Tag: United States
A not so luminary 57
Colleagues over at the Foreign Policy Initiative and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies have lined up 57 luminaries to advocate the following policy prescriptions on Syria:
- Immediately establish safe zones within Syrian territory, as well as no-go zones for the Assad regime’s military and security forces, around Homs, Idlib, and other threatened areas, in order to protect Syrian civilians. To the extent possible, the United States should work with like-minded countries like Turkey and members of the Arab League in these efforts.
- Establish contacts with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and, in conjunction with allies in the Middle East and Europe, provide a full range of direct assistance, including self-defense aid to the FSA.
- Improve U.S. coordination with political opposition groups and provide them with secure communications technologies and other assistance that will help to improve their ability to prepare for a post-Assad Syria.
- Work with Congress to impose crippling U.S. and multilateral sanctions on the Syrian government, especially on Syria’s energy, banking, and shipping sectors.
Does this approach have merit? Let’s look at the components one by one.
Safe zones would require a major U.S. military operation to take down Syria’s air defenses and a major military ground operation, presumably by Turkey and the Arab League, to push back the Syrian army armor and artillery from the safe areas. This would still leave Damascus and Aleppo in Bashar al Assad’s hands. It would also divide the country in a way likely to exacerbate sectarian tensions: Sunnis would likely flee to the safe areas, if in fact they are safe, and Alawis and Christians away from them to Damascus, Aleppo and other areas. Some of this of course is already happening, but it could get worse.
“Full range of direct assistance” presumably means arms to the Free Syria Army (FSA). This will reinforce the drift toward civil war, but it is unlikely to give the FSA means sufficient to win on the battlefield. A prolonged, increasingly sectarian armed conflict in Syria is among the worst outcomes from the U.S. perspective. It could destabilize Lebanon, Iraq and other countries in the Middle East.
I can only agree with the improving coordination with the political opposition and provision of more secure communications technology. But I’d be surprised if the Administration didn’t claim it was already doing the former and more surprised if it hasn’t begun to do the latter.
Crippling sanctions seem to me a good idea–at least as crippling as what we are already imposing on Syria’s sponsor Iran. The war, as the 57 point out, is already a proxy war–we may as well treat everyone on the other side equally.
So I’m with the luminaries half way: the non-military half. They are correct that more than humanitarian considerations are at stake, but they have failed to show how the military action they recommend would improve the situation.
If they really believe military action is possible and desirable, they should come up with a better proposition: destroy the command, control, communications and intelligence centers of the Syrian state and you will see a quick and decisive end to the killing of civilians by the Syrian army as an organized force. The trouble is you won’t know what will eventually take over, and in the interim you could trigger sectarian bloodletting that would make the current situation look like child’s play.
I remain convinced that
- the U.S. and Europe are not interested in intervening militarily;
- diplomatic and political means have not been exhausted, even if they so far have been ineffectual.
I am every bit as appalled as the 57 luminaries by what Bashar al Assad is doing in Syria. But before we do something big and expensive, best to make reasonably sure that it will improve the situation, not make it worse.
“Friends of Syria” will meet at the ministerial level in Tunisia next Friday. That is a good time and place to consider an amplified diplomatic and political effort. I’m sure the military options will be discussed as well, but I’ll be surprised if anyone is ready and willing.
P.S.: Here is what will bring down Bashar al Assad faster than “safe zones” and arming the FSA. This is one of a claimed 41 mini-protests staged in Damascus today:
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More thunder, no lightning
The UN General Assembly today passed a resolution supporting the Arab League plan for Syria, which would have Bashar al Assad step aside from his presidency and turn over power to his vice president, who would form a broad coalition government and initiate a democratic transition. The vote was 137 to 12, which is pretty lopsided even in the UNGA, where lopsided votes are common.
The opponents were: Belarus, Bolivia, China, Cuba, DPRK, Ecuador, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, Zimbabwe. This is a crew that needs a name: something like the antidemocrats, but snappier.
So what practical effect will this have? Hard to say, but the legal effect is nil. UNGA resolutions are like preseason football: the games may be well played and show off talent, but they have no direct impact on the standings. Only UN Security Council resolutions have legal effect.
