The End of Another Chapter in the Middle East

And another attempt to bring peace to the Middle East limps off the stage.  April 29 was the official deadline for Secretary of State John Kerry’s nine-month effort to reach a deal.  But it really ended on the last week end in March. [Caution: we are entering the spin cycle, where everyone is working over time to make the case that it was the other side who wrecked everything.]

The Fateful Events

Prisoner Release.  The first public sign of crisis in the talks was Israel’s announcement that it was delaying the release of the fourth set of Palestinian prisoners.  The government of Israel, as a confidence-building measure at the start of the talks, had agreed to release 104 Palestinian prisoners who were convicted of crimes against Israeli citizens (“terrorist acts”) before the 1992 Oslo Accords.  The prisoners, some of who were near the end of their sentences, were to be released in four stages.  The problem with the fourth group, as I understand it, is that 14 of the 24 prisoners were Israeli Arabs rather than Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza Strip.  The prisoner release was controversial enough in Israel as it was; the fact that some of them were Israeli citizens was especially troubling because they were seen as both terrorists and traitors who would be returning their homes in Israel.  There were demands from members of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cabinet that they be exiled to the West Bank and stripped of their Israeli citizenship.

 A Scramble for a Deal.  When the Palestinian negotiators threatened to react to the delay in the prisoner release by walking out of negotiations, Secretary of State Kerry launched a frantic effort to patch things up.  If various press reports are accurate, Kerry was going to offer the release of Jonathon Pollard and an extension of the talks beyond the April 29 deadline.  (The White House has officially denied this story.)

Jonathon Pollard: An American intelligence analyst who was convicted in 1987 of spying for Israel and given a life sentence.  Many people in both Israel and the United States feel that his sentence was unduly harsh given that the information he passed to the Israeli government was U.S. intelligence on Arab countries, not information on U.S. military or political strategy.  They also point out that no other person convicted of spying for a U.S. ally has drawn a life sentence.  

Both Sides Act.  Kerry’s effort were eclipsed by three actions.  The first was the announcement by the Palestinian Authority that it had signed some 15 United Nations conventions and treaties.  The second was the announcement of plans by Israel to build several thousand additional housing units in the West Bank.  The Israeli side regarded the Palestinians’ actions as violating their pledge not to pursue claims to statehood through the UN system.  (For more discussion, see http://ir-comments.blogspot.com/2011/09/palestinians-at-un-does-it-matter.html) The Palestinians regarded the expansion of settlements as a violation of Israel’s pledge to “show restraint.”  A few days later, the Palestinians announced that Fatah, the dominant faction in the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, and Hamas, the governing party in the Gaza Strip, had reached a unity agreement. 

Why Bother?

Time after time the President of the United States has announced a new effort to bring peace to the Middle East and time after time those talks have failed.  Even the Oslo Accords of 1992, which initially led to a fundamental change in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship and promised so much more, fell far short of delivering on  what each side promised to the other.  One might ask, why should the U.S. bother?  The quick answer is that it is in the long-term national interest of  Israel, the Palestinians and the United States. 

He Really Said That?  In a speech the National Press Club, Secretary of State Kerry used the term “apartheid state.”  Contrary to some of the more hysterical reactions in both the U.S. and Israel, Kerry did not say that Israel was guilty of practicing apartheid, with all the connotations of racial oppression and gross injustice that word carries.  What he did say was that that was one of two terrible options looming in the future if there is no agreement on a two-state solution.  By the way, Tzipi Livni, Minister of Justice in the Israeli government and chief negotiator in the talks, said the same thing in a speech last week. 

One alternative to two states -- Israel and Palestine -- is the current situation.  Some parts of the West Bank have local control over internal policies but with the Israeli military controlling security, the Israeli government controlling and collecting taxes on imports and exports,  and increasing numbers of Israeli setters establishing gated and armed enclaves with their own roads and infrastructure.   Other parts of the West Bank are under direct Israeli administration.  This mix of indirect and direct rule of people who are not part of the Israeli polity is a direct threat to Israel’s democratic essence.  The roughly 540,000 Israeli citizens who live in settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have far more rights and privileges than the 2.7 million Palestinians.

The other alternative to two states, is to make them one.  That is, Israel would simply annex the West Bank.   But the resulting new Israel would have around 9 million Jewish citizens and 5 million Arab citizens and the so-called “demographic time bomb” would be loudly ticking.  The Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and the quarter of the current population of Israel that is classified as Arab have markedly higher birth rates than Jewish Israelis.  The day would inevitably come when Jews would become a minority and the Jewish identity of Israel was we know it would be gone.

The Politics of Despair.  West Bank Palestinians are young -- half are less than 22 years old.  By contrast the median age in Israel is 29 and in the U.S. it’s 37.  The official unemployment rate is around 25% but everyone understands that it is substantially higher than that.  Compared to their counterparts in most of the rest of the Arab world, these young Palestinians are better educated and more urbanized ... both factors that lead to greater political involvement, especially in protest movements.  There is a major disconnect between many young Palestinians and the current leadership, men in their 70s and 80s whose glory days as freedom fighters in the 1970s and 1980s are ancient history and who are widely perceived as self serving and corrupt.  As the creation of a Palestinian state seems to recede further and further into the realm of the impossible dream, a third Intifada (uprising) looms as a larger and larger threat.  And this time it may be that stones and burning tires will be replaced by AK-47s and Improvised Explosive Devices.  But an armed insurgency is far more likely to destroy the economic, social and political progress the Palestinians have made in the past 20 years than it is to dislodge the Israeli Defense Forces and the armed settlers.

Pragmatism, Politics and Principle.  The United States has pragmatic interests in seeing a stable and peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Israel is an important military asset for the U.S.  The Israeli army, air force and navy are far superior to any other country in the region and cooperate closely with the U.S. on strategy and tactics, and the Israelis contribute vital intelligence on the Arab world.  Israel is a significant trading partner, despite the relatively small size of its economy.  Israeli tech firms are important partners for many U.S. software giants and the Israeli military is an important consumer of American-made weapons and equipment.   Creation of a Palestinian state would enhance the Israeli economy.

Many Americans take a candidate’s stance on Israel into consideration when they vote.  In addition to Jews who feel an understandable emotional and ideological kinship with Israel, evangelical Christians have become increasingly vocal and uncritical champions of Israel.  And public opinion polls consistently show Israel with a profoundly positive image in the eyes of the vast majority of Americans.

Even if the coldly practical economic and military reasons and the politics of the issues did not impel American leaders to seek a solution, political morality does.  Israel is a stable, mature democracy.  The core values of Israeli civic life are the same as the core values of American civic life.  If, as many people think, the future of Israel and the future of the Palestinians are inextricably linked, then the United States has a principled reason for working to find a way for them to live together.

So How Come It Didn’t Happen?

The Core Issues.  For the past twenty years the four central issues in the conflict have been borders, security, Jerusalem, and refugees. 

Borders: No one seriously believes that the borders of Israel at the start of the Six-Day War in 1967 can be restored.  But how much alteration will be done to account for military defense and the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and around Jerusalem?

Security: What restrictions will a Palestinian state accept on its military and defense forces to reassure Israel that it is not the spearhead of aggression from the Arab world?  What assurances can the Palestinian state get that the Israeli Defense Forces will not operate at will in Palestinian territory?

Jerusalem: Israel has declared Jerusalem its “eternal and indivisible capital”; the Palestinians have built a large “lecture/community” hall that looks a whole lot like a potential parliament building in the eastern, traditionally Arab section of Jerusalem.  Can the semantic and historical distinction between “:Jerusalem” and “East Jerusalem” satisfy each side?

Refugees: Regardless of the morality of telling people whose families have been expelled from their homes that they can’t go back, the fact is that it is impossible for Palestinians (or their descendants) who left their homes during the 1948 or 1967 wars to go home.  But is it possible to find some way to compensate them for their loss?

While the negotiators did a good job of keeping their discussions private and not negotiating in the media, enough leaked out to suggest that the talks bogged down on the complications of drawing borders. 

