Tag: United Nations
Ambiguities in Egypt and Syria
It’s only two days since I attempted a summary of where things stand in the Arab world. Already things are changing. As one of my colleagues notes, that’s just the point: politics are going to be dynamic in the Arab world in the future. The decades of stasis are over.
In Egypt, large crowds are turning out today (the first anniversary of the revolution) to insist on transfer of power to the newly installed parliament. It looks as if the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) is going to have trouble holding on to as much power as it would like. Will the SCAF make the mistake of forcibly dispersing the demonstrators, or has it begun to understand that it needs to reduce its own visibility and delegate more authority to the popularly elected representatives of the people? The soldiers would be wise to let them take the rap for the lousy economy and political strife.
In Syria, developments are also ambiguous. Led by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries have yanked their human rights observers from the Arab League team, which is likely to eviscerate that effort, or at least de-fang it. The Syrian Foreign Minister is welcoming the observers back, which is not a good sign for their likely effectiveness without the GCC participants. That is a great irony: the GCC as the guardian of human rights?
At the same time, the Arab League is asking for the UN Security Council to act. The Assad regime, having rejected the Arab League plan for a peaceful transition, is buying lots of Russian trainer aircraft, a sale that directly contradicts Moscow’s indications that Syria has reached the end of its rope. While those aircraft will presumably not be delivered for some time, their sale would certainly be a political signal of Moscow’s support for Damascus.
It will be interesting to see how the Americans react if Syria begins to use its existing aircraft against the demonstrators. President Obama in last night’s State of the Union address paired Bashar al Assad with Muammar Qaddafi. Will their ends be similar? I have generally discounted the possibility of military action to protect the protesters, but if Assad starts using aircraft that could change the equation quickly.
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This is called retrenchment
We all anticipated this State of the Union speech would not focus on international issues, but here is my short list of more important things not mentioned or glossed over:
- West Bank settlements (or Palestinians)
- North Korea
- Euro crisis
- Africa or Latin America (not even Cuba),
- Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, virtually no Egypt, Tunisia or Yemen
- China (except as an unfair competitor)
- Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, India or even Russia (except as an emerging market)
- Pakistan (except as an Al Qaeda haven)
- Strait of Hormuz
That’s a pretty spectacular list, even without noting the absence of NATO, Japan, allies, Europe, the UN…
A few notable items that were mentioned:
- Strong on regime change in Syria (putting Assad in the same sentence with Qaddafi could have implications) and on exporting democracy and free markets in general
- Positive about peaceful resolution of the dispute with Iran over nuclear weapons, while keeping all options on the table
- Trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia
- Burma as the hope of the Pacific!
Of course the President also mentioned withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, security cooperation with Israel, blows delivered against Al Qaeda, and the troops (no mention of civilians serving abroad this time around I’m afraid).
If this is a prelude to the campaign, as rightly it should be, it presages an ever more economically focused foreign policy, with security issues narrowed to a few top priorities and little focus on diplomacy except on a few specific issues. This is a vision for restoring American economic strength at home, not increasing–or perhaps even maintaining–its commitments abroad. This is called retrenchment.
PS: I should have mentioned that Richard Haas calls it “restoration.” That’s a more positive word, but the substance is the same.
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This week’s “peace picks”
1. International Responsibility After Libya, January 9, 10 -11:30 AM, Brookings Institution
The question of international responsibility for protecting civilians at risk has long been a topic of heated debate within the global community. From the protection of civilians in peacekeeping mandates to the principle of “responsibility to protect,” the international community has grappled with the question of its role in protecting people when their governments are unable or unwilling to do so. The NATO-led operation to prevent Muammar Qaddafi’s forces from inflicting mass atrocities on Libyan civilians was the first United Nations-authorized military intervention which explicitly invoked the “responsibility to protect” principle as grounds for action.
The Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement will host a discussion on what the Libyan intervention means for future international efforts to protect civilians. Panelists include Edward Luck, the United Nations special advisor on the responsibility to protect; Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Richard Williamson; Jared Genser, an international human rights lawyer; and Irwin Cotler, a Canadian member of Parliament and expert on human rights law. Genser and Cotler are co-editors of The Responsibility to Protect: The Promise of Stopping Mass Atrocities in Our Times (Oxford University Press, 2011). Senior Fellow Elizabeth Ferris, co-director of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, will provide introductory remarks and moderate the discussion.
