Tag: United States
Peace picks, September 16-20
A busy week ahead in the Nation’s Capital:
1. Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and the American Strategy
Monday, September 16, 2013 | 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM EDT
Brookings Institute, 1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20036
Lying behind the turmoil over Syria is another, greater challenge. It is the challenge of a nuclear Iran, which already haunts our Syria debate. President Rouhani’s election has revived the hope of many that a negotiated resolution of this issue is still possible. However, the history of U.S.-Iranian relations leaves room for considerable skepticism. Should these negotiations fail too, the United States will soon have to choose between the last, worst options: going to war to prevent a nuclear Iran or learning to contain one. A nuclear Iran is something few in the international community wish to see, but many fear that a choice will have to be made soon to either prevent or respond to that reality. Can the U.S. spearhead a renewed international effort to prevent a nuclear Iran, or will it be forced to do the unthinkable: to determine how to contain a nuclear Iran?
In his new book, Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Kenneth M. Pollack tackles these daunting questions. Pollack delves deeply into what the U.S. can do to prevent a nuclear Iran, why the military options leave much to be desired and what the U.S. might have to do to make containment a viable alternative. On September 16th at 2:30pm, Foreign Policy at Brookings will host Senior Fellow Kenneth M. Pollack to discuss these sobering issues. Robin Wright, a United States Institute of Peace distinguished fellow and author of several highly-regarded books on Iran, will moderate the discussion, after which the author will take audience questions. Copies of the book will also be available for sale at the event.
EVENT AGENDA
- Introduction
Tamara Cofman Wittes
Director, Saban Center for Middle East Policy
Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy,Saban Center for Middle East Policy
@tcwittes
- Featured Speaker
Kenneth M. Pollack
Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy,Saban Center for Middle East Policy
- Moderator
Robin Wright
Distinguished Fellow, United States Institute of Peace
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Force and diplomacy aren’t antithetical
I’ve had a number of people ask in the past 48 hours whether proceeding on the diplomatic track to collect Syria’s chemical weapons will strengthen Bashar al Asad.
The answer in the short term is “yes.” Whenever the international community negotiates with a ruler whose legitimacy is in question, it shores up his hold on power. Especially so in this instance, as Bashar will soon be responsible for declaring, collecting and turning over Syria’s chemical weapons, making him appear indispensable to a process Russia and the United States have dubbed A number 1 priority.
Neither will want him pushed aside while this process is ongoing. If he were to disappear suddenly, the process would at best come to a halt and at worst disintegrate, making accountability for the chemical weapons difficult if not impossible. Even the Geneva 2 formula–full delegation of executive authority to a government agreed by both the regime and the opposition–might be a bridge too far so long as the chemical weapons are not fully under international control.
This of course means that Bashar, whether he intends to use the chemical weapons again or not, will want to prolong the process as much as possible. The opportunities for footdragging are many. He is already demanding that the US give up the threat to use force as a condition for his turning over the chemical weapons. He can delay his accounting for the weapons and their locations for a month under the convention he has said he will sign. He can stall the deployment of weapons inspectors. He can claim that security conditions make collecting the weapons, said to be distributed to 50 or so sites, impossible. He can make working conditions for the inspectors hellish.
It will be Moscow’s responsibility to deliver Bashar and ensure he performs. I really have no doubt about Russia’s ability to do this. Syria depends on Russian arms and financing. Even a slight delay in deliveries of either would put Damascus in a bind. But Moscow too will have reasons to delay and prevaricate. The Americans, if they are to get anything like full implementation of a serious agreement on chemical weapons, will need to keep alive a credible threat to use force if Bashar fails to meet expectations.
This push and shove between the diplomacy and force is the rule, not the exception. It went on for more than two years after the UN Security Council authorized the use of force in Bosnia. It went on for months in the prelude to the Kosovo bombing, with several diplomatic failures to end the ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo preceding the eventual use of force. Even in Afghanistan, the Taliban were given an opportunity to deliver Al Qaeda into the hands of the Americans. Force was used only after diplomacy had failed. President Bush’s supporters would claim this was also true for Iraq.
