Tag: United States
Syria has dropped off the screen
The White House justifications for backing out of a bilateral summit with President Putin lack one important one: Syria. The list is a long, citing (in addition to the asylum for Edward Snowden):
our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society.
Some might hope that this presages progress in convening the proposed Geneva 2 meeting on Syria, but there is no sign of that. The more than 100,000 people killed in Syria in the past 2.5 years, the 1.5-2 million who are refugees, the 4 million who are displaced inside Syria and the 7 million in humanitarian need have dropped off the radar of an administration that promised to anticipate and prevent mass atrocities.
A colleague deeply immersed in Syria asked the other day whether watching the Bosnian implosion was this bad. I answered that it was worse, because the crisis was on the front pages daily. And it went on for 3.5 years before President Clinton carried out the threat he had made during his first campaign for the presidency to bomb Serb forces. That is why it is not on the list of reasons for canceling the Obama/Putin meeting.
Why was it on the front pages every day? The proximate causes were two: the Bosnians had forceful and effective spokespeople, mainly their ambassador to the UN in New York and their wartime prime minister. Ambassador Mo Sacirbey was on CNN daily strumming the heartstrings of ordinary Americans. Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic would whip himself into a lather bemoaning the latest atrocity. Students organized against the war on college campuses, Congress held hearings, Foreign Service officers resigned and newspapers ran daily accounts of a war in which little of strategic significance was happening.
While Senator McCain and a few others have raised their voices about Syria, mobilization today against the atrocities in Syria extends little beyond the Syrian American community, which is doing its best to funnel in humanitarian assistance but has found no resonance in the broader US population. There is no recognizable and consistent Syrian voice speaking out daily on US television.
Part of the reason is political instability in the Syrian opposition, which has gone through three or four “presidents” in a couple of years, none of whom became a welcome figure in the American media. Divided international sponsorship–the Qataris backing the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudis backing less Islamist forces–underlies this instability.
The Bosnians faced similar divisions among their international sponsors: their money and weapons came from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others. But the government in Sarajevo had from the first a stable leadership: the laconic Alija Izetbegovic was the more or less uncontested first among equals, accepted even by his rivals as the legitimate president of the beleaguered Bosnian state. There was stolid consistency at the top, which helped to paper over the differences among the international donors and reduce the perceived significance in Washington of the jihadi fighters who joined the Bosnian cause.
In Syria, the Saudis, perhaps emboldened by the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are now trying to play a leadership role by offering to buy off the Russians. They have managed to install one of their favorites as president of the Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. What they have not managed to do is counter the growing significance of the extremist fighters, who have frightened Washington away from embracing the revolutionary cause.
The Syrians are not lacking in rhetorical power: sister and brother Rafif and Murhaf Jouejati here in DC do a great job trying to bring the latest atrocity to our attention. But they are doing it essentially as civil society activists rather than as official representatives of the Syrian opposition. And they are heard mostly in a narrow circle of Syria-watchers and expatriate Syrians, none of whom carry much weight in the broader American body politic. Syria really has dropped off Washington’s screen.
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The Al Qaeda conference call
This morning’s report of an intercepted conference call with participation of up to 20 Al Qaeda bosses and operatives goes some way to explaining the nonsensically broad travel warning and embassy closings of recent days. The odd configuration of closings apparently was derived from the conference call. This suggests what anyone who knows the American bureaucracy will have already guessed: we don’t pay anyone to be careless, so the system is exceedingly risk averse (without however necessarily decreasing the risk).
Also of interest is this: Washington responded to the intercept in part with drone strikes in Yemen. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula escalated the threat, causing the evacuation of Embassy Sanaa and disruption of American aid programs in a country desperately in need of them. Now both Al Qaeda and its opponents seem to be massing in Sanaa for a showdown. A movie script along these lines would hardly be credible.
Evacuation of civilian Americans from Yemen has serious implications. It is hard to picture how the flow of personnel from the Yemeni hinterland into Al Qaeda can be stemmed without solving some of Yemen’s problems with water, poverty and governance. There is every reason to believe that the drone war increases Al Qaeda recruitment, however vital it may appear to the joint chiefs in the short term.
This is a frustrating situation: a terrorist network conference call stymies the world’s last remaining super power. Ayman al Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s chief executive, has to be reasonably pleased with the effect he is having at so far minimal cost (those few “militants” killed by drones in Yemen). It might even be that the conference call was a setup, conducted entirely for the benefit of the National Security Agency’s Arabic speakers. The subsequent leaks will have indicated to Al Qaeda a good deal about American intercept capabilities, though they likely already knew most of that.
President Obama was right to underline last night on Jay Leno that Americans are far more likely to be killed in automobile accidents than in terrorist attacks. That was true even in 2001, when Al Qaeda killed close to 3000 Americans. The numbers in most years are well under 30, few of them in the United States and not all by Islamic extremists.