Complication 1: Settlements.  The first time the Obama administration ventured into Middle East peacemaking, it tried to make a six-month moratorium on settlement activity in the West Bank a precondition for talks.  That led to a direct confrontation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the talks were declared dead before they began.  This time around the U.S. and the Palestinians merely asked for “restraint.”  But Israel authorized 4800 new houses in settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and announced plans for 6800 more in the months ahead.
To paint with a broad brush, there are two types of settlements.  One comprises the suburban communities built in the eastern suburbs of Tel Aviv and in a ring around the eastern side of Jerusalem.  Around 400,000 people live in those two areas, attracted primarily by the lack of housing elsewhere in Israel and government subsidized rents.  They look and feel like gated suburban communities in the
U.S. except for the fact that security is much tighter and people commute to their jobs in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem along special roads from which Palestinian cars are excluded.  The other type of settlement consists of much smaller units scattered throughout the West Bank.  Some are legal under Israeli law; others are illegal.  Most of the residents of these settlements are motivated by ideology and religious conviction.  They describe themselves as living in Judea and Samaria, integral parts of the land of Israel in both the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament.  This second type of settlement is often built close to Palestinian villages and farms, and contentious interactions between settlers and Palestinians are common.  Some of these settlements are the sources of “price tag” incidents, in which olive orchards are decimated or mosques, churches and graveyards are desecrated to convince local Palestinians that staying in their homes and resisting settlements is too expensive.
The settlement program, begun in the early 1970s to “create facts on the ground” that would make a return to Israel’s pre-197 borders, has succeeded.  No one, including the Palestinian leadership, seriously expects Israel to abandon the settlement communities around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.  The other settlements in the West Bank are far more problematic for both sides.

Complication 2: Politics in Israel.  Israeli voters run the gamut from very secular to very religious.   Middle and upper middle class Israelis, especially those whose families originally came from Europe or North America, differ from working class or poor Israelis, especially those whose families originally came from elsewhere in the Middle East.  Second or third-generation sabras (native-born Israelis) differ from more recent immigrants, particularly the large number of Russian Jews who have arrived since the end of the Soviet Union.

Without making this sound too much like a Political Science lecture (although that’s not a bad thing ....) The structure of Israeli political institutions tends to exacerbate political differences rather than promoting compromise.  Seats in the Knesset are allocated by proportion of the vote a party receives, and a party only needs to get slightly more than 1% of the vote to get a seat.  This encourages a proliferation of small parties reflecting rather narrow ideological or religious interests.  The large majority of Israeli voters are fairly evenly divided between moderately left of center and moderately right of center ideological positions, but the proliferation of smaller, more extreme parties means that no centrist party can get a majority of the seats necessary to form a government.  Instead coalitions are built among sometimes widely divergent political factions.  The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an example of very strange political bedfellows:   Netanyahu gets to be Prime Minster because he controls the single biggest bloc of votes -- 31 out of a total of 120.  But he had to combine his Likud party with Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home), a party whose base support is Russian immigrants, most of whom live in West Bank settlements.  Thus the Foreign Minister of Israel is Avigdor Lieberman, who is only weakly committed to a two-state solution and is openly dismissive of any chance that talks with the Palestinians will ever succeed.  The coalition includes the Jewish Home party, led by Nafatli Bennet.  Mr. Bennett, an outspoken and colorful advocate of ever-expanding settlements and opponent of a Palestinian state, serves as Minister of Economics in the government.  But the government also includes Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, a veteran centrist politician who has long been an advocate for negotiations and a Palestinian state and was Israel’s lead negotiator in the last round of talks.  While the left hand of the government negotiated with the Palestinians and the Americans, the right hand called for the annexation of large parts of the West Bank and stripping Israeli Arabs of citizenship and letting them join the Palestinians in tightly controlled enclaves.
The outcome of the negotiations rested heavily on the assumption (or wishful thinking) that Mr. Netanyahu could find the political will and wiles to overcome the obstructionism of his erstwhile allies.

I do not mean to suggest that the failure is solely Israel’s fault.  The Palestinians missed opportunities to move ahead, perhaps most notably by moving to join 15 United Nations conventions instead of waiting another day or two for Secretary of State Kerry to finalize a deal that would allow Netanyahu, over the vehement objections of some of  his own government ministers, to release the last 24 Palestinian prisoners in return for the release of Jonathon Pollard (there is substantial circumstantial evidence to suggest that that was about to happen ... despite official White House denials.)

And Now? 

Two things that will NOT happen:  

1.  A MAD action.  Some Palestinian leaders have threatened to dissolve their government, thus forcing Israel to assume direct control and full responsibility for all of the West Bank.  This would be a variant of the old Mutual Assured Destruction threat of the Cold War, inflicting disastrous consequences on both sides.

2.  Annexation.  Israel will not follow the urging of the Economic Minister and annex some 61% of the West Bank, ending all hope of a viable Palestinian state.  This also would be a MAD act with even greater catastrophic damage for Israel.

Two Nightmares that Might Happen.

1.   The failure of the talks, on top of widespread disillusionment with the aging and often corrupt leadership of the Palestinian Authority and the indignities and irritations of the Israeli military presence lead to a third Intifada.  This youth-led uprising could feature widespread, chaotic violence against Israeli soldiers, Palestinian police forces, and Israeli settlers. 

2.  The ideologically and religiously motivated settler movement expands even more rapidly in the West Bank, accompanied with increased violacea against Palestinians and more incidents of violent resistance to Israeli civil and military authorities.  Much of the West Bank would become effectively ungovernable.  The hope of a land for peace deal, in which Israel would dismantle enough settlements to permit a viable Palestinian state in exchange for guaranteed peace and security, would be dead.

The Next Chapter?

There is an official pause in the talks.  Unlike Coca Cola, this is not a pause that refreshes.  The Obama administration has tried to broker talks twice and failed both times.  There will not be a third effort.  The next elections in Israel will be some time in 2017.  Mahmoud Abbas, Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, has said often that he feels old (at 79) and tired and it is time for a new generation of leadership.  It will take months, if not years, to work out a new leadership structure and close the schism between the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and Hamas in Gaza. 

If everyone is fortunate, there will be time to resolve the political dynamics before either nightmare comes to pass.  But it will not be soon and in the meantime everyone’s situation -- Israeli, Palestinian and American -- will get worse.

Syria Has Become Regional Battleground

The year 2014 may see some profound changes in the Middle East.  There are three major dynamics in play that have the potential to reshape the political landscape for decades to come:
the transformed war in Syria, a changed relationship between Iran and the West, and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. 

This entry will focus on the war in Syria, subsequent entries will look at the thaw in Iranian relations with the U.S. and Europe, and the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

As the new year dawns, the most significant development in the ongoing battles in Syria is that the conflict is no longer a simple struggle by anti-regime forces to oust Bashir Assad and his government but has become a regional war in which most of the key players are from outside Syria.

The Arab Spring, the popular movement for the end of corrupt, authoritarian regimes that began in Tunisia and spread quickly to Egypt and other countries, arrived in Syria in March, 2011.  In keeping with Tolstoy’s observation that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, the movement against the regime of Bashir Assad took on a unique dynamic.

All Politics is Local

The Syrian regime is rooted in the Alawite community.  The most familiar division within Islam is between Sunni and Shi’a communities.  But there are distinctions within those two overarching groups, typically far more deeply rooted in history and communal identities than the finer points of theology or proper religious observances.  The Alawites emerged as a distinctive group within the larger Shi’a community in the 9th Century in the coastal region around Latakia.  Many Sunni imams and scholars tend to regard all Shi’a as at best heterodox believers and at worst heretics and infidels. Other Shi’a communities in the region tended to regard the Alawites with suspicion because the community has a set of unique doctrines and mystical beliefs that is known only to the leaders of the community.  The Alawites often had strained relations with their neighbors and suffered repression and persecution from time to time over the centuries.  They came to dominate the military and civil administration under French colonial rule and when several years of instability ended with Hafez al-Assad’s military coup in Damascus, they came to dominate the government of Syria. 

In both Tunisia and Egypt the protest movements were aimed at a particular family or ruling clique and very few people outside the regime’s inner circle felt that they were potential targets. But in Syria, because the regime was so strongly rooted in and identified with the Alawite community, many people outside the government and outside Damascus defined the protests as largely Sunni Muslims attacking not only Alawites but Shi’a Syrians in general.  When Assad’s government reacted with brutal force against peaceful demonstrators in Damascus and other cities, an armed insurrection broke out, centered in parts of Syria with largely Sunni population.  Instead of an isolated and unpopular regime whose own security forces were willing to sacrifice the politicians to protect their own status and position, the Assad regime became the lesser of two evils for a large portion of Syria’s citizens. 

But Some Politics are More Local Than Others

The more Syrians defined their struggle in communal and sectarian terms, the more powerful forces outside the country began to dominate.  The most important external players include Saudi Arabia, Iran, Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.  Less important players include the U.S., Russia, and Europeans.

