Tag: United States
This is awkward
British parliament disapproval of participation in a military attack on Syria leaves the US with only France and Turkey as seemingly willing allies in punishing Bashar al Asad’s regime for the use of chemical weapons. The rest of the world seems content to sit back and watch, commenting all the while and reserving the option to hiss and boo if things go badly and to applaud if they go well.
At the same time, there is a growing view in the commentariat that military intervention will have little positive impact, and may even cause Asad to escalate his chemical attacks, or lash out in with terrorist attacks. Narrowly targeted military action to deter use of chemical weapons in the absence of a broader political strategy is likely to be ineffective at best, counter-productive at worst. Even if it deters further use of chemical weapons, the regime has ample alternative means with which to kill Syrians, as it has demonstrated for more than two years.
The UN chemical weapons inspection team is returning from Damascus and will need to prepare a report on its findings. These will presumably demonstrate unequivocally that chemical weapons were used but likely not who used them, as that was never part of the inspectors’ mandate. The Administration therefore needs to clarify for the American public, which is thoroughly unconvinced of the need for the US to take military action, and the international community, including the UN Security Council, why it thinks the regime was responsible. I personally don’t have any doubt, but others do and are entitled to answers from a government that has proved unreliable, even untrustworthy, more than once (read “Gulf of Tonkin,” “WMD in Iraq”).
It will be early next week before a case can be made in the serious way the situation requires. At that point it makes more sense to wait until after Presidents Obama and Putin have a chance to discuss the issues on the margins of the G20 Summit (September 5-6) in Saint Petersburg. An American-led attack on Syria will be a serious embarrassment for Moscow, which will squeal loudly about the horrendous consequences for the Middle East and world peace but will mostly be chagrined that it has once again failed to block the Americans. If Moscow will agree to push Bashar al Asad aside, that would be reason enough to hesitate more.
My colleagues Ed Joseph and Elizabeth O’Bagy have tried to sketch what a serious diplomatic initiative might look like, putting the emphasis quite rightly on security. But they wave their magic wand and create UN peacekeepers who are nowhere on the horizon in the truly vast numbers that would be required (100k at a minimum). They also rightly (if regrettably) suggest some degree of sectarian and ethnic separation, which is occurring in any event. The trouble is that the confrontation lines in many parts of Syria are still intertwined and contorted. It will take a lot more violence to straighten them out. Doing it at the negotiating table will be an even lengthier process.
President Obama is an awkward spot. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. It sure would be nice to find a diplomatic way out.
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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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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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Yes, I was there and then is now
This piece was republished today, the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, by Buzzfeed under the heading “I Was At The March On Washington 50 Years Ago,” with my enthusiastic concurrence:
Eighteen years old in August 1963, I had spent the summer after high school graduation working in a factory, commuting by bike the five miles or so from where I was staying with a friend. I don’t remember my decision to go to the March, but I do remember my racist aunt calling my mother the night before and trying to get her to stop me. There would be violence, Aunt Betty was sure, and who knows what kind of trouble.
That appeal fell on deaf ears. My mother was a committed advocate of integration, which had been an issue for years in my hometown of New Rochelle, New York. My father, until he died in 1961, was an activist and successful opponent of “blockbusting”: the real estate agents’ practice of scaring whites to move by implying that the neighborhood was “turning,” thus fulfilling their own prophecy and collecting lots of commissions. A Federal court had found two years earlier that the Lincoln School half a mile from our house had been intentionally segregated and eventually ordered remedies. This, people, was hundreds of miles north of the Mason-Dixon line.
I was already dating a “Negro” girl, in the terminology of the time. That wasn’t common (nor was it common when we married five years later and remained married until today). I confess it had taken me years to work up the courage to ask her out. She was away that summer and did not go on the March. But surely the sense I had that the March was the right place to be was connected to my romantic interests, if only by worldview.
To get to Washington around 8 am in those days meant a 2 am rising in New Rochelle, no breakfast and a quick dash out of the house grabbing the brown paper lunch bag from the fridge. As the bus arrived in DC, I awakened to a strong fish smell. It was that brown paper bag. It wasn’t the one with my lunch. I don’t know what my family had for dinner, but I had little money in my pocket (no ATMs then) and was hungry much of the day.
We staged at Thomas Circle and marched from there singing and chanting to the Lincoln Memorial, where I found a good spot on the left of the reflecting pool under the trees. It was a happy but determined crowd. We knew the country was watching. We all dressed reasonably well, the “Negroes” better than the “whites” to look as respectable as possible. We knew there was an absolute need to avoid violence, but the issue never arose in my part of the march. There were just too many of us for anyone to tangle with. The racists, who were many in that day in Washington, stayed home.
Solidarity was the overwhelming feeling. The weather was beautiful and the mood was good, but this was no picnic. It was a determined and disciplined protest. “We Shall Overcome” was the anthem. The New York Times reporter who quoted me in Saturday’s paper asked whether I was surprised that celebrities like Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan sang. No, that was no surprise: they had been part of “the movement.” The answer, my friend, was blowing in the wind.
A word about the concept of race at the time of the March, which was clearly organized and led by Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph. In the terminology of the time, they were “Negroes,” not yet blacks or African Americans. The concept of “whites” is likewise an anachronism. I didn’t regard myself as part of a white majority then (nor do I really now). The majority then was WASP: white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. As a Jew whose grandparents immigrated from Russia and Russian-occupied Poland, I was in none of those three categories. I was a minority. The barriers to Jews (quotas in universities, prohibitions in clubs and limitations in employment) had only recently come down. The affinity of Jews for the civil rights movement was strong.
