporters in the United States could accept such a diplomatic solution as denying Iran nuclear capability. There was no sign of that at the AIPAC meeting today, where the President was applauded only when he talked about the military option and not when he mentioned diplomacy.
The problem with the military option is that it only delays and does not resolve. Iran would unquestionably redouble its efforts if its nuclear facilities are attacked. That is the correct lesson of the Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osiraq reactor in 1981, as Colin Kahl points out. Any attack would have to be repeated at shorter and shorter intervals, without any guarantee that they would prevent Iran from eventually getting nuclear weapons.
So which do you prefer? Diplomacy that leaves some capability in Iranian hands, and has to be constantly monitored to ensure compliance, or the military option, which is doomed to eventual failure in preventing Iran from “getting” nuclear weapons?
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The choice is a deal or many attacks on Iran
Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with President Obama has attracted lots of attention, mainly for his threat to use military force to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, about which the President said he is not bluffing. But what does it tell us about the prospects for a diplomatic solution to the impasse over Iran’s nuclear program? Not much, except for this key bit:
…the only way, historically, that a country has ultimately decided not to get nuclear weapons without constant military intervention has been when they themselves take [nuclear weapons] off the table. That’s what happened in Libya, that’s what happened in South Africa. And we think that, without in any way being under an illusion about Iranian intentions, without in any way being naive about the nature of that regime, they are self-interested. They recognize that they are in a bad, bad place right now. It is possible for them to make a strategic calculation that, at minimum, pushes much further to the right whatever potential breakout capacity they may have, and that may turn out to be the best decision for Israel’s security.
This is important because the President here is outlining the diplomatic solution he thinks possible, albeit in the vaguest terms.
What does he mean? Many countries have made the commitment that the President is referring to. They usually do it by signing and ratifying the Non-Proliferation Treaty (or in Latin America the Treaty of Tlatelolco) and agreeing to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections. Brazil and Argentina made this commitment in the 1990s. So far as I am aware, no country has agreed to give up enrichment or reprocessing technology–it isn’t even clear what it would mean to do so, since the know-how resides in scientists’ brains and not in any given physical plant.
The trouble with Iran is that it has already signed and ratified the NPT, and apparently violated its commitments by undertaking uranium enrichment outside the inspection regime, according to the IAEA. So President Obama will be looking for additional commitments reflecting a genuine decision by Iran not to pursue nuclear weapons, presumably based on the calculation that they would be better off without them.
How could that be? Acquisition of nuclear weapons creates several security dilemmas for Tehran: the United States will target Iran (we have foresworn first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states, but not against nuclear weapons states), Israel will not only target Iran but also launch on warning, and other countries in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Egypt?) are likely to begin seriously to pursue nuclear weapons. Acquiring enrichment technology but giving up the nuclear option would provide Iran with a good deal of prestige without creating as many problems.
U.S. intelligence leaks this past week claim that Iran has not in fact made the decision to acquire nuclear weapons, thus leaving the door open to an agreement along the lines the President seems to be suggesting. Iran would have to agree to rigorous and comprehensive IAEA inspections as well as a limit on the degree of enrichment it would undertake well below weapons grade, which is 90 per cent and above.
The question is whether the internal politics of the three countries most directly involved (United States, Iran and Israel) will allow an agreement along these lines. As Martin Indyk points out, they are engaged in a vicious cycle game of chicken: Israel threatens military action, the U.S. ratchets up sanctions to forestall it, Iran doubles down on the nuclear program, causing the Israelis to threaten even more….
If war is to be avoided, someone has to break this cycle, putting a deal on the table. Daniel Levy suggests that Netanyahu is not really committed to Israeli military action but is trying to stiffen Obama’s spine. Obama is constrained because of the American elections from appearing soft on Iran. He has to appear ready and willing to use military force, especially when he appears before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) tomorrow and then meets with Netanyahu Monday.
This leaves a possible initiative to Tehran, which is free to move now that the parliamentary elections have been held. They are likely to mark a defeat for President Ahmedinejad, who has appeared to be the Iranian official most willing to deal on the nuclear program in recent months. Supreme Leader Khamenei is more committed to the game of chicken. He may even think nuclear weapons are necessary to his regime’s survival, a conclusion Indyk thinks is rational in light of what has happened with North Korea on the one hand and Libya on the other.