But legal effect isn’t everything and doesn’t guarantee implementation either. The important thing is that the “international community” has made an appropriate noise in response to Bashar al Assad’s military assault on Syria’s citizens. This will weaken Bashar’s position both internationally and within Syria and give inspiration to his opponents, who will also bemoan international community ineffectiveness.
The real question is what should be done now. Some will want to resort to military intervention or arming the Syrian Free Army. This is a serious error in my book. The worst outcome for the U.S. is a prolonged civil war in Syria, which could have a destabilizing impact on Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and more widely. “Safe areas” and “humanitarian corridors” would, in the absence of Syrian government cooperation, require major military intervention.
As Mona Yacoubian, Randa Slim and Aram Nerguizian were at pains to make clear this morning at a Stimson/Middle East Institute Event, there are diplomatic and political courses of action that still need to be played out:
- The U.S. should lead on getting a “Friends of Syria” group up and running;
- The Arab League and Turkey should lead on pressing the Syrian opposition to unify;
- Sanctions implementation needs to be tightened, especially by the Arab League;
- The U.S. and Turkey need to court Russian support, on grounds that their interests require a good relationship with whatever comes after Bashar;
- The Syrian opposition has to work on peeling away Sunni and Christian merchant, as well as military, support for the regime.
As Randa Slim noted, what helps the regime is fear of instability on the one hand and Islamism on the other. These fears would get worse with military intervention, not better. We need more thunder, no lightning.
PS: Somehow this “Dancing and chanting around an independence flag in Qudaysa, Damascus” tweeted by @LeShaque and retweeted by Robert Mackey grabs me this morning. It is a lot more expressive than the important, if dull, session of the UNGA yesterday and reminds us of what the resolution is really about:
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Hard choices
My friends at Reuters published today my reaction to Dennis Ross’ New York Times piece yesterday on negotiating with Iran under the heading “What does Iran want?”:
Dennis Ross, until recently in charge of Iran in the Obama White House, has outlined why he thinks strengthened sanctions have created an environment in which diplomacy may now work to block Tehran’s development of nuclear weapons. At the same time, it is being reported that Iran has finally responded to a European Union letter requiring that renewed talks focus specifically on ensuring that the Iranian nuclear program is exclusively peaceful.
These are important developments, but they leave out half the equation. What can Iran hope to get from nuclear talks with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the U.S., U.K., France, Russia and China — plus Germany? Iran will certainly seek relief from sanctions, which have become truly punishing. But they will want more.
It is clear that Tehran’s first priority is an end to American efforts at regime change. This is not an issue Americans know or think much about, but it obsesses the Iranians. They believe that Washington has tried to bring about regime change in Tehran for decades. Iranian officials can entertain you for hours with stories about American (and Israeli) assistance to Azeri, Baloch and Kurdish rebels. The Arab Spring uprisings took their inspiration in part from Iran’s own “Green Movement,” which protested fraud in the 2009 presidential elections before being brutally repressed. While some in Congress view President Obama as insufficiently supportive of the Greens, the regime in Tehran thought the Americans were behind the whole movement.
The nuclear program, in addition to beefing up Iran’s military muscle and regional prestige, is also intended to end attempts at regime change, as it is thought in Tehran that the U.S. will not attack a nuclear weapons state for fear of the consequences. To those looking for it, there is ample supporting evidence: Witness the contrast between North Korea, a severely repressive regime that has obtained nuclear weapons, and Libya, which gave up its nuclear efforts and suffered a NATO air war that brought about regime change.
So the question becomes this: will the Americans be prepared to take regime change off the table if the Iranians are prepared to give ironclad and verifiable assurances that their nuclear program is entirely peaceful? The answer to that question is not obvious. While it is barely possible to picture Washington recognizing Tehran and re-establishing diplomatic relations after a 32-year hiatus, it is far harder to picture a bilateral agreement promising mutual noninterference in internal affairs. Certainly an agreement of that sort would not find ready approval in Congress.
Another key question is whether the U.S. is prepared to accept Iran holding on to sensitive nuclear technology, in particular, uranium enrichment, even if Tehran can use that technology only under tight international controls. Many countries have this arrangement: No one took uranium enrichment or reprocessing technology away from Argentina and Brazil when they mutually agreed to back off the development of nuclear weapons. Japan, South Korea, Sweden and many others are presumably no more than a couple of years (and probably far less) away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.