But that won’t satisfy the Administration’s critics, who will emphasize that the conference call suggests Al Qaeda central has been reconstituted and is directing its franchisees once again. Al Qaeda is certainly showing itself a resilient and resourceful opponent, one that manages to tie up gigantic American resources with minimum effort.
What should we be doing in this situation? Protecting our people is certainly priority one. But making sure they can conduct their diplomatic, consular, economic assistance, and other functions is also vital. I know no one who thought we were doing enough on the civilian side in Yemen before the recent threat emerged. Just restoring our people to their original effort will not be sufficient.
We need a much beefed up civilian effort in Yemen. That isn’t going to happen so long as the terrorist threat is out there. The terrorists know it. They also know they don’t actually have to carry out an attack to block governance and development efforts. They need only get us to evacuate our civilians. Yemeni employees will carry on, at great risk, but they will not be fully effective beyond the humanitarian realm without Americans or third country nationals.
A terrorist attack now might underline the point and prevent us from returning them any time soon, but the threat has already had a serious impact.
PS: On the ingredients of what is needed, see for example Daniel Green’s piece.
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Moderate tones, but Iran needs the pressure
Newly inaugurated Iranian President Rouhani held his first press conference today. The tone was moderate, even if the content was essentially unchanged: Rouhani wants a negotiated solution to the nuclear impasse, one that includes lifting of sanctions as well as an end to threats and the “secret” American agenda (read “regime change”).
Rouhani was well aware that strict new sanctions on Iran had passed overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives last week, which he attributed to Israeli pressure:
so the interests of a foreign country are served and imposed on representatives in Congress so that even U.S. interests are not being considered…
Most of those hoping for a negotiated solution to end Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons bemoaned this hostile signal in the run-up to this weekend’s inauguration of a relatively moderate president. The man hadn’t even finished naming his cabinet yet. The sanctions vote could have increased pressures in favor of more conservative “principalists” and undermined Rouhani in his declared intention of reaching a settlement that would relieve Iran of at least some of its economic burdens.
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You are not safer
There are many cock-eyed things about the travel alert the State Department has issued, along with the embassy and consulate closings it has ordered:
- They cover a very wide swath of the Middle East and Africa (19 countries, down a few from the original) and now a full week, making the travel warning essentially useless to anyone wanting to avoid an attack.
- The people the closings are supposedly intended to protect are those who serve abroad, most of whom live in well-known compounds often less well protected than the embassies and consulates they work in.
- It would presumably take little for the planners of an attack to postpone for a week or two.
- The warning itself is causing a good deal of the harm that an attack might cause–disrupting American diplomatic operations, convincing Americans on the home front that their government can’t protect them, casting doubt in the minds of our friends and allies about whether we are prepared the run the risks engagement on their behalf entails.
It makes me wonder: did this intercept pick up a communication Al Qaeda wanted to be heard, so as to cause damage without having to bother with all that messy bombing, maiming and killing?
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Peace picks August 5-9
Summer doldrums, but some good pickings:
1. Dissecting the Pentagon’s Strategic Choices and Management Review, Brookings Institution, Tuesday, August 6, 2013 / 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Venue: Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, D.C. 20036
Speakers: Marvin Kalb, Michael E. O’hanlon, Mackenzie Eaglen
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently summarized the results of his Strategic Choices and Management Review (SCMR), an internal Pentagon process designed to assist the Department of Defense as it plans for a future period of uncertain and significantly constrained defense spending. Deputy Secretary Ashton Carter also provided Congressional testimony on the subject. The review explored how the Pentagon might deal with at least two possible budget scenarios: the president’s own long-term plan, which calls for another $150 billion in ten-year defense savings beyond those mandated initially in the 2011 Budget Control Act, and the possibility that sequestration will stay in effect for a decade, requiring a full $500 billion in additional defense cuts relative to the same baseline.
On August 6, the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings will host a discussion on the usefulness of the SCMR as an analytical product which clarifies the kinds of changes that will be needed in the future, while also examining plans within it that may not be prudent. Panelists, among others, will include Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Senior Fellow Michael O’Hanlon, author of Healing the Wounded Giant: Maintaining Military Preeminence While Cutting the Defense Budget (Brookings, 2013). Marvin Kalb, nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, will moderate the event.
After discussion, the panelists will take audience questions.
Register for the event here:
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Whining narcissist
The interview excerpts published in this morning’s Washington Post dash any hope that Egypt might get lucky and find a serious democrat in General Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the July 3 coup leader and still Defense Minister. Normally I would gripe that the Post failed to publish the entire text, but it would be hard to read much more.
It’s not that Sissi doesn’t say interesting things. His annoyance at President Morsi’s disrespect for the Mubarak-appointed judiciary and other state institutions (read Egyptian army) and his disdain for the Brotherhood’s anti-nationalist, pan-Islamist political program confirm that the coup represents in part the revenge of the Mubarak deep state, which Morsi did relatively little to dismantle during his year in power.
But the whining screeches through:
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