Tag: United States
Time to act
Here is President Obama’s statement from three days ago:
I am deeply concerned by reports of violence in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen. The United States condemns the use of violence by governments against peaceful protesters in those countries and wherever else it may occur. We express our condolences to the family and friends of those who have been killed during the demonstrations. Wherever they are, people have certain universal rights including the right to peaceful assembly. The United States urges the governments of Bahrain, Libya and Yemen to show restraint in responding to peaceful protests, and to respect the rights of their people.
This statement had a good impact in Bahrain, where the monarchy saved its skin by withdrawing army and policy from Pearl square and allowing the Crown Prince to make a truly conciliatory statement.
But today was a day of carnage in Libya according to many reports: jet fighters strafing demonstrators, thugs shooting into crowds, perhaps 250 fatalities. While the State Department has expressed “grave concern” and ordered an evacuation of its own personnel, President Obama has been silent and no specific counter-action, even an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, has been announced. We need to hear from the President what he is prepared to do.
It is time to act. The Twittersphere is full of recommendations for a no-fly zone, which would be fine by me if the UN Security Council can move quickly to order one. I am not convinced that unilateral U.S. action along those lines would be welcomed even among the protesters in Libya, and we should note that it would prevent defections like the two colonels who flew to Malta today. But letting it be known that one or more aircraft carriers is moving towards North Africa even before the UNSC acts could inhibit some of Gaddafi’s worst behavior.
What else could be done? The Arab League is said to be meeting tomorrow to discuss Libya. That is only a good thing if they drop their usual hesitancy to criticize a reigning sovereign and denounce Gaddafi’s attacks on his own people. I hope the Americans are demarching (that diplomatese for talking to/asking) every Arab League capital by morning pointing out that what Gaddafi is doing is counterproductive and will rouse the public in many other countries.
In any event, I trust the Americans are making it clear in Tripoli that what is going on needs to stop right away. It is not only Libya that is at risk–if Gaddafi succeeds in his effort to repress the demonstrators, which is possible though unlikely–you’ll see every tyrant in the Middle East copying his lead. That would not be a pretty picture.
PS: A few more things the UNSC could do: freeze assets and ban travel of regime principals, prohibit arms sales, send the Secretary General to Tripoli to negotiate for deployment of a group of observers.
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Why the violence?
Violence isn’t new to the wave of Tunisian flu that is sweeping through the Arab world, but it seems to be getting worse, hitting Bahrain, Libya and Yemen during more or less the past 24 hours.
Why?
The short answer: this is the regime response to seeing the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt taken down. While some accounts are not clear, it is certain that the violence in Bahrain this morning was initiated by the police, who attacked a peaceful (and mostly sleeping) encampment in Pearl Square unprovoked. Police and allied thugs seem to have been initiating violence in Yemen as well. The accounts of events in Libya are sketchy, but I would bet that there too the police are rioting. Kings and presidents are concluding that Ben Ali’s mistake was to flee without a fight and Mubarak’s was to step down without cracking down.
How should peaceful protesters deal with this development? They are unlikely to beat the police and thugs in a street fight. What they need to do is mass greater numbers, stay particularly attentive at night, befriend the security forces, beef up their connectedness to foreign and domestic journalists, and make sure their own cadres include people from across the social, ethnic, sectarian and other divides. If they can’t do these things, they need to stay away from confrontation until they can.
You can also hope that the Americans will be telling the regimes in Sanaa and Manama that crackdowns of the sort they are pursuing are counterproductive and likely to spawn more violence. But I doubt Washington has all that much sway in either place at the moment, and they surely don’t want one of those regimes to fall without a safety net in place.
President Saleh is no doubt declaring himself indispensable to the war on Al Qaeda, but there really isn’t much time before the “use by” date on that bag of potatoes. One way or another, he is finished within the next few years (if not the next few months). Time to get some sort of safety net in place, preferably a more democratic one with some prospect of holding north and south together by sharing power between them.
Qadhafi is of no concern in Washington–they would just as soon he take his tent to the desert.
But the Khalifa monarchy in Bahrain is a real dilemma for the Americans. You know: 5th fleet vs. the possibility of a Shia (some presume Iranian-dominated) regime. But the question for the Americans (and for the regime) is whether the kind of police riot the monarchy indulged in this morning will make things better or worse. My bet is worse, maybe much worse if it turns what has been a mild-mannered expression of dissent into a sectarian war that the Sunnis are likely to lose. It is not enough for the monarchy to have allowed municipal and legislative elections last fall. And the 5th fleet is more in danger from getting behind the curve than getting out in front of it. Mr. Obama needs to remember what he said about universal rights–they won’t stop at Manama.