2. Cooperation from Strength: The United States, China and the South China Sea, January 10, 9 – 11:30 am, Center for New American Security
Grand Ballroom
1401 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20004
American interests are increasingly at risk in the South China Sea. The geostrategic significance of the South China Sea is difficult to overstate – the United States and countries throughout the region have a deep interest in sea lines of communication that remain open to all, both for commerce and for peaceful military activity. Yet China continues to challenge that openness through its economic and military rise and through concerns about its unwillingness to uphold existing legal norms.
The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) will release the report Cooperation from Strength: The United States, China and the South China Sea, which examines the future of U.S. strategy in the South China Sea and the impact of territorial disputes on the maritime commons. The event will feature a keynote address by Admiral Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations, followed by a discussion with a distinguished panel of experts chaired by Richard Danzig, former Secretary of the U.S. Navy, and including Ambassador Chan Heng Chee, Ambassador of the Republic of Singapore to the United States, and report co-authors Patrick Cronin, Senior Advisor and Senior Director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program and Robert D. Kaplan, Senior Fellow, both of the Center for a New American Security. RSVP here or call (202) 457-9427.
Copies of Cooperation from Strength: The United States, China and the South China Sea will be available at the event.
3. Reframing U.S. Strategy in a Turbulent World: American Spring? January 11, 12:15 – 1:45 pm
The New America Foundation’s American Strategy Program, in association with Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, cordially invites you to join a brown bag lunch U.S. Grand Strategy discussion.
Participants
Featured Speakers
Charles Kupchan
Professor of International Affairs, Georgetown University
Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations
Rosa Brooks
Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Bernard Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation
The Hon. Tom Perriello
Former Member, U.S. House of Representatives
CEO, Center for American Progress Action Fund
Bruce W. Jentleson
Professor, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
Co-Author, The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas
Moderator
Michael Tomasky
Editor, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
Special Correspondent, Newsweek/The Daily Beast
Opening Comments
Steve Clemons
Washington Editor-at-Large, The Atlantic
Senior Fellow & Founder, American Strategy Program, New America Foundation
4. Democracy Promotion Under Obama: Revitalization or Retreat? January 12, 12:15-1:45 pm, Carnegie Endowment
Register to attend
Despite their initial inclination to lower the profile of U.S. democracy promotion, President Obama and his foreign policy team have had to confront a series of urgent, visible cases, from political upheaval in multiple Arab countries and unexpected events in Russia to thwarted elections in Côte d’Ivoire and beyond. Has the Obama administration succeeded in crafting a line that effectively balances U.S. interests and ideals? Or have they—as some critics charge—pulled back too far in supporting democracy abroad?
The discussion marks the launch of a new report by Thomas Carothers, Democracy Promotion under Obama: Revitalization or Retreat? Copies of the report will be available at the event.
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The limits of R2P
The Arab League, meeting today in Cairo, got it right: it is not their human rights monitors who have failed, it is the Syrian government that has failed to fully implement its commitments to withdraw from cities, stop the violence and release prisoners. More monitors are needed. Their withdrawal would allow the regime to intensify its crackdown.
Unfortunately the League failed to ask the UN Security Council to weigh in, a potentially important step towards a resolution condemning the regime’s repression of the demonstrations. It will be far more difficult for Russia to block such a resolution if the Arab League calls for it.
Is military intervention in the cards? I don’t think so, and I think it is a mistake for anyone to encourage the demonstrators to think so. One of their signs reportedly called for an alien invasion. Syrians are desperate and don’t understand why there is so much international hesitation.
This is why:
- Russian opposition to anything that might lead to a U.S. or NATO military strike against the Assad regime, which provides Moscow with an important naval base at Latakia.
- Chinese opposition, which likely has more to do with not wanting a precedent for a military strike on Iran, a major oil supplier.
- American interest in cutting back military commitments and nervousness about precipitating a civil war in Syria, where the opposition to the regime is still not strong and united.