I have no doubt President Obama is not bluffing, even if he is also trying to leave the door open to a diplomatic denouement. But of course Khamenei could come to the opposite conclusion. Even a successful bombing of its nuclear program will increase Iran’s commitment to getting nuclear weapons, without setting it back more than a year or so from the goal. Let’s hope one or the other–better both–decide to blink and cut a deal that ends Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions definitively and avoids a military effort that will have to be repeated at shorter intervals for a long time to come.
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The revolution needs better terrain
How do you know when the revolutionaries are losing? When the world starts lining up to arm them. The latest to join this parade is the respected former National Security Advisor Steve Hadley, who rightly argues that the moral argument is overwhelming. The problem is that the strategic argument is not.
To his credit, Steve recognizes the counterarguments:
Arming Syrians seeking their freedom would have its costs. Bashar al-Assad will brand it as outside intervention and wrap himself in the Syrian flag. His efforts to rally especially uncommitted Syrians in defense of Syrian sovereignty will further divide an already-riven society. And it may not force the Assad regime from power anytime soon.
He even adds:
Saying that Assad has lost legitimacy and ultimately will fall is cold comfort. The longer this struggle goes on, the more militarized it will become. The more militarized it becomes, the more Syria’s future will be dictated by who has the most guns, not who gets the most votes. Look at the Libyan Transitional National Council’s struggle to control that country’s militias, and contrast that with the more democratic evolution in Tunisia.
And the more militarized the Syrian struggle becomes, the greater the opportunity for al-Qaeda. Events in Somalia and Yemen show how al-Qaeda thrives on chaos and violence. For the sake of preserving human life and a democratic future for Syria, the Assad regime needs to go now.
I agree with all of that, but the fastest and most effective way of making him go quickly is not arming the opposition. That would take years and at best create an insurgency, one that will frighten away the business and minority support that is so vital to the revolution’s success in Syria. There is no sign yet of NATO, U.S. or EU interest in intervening militarily to support it. Historically, most insurgencies are defeated, though it takes a long time for that to happen. That is the worst of all possible worlds for the United States: a lengthy military contest, increasingly fought along sectarian lines, with likely spillover to Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.
What is the alternative? Those who want to displace Bashar al Assad need to shift the contest from the terrain on which he is strong–the military battlefield–on to the terrain where he is weak: political legitimacy and authority. This requires massive shows of popular support for displacing him, which are impossible under the wartime conditions the regime created in Homs over the past month.
The first requirement is a ceasefire. But a ceasefire is meaningless without neutral observers. The 160 or so Arab League observers/peacekeepers who have been withdrawn since the defeat of the UN Security Council resolution are nowhere near sufficient. Thousands will be needed. Why would Bashar let them in? Because he does not want the responsibility and expense of maintaining law and order, or feeding and housing people in the neighborhoods his forces have battered. He’ll want to keep close tabs on the effort and complain repeatedly about its ineffectiveness.
That’s all right so long as the international presence creates a relatively safe space for the citizens of Syria to begin governing themselves without respecting the authorities in Damascus. There will be less need for strikes or demonstrations–far better to focus on establishing and operating education and health systems that deliver services more effectively than the regime’s, which will have all but disappeared in the most ruined areas. Essentially, the internationals would be helping to create liberated areas. Bashar could object and even attack them, but if he does so he runs a far greater risk of international intervention than he has so far.
International legitimacy is another area in which Bashar is vulnerable. The Russians are the key in that sphere. Here is Putin’s latest:
“We don’t have a special relationship…It is up to the Syrians to decide who should run their country. We need to make sure they stop killing each other….”
Asked if Mr. al-Assad can survive, he said: “I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s obviously a grave problem. The reforms are long awaited and should be carried out. Whether the Syrian government is ready to reach a consensus, I don’t know.”
It is almost quaint for Putin to be talking about an autocratic government needing to reach a consensus, but apart from that false note this gives Bashar al Assad something important to worry about: whether he can hold on to the Russian veto in the Security Council after this weekend’s Russian presidential elections.
Internal and external legitimacy: that is the terrain on which Syria’s citizens need to contest Bashar al Assad.
PS: If you mix demonstrations with regime force, this is what you get (allegedly today in Homs):
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