Saudi Arabia and Iran been involved in an historic battle over the future of Islam since the 1979 Iranian revolution.  Iran sees itself as the embodiment of a Shi’a revolution that will counter the historic oppression of Shi’a by Sunni dominated regimes.  Saudi Arabia sees itself, the Guardian of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, as the protector of true Islam against heretics, apostates and infidels.  Thus Iran has provided moral, monetary and material support to Shi’a based movements in Iraq, Lebanon, the Gulf States, the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia, and Palestine.  Saudi Arabia has countered by training thousands of imams in a particularly conservative and fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam who serve not unlike missionaries throughout the world.  The Saudis were the primary financiers and advocates for the guerrillas who waged war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.  Many of the fighters in Afghanistan were young men from Arab or other Muslim countries who returned home battle hardened and ready to continue the fight to protect the Saudi version of Islam. 

          Irony: Al-Qaeda was founded by veterans of the Afghan war from Saudi Arabia
          whose initial target was the Saudi royal family whom they saw as having strayed
          from the Saudi version of Islam.

So when the conflict erupted in Syria, Iran was more than willing to expand its continuing cooperation with the regime.  And Saudi Arabia, along with other some of the Gulf States, especially Qatar, was ready to support the anti-Assad movement with money, weapons and armed fighters. 

The conflict in Syria was never a simple clash between government forces and an organized resistance.  The Syrian opposition was never unified around a particular set of leaders or organizations.  Opposition groups within the country and emigre opposition groups in Paris or London had little contact with each other and no cooperative relationships.  The opposition within the country, particularly the armed elements were, and are, very localized, crystalizing around local community leaders or the officers of a miliary unit that defected from the Syrian Armed Forces.  While The Free Syrian Army emerged as a potential unifying force among rebellious troops and local militias and a bridge between internal and external regime opponents, it did not develop into anything more than a loose coalition among the various armed groups.  As money, munitions and manpower flowed into Syria from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, the number of small fighting groups multiplied.  Many of the new groups had a transnational outlook, motived less by opposition to the Assad regime than by a sense that Syria was becoming the new front in the struggle of righteous (Sunni) Muslims against the heretics, apostates and unbelievers. 

What began as a Syrian narrative of a repressive and corrupt regime brutally resisting public demands for change quickly became a chapter in a decades long regional saga.

The Iran-Syria-Lebanon Connection

Late in the 19th Century France and other European powers pressured the Ottoman Empire to create a protective zone for Maronite Christians and other religious minorities around Mount Lebanon, which had until then been politically and administratively part of Syria.  The separation was formalized after World War I when France created Lebanon as a mandated area under the League of Nations distinct from its colonial rule of Syria.  But from the perspective of Damascus Lebanon was, and always would be, part of Greater Syria.  When Syria gained independence from France in 1946 Lebanon was already an independent state and part of the United Nations.  As much as Syrians might wish it, the combination of domestic political turmoil in Syria and explicit security guarantees to Lebanon from France made a simple reabsorption of Lebanon impossible.  But Syria remained a major player in the convoluted Lebanese mosaic of communal and sectarian politics.  Syria tended to promote the interests of the Shi’a Lebanese community against the dominant Christian and Sunni communities and to see Lebanon as a potential second front against Israel. 

In the aftermath of the 1980 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, a resistance movement calling itself Hezbollah emerged in the Shi’a heartland of southern Lebanon.  Inspired and supported by the newly established Islamic Republic in Iran, Hezbollah was also supported by Syria since it was both dedicated to fighting the Israeli occupation and Shi’a.  Over time Syria, Iran and Hezbollah developed a close relationship, with Iran supplying much of the funding and Syria delivering weapons and technical support. 

Syria and Iran continued to develop close ties, beyond the shared support of Hezbollah.  The contradiction between Iran’s vision of an Islamic state and Syria’s vision of a secular, nationalist  country brought into modernity by socialism mattered far less than their mutual antipathy to Iraq, Israel, and to the West.  The end of the Cold War and the apparent dominant role of the United States in the Middle East helped cement the bond.

It was not surprising, then, that when insurgents threatened the regime in Damascus, Iran lent monetary and material support.  And when the ranks of opposition were swelled by foreign fighters espousing the conservative Sunni view that Shi’a Muslims were not real Muslims, Hezbollah sent thousands of its well trained and armed members to support the Assad regime. 

The Latest Layer of Strife

The American invasion of Iraq created a regime dominated by Shi’a factions and politicians.  Many of the key players, from the prime minister on down, seem to have adopted the attitude that Iraqi Sunnis oppressed the Shi’a community for decades; now it is their turn to get even.  Despite the urging of the U.S., the people in power in Iraq since 2004 have systematically excluded Sunni from good jobs with the state (by far and away the largest source of jobs in Iraq), marginalized them in the military and police forces, and shifted government spending away from Sunni provinces.  The Sunni local leaders who spearheaded the “Awakening Movement” in 2005-6 that shifted the focus of some 100,000 armed militiamen from fighting the American occupation to fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq and bolstering the new regime in Baghdad were promised larger share of the national budget and jobs for their young men, including posts in the Iraqi Army.  Not all of those promises were kept and the situation got worse after the last American soldiers withdrew in 2011. Insurgents began fighting again in the Sunni provinces and Al Qaeda in Iraq renewed its campaign of suicide bombings against Shi’a civilians and the Iraqi security forces.   The border between western Iraq, where Al Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni groups are active and eastern Syria where al Qaeda linked and other jihadist groups are fighting Damascus runs through hundreds of miles of barren and lonely desert.  As the fighting has expanded in both Iraq and Syria, forces from Iraq have linked up with kindred sprits in Syria and declared the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and have succeeded in taking control of some towns, as well as defeating militias associated with the Free Syrian Army and seizing supplies and equipment provided by the United States.

Young men recruited from across the Arab world and areas like Chechnya or Bosnia where Muslims have been fighting outside forces, hardened by combat in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, and inspired by a vision of pure and simple world where strict traditional social norms are scrupulously followed make wonderful soldiers but terrible rulers.  When the Al-Qaeda influenced fighters have captured a town or small city, they have instituted a draconian regime that outlaws all Western influences and anything that strikes their puritanical views as immoral, including television, dancing and singing. 

But Syrians, particularly the half of the population that is 24 years old or younger, are not traditional peasants but largely literate, with at least an 8th grade education and wide exposure to the broader world via television, movies, and social media.  The only way a group composed of people seen as unsophisticated outsiders and foreigners can impose a harsh new social order is through violence and intimidation.  Areas captured by the jihadists have been marked by rebellions and the emergence of groups dedicated to ousting them.  Some of the major assaults in ISIS forces are being led by al Nusra, a larger, better equipped group that claims to be the official Al Qaeda group in Syria.  One issue in the struggle has been the ISIS insistence that the immediate goal is to establish an Islamic state, not to fight Assad’s forces.  The other groups want to eliminate the Assad regime first, then create a new political and social order.

The Assad regime has benefitted from these internecine battles in two major ways.  The regime has claimed all along the opposition is nothing but terrorists and thugs, not honest Syrians seeking political change.  And the disarray among the opposition military forces has permitted the Syrian military to regain significant amounts of territory.  The regime’s grip on power is firmer today than it was a year ago.

January 22 .... no big deal

The United States and Russia, under UN auspices, are sponsoring talks to resolve the crisis in Syria starting on January 22.  The Assad government has said it will attend; some opposition groups have refused to participate.  The Free Syrian Army probably will show up. 

I don’t think the talks will bear any fruit.  As much as the US, Russia, and Europe want an end to the terrible suffering of ordinary Syrians, as much as everyone prefers stability to chaos, the states we think of as world powers are helpless to change the facts on the ground.  Negotiations are most likely to work when there are two sides to a dispute and both sides think they can improve their position by reaching an agreement.  Having powerful external actors who can nudge both sides toward compromise helps.

But there aren’t two sides in Syria, there are multiple armed groups with only partially overlapping agendas.  Some groups think they would be better off with a cease fire; others feel events are moving in their favor.  Russia and Iran both have some influence in Damascus with cooperation going back to the 1970s and continuing weapons sales but (even if they wanted to) Russia could hardly persuade the Syrian government to dismantle itself.  The US and European states like France and Britain have some influence with some opposition groups, notably the Free Syrian Army, but no contact, let alone leverage with the better equipped and more effective fighting forces supported by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others. 

In the short run it is hard to see any positive development in Syria, though I certainly hope that when somebody reads that in a month or two they will be able to laugh at how far off that prediction was.  The future of the Assad regime as a core issue has been overshadowed by what outside forces have defined as a Sunni-Shi’a conflict and struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for influence in the Middle East. 

And all that means that the humanitarian catastrophe that is Syria today will only get worse.  Tens of thousands more will die; hundreds of thousands will become refugees. 