Iran, however, is not Sweden. It isn’t even North Korea, a country far more readily sanctioned and bribed back into line and unable to produce more than a few relatively primitive atomic bombs. Iran, once it has the capacity to enrich uranium to bomb grade (90 percent or more), will be no more than a few years from getting an arsenal of nuclear weapons. In the meanwhile, it will presumably continue to develop and deploy longer-range missiles that could target Israel and Europe, if not the U.S. Can the United States, and Israel, live with that short a fuse?
The hard choices in dealing with Iran on nuclear issues are not only up to the Iranians. There are hard choices for the U.S. as well.
P.S. Anyone who doubt that the U.S. will have trouble signing on to a diplomatic solution should read this from Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post.
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Silence on the main issues
Sometimes the things that don’t happen are more important than the things that do. What did not happen last month were talks between the P5+1 (that’s the U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China + Germany) and Iran. Turkey announced repeatedly its willingness to host such talks, but the Iranians apparently never responded to a European Union letter stating that the talks would have to focus on access to all aspects of Iran’s nuclear program and demonstrating that it is exclusively for peaceful purposes.
Likewise, sometimes the things not said are more important than what is said. Hossein Mousavian, in a Foreign Affairs article last week proposes a grand bargain between Washington and Tehran:
The United States and Iran should also work together on establishing security and stability in Afghanistan and preventing the Taliban’s full return to power; securing and stabilizing Iraq; creating a Persian Gulf body to ensure regional stability; cooperating during accidents and emergencies at sea, ensuring freedom of navigation, and fighting piracy; encouraging development in Central Asia and the Caucasus; establishing a joint working group for combating the spread of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism; and eliminating weapons of mass destruction and drug trafficking in the Middle East. Finally, the two countries could do much good by strengthening the ties between their people through tourism, promoting academic and cultural exchanges, and facilitating visas.
This is not new: it is well known that Iran and the U.S. have many common interests. But Mousavian, who has been associated with the Iranian nuclear program in the past but is on the outs with President Ahmedinejad and is now at Princeton, has only the vaguest things to say about it:
Together, the two countries should draft a “grand agenda,” which would include nuclear and all other bilateral, international, and regional issues to be discussed; outline what the ultimate goal will be; and describe what each side can gain by achieving it.
He nevertheless declares:
There is a peaceful path — one that will satisfy both Iranian and U.S. objectives while respecting Iran’s legitimate nuclear rights.
There may be such a peaceful path, but the only way of finding out is to open the Iranian nuclear program completely to international scrutiny, as the EU letter required. At this point, no one believes the Iranian claims. Silence on the issue does not bode well for an agreement.
Mousavian also calls for the U.S. to drop regime change as a goal. This is the issue on which the American Administration is silent. It is the primary issue for the Iranians, who no doubt see what is going on in Syria today as a proxy war fought with the U.S. If Bashar al Assad is forced to step down, it would not only hurt Iranian interests in Syria and in Lebanon but also, they fear, presage regime change in Tehran. In addition, they fear use of Iran’s many minority populations–Azeri, Kurdish, Baloch and others–to incite rebellion and weaken the regime.
It is not clear whether this or any American Administration can give up on regime change. Especially in the lead-up to the American presidential elections, all the political pressure is for a tougher stance on Iran, not a weaker one. The same is likely to be the case in Iran, where the political pressure will weigh heavily against opening the nuclear program to international inspection.
I fear that it will only be in November that political conditions in the U.S. will permit a serious dialogue to take place. It should focus on what really counts for both sides:
- for the Americans, that means guarantees that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons (even if it continues to have enrichment technology);
- for the Iranians, it means guarantees that the U.S. is not pursuing regime change.
How would the U.S. guarantee it is not pursuing regime change? I imagine mutual recognition and establishment of diplomatic relations would be involved, and there might need to be a bilateral agreement of some sort pledging mutual non-interference in internal affairs. That would be very difficult for the U.S. to swallow.
Of course November is a long time in the future–perhaps past the time Israel is willing to wait before taking military action.
In the meanwhile, it may be wise to reach out to elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, as Mehdi Khalaji suggests, though he is notably silent on how and where to do this. The symmetrical advice to the Iranians would be to reach out to the Republicans. It is not obvious that will be any easier.