Nor should they if they are going to make it all the way to Tehran, where in many respects the violence and crackdown is at its worst. That is the good news: the theocracy is feeling threatened by Tunisian flu. It dreads the fate of Mubarak, as well it should.
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Wasting your money, Tomislav?
This is inside baseball, but for those of you who might be interested: former U.S. Ambassador William Montgomery’s September 2010 registration with the Justice Department as an agent for Tomislav Nikolic, President of the Serbian Progressive Party.
I would be the last to deny a retired Foreign Service officer whatever income he can find, and 7500 euros a month is not pocket change, but I would also want to know whom he represents when he gives interviews calling for the dissolution of Bosnia. To be fair he was doing this even before the date of his registration, and he is of course entitled to his views, which are contrary to mine.
The partitions Montgomery proposes are sure formulas for re-igniting conflict in the Balkans, with devastating results, including the formation of an Islamic Republic in central Bosnia. Remember Bill? We called that the “non-viable, rump Islamic Republic that would be a platform for Iranian terrorism in Europe.” Hard for me to see how that is in the U.S. or Serbian interest. But there is of course no longer a need for Bill to worry about that. He works for Nikolic.
The bigger problem may be for Nikolic: he is going to have a hard time being welcomed in Washington unless he takes a pro-Europe, One Bosnia line. Associating himself with Bill Montgomery’s advocacy of partition of Bosnia and Kosovo is no way to overcome Nikolic’s past association with the hard-line, anti-European ethnic nationalism of the Serb Radical Party, from which he split in 2008.
What does Montgomery do for Nikolic’s money? He’ll call his old friends at State, the National Security Council and Congress to get appointments. This is something that the head of a party in the Serbian parliament could and should have done by his own secretary, or by the Serbian embassy.
If that doesn’t work, I’ll help him, for free. I am vigorously in favor of Washington hearing from all parts of the political spectrum in Serbia. But it is simply outrageous that people get paid to make appointments in Washington–our public servants should all be told to tell paid agents that appointments can only be made directly, not through intermediaries.
If Nikolic wants to pay Montgomery to write his talking points, that’s fine with me. But they’ll have to say something different from what Montgomery has been saying in public.
Wasting your money, Tomislav?
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Maliki ueber alles?
While we’ve all been preoccupied with Tunisia then Egypt, an Iraqi Supreme Court decision has called into question the independence of the central bank, the electoral commission, the human rights commission and the integrity commission. Reidar Visser has commented on the electoral commission aspect, but arguably the central bank is even more important. The big issue is accumulation of power in the hands of the Prime Minister.
Here are the most obviously relevant articles of the Iraqi constitution:
Article 102:
The High Commission for Human Rights, the Independent Electoral Commission, and the Commission on Public Integrity are considered independent commissions subject to monitoring by the Council of Representatives, and their functions shall be regulated by law.
Article 103:
First: The Central Bank of Iraq, the Board of Supreme Audit, the Communication and Media Commission, and the Endowment Commissions are financially and administratively independent institutions, and the work of each of these institutions shall be regulated by law.
Second: The Central Bank of Iraq is responsible before the Council of Representatives. The Board of Supreme Audit and the Communication and Media Commission shall be attached to the Council of Representatives.
What the court apparently decided is that agencies with an “executive” function have to be subordinated to the executive branch, not the Council of Representatives, in order to respect the separation of powers. This is obviously pretty deep legal water in which I don’t know how to swim, so I am reluctant to dive in.
But it also raises important questions about the survivability of democracy in Iraq, where accumulation of power has a long and unhappy history. Independent agencies are a frequent feature of the landscape in democratic societies, and independent central banks are regarded as absolutely vital to macroeconomic stability, which Iraq has enjoyed for the most part since the fall of Saddam Hussein. If executive branch supervision refers exclusively to financial probity and other administrative questions, that is one thing (though perhaps not entirely without problems). If executive branch decision is going to mean that these institutions are no longer in any serious sense independent, that is another.
We shouldn’t leap to conclusions, but I certainly hope the U.S. embassy in Baghdad is inquiring and letting the Prime Minister know that those who fought and paid for Iraq’s relative freedom would not be interested in seeing it undermined by an overly aggressive effort to centralize power.
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What a day!
What a day!