The March on Washington was important to us because it was a massive show of support to those who wanted to end segregation, which was more the rule than the exception. It was inconsistent with what the marchers understood as the founding creed: all men are created equal (the question of women was posed later). “Jobs and freedom” meant an end to discrimination on the basis of skin color in a society still based on racial separation. It was a radical proposition. I learned only this week that the even the police force in DC was still segregated, with no mixed patrols.
Segregation did not end during the March on Washington, as some would like to imagine. The struggle continued even more intensely after August 1963. The bombing of the 16th Street Batist Church in Birmingham came just two weeks or so later. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner, who was the son of my high school biology teacher, were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi the next June. I had wanted to spend the summer there but yielded to my mother’s entreaties and instead earned some much-needed cash doing research at Yale. New Haven was still mostly segregated, especially schools and housing. I imagine it still is to some extent.
I was sitting down in the street in Cambridge, Maryland in 1964 in support of people trying to end school and housing segregation in what was known then as the Delmarva peninsula (not the Eastern Shore). Delmarva was more akin to the deep South than the northeast when it came to segregation. The state-mobilized National Guard blocked our march there with fixed bayonets, wearing gas masks. The protest leadership decided not to test their will to use them. I’ve never regretted that.
Once MLK and RFK were murdered in 1968, the civil rights movement lost steam to the anti-Vietnam War movement. I got my first whiff of tear gas protesting at Fort Dix in 1969 and tested the patience of army officers at my physical in 1970. The civil rights movement ended prematurely, befuddled by weakened leadership and dissension within the black community (as it came to be called), some of which toyed with violence while others tried to move further in the direction of economic justice.
Another ten years of MLK leading the challenge to the American reality would have done a lot more good than the lionizing of him now. In housing, schooling and the economy the sharp divides between blacks and whites have not disappeared. Some have even widened. The mechanisms of segregation are no longer overt and direct, but they are effective and persistent. No one can hope to do what Bull Connor and George Wallace did once upon a time, but voter ID laws are just a more sophisticated version of a particular group’s desire to keep America in the hands of people who look, behave and vote like them.
Still, things have changed for the better. I can hope that the voter ID laws will mobilize massive minority participation in the states that pass them. I am pleased my children have had opportunities that would have been denied a generation earlier. My wife and I married in the year after the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s prohibition on interracial marriage, though we were unaware of the decision at the time. Today we travel the length and breadth of America without worrying about being lynched. And yes, President Obama embodies the ideals of August 28, 1963.
But we still need to make sure we treat all people as the equals they are. Then is now.
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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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Square one
Having written about nothing but Syria for the better part of a week, it is time to take a glance back at Egypt, where the wise-beyond-his-years Ahmed Maher is telling it like it is:
We view ourselves back at square one, because what is happening now could be more dangerous, more complicated than what was there before January 25, 2011
I fear he is right. The Egyptian army has taken back power and appears determined to repress the Muslim Brotherhood, whose leadership is to be prosecuted and whose membership is to be harassed to an even greater degree than under Hosni Mubarak. Guys like Ahmed, a leader of the April 6 movement that helped precipitate the revolution, aren’t safe either, because they speak up for the rights of Islamists and others.
Disappointed as I am by this turn of events, things are never quite the same as the first time around, as Ahmed implies. It’s a bit like turning up at “Go” in Monopoly. The board has changed a bit since last time you were there. It may be more dangerous and complicated, but there are also more people who have tasted something like basic freedoms and will be unwilling to let the savories disappear. I wish Ahmed well in forming a coalition that will harness that sentiment and push for a return to a democratic path.
That will take time and effort. One of the many shortcomings of the Egyptian revolution was that it failed to mobilize grass roots support for a clear roadmap to a democratic outcome. Instead it entrusted the country’s future first to the military, which failed to deliver, then to President Morsi, who failed to deliver, and now again to the military, which is likely to fail to deliver again.
With each failure, the Islamist/secularist divide in Egypt has widened, making it difficult at this point to imagine that the Muslim Brotherhood will participate in the referendum to approve a revised constitution and elections promised for early next year. Though they supported the July 3 coup, even Salafist participation is in doubt.
Breadth of participation matters, but apparently not to the Egyptian army, which is forging ahead with the expectation that its diktat will rule Egypt for the foreseeable future. General Sissi is definitely not the self-restrained George Washington of Egypt. It looks very much as if he is preparing for a long period in power.
What should the United States do in this situation? I really don’t see much point in cutting off military assistance, as the Saudis have vowed to replace whatever the Americans cut. We can of course still do it as a symbolic act, and there are many in Washington arguing that we have to in order not to be seen as complicit in restoring the Egyptian army to power. But the aid is tied to the peace treaty with Israel, at least in the minds of the Egyptians, which means the Israelis will be pressing us hard to maintain it.
If we do decide to cut off military aid, I hope we can do it in a way that sends a clear message in favor of a serious democratic outcome. I’d wait for some egregious act to which we could respond. More than likely, the Egyptian army will give us cause by committing another mass atrocity, conducting show trials, departing dramatically from the schedule for a new constitution and elections, or some other outrageous move.
In the meanwhile, we need to do what we can to protect people like Ahmed who are daring to speak out even under newly repressive conditions. We can’t want democracy for Egyptians more than they want it for themselves, but we can support those who are taking serious risks even as the country returns to square one.
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