Things I Think I Think About Syria

I do not know what should be done in Syria.  I can make the argument for supporting the administration’s plan for a targeted response that degrades some aspects of Assad’s military.  And I can make the argument for avoiding a unilateral miliary response in favor of a multilateral negotiated settlement.

Some things I think are part of the mix.

The quality of intelligence

This is NOT Iraq.  There is no ideologically driven clique in the White House and Defense Department committed to the conquest of Iraq as part of a broader scheme to remake the Middle East.  There is no cherry picking of ambiguous information.  I think the evidence of the use of sarin gas is compelling.  I think when the UN inspection team completes its report, they will echo that conclusion.  I also think the UN inspectors will not go beyond their mandate to determine if chemical weapons were used to offer an opinion on who used them.

The Long Shadow of Rwanda and Darfur

Arguments that seek a parallel between Syria and Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Somalia are misleading.  In each instance the differences are striking, the similarities minimal.  I don’t think Obama’s foreign policy and national security advisors are affected by them.  But I do think there are two tragedies of the past 20 years that do affect decision making on Syria: Rwanda and Darfur.  

In 1994 one side in a civil conflict in Rwanda orchestrated a genocidal assault on the Tutsi ethnic minority that killed as many as a million people in about three months.  The Clinton administration, and the rest of the international community, did nothing to stop the killing which ended only when rebel forces took control of the country.  The conventional wisdom among scholars and foreign policy practitioners is that the failure to respond to the worst genocide since the Holocaust is a shameful chapter in U.S. history.  Many people currently in senior positions in the State Department or National Security Council served in the Clinton administration and were involved in the policy of willfully ignoring the slaughter.

From 2003 to 2010 the government of Sudan waged war on the civilian population of its rebellious Darfur province killing tens of thousands of people and forcing over a million into refugee camps.  With the UN Security Council hamstrung by Russia and China’s unwavering opposition to any intervention, and the higher priority given to negotiating an end to the larger civil conflict between the North and South Sudan, the U.S. and the rest of the international community did not take effective action to stop the killing.

The most prominent veteran of the Rwanda decisions is Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Advisor.  She was a member of the National Security Council during the Rwanda episode and has been strongly critical of the failure to act.   "I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required." [Carney, Timothy (2011-03-28) Obama aides find moral clarity in Libya's foggy war, Washington Examiner]   The otehr top advisor strongly affected by Rwanda and Darfur is Samantha Power, United States Ambassador to the United Nations.  She is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” which traces the sad history of genocides in the 20th century.  Not surprisingly she has been very outspoken on the need to respond to humanitarian crises.

The Parallel that Dares Not Speak Its Name

While the failure of the international community (in significant part a failure of the United States to provide leadership) in Rwanda and Darfur plays a role, I believe, in key members of the Obama administration’s decisions, I do not think either case is an accurate or useful example in thinking about Syria. 

Libya in 2011 does provide a good parallel: civil war, potential assault on innocent civilians, successful use of air power to prevent mass slaughter.  But 1) the Libyan intervention was authorized under a UN Security Council resolution with participation from a broad array of countries; 2) the Libyan intervention was not the short, narrowly targeted attack projected for Syria; 3) the pious fiction that the intervention was strictly humanitarian and not meant to affect the balance of power in the civil war was so obviously untenable that no one took it seriously; 4) Benghazi happened.  I do not think the Libyan case helps the Obama administration argue for use of force against Syria but neither do I think it is a useful argument against the use of force.  After all, it can be plausibly argued that the intervention did prevent a terrible assault on civilians and did play a role in ending the fighting. 

What do you do when deterrence fails?

It appears now that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale several times in the past.  It seems likely that Obama’s “red line” statement was not a casual comment or unconsidered remark, as some critics have claimed.  It seems more likely that it was a calculated deterrent threat.  The threat failed ... now what? 

When you try to get someone to do something you want by threatening them – my way or else, or by promising them – try it, you’ll like it; there is always a question of what happens next.  If you promise good things and someone goes along with you, there is a temptation to stiff them on the reward ... you’ve gotten what you want, why pay off?  If you make a threat and it doesn’t work, then what’s the point of punishing them ... it’s too little, too late. 

In both cases, the answer is credibility.  Unless you come through on most of your promises and carry out most of your threats, you will not be believed when you  interact in the future.  The word “most” is an important modifier.  Credibility does not demand that you keep each and every promise or carry out each and every threat.  You don’t have to be a fanatic about it if it really does hurt you more than your target. 

The question proponents of military action raise and opponents ignore, is “What do interested observers like Iran and North Korea make of U.S. hesitancy about carrying out a threat?”  I don’t know and I don’t believe anyone can confidently assert it is either “The U.S. is a paper tiger” or “The U.S. prudently picks its battles.”

Don’t Get Involved in the Syrian Civil War

That train left the station three years ago.  We are involved and striking or refusing to strike will into change that.  It is not just that Congress has already authorized expanding our aid to the anti-regime forces to include lethal weapons.  And it is not just that our NATO ally Turkey is deeply involved with housing refugees and providing some measure of security along its border with Syria, or that countries friendly to us like Saudi Arabia have been major sources of weapons and supplies for the anti-regime forces. 

For the past two years Syria has been morphing from a civil war into a regional war.  Conservative Arab regimes and al Qaeda fighters (a classic odd couple) have become major participants on the anti-regime side.  Iran has become the major supplier of military goods to the regime and thousands of Hezbollah members have crossed from Lebanon to bolster the Syrian armed forces.  Internal Syrian politics and factions are increasingly outweighed by external forces.

Even if a military strike is rejected, it does not mean the United States will not be deeply involved in the future of Syria.  I think the future of Syria will be decisively influenced by the success or failure of the United States and Russia to broker a negotiated settlement of the conflict.  I am not sure that a military strike or decision to avoid a strike will make much difference in the dynamics of the U.S.-Russia relationship or the constellation of interests that logically should drive both countries to collaborate on an outcome with no clear winners or losers.

Going it Alone

If credibility is the strongest argument proponents of a military strike have, then the lack of international support is the strongest argument opponents have. 

In the past couple of decades one of the hottest topics in international relations theory has been norm formation.  The idea that there are rules governing relations among political entities even when there is no overarching authority is as old as interactions between separate communities.  Enforcement has always relied on a combination of reciprocity and the threat of retaliation.  In the last 100 years the evolution of international norms has dramatically accelerated, including rules surrounding the use of force. 

Response to the use of sarin gas in Syria invokes two central norms, both codified in international law.

I need to vent a little.  Whenever I’ve taught a course on International Law I have had to deal with the cynical “realists” who snorted “All’s fair in love and war” or sneered “No courts, no cops, no law!” on their way to equating international law with Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny ... they give you warm fuzzies but they don’t exist. 

For most of us most of the time, compliance with formal laws is NOT based on fear of being caught.  The only reason you didn’t knock over a couple of banks today or hot wire a car is that you were afraid of the cops?  Really?

Compliance with formal laws is the same a compliance with informal norms: we do it out of reciprocity -- we observe and expect everyone else to do it; or social sanctions -- others will think badly of us or shun us. 

In desperation our cranky “realist” friend might point out that states do not always comply with international law, that there are enormous violations.  Yes ... and folks rob and murder and cheat on their taxes and rip the tags off their mattress.  Does that prove that the relevant laws are but mere suggestions?

The first norm, codified in a 1925 Geneva Convention, prohibits the use of poison gas in warfare.  Clearly the Assad regime is in violation of that and related norms that prohibit manufacturing and possessing poison gas, as well as using it. 

But norms restricting the use of force in international affairs were explicitly written into the United Nations Charter.  In simple terms, the Charter says military force can be used only in immediate self defense, with the approval of the UN Security Council or approval by a regional body such as the OAS, African Union or Arab League. 

The United States is, I think, in the awkward position of justifying supporting one norm by violating another.  One would have to argue that acting to maintain the norm against poison gas is a higher legal or moral responsibility than complying with the norms on the use of force.

A Way Out?

As I am writing this the apparent Russian proposal for Syria to hand over its chemical weapons to international control has just been announced.  It seems to me this could be a momentous development.

In the worst case scenario this is a stalling tactic, replacing the high drama of a potential U.S. strike with weeks or even months of tedious, mind numbing preparations for  inspections and then arguments and ambiguity about whether everything has been declared and turned over.  

But:

it means Russia implicitly admits Assad used gas;
it makes the Russians partially responsible for preventing future uses of gas;
it makes it far less likely the regime will use gas again;
it offers an opening for the U.S. and Russia to resume collaborative diplomatic efforts;
it gives the Obama administration a way of avoiding a crushing defeat when a bare majority (at best) in the Senate OK’s a strike and a large majority in the House rejects it;
it lets the administration claim victory for their strategy by arguing that it was only the threat of a military strike that provoked the proposal.