- European concerns of the same varieties, especially at a moment of great concern about budget deficits and the stability of the euro.
- Anxiety in the region and elsewhere that military action could have unintended, negative consequences for Turkey, Israel, Iraq and Lebanon.
So, yes, of course we need a Security Council resolution that denounces the violence and calls on the regime to implement fully the Arab League agreement. It would be good if it also called for deployment of UN human rights monitors, either alongside or within the Arab League contingent. But it won’t be backed up with the threat of force.
Some will complain that responsibility to protect (R2P), the UN doctrine under which the NATO led the intervention in Libya, requires military action against the Assad regime. But responsibility to protect is a principle that applies in the first instance to the authorities of the state in which rights are being abused. How quickly, even whether, it leads to outside international intervention depends on the particular circumstances, which are not favorable in the Syrian case.
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Could we go to war by mistake again?
I was on C-Span this morning talking about Iraq. The program is now up on their website. A lot of questions focused on the past: why we went to war in Iraq, who should be held accountable for the mistake and whether oil was a motive. The moderator, Rob Harrison, tried to keep the focus on the future, but he was only partly successful.
While I too worry more about the future than about the past–there is more you can do about it–I regard it as healthy to ask why we made a mistake like invading Iraq.
I am convinced oil had little to do with it–we were getting oil from Saddam Hussein, and we are getting some oil from Iraq now. Few American companies have benefited from Iraq’s new openness to foreign oil companies, and most of those are active in Kurdistan. The stuff is sold on a world market at market prices. No need to invade anyone to get it.
One caller suggested we were unhappy with Saddam because he wanted customers to pay for oil in a currency other than dollars. Lots of oil producing countries have tried that trick, which has been abandoned as often as it has been adopted. The day will come, but it is not here yet. And it is certainly nothing to go to war about.
There are two other explanations for the mistake that strike me as far more likely: the argument that a democracy in Iraq would transform the region and concern about weapons of mass destruction (WMD). There is no doubt that many within the Bush 43 administration were arguing the former. They were dead wrong: the Arab world regards today’s Iraq as a catastrophe, not a model democracy. The Arab spring owes nothing to Iraq. But the argument likely carried some weight in 2002-3.
The more decisive argument was WMD. I can’t know what was in George W. Bush’s head, but in the public sphere that was the argument that was prevalent, and prevailed. We had only recently been attacked, on 9/11 (2001, for those too young to remember!). The Bush 43 administration claimed that Saddam Hussein was harboring international terrorists and pursuing nuclear and biological weapons (he was known to have chemical weapons, and to have used them against Iraqi Kurds). It was a small step to concluding that he represented a grave and imminent threat to the United States, which is what Colin Powell argued at the UN Security Council. Condi Rice won the day with her warning that the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud. I doubt she or Colin Powell knew the premise they were acting on was wrong.
We are now facing in 2011, and soon 2012, the same argument with respect to Iran, more than once. This does not mean that the argument is wrong. There is lots of evidence that Iran is trying to assemble all the requirements, including non-nuclear high explosive technology, to build atomic weapons. There is nothing like the cloud of uncertainty that surrounded Iraq’s nuclear program. But still we need extra care to make sure that we have pursued all other avenues to stop Iran from going nuclear before deciding to use our military instruments.
There is ample evidence that the Obama administration has in fact done this:
1. We’ve tightened sanctions, and gotten others to tighten theirs.
2. We’ve offered negotiations, which so far have been fruitless.
3. Cyberattacks and assassinations targeted against key technologies and people, respectively, occur often.
4. Support is flowing to the Iranian opposition, perhaps even to ethnic separatists.
5. We’ve repeatedly said that no options are off the table.
Trouble is, none of this guarantees that Tehran won’t go ahead anyway, hoping that possession of nuclear weapons, or more likely all the technology required to build them, will end American attempts to topple the theocratic regime.
If so, we still have to answer one further question: will military action make us better off, or not? Certainly in Iraq it did not. It is easy enough to imagine that the Arab spring might have swept away Saddam Hussein, as it has other autocrats. Iran’s green movement, quiescent as it is for the moment, could still be our last best hope, not so much for ending the nuclear program as for removing the fears that have fueled it since the days of the Shah. Military action would do serious damage to dissent in Iran, especially as it will have to be repeated periodically to prevent Tehran from repairing damage and moving ahead with redoubled determination to build nuclear weapons.