The problem in Syria is that the issues there go far beyond chemical weapons. In addition to the mass atrocities committed with conventional weapons, there are two vital US interests at stake: regional stability and blocking an extremist (Sunni or Shia-aligned) succession in Syria. Secretary Kerry is trying hard to keep the door to a Geneva 2 negotiation open, because only a negotiated political transition has much of a chance of avoiding state collapse, which will threaten regional stability, and extremist takeover.
Russia and the United States share these interests in a negotiated political transition, but so far Moscow has remained wedded to Bashar al Asad, no matter how many times Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov claim they are not committed to him personally. What Kerry needs to do is convince the Russians that Bashar remaining in power is a real and serious threat to Russia, as it will encourage jihadi extremists to extend their fight to the Caucasus and cause state structures in the Levant to fragment.
The military balance will be an important part of Russia’s calculations. While President Obama has stayed largely silent on support for the Syrian opposition, frustrating Senator McCain and other Republicans who have wanted to see intervention, there are lots of indications that he is ratcheting up a military supply and training chain that moved slowly over the summer. The faster the Syrian opposition can pose a serious military threat to the regime, the sooner Russia will be inclined to reexamine its support for Bashar and its hesistancy about Geneva 2.
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Don’t bank on diplomacy yet
President Obama last night tentatively accepted Putin’s paddle and began his effort to paddle away from military action, which faced rejection in the Congress, towards a diplomatic denouement. This latest turn will disappoint and frustrate opposition Syrians who wanted a decisive military intervention.
But that was not in the cards, and the President’s move cheers those who believe that chemical weapons are the main issue Americans should be concerned about in Syria, as it offers a potentially better outcome than bombing. Certainly an endstate in which the international community gains control over Syria’s gigantic stockpile of chemical weapons (estimated at 1000 tons) and destroys them safely and securely is better than the uncertainty of a punitive bombing campaign, pinprick or not.
I see two problems with this approach:
- We are very unlikely to reach the desired endstate, which depends on Syria declaring all its chemical weapons, securely moving them to a relatively few destinations, and giving international inspectors unfettered access while a civil war rages. Remember what happened to the Arab League and UN observers? With no US boots on the ground, international control of Syria’s chemical weapons likely means mainly Russian control, which isn’t going to satisfy anyone in Washington. But it will make military intervention much more difficult.
- Chemical weapons are not all that is at stake for the United States in Syria. Continuation of the civil war there threatens the stability of Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey. The longer the fighting goes on, the more likely it is that Islamist extremists will eventually succeed and make Syria a haven for Al Qaeda’s ambitions. That will mean threats to Israel as well.
Thousands of civilians will die from conventional weapons in the next month or so, while the diplomats try to hammer out a solution. Read the latest report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry for the gruesome details.
If it is any comfort, this kind of diplomatic delay was also the rule rather than the exception in the 1990s, when NATO intervened from the air first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo. The decisive intervention in Bosnia came more than two years after the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to protect UN-designated safe areas. Prior pinprick attacks had little impact. In Kosovo, force was used only after months of diplomatic efforts (and without a specific authorizing resolution from the UNSC).
President Obama’s enormous reluctance to use military force in Syria is not, as some commentators would have it, a sign of weakness. It of course behooves us to pursue any diplomatic lead that might accomplish our ends without the use of force, which always causes collateral damage and unanticipated consequences. The only real signal of weakness came from the Congress’ apparent willingness to back military action.
Where I differ from President Obama is on the breadth of American interests in Syria as well as the odds of a favorable diplomatic outcome. Chemical weapons are a relatively small part of the problem there. The real issue is an autocrat who prefers state collapse–so long as he remains in power in Damascus–to stepping aside and allowing the democratic evolution that the nonviolent protests called for.
While he did not mention the Syrian opposition last night, I can hope that the President is quietly trying to ensure that the more moderate forces of the Free Syrian Army have the means to protect themselves and the civilians who live in liberated areas. The Russians have not hesitated to make sure that the regime is well equipped and armed. Without an effort to level the battlefield, diplomatic initiatives to end the war are doomed to failure. Military interventions after diplomatic failures need to be more vigorous, not less.
Give diplomacy a chance, but don’t bank on it yet.
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Putin’s paddle
Yesterday’s strange idea is today’s hot topic: the proposition that Bashar al Asad will destroy chemical weapons he refuses to acknowledge possession of. And it will have to do it under tight international control while continuing its slaughter of Syrians with conventional weapons.