The Latest Middle East Peace Talks

The latest attempt to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been launched with remarkably little fanfare. 

Chief negotiators for the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority met in Washington last Monday and Tuesday (July 29 and 30) and agreed to begin formal talks about the substantive issues within two weeks.  They set a nine month time limit and will alternate between Ramallah and Jerusalem as sites of the talks. 

The U.S. government, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, has been actively negotiating with the Israelis and Palestinians for the past several months to set the stage for renewed talks. 

Compared to the 2010 effort, the U.S. role in creating the conditions for talks to begin has been quite different this time around,.  And the biggest difference has been lack of public involvement by President Obama.  In 2010 the President was a prominent player in the process, appointing George Mitchell as his special envoy, calling on both sides to come to the table and getting into a very public spat with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli government over a potential freeze on settlement activities in the West Bank.  The talks did not ever get started.

This time there was no public announcement of a new push in the Middle East, no high level meetings in Washington with the Israeli and Palestinian leadership, and no visible attempt to get both sides to agree to try to agree on the preliminaries.  Instead there have been a series of events that have been seemingly unrelated to each other and unrelated to potential talks.  For example, the Arab League revised their official peace plan to include the possibility of adjustments to the 1967 borders of Israel ... which gives the Palestinian Authority a tacit blessing to agree to some territorial adjustments.  The Palestinian Authority shifted its rhetorical position and stopped mentioning a freeze on settlements as a precondition to negotiations.  Israel stopped mentioning the necessity of recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

The first public indication that serious steps were being taken was the Israeli decision to release 104 Palestinians who had been convicted of a variety of terrorist offenses, many of whom had been incarcerated in Israel for 20 years or more.  That decision came amidst a flood of rumors about impending talks and was seen as a major good will gesture by the Israelis.  No one has agreed to any other concessions, but somehow people seem to have gotten the idea that Israel will ease up on settlement construction and the Palestinians will drop efforts to get enhanced United Nations recognition this Fall.  (For a quick refresher on what enhanced UN recognition might mean as well as a review of the political situation in the Middle East two years ago, check out an earlier blog entry Palestinians at the UN ... does it matter?

The first step in any negotiation is agreeing to talk about talks and the first success was getting the sides to agree to talk about the issues.  While this is a major step forward, no one needs Yogi Berra’s reminder that it ain’t over until it’s over.  Polls indicate that a majority of Israelis and a larger majority of Palestinians expect the talks to come to nothing.  Even Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister has said the talks will be useless.  Many pessimists are already deciding whether to say “I told you so” with a regretful or gloating tone. 

One might even ask, what’s the point?  Why go through all the hassle and expense of having negotiations if they are guaranteed to fail?  The next step after talks fail is always the blame game, with each participant assuring the world that they were the very essence of reason and sweet charity and it was the other side that was completely unreasonable and intransigent.  Why waste nine months in meaningless charades?

A contrarian point of view (and being optimistic about peace in the Middle East is about as contrarian as you can get) would argue that if you compare the internal political dynamics of both Israel and the Palestinians with the situation three years ago there are some notable differences that make successful talks more likely.

ISRAEL

Binyamin Netanyahu won reelection as Prime Minister last January but the coalition of parties included in his government lost a total of 11 seats in the Israeli parliament.  Netanyahu’s Likud party did not have the necessary Knesset majority so he put together a new coalition government, one that included a centrist and even a small liberal party and excluded the most hard line right wing parties that had played a large role in his old coalition.  The center of gravity in the Israeli government has shifted toward the center of the political spectrum and is far more supportive of the possibility that hard choices and real pain could lead to progress toward peace.  (The decision to release the Palestinian prisoners, many of whom have been convected of murdering Israeli citizens in terror attacks, is immensely unpopular in Israel and would have been unthinkable in the past.)

One example of the difference the change in the composition of the ruling coalition has made is that Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Justice Minister and a well known moderate politician is the chief negotiator in the talks.   A second example of the impact of the change in is the fact that it is the deputy foreign minister who is dismissing the talks; in 2010 it was the then Foreign Minister, leader of one of the most hard line right wing parties in the cabinet, who publicly scoffed at negotiations. 

A second significant difference between 2013 and 2010 is in the West Bank and Gaza.  Two things have made the occupation of much of the West Bank more difficult for Israel.  One is the growing international movement against Israeli settlers, including organized boycotts of Israeli products produced in the West Bank.  The other is the increased number of so-called “price tag” actions by Israeli settlers against Palestinian villagers.  These have ranged from desecration of mosques to destruction of olive orchards and open confrontations between Israeli soldiers and ideologically motivated settlers.  The situation in Gaza, which we’ll discuss below,  has changed dramatically in the past two years, in ways that make it easier for Israel to consider negotiations.

THE PALESTINIANS

There has been a sea change in the relationship between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.  Two years ago, in the aftermath of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip, (for a reminder of what that was all about, see On The Recent Violence in the Middle East ) Hamas was riding high and the Palestinian Authority looked near collapse.  The emergence of a Muslim Brotherhood dominated government in Egypt seemed to boost Hamas stock even further.  But the civil war in Syria dramatically weakened the Assam regime’s ability to act as a Hamas ally, the coup* in Egypt that removed President Morsi and the Brotherhood from power, and growing discontent with Hamas’ failure to provide a minimal standard of living and jobs in the Gaza Strip, have all seriously undermined Hamas support.  (Even Hamas’ glorious image as the valiant leaders of armed resistance against Israel has been tarnished since it has cracked down on anyone who has been tempted to launch rockets over the border in Israel.  “Real” resistance fighters see Hamas as having struck an implicit bargain with Israel to give up armed attacks for economic benefits.)  Significant economic growth in the West Bank and a more efficient and less corrupt administration, have made the Palestinian Authority more popular and stronger in the West Bank and make it look better in contrast to Hamas’ performance in the Gaza Strip.

 All of this gives the Palestinian Authority more political wiggle room and a better chance of selling an agreement to the citizens of the West Bank and the larger Arab world.


*I am well aware that no one in the U.S. government uses this word because it would mean the administration would be legally obliged to cut off all funding for Egypt, which would leave no leverage over the Egyptian miliary.  Sometimes something can look like a duck, walk like a duck, and quack like a duck, but not necessarily be a duck.

And the ROLE OF THE UNITED STATES is different.  President Obama was the highly visible driving force and face of the 2010 initiative.  He tried to push the Israelis into meeting the Palestinian demand for a moratorium on West Bank settlement activity and got a very public slap in the face when Israel announced a major increase in settlement activity while Vice President Biden was visiting Tel Aviv.  Obama and Netanyahu have had a frosty personal relationship from the beginning and Netanyahu’s open preference for Mitt Romney in the 2012 election has been a further complication. 

This time Obama is very much in the background.  Secretary of State John Kerry is getting the credit for the serious politicking that had gotten the talks started and former Ambassador Indyk will probably be the American official most closely involved with the talks as they develop.  There has been far less media coverage and White House positioning which reduces the temptation of either side to play to public opinion here or in the Middle East.  All other things being equal, it is easier to explore possibilities and  make concessions outside the glare of the limelight.

The logic of the situation and the current political dynamics justify a modest optimism.  But the shadow of past failure and the cautionary tale of the frog and the scorpion should give even the most robust optimist pause.

THE FROG AND THE SCORPION

A scorpion was crawling across the Sinai desert under a brutal noonday sun when he came to the Suez Canal.  He spotted a frog sunning itself on the bank.  Since he wanted to cross the canal, and couldn’t swim, he asked the frog to give him a ride on his back.  The frog initially refused, on the quite prudent grounds that the scorpion would sting him.  The scorpion argued persuasively that it would be unreasonable for him to sting the frog in the middle of the canal because they would both die.  So he got on the frog’s back and they started across.  In the middle of the canal the scorpion felt the urge to sting and it grew and grew until he could no longer resist and he sank his deadly venom deep into the frog who began to sink beneath the water.  “Why, why did you do it?” cried the frog with his dying breath.  And with his last gasps, the drowning scorpion replied, “This is the Middle East.”

A Critical Choice on Syria

The moment when President Obama has to make an unpalatable decision on escalating involvement in Syria  is inching closer.  The pressure to intervene more actively mounts daily.

Last year the President defined the use of chemical weapons by the regime as a red line, whose crossing would provoke a strong American response.  There is mounting evidence that sarin gas has been used at least once on a small scale in Syria.  The President insists that the evidence is not conclusive; his critics, both here and abroad, accuse him of dithering. 