For a far more detailed treatment of the nuclear issues, see Mark Hibbs: “Engage Iran”–What Does It Mean? He does not treat the regime change part of the equation, which so far as I can tell is left out of all Western writing on the subject of Iran.
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Boning up on China
As readers of this blog will know, I am not an Asia expert and hesitate to write about a part of the world with vast significance to the United States. But it is hard to ignore China when its heir apparent, Xi Jinping, comes to town. I thought it might be useful for me to list a few readings I am finding interesting:
1. Kenneth Lieberthal and J. Stapleton Roy in this morning’s Washington Post argue for restraint by both Beijing and Washington, hoping to avoid strategic rivalry turning ineviably to military confrontation. But this they suggest will require not only dialogue but a new set of agreements far more explicit and formal than the widely accepted American hegemony in the Pacific that has provided an unprecedented period of peace and stability there in recent decades.
2. Colleagues at CSIS have prepared a briefing specifically on Xi Jinping’s visit, which the Americans and Chinese are advertising as focused on “getting to know you,” even though he is in fact a fairly well-known figure here. But lots of issues will lurk just below the surface.
3. Americans are amply familiar with U.S./China issues like trade and monetary policy, but a relatively few Americans worry about the South China Sea, which according to Patrick Cronin and colleagues is vital to American interests in the Pacific. I may not be able to buy their proposed naval buildup, but the discussion of the issues is the best I’ve seen.
I’m sure there is a lot more good material out there and will welcome suggestions from readers. We are all going to have to bone up a bit on China.
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What doesn’t happen counts
Sometimes what matters in diplomacy is what doesn’t happen. That was certainly the case with Saturday’s defeat of the Arab League effort to get the UN Security Council to approve its plan for Bashar al Assad to begin a transition in Syria. Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat’s chief, suggested in a tweet that it was a non-event:
But in end it was non-event – no resolutn, just reaffirmation of division. Much talk; Effect on the ground, sadly, nil.
Far from it: the Syrian regime has taken it for what it was: a sign that the international community is not united in asking him to step down and he can therefore proceed for the moment to try to finish off his opposition using military force. The residents of Homs know what I mean.
The notion, purveyed most recently by Senator Lieberman, that Bashar al Assad’s end is “inevitable” is comprehensible only if you understand the peculiar American meaning of that word. Most dictionaries think it means that something will happen no matter what. But in the American diplomatic lexicon it means that we have to do something to make it happen. And Lieberman clearly intended the second meaning, as he immediately began talking about assistance to the Free Syria Army. Secreteary of State Clinton has been less clear, but she is talking about forming a multilateral contact group for support to the Syrian opposition. If the failure of the UNSC resolution triggers an intensified crackdown and military assistance to the Free Syria Army, it will certainly be an important event in the Syrian uprising.
Something else hasn’t happened lately, but no one has noticed: the P3 plus 1 (US, UK, France and Germany) meeting with Iran long rumored to take place in Turkey in late January seems not to have occurred, or if it did happen some place else no one reported it. This may be even more important than the non-resolution on Syria of the Security Council, but it is hard to know how to interpret it. President Obama in his Super Bowl interview yesterday seemed almost nonchalant in saying that Iran has to make it clear that it is not pursuing nuclear weapons. According to press reports of the recent International Atomic Energy Agency visit to Tehran, this they have not done, but another visit is scheduled for this month.
There was of course an implied “or else” to what the President said. He made it clear the military option is still on the table. But while sounding belligerent for the domestic American audience, it seems to me he was also offering an olive branch to the Iranians, essentially saying that they can keep their uranium enrichment and other technology so long as the world can reliably verify that they are not using it for weapons purposes. This is the deal many other countries have: anyone who thinks Sweden, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Argentina and a couple of dozen others don’t have the technology they require to build nuclear weapons within a year or two is living in a different world from mine.
The problem of course is that Iran is not one of those relatively reliable countries. There is ample evidence that it has begun to do high explosives research that is only useful in the context of a nuclear weapons program. If we get to summer without a clear and verifiable commitment on Iran’s part, that will be another non-event that matters. By then, talk of an Israeli attack will have quieted. That will be the clear signal that it is imminent. It’s not only what isn’t done that matters, it’s also what isn’t said.
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