There are a lot of things wrong with this idea, apart from those contradictions:
- Syria would have to declare all the sites at which chemical weapons and their precursors are held;
- Washington would need to be confident that chemical weapons and their precursors exist nowhere else in Syria;
- credible international observers would need to deploy to all the declared sites in significant numbers to ensure 24-hours per day that nothing is being moved;
- those observers would have to be housed and protected from the significant violence occurring every day in Syria;
- they would also need uninterrupted and reliable communications;
- if the chemical weapons are to be destroyed, the 1000 tons or so of material would need to be safely and securely transported to a specially constructed facility;
- the destruction would need to be carefully monitored.
I think it only fair to say that this is a very tall order of dubious virtue. Those who remember the difficulties nuclear inspectors faced before both Iraq wars should multiply by a factor of ten, or more. I can’t wait to hear the quarrels over whether this site or that one does or does not hold chemical weapons. The observers themselves would become clear markers of where the chemical weapons are, making the sites tempting targets for extremists.
Once we occupied Iraq, it still took a year or so and cost hundreds of millions to verify that there were no weapons of mass destruction. That’s when we could go anywhere, talk to anyone, read all the files and test anything we wanted. Or think about the more recent and ill-fated Arab League and later UN observers in Syria. They weren’t trying to do anything technically difficult. Just trying to monitor the military action and report. Both groups were withdrawn without being able to accomplish their objectives.
The numbers of Syrians killed by chemical weapons likely don’t amount to 2% of the total 100,000 killed so far. To allow the killing to continue while the international community invests many millions in securing, observing, collecting and destroying chemical weapons stockpiles would be not only hypocritical but also deeply offensive to the Syrians who suffer the depredations of the Asad regime.
But the Obama Administration finds itself up the creek without a paddle. Approval of a military strike in Congress appears less and less likely. Proceeding anyway after the Congress says “no” is possible legally, but politically it would be a disaster. So the President is going to have a hard look at this “diplomatic” proposition, whose origins lie not in John Kerry’s supposed inadvertent slip yesterday morning but rather, as the President acknowledged in his interview last night with Gwen Ifill, in conversations he has had with Vladimir Putin.
The idea should be dubbed “Putin’s paddle.” Mr. President, you may have to use it, but only because of the unfortunate situation you put yourself in. That’s not an endorsement.
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Crisis breeds strange ideas
Secretary of State Kerry today floated the idea that has been kicking around: Bashar al Asad can avoid an American attack if he gives up his chemical weapons, within a week. The Secreatary was quick to add that he does not expect Asad to do this. Now the Russians are suggesting that Syria’s chemical weapons be put under international control.
Does the idea have virtue?
Not on the face of it. There are lots of chemical weapons and precursors in Syria, perhaps as much as 1000 tons according to French intelligence. Moving even one ton of such material securely in the conditions that prevail in Syria at the moment would be a challenge. Moving hundreds of tons would take months. Where would you move them to? A special facility would have to be built to destroy the material. I somehow doubt any of the neighbors is prepared to host it, and store the stuff until the facility can be built.
The Russian proposal focuses not on moving the material but putting it under some as yet undefined international control. I suppose that means international observers or inspectors to watch the chemical weapons stockpiles and report if they are used. The difficulties of doing this even in peacetime conditions are apparent from the difficult history of nuclear inspections in Iraq. How would anyone know that all the chemical weapons stocks had been reported? But doing it under wartime conditions seems truly impractical. I don’t think I’d want to be the international inspector embedded with Syrian forces protecting the chemical weapons stockpiles and trying to ensure they are not used.
German intelligence is suggesting that Bashar al Asad did not himself authorize the chemical attack on August 21. But that contradicts what Bashar al Asad has said to Charlie Rose: Bashar claimed that any such chemicals, if they existed, would be firmly in centralized control. That is surely true, as these weapons exist above all to protect the regime and to strike at Israel in a regime-threatening situation. If control of the chemical weapons has loosened to the point they can be used without the regime’s approval, things are worse in Syria than we had imagined. Intervention might be justified on that score alone, though it could not be limited to air attacks.