There have been rumors and accusations of the use of chemical weapons in Syria at several points in the past year.  Both the opposition and the Assad regime have accused the other of using poison gas. The allegations have increased in the past few weeks and focused on events in a village last March.

Almost all the primary sources of information on what is happening in Syria are second hand and filtered through sources with inherent unreliability.  For example, the primary “go to” source of information on events inside Syria for media in the U.S. and Europe is the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a small London based group of anti-Assad activists that claims to have some 200 informants inside the country and tracks civilian casualties (more precisely, people killed and wounded by government forces; government soldiers or supporters killed by opposition forces are not always included.)  It is highly unlikely that the CIA, British MI6, or Israeli Mossad have a network of spies on the ground; it is highly likely that they are getting at least some of their raw data from SOHR or other anti-Assad exiles.  The other major source of information is interviews with refugees who have fled Syria for camps in Turkey or Jordan.  (It was those interviews that led to the assertion by a UN human rights investigator that there was evidence opposition forces had used gas.)  The UN mission authorized some months ago is prepared to go to Syria, if and when the government guarantees free and unfettered access.  All the reports and claims of gas use agree that the incidents, if they happened, were sporadic and small scale.  That makes it even more difficult to verify or refute the claims.

I think it is fair to say that the weight you give to the uncertainties in determining what happened is inversely related to how eager you are to have the U.S. get more heavily involved. 

Some observers, including members of the U.S. senate like John McCain, have long advocated more robust support for the Syrian opposition.  The charges that the regime used sarin gas in March are further evidence of the brutality and inhumanity of a desperate dictator whose forces have already killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians. There is a strong belief that the United States could and should provide direct military support to hasten the end of the Assad era and influence the regime that will emerge after victory.  Failure to act undermines our ability to influence events in the Middle East.  After the President’s statement that use of gas would be a red line the regime could not cross without grave consequences, failure to act now undermines the credibility of any U.S. pledge.  

For those who are hesitant to see the United States move beyond the current policy of supplying non-lethal supplies and advice to the opposition, there is skepticism that military assistance can be narrowly targeted to the “good guys” among the opposition and/or doubts that we really can influence the outcome, either in terms of hastening the end of Assad or making sure his replacement is friendly to Western interests. Iraq and Afghanistan are stark warnings to look long and hard before you leap.  Another line of argument against increased involvement focuses on the broader international context and warns about adding unnecessary complications to our already difficult relations with Russia and China or seeming to validate the Iranian fears that we’re out to get them.

The problem for President Obama and others who are reluctant to expand U.S. involvement is that there is a simple and compelling story about chemical weapons in Syria.  The President said using chemical weapons would provoke a strong response from the U.S.  The British, French and Israeli intelligence services all say the regime used gas and no one in the U.S. intelligence community says we are sure they didn’t.  The counter story stressing the carefully hedged qualifiers and definite maybes is lame and makes the President look both weak and indifferent to the massive suffering of millions of Syrians over the past two years.

What is the menu of choices facing the United States?

The focus here is not fine tuned tactics but overall strategy.  A minimalist strategy would seek to redress the military balance between factions in the anti-regime coalition.  A maximalist strategy would try to position the United States to control, or at least strongly influence, the post-Assad regime.  We have been supplying non-lethal equipment to some elements of the Free Syrian Army (a loose coalition of disparate armed groups who, sometimes with difficulty, cooperate in the fight against the regime.)  Supplying more non-lethal materiel is not really an option; we’ve gone about as far as we can go down that path.  All the options available for increasing U.S. involvement include some level of actual weapons.  No one is suggesting that uniformed American soldiers be deployed anywhere near Syria. 

Broad options include:

Even the balance between factions.

  For most of the past two years a growing volume of weapons has been shipped into Syria from Qatar and Saudi Arabia.  There are a number of very wealthy people in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf who finance a wide range of Sunni Islamists throughout the world, from conservative Whahabbi imams for mosques throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe to armed fighters.  The arms suppliers and smuggling routes that supported the Sunni insurgency in Iraq ran from the Gulf through Syria; shifting the delivery point from Iraq’s Anbar province to groups within Syria was simple.  The Syrian groups fighting Assad who are not inspired by political Islam, home grown or linked to expatiates in Britain, France or the United States have receiver far less support.  The United States and European countries have supplied non-lethal aid, such things as medical supplies or communications equipment and some covert advice on strategy and tactics. 

So the first, minimal, option would be to try to supply enough weaponry to insure that the elements who would resist the imposition of a narrow and repressive regime have the firepower to counter those who would.

Change the balance between the regime and its opponents. 

The Syrian military, despite significant loss of bases, defections of officers and men, and using up large amounts of weapons and ammunition, remains a formidable fighting force.  The regime is able to muster large numbers of tanks, artillery, short and medium range missiles, and other heavy weapons.  It is unchallenged in the skies, freely operating helicopter gunships and jet fighter bombers.  Rebel advances have been fiercely contested and rebel gains have come at a heavy cost in human life, both military and civilian.  While the balance has shifted from clear regime superiority to something closer to a stalemate, Assad and his supporters seem able to hold on to Damascus for a very long time, especially since they have been resupplied by Russia several times in the past two years.

Ensure the rapid victory of the opposition.

 One idea that is being floated in Washington is to neutralize the Syrian air force by declaring a no-fly zone over rebel held areas.   While Israel has demonstrated that you can fly over Lebanon and launch cruise missiles and smart bombs at targets in Syria, enforcing a no-fly zone means flying regular patrols over Syrian territory and that would necessarily mean a major bombing campaign to take out the Syrian air defense system.  An additional step might well be the use of CIA agents and military Special Operations personnel to provide training and close support to the opposition forces on the ground. 

And the maximal strategy would be to insure enough American support, including weapons, a no-fly zone, advisers and other assistance to guarantee the United States a major role in the creation of the post-Assad regime in Syria.

Each of these broad options comes with major questions and risks.

For the minimal strategy of supporting “good” elements with enough weapons to counter the “bad”ones:

How “good” do the good guys have to be?  Is being independent of influences from Islamist sources in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf enough?  Do we have to look for (probably nonexistent) nascent democrats, or altruistic leaders who seek neither power nor wealth for themselves?  How much corruption and brutality is tolerable?  Do you draw the line all the way down at “He may be a nasty rat bastard but he’s our nasty rat bastard?” Or do you insist on a moderately high standard at the risk of not finding enough people eligible to receive weapons?

How do you insure that the weapons you supply to the “good guys” don’t end up in the hands of the people you’re trying to counter, either in the short term or the long run?

For the more robust strategy of supplying weapons and other support to defeat the Syrian military and bring a quick end to the Assad regime:

If this option means a no-fly zone, how do you insure that the campaign to neutralize
Syrian air defenses doesn’t mean weeks of intense air warfare with high risk of killing civilians on the ground and U.S. casualties in the air?

At what point does U.S. involvement become significant enough to trigger reactions by other countries?  Iran is an active supporter of the Assad regime ... at what point does Iran perceive U.S. involvement in Syria as a threat to its interests?  Russia has long standing military, commercial and political ties with Syria.  At what point does the Putin government in Moscow perceive U.S. involvement as destroying a Russian ally? 

How do you insure that the “victory” doesn’t mean the triumph of radical Islamists?

Escalating to a maximalist strategy of not only toppling the Assad regime but also playing a major role in shaping the next regime through supplying even more weapons to the opposition and major financial and political support to our favored elements in the coalition, raises the same questions as the other two options, plus:

Doesn’t this amount to a major, very long term commitment to financial and political supporter to a new regime with a significant probability that those parts of the opposition that we do not like or support will change their definition of “the enemy” from the Assad regime to what they label an American puppet regime?  Do we really want to become responsible for Syria?

At no point in this discussion is “don’t get involved” listed as an option.  It is not just that the United States has been involved in Syria since the violent conflict began, trying to find a peaceful solution and avoid tens of thousands of deaths.  We have a important interests in the Middle East,   from tangible ones like oil to intangible ones like stability and development.  In an interconnected world, what happens in Syria directly or indirectly affects all its neighbors and through them, most of the rest of the world.  The cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the food on our tables are all inextricably linked to the global economy and society.  Given the size of our economy, the array of diplomatic and military resources we have available, and the values America embodies when we are at our best, what we do inevitably matters.  Deciding to avoid involvement in a situation affects the outcome as much as deciding to become involved. 

Population Growth, Climate Change and Small Animals

I was at a lecture on climate change by a distinguished atmospheric scientist the other night.  Her talk focused on the wealth of data supporting a strong relationship between growing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere and increased average temperatures around the globe.  She talked about some possible approaches to limiting CO2 emissions, arguing against a “silver bullet” -- a single strategy that would solve everything, but suggesting there were “silver shotgun pellets” of multiple behavioral and technological changes each of which could make a difference.