If there is anything worse than going to war by mistake, it is doing it twice.
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Half the world
The goal of this National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security is as simple as it is profound: to empower half the world’s population as equal partners in preventing conflict and building peace in countries threatened and affected by war, violence, and insecurity. Achieving this goal is critical to our national and global security.
Those are the opening lines of the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security unveiled yesterday at Georgetown University by Secretary of State Clinton. My friends at Inclusive Security asked me if I would blog on it–I hope they won’t be too disappointed in the results.
The plan is impeccably right-minded: it makes engagement and protection of women central to U.S. policy, complements existing efforts, establishes inclusion as the norm, emphasizes coordination and declares U.S. agencies accountable for implementing the plan. Nothing wrong with any of that.
The problem is that women are not often the problem. Only in rare instances do they join armed groups, chase civilians from their homes, rape and pillage or commit other war crimes. Men do most of these things, and men generally order these things done. When the time comes to make peace, the people you need at the negotiating table are the ones who control the ones with the guns.
The people you should want at the negotiating table are the ones without guns: victims, male or female, who have a stake in ending war and building peace. But only rarely are they brought in, mainly because the guys with guns don’t want them there. In my time working on the Bosnian Federation in the 1990s, I can’t recall an occasion on which a woman was in the room during a negotiation as a representative of one of the “formerly warring parties.” But neither was there ever a man in the room who hadn’t been a belligerent, who just wanted a normal life, who thought the safety and security of his family was more important than ethnic identity. Constituents for peace are a threat to belligerents, who want all the cards in their own hands, not in someone else’s.
This does not explain why women aren’t used as mediators. Of the current State Department special envoys and representatives who report directly to Hillary Clinton, only four of twenty-one are women, if I am counting correctly. Seven of the ten who do not report directly to the Secretary are women. Certainly these are higher numbers of women than at times in the past, but that 4/21 is not exactly smashing the glass ceiling. The UN, which naturally reflects not only American values, has never used a woman as a chief mediator, according to the report.
While I would be the last to quarrel with the need to protect women from sexual and gender-based violence during and after conflict, as well as their right to resources during recovery from violence, it is in the conflict prevention section that I think the report says some really interesting things. Let me quote at some length:
…gender-specific migration patterns or precipitous changes in the status or treatment of women and girls may serve as signals of broader vulnerability to the onset or escalation of conflict or atrocities. This focus will help to ensure that conflict prevention efforts are responsive to sexual and gender-based violence and other forms of violence affecting women and girls, and that our approaches are informed by differences in the experiences of men and women, girls and boys. Further, we will seek to better leverage women’s networks and organizations in activities aimed at arresting armed conflict or preventing spirals of violence.
Finally, the United States understands that successful conflict prevention efforts must rest on key investments in women’s economic empowerment, education, and health. A growing body of evidence shows that empowering women and reducing gender gaps in health, education, labor markets, and other areas is associated with lower poverty, higher economic growth, greater agricultural productivity, better nutrition and education of children, and other outcomes vital to the success of communities.
I’m not sure I am completely comfortable with the notion that women and girls are the canaries in the coal mine, but the notion that women’s employment, health and education, often viewed as the softer side of peacebuilding, are in fact central to the enterprise is one that I think has real validity. If Afghanistan has any chance at all of coming out all right from the last decade of hellish conflict, it is because of what has been done on health and education, two of the relative success stories in an otherwise bleak picture. Education is one of the failed sectors in Bosnia, where its segregation has helped to sustain ethnic nationalists in power. The role of women in North Korea, where they are increasingly responsible for providing livelihoods from small gardens, is likely to be fundamental.
We won’t really know if this “action plan” is effective for another year, or perhaps two or three. It is probably too much to hope that the forcefulness and clarity of purpose with which it was prepared will blow away the barriers that have stood for so long. But if it enables America to tap more of its own talent as well as draw on constituencies for peace in conflict-prone countries, it will have served a useful purpose.
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