Somehow my friend Emile Hokayem came to the conclusion several days ago that events in Egypt would favor Tehran, by removing a strong U.S. ally and “rekindling” Arab pride. Today it looks as if he could not have been more wrong. I know lots of people would have preferred that the United States do more for the demonstrators earlier in the process, as I would have, but it seems to me the President has had his thumb on the scale in their favor for some time now. Look and hear what he had to say today:
It’s not just that he comes out on the right side–that is easy enough after the fact. But he comes out on the right side for the right reasons. This is an enthusiastic endorsement, unhedged by the kind of reserve that Emile and others would expect.
And rightly so. As Shibley Telhami argues today in Politico, a democratic Egypt will shrink the space in which extremism thrives, not increase it. It will also speak up more loudly for the Palestinians, something that really is necessary if an agreement is to be reached–someone needs to save the Israelis from their single-minded drive towards a one-state solution.
What worries me is not Egypt’s regional impact or its effect on Israel, but rather completion of its democratic trajectory. As the President said today, this is a beginning, not an end. We’ve seen what happens when revolutions are hijacked–as in Iran–or stopped three-quarters of the way to the finish line–which is how I would describe Serbia. The turnover of power to the military, which is what happened today, cannot be allowed to get frozen in place.
There is at least a year ahead of difficult transition, and more likely several years. It will sometimes be hard to tell which is the right path. Egyptians have chosen wisely so far, and we are wise to let them continue to choose. But for the moment: what a day!
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Stress reveals the best and the worst
Stress brings out interesting things in both people and institutions. Egypt is under stress these days. What has been revealed?
Mubarak: his speech last night revealed a chasm between his understanding of the situation and that of ordinary Egyptians. For Mubarak, two things are critical:
1) sticking with the constitution: “to satisfy the demands of the youth and the people in a way that respects the constitutional legitimacy and would not restrict it in any way”
2) saving the economy: “the priority right now is regaining the sense of confidence in Egyptians and a sense of trust in our economy, our reputation.”
No surprise here. Along with the military, these are the mainstays of the regime, a constitution that ensures continuity by blocking any serious political competition and an economy that feeds regime backers. The only surprise is that Mubarak thought this would appeal to the hundreds of thousands who gathered in Tahrir square last night to hear his resignation and celebrate the death of the regime.
The military: its two communiques betray its profound ambivalence. As
Shadi Hamid on the New York Times website says:
The military is by no means a pro-democracy organization. It has benefited from the status quo, becoming a privileged, powerful economic force in society. It has something to gain, but also, perhaps, quite a lot to lose.
While expressing support for the democratic goals of the demonstrators, and offering itself as their guarantor, it is backing the regime-led, constitutional transition, at least for the moment. In Arabic:
As Amir Taheri puts it, this is “change within the regime, not regime change.”
The United States: this is the biggest shift yesterday, with the President saying,
…the United States has also been clear that we stand for a set of core principles. We believe that the universal rights of the Egyptian people must be respected, and their aspirations must be met. We believe that this transition must immediately demonstrate irreversible political change, and a negotiated path to democracy. To that end, we believe that the emergency law should be lifted. We believe that meaningful negotiations with the broad opposition and Egyptian civil society should address the key questions confronting Egypt’s future: protecting the fundamental rights of all citizens; revising the Constitution and other laws to demonstrate irreversible change; and jointly developing a clear roadmap to elections that are free and fair.
This marks the definitive return of the “d” word, democracy, to American foreign policy, after two years of exile to cleanse it of its associations with George W. Bush and military intervention. If the rights are universal, they need to be respected not just for Egyptians, but for others as well. Stay tuned: this will be heard throughout the world, frightening autocrats and inspiring demonstrators.
The protesters: they remain inchoate, but I found this Asharq Alawsat interview with an April 6 activist interesting:
As for our meeting with Dr. Ahmed Zewail, we believe that he is the closest to our current viewpoint and desires, and even when he held his press conference he was careful to deliberately separate his viewpoint from the viewpoint of the protestors. As a result of this, we believe he is one of the most important figures and we support his candidacy to be a member of the “presidential council” that we propose governs the country’s affairs for a transitional period.
Ahmed Zemail is the Egyptian and American winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, who has returned to Cairo to join the demonstrations. Zeweil in 2008 asked the question,
Does the problem lie in the fact that we are Arabs or is it because we are Muslims?
This was in reference to the failure of the Arab and Muslim worlds to participate in contemporary scientific advances, but it could well have been asked about democracy in the Arab and Muslim countries as well. The account of his answer was also more broadly applicable. After denying that lack of scientific progress was due to either Arab or Muslim culture, he is reported to say,
…the appropriate environment for scientific research is absent in the Arab world…he explained that had it not been for the freedom of creativity in the United States he would never have progressed in the field of science to such an extent.
If this is the man the protesters are looking to for at least part of their leadership, we are fortunate indeed.
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