At the end of the question and answer period, a gentleman commented that he could remember 50 years ago when there was much talk about a population explosion and ensuing global famines and other catastrophes.  The implication seemed to be that we got all hot and bothered back then but the worst didn’t happen so maybe climate change isn’t that serious an issue. 

The comment reminded me that I wrote my dissertation on the politics of population policies focusing on the big battles over family planning at the UN that culminated just about 50 years ago.  And I began to see some interesting parallels between the dynamics of dealing with population growth and the dynamics of facing up to climate change.

Only barely relevant but interesting, I hope, side note.  The UN debates were couched in careful euphemisms.  The question was always “family planning” modified by reference to cultural values, as if “birth control” or “contraception” were just too shocking.  With the one exception noted below, everyone carefully avoided anything that even the most prudish moralist could regard as “unfit for pious ears.”

Something’s Happening Here ...

Like the concern about climate change, the attention to population dynamics began in an academic discipline and was initially discussed at international meeting of professional demographers.  But as data accumulated from around the world a remarkable pattern began to emerge and the discussions in various international conferences began to move from “here is what the data shows” to “HEY! SOMETHING REALLY IMPORTANT IS HAPPENING AND WE BETTER DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!"  In the case of population it was the Demographic Bureau of the Economic and Social Council that evolved into the UN Population Commission and pushed the issue into the General Assembly.  In the case of the climate it was a series of meeting of atmospheric scientists who pushed the item onto the agenda of the 1992 Rio conference on the environment and created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

Like climate change, population growth had its skeptics.  Unlike climate change, where the skepticism is about whether it is really happening and/or the role of humans, the population skeptics argued that it wasn’t really a problem.  (It was kind of hard to argue against the data on growing population and impossible to argue that human behavior wasn’t a major factor.)

What It Is Ain’t Exactly Clear ...

Climate change skepticism comes in three flavors:

Full blown denial: the climate is not changing.  Either data is cooked by self-serving scientists so they can get more grants or by an international conspiracy to impose world government;

Deja Vu all over again: climate is changing but that is merely natural alteration that has been going on for millennia and soon enough we’ll be back in a cooling trend (the cynic adds “and we’ll be all hot [sic] and bothered about an impending ice age!”);

It Isn’t Us: climate may well be changing but the causal mechanism is NOT increased emissions of CO2 or methane, etc. because of human activity.  Therefore there’s no need to do anything.

In contrast, population growth denial did not focus on disputing the data on rapidly growing numbers of people in much of the world, with the exception of the Irish delegate to the UN General Assembly in 1965 who condemned the whole discussion of population growth as merely “...a conspiracy of the international contraceptive manufacturers...” Instead the argument centered around whether there were real problems posed by rates of growth.

Two population growth denial positions were common.

Up With People: one point of view, strongly associated with the position of the Roman Catholic Church, saw growing population as a positive good, a manifestation of God’s command in Genesis to be fruitful and multiply.  The real problem was that efforts would be made to promote contraception.

Grow Baby, Grow: yes, this position said, population is growing and there is a problem -- a potential lack of food.  But the solution is not curtailing people but expanding production.  This view was most often voiced by the Soviet Union and its allies, who usually added the notion that it was capitalist/imperialist stifling of Third World workers and farmers that caused the problem . 

International Solutions to International Problems

In the early 1960s the United Nations tried to develop a comprehensive global strategy for dealing with population growth.  In essence, what proponents wanted was a sweeping statement that uncontrolled population growth was a global threat to world peace and stability and therefore every government had to develop national strategies for family planning (which everyone knew had to include access to contraception.)  The effort failed in the face of a passionate minority of states. 

Side note that may interest me more than anyone else: whether a country voted for or against the proposal was not related to its demographics, either size of population rate of growth, or density.  It was not a Cold War issue pitting the Communist East against the capitalist West, nor a clash between the more developed North and the less developed South.  States with a large proportion of Catholics in their population, regardless of demographics, ideology or level of development, were against the proposed grand strategy.

The emergence of climate change as an issue also had a strong international dimension.   Beginning with the global conference on the environment in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the UN fostered a global strategy for dealing with climate change, initially expressed in the Framework Contention on Climate Change which came into effect in 1994.  The Framework was broad and bland enough that almost everyone signed on.  But when negotiations were in held in Kyoto in 1997 to try to put some meat on the Framework’s bare bones and to go beyond “somebody probably ought to do something” to draft a Protocol to the Framework treaty that would lay out who should do what, the international consensus collapsed.  Several subsequent meetings have made no progress.  Many observers think that between the international politics of deciding which countries have to change and who should bear the short term economic consequences of reducing emissions and some doubts about the utility of the strategies embodied in the Kyoto approach, the search for a comprehensive global strategy has reached a dead end.  It is not as simple as a conflict between the advanced capitalist economies of the Global North and the developing economies of the Global South.  But when the discussions have gotten serious, it has tended to degenerate into one side saying “you got rich by spitting tons of CO2 into the atmosphere for 150 years and now you want to stifle our growth” and the other side saying “if you make the same mistakes we did we’re all screwed and, besides, you’re refusing to do anything so you can have a competitive advantage and sell even more stuff to our consumers.”

Out With The Hedgehogs, In With The Foxes [a hedgehog knows one big thing; the fox knows many little things]

Even if the global approach of the 1960s had been politically feasible, it would not have halted the unprecedented growth in the world’s population.  There are several variables that determine the size of a country’s population at some time in the future.  Two of the most important are the number of women of child bearing age and the number of children each of those women can be expected to have.  Given the growth that had already occurred, there were more women of child bearing age than the world had ever seen and their younger sisters who would soon begin bearing children were an even larger cohort.  So even as the number of children each woman was expected to have declined, as it did, the overall population continued to grow.  But that rate of growth was slowed by a number of steps taken by governments, non-governmental groups, and individual women and men.  Our situation today and in the decades to come would have been far worse if these groups and individuals had not taken action.

The changes in population dynamics did not happen automatically.  The hedgehogs who pushed for a unified global solution started the process but it was a host of foxes who worked on a variety of ideas who made the myriad of small changes that cumulated in big differences. 

International efforts did have an impact.  The United Nations General Assembly may have failed to pass a comprehensive population treaty that would have impelled action by governments, but that was not the end of UN involvement.  The General Assembly did create a United Nations Population Fund which supports not only continuing research but programs within 150 countries that help local governments address women’s reproductive health, maternal and child health care, family planning, and a range of related issues.  The Fund and its staff of experts cannot force a government to do something but it gives it some positive incentives to do the right thing.  The second major result of the General Assembly’s 1965 showdown over population was the movement of international discussion of population issues away from the political arena to a series of international conferences in the next three decades in Bucharest, Mexico City and Cairo.  Unlike the General Assembly where governments are the sole players, these conferences provide a forum and networking opportunity for citizen activists and non-governmental organizations.  This is a huge benefit for people from countries whose governments are reluctant to take action or are recalcitrant opponents of doing anything.  The agendas for these conferences show a steady evolution in thinking about population dynamics and the development of strategies for change.  (This abbreviated and simplified account can’t capture all the hard work and sustained effort by literally hundreds of thousands people around the world, nor catalog their successes and frustrations.  It also ignores continuing battles over birth control, sterilization and abortion.)

Technological breakthroughs such as the development of new strains of rice and improvements in irrigation systems for small farmers in the Global South that launched the Green Revolution in food production in the 1970s did not just happen but came from focused research and development projects and years of work by individuals and organizations to diffuse the innovations to arms and villages around the world.

Individual changes, from greater education for young girls to changes in social mores and attitudes toward women and birth control, have been an important dimension in changes in birth rates and population growth. 

An optimist might expect the same pattern for climate change.  Given the amount of greenhouse gases already circulating in the atmosphere and the chemistry of gases like CO2 and the reality of the lives and aspirations of the some 6 billion people who live in the less developed Global South, there seems to be no realistic hope for suddenly reducing emissions to the point where we are not adding anything to the dynamics of global warming.  But the optimist can see technological changes, personal choices, and national policies that lead to significant reductions in emissions and creative adaptations that let us cope with the most disastrous consequences of climate change.

The optimist is willing to make a leap of faith and believe that the efforts of the hundreds of thousands of people around the world, from the scientists of the IPCC and universities to the economic and political forces shaping government policies to the  activists pushing for bigger and faster changes, to the individuals making small changes in life style, will cumulate into real progress.  The optimist will realize that, fortunately, she or he doesn’t have to counter the negative effects of climate change all by him or herself but can look for opportunities to be a helpful fox whatever means are available, be it political activism, financial support for the work of others, or life style changes.  The optimist may look at the story of five decades of work on population issues and decide that the tortoise is a better mascot: slow and steady beats flash and dash.