The main virtues of John Kerry’s floated idea, and the Russian proposal, are to delay further the prospect of an attack and to demonstrate that the Obama Administration is prepared to go the extra diplomatic mile to avoid military intervention. The time may well be needed to twist arms in the House of Representatives, which is playing its assigned role by reflecting the reluctance in the American population. The extra diplomatic mile is needed to show that there is no alternative to military action, or to provide a face-saving alternative if the Administration fails to get Congressional approval.
On the diplomatic front, the US needs to go, once again, to the UN Security Council to lay out its case and seek its concurrence in military action. The Russians and Chinese will not go along, but there is really no harm in demonstrating to Moscow and Beijing, and to the world, that they do not control the use of American power any more than we control the use of theirs, which Moscow has used against Georgia and Beijing uses often to assert its territorial claims against American allies in the East and South China Seas.
But going that route requires prior approval of military action in the US Congress. That seems a tall order at the moment. John Kerry is trying to convince us that the effort will be a small one:
We will be able to hold Bashar al-Assad accountable without engaging in troops on the ground or any other prolonged kind of effort in a very limited, very targeted, short-term effort that degrades his capacity to deliver chemical weapons without assuming responsibility for Syria’s civil war. That is exactly what we are talking about doing – unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.
The trouble with that argument is it is inconsistent with going to Congress for approval and with the notion that Syria’s use of chemical weapons puts American security at risk by breaking an international taboo. Nor is there any guarantee that things can be kept small. The enemy has a vote. If Bashar escalates, we’ll need to respond.
Bashar giving up his chemical weapons, putting them under international control, a small intervention to solve a big problem. Crisis breeds strange ideas.
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No evidence I used CW on my people
That’s Bashar al Asad’s defense, according to Charlie Rose:
The full interview will be broadcast tomorrow. All we’ve got so far is Charlie Rose’s account, in which he typically spends more time reciting what he asked than what Bashar al Asad said.
But the defense is worth parsing. It is not a categorical denial, which would have read something like this:
Neither I nor anyone under my command has used chemical weapons in Syria against anyone.
Instead Bashar has left lots of loopholes:
- Someone under his command may have used them
- No evidence has been presented connecting him to their use
- The opposition might have done it
- They were used against terrorists, not loyal Syrians
Charlie Rose being the worst interviewer with a good name on TV, I don’t expect him to have explored any of these loopholes in the interview, but we’ll have to wait to be certain.
The purpose of this interview is to make it harder for President Obama to gather the votes needed in the House of Representatives in favor of a resolution approving the use of force. I don’t expect it to make things much harder than they are already proving to be. No one in the US really doubts the facts, or Bashar al Asad’s responsibility. Even if he did not know about this specific attack, he is the responsible commander.
The issue for Americans is not what happened but rather “why us?” Why do we have to take on a burden that more properly belongs to the international community as a whole, or to parts of its like the Arab League that have so far ducked taking action. It does little good for John Kerry to be coming out of meetings with the Arabs and announcing that he has support from the Saudis or others. It is time we heard directly and forcefully from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, Jordan and others involved or threatened by what is going on in Syria. And our diplomats should be trying to get all of them to put skin in the game: don’t all those nice warplanes we’ve sold them deserve a test in battle?
Even if they say “yes,” the primary responsibility for any military intervention will rest with the US. We cannot be the world’s policeman, but we do have to be the world’s fireman. The conflagration in Syria threatens to spread throughout a good part of the Middle East. Present policy–humanitarian assistance in unprecedented quantities, arms to the rebels from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, pushing for greater unity and coherence among the moderate opposition, support to governance efforts in liberated areas–has proved insufficient. Not useless, but unequal to the goal of getting Syria to a negotiated political settlement.
That goal drops farther and farther out of reach with every attack and every death in Syria. The opposition, which at one time wanted the Syrian state preserved, is increasingly focused on destroying it. Sectarian and ethnic divisions are widening. Resentments are growing. Syria is becoming a collapsed state, even if the center of its capital remains, as Charlie Rose reports, relatively calm. Only kilometers away there are large portions of the countryside already under opposition control.
The longer this persists, the worse it gets. I would favor one more diplomatic effort in the UN Security Council, something I expect the House of Representatives will insist on. But the time is coming for the United States to try to put out the fire, with difficult to predict consequences, or allow it to continue to burn, with consequences that are all to easy to predict.
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