Timbuktu is Closer Than You Think

For many of us, Timbuktu is a symbol of exotic remoteness, a synonym for “the ends of the earth.”  If you say “Tuareg,’ some Americans will think of the VW Touareg SUV while others might conjure up fierce desert nomads swathed in distinctive deep purple robes.   And “Mali” is likely to be misheard and evoke images of aunt, niece or sister Molly or Molly Pitcher of song and legend. 

“What,” almost all of us are likely to say, “does any of this have to do with air strikes by French jets, 2,000 French soldiers in armored vehicles already fighting on the ground and more being flown in on U.S. aircraft?” 

Much of the answer has to do with powerful political dynamics within the country of Mali and part with the impact of external events on the main actors in the Malian political drama.

All Politics is Local

The real estate agent’s “location, location, location” mantra is a good place to start to understand Mali.  Northern Mali is deep in the Sahara desert, home to a sparse population of fiercely independent nomads.  Southern Mali is almost entirely in the Sahel, the transition zone between the desert and more fertile and temperate land to the south.  The Sahel is flat, rolling terrain with just enough rainfall to support sparse grass and scrubby brush.  Several centuries ago the Sahel was wetter and greener and from the 10th to 17th centuries supported a series of large kingdoms.  Timbuktu was developed as a major staging area for caravans carrying salt, slaves, ivory and gold from southern Africa to North Africa and on to Europe in enormous camel caravans.  It also served as a center of Islamic leaning and culture, from which missionaries spread Islam throughout West Africa.

Around the world, nomads like the Tuareg of the Sahara and the more settled small farmers and herders of the Sahel tend to live in an uneasy equilibrium.  They depend on trade with each other for goods they cannot produce themselves but they fear and distrust each other.  As the Sahel becomes drier and the Sahara desert creeps south, pasture land grows more scarce and conflicts between nomads and settled people are exacerbated. 

This is a central dimension in the current conflict. 

Like so many African countries, Mali’s borders were drawn for the administrative convenience of colonial powers at the end of the 19th Century.  What is now Mali was part of the larger entity of French Sudan which became independent in 1960 as the Mali Federation.  Within two months Senegal withdrew from the federation, leaving Mali landlocked and, aside from some gold deposits and a small area of fertile land along the Niger river, bereft of natural resources.  Over time tourism, especially from France, has become a significant factor in the economy.  At least it was until violence erupted in the north and tourists were taken hostage.

In the more settled areas of the Sahel making the distinction that this village is in Mali, that one is in Senegal, Niger, or Burkina Faso makes some sense, especially some 50 years after Mali gained independence from France.  But for nomads in the Sahara, borders are merely marks in the sand that the wind blows away.

Leaders of the several Tuareg clans resisted French attempts to control their movement and interfere with their profitable trading and smuggling.  As the French withdrew from their African colonies, Tuareg leaders called for the creation of an autonomous Tuareg homeland.  Instead Tuaregs were included in the Saharan desert portions of the new nations of Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Senegal. Around 15% of the population of Mali is classified as Tuareg or a related group.

The tension between political, economic and social development in Mali and Tuareg aspirations for autonomy has waxed and waned over time, but some level of political conflict has always been present.  The conflict escalated to significant violence in early 2012.

Some Politics are More Local Than Others

The conflict in Mali became a violent threat to the survival of the country last year because the long standing balance of political and military power was upset by three major developments:

1) Over the past two decades the ancient trans Sahara trade routes have been revived as one of the major avenues for smuggling drugs shipped from South America to the coast of West Africa and then overland to North Africa and Europe.  The Sahara trade routes are also a major artery for the movement of economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and on into Europe.  Tuareg clans have made some money as caravan guides but even more by charging smugglers protection fees ... so their operations will not be attacked by Tuaregs.

2) A significant number of young Tuareg men were recruited into elite units of the Libyan army.  When rebels toppled Qadhafi, Libya became a dangerous place for non-Libyans who had fought the rebel militias and the Tuaregs left with their weapons.  Not only were there now hundreds of young Tuaregs with military training but they had brought large numbers of sophisticated infantry weapons with them.

3) Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other militant groups grew rapidly from relatively obscure remnants of the brutal civil war between the Algerian military and Islamist militants.  Fueled by money from drug smuggling and hostage ransoms, the turmoil in Libya and the weakness of Libya’s Saharan neighbors, the region has become a magnet for disaffected youth from neighboring countries and combat veterans from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. 

A Sense of Crisis

The conflict in Mali became a major international concern after the capture of the town of Aguelhok by insurgent fores in January 2012.  Ninety-seven Malian soldiers surrendered after they ran out of ammunition and were summarily executed, along with an unknown number of civilians.  The perceived failures of the government to support the army in its fight against the insurgents led to a coup by junior officers in March.

Mali’s neighbors in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) negotiated an end to the coup and immediate restoration of civilian rule and also promised economic and military support, which, however, has been slow in coming.  The insurgents have continued making major gains in northen Mali, capturing several towns and underlining the weakness of the Malian armed forces.  While the insurgents are a loose coalition of tractional Tuareg groups, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and other Islamist groups, it has been the most radical elements who have taken control of captured towns and imposed a particularly harsh and rigid interpretation of Islamic law on the citizens.  There is widespread evidence of beatings and executions, as well as destruction of local religious sites and historical monuments.

In October 2012 the UN Security Council unanimously voted to direct ECOWAS and the African Union to develop a plan for intervention to support the government of Mali.  But the situation continued to deteriorate and when it seemed there was little standing between rebel forces and the capital of Bamako, Mali asked France to intervene last week.  The initial rapid response drew from French assets already on the ground in Chad and Côte d’Ivoire with additional troops being flown in on U.S. Air Force transports.

As of this writing the French seem to be making steady progress but are meeting stiffer resistance than expected. 

What’s the Point?

As fascinating as the history of Timbuktu maybe, it is still a long way from much of anywhere.  So why all the excitement?

For the government of Mali the stakes are obvious: the insurgency has already seriously destabilized the regime and a successful assault on the capital Bamako would spell the death of a relatively open, relatively democratic regime. 

For the large majority of the people of Mali, the violence and behavior of the insurgents when they have taken a town are extremely threatening.  Before the fighting began, Mali was one of the 25 poorest countries in the world.  The collapse of tourism has made things worse. 
The Muslim missionaries who moved across the Sahara from North Africa in the 10th and 11th centuries were predominantly Sufi.  The Sufi movement within Sunni Islam puts more emphasis on emotional expression, integrating music and dance into prayers, and less emphasis on formal obedience to behavioral laws.  Islam in West Africa has adopted and adapted many local customs and beliefs and is typically described as “more relaxed” in practice than, for example, Saudi Arabia.  But Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and similar groups have been inspired by the rigid, puritanical version of Islam originating in Saudi Arabia and spread by Saudi funded religious schools throughout the region.  It is overly simplistic but not completely wrong to say there is a real fear of fierce desert nomads seizing control and imposing a harsh and repressive regime which is likely to regard Sufi-influenced Malians as not “real” Muslims.

For France the fate of Mali is tied to the fate of its neighbors, all of whom are former French colonies who have maintained strong economic and military ties with France.  The attack on the Amenas oil field in Algeria by a group associated with the Islamist forces in Mali is a pointed example of how the presence of several thousand heavily armed militants can threaten important economic assets throughout the northern Sahara. 

Mali’s neighbors are not only concerned with attacks on their own territory but also about the reported tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting and the brutal regimes established in captured towns.  The Italian willingness to provide some trainers and logistical support to the Mali army reflects the same concern about refugee flows from North Africa to Europe.

For the United States, the dominant perspective in the response to the Mali situation is the concern that the Sahara desert will become the newest base for al Qaeda and al Qaeda-like organizations to train terrorists. 

The End Game

The pessimistic scenario sees French forces getting bogged down in a protracted battle to liberate the towns taken by the insurgents and a corresponding failure to bolster the military and political capabilities of Mali’s neighbors.  The optimistic scenario sees the French succeeding relatively quickly in pushing the fighters back into the desert and relieving the pressure on the government of Mali, then working with an African Union/ECOWAS force to stabilize the region.  Optimists might point to the situation in Somalia where an AU force supported by the U.S. and other western powers has prevented the radical al Shabaab group from seizing control of Mogadishu and gone a long way to neutralize them throughout the countryside.