Syria – Page 19

Is Iran Part Of The Solution In Syria?

Jay Newton-Small floats the idea:

When I was there late last summer, it was clear that Iranians weren’t particularly happy with Tehran’s unwavering support of Syria. Most of the bazaari wanted to see the money flowing to Syria spent instead propping up Iran’s faltering currency and economy. Add to that Assad’s use of chemical weapons, which are much reviled in Iran, and Rouhani might find popular support to weaken, if not break ties with Assad. And Iran might just be the only country Assad would listen to if they asked him to step aside. It is in both Washington and Tehran’s interests to prevent a failed state in Syria, and to stop Sunni radical al Qaeda factions from taking over the country. Such cooperation has been done before: Iran was a key ally in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, an Iranian neighbor, and with the toppling of the Taliban.

Packer also raises the possibility of Iran and the US working together:

Some Iranians point to the Bonn Conference of 2001—where Iran and the U.S. coöperated in the formation of an Afghan government, after the fall of their mutual enemy, the Taliban—as a model for what might take place with Syria. The U.S. and Iran have a common interest: preventing Salafi extremists, affiliated with Al Qaeda, from gaining power in the region. If this appeared probable in Syria, Iran might be willing to drop its support for Assad in exchange for a face-saving transition, backed by Turkey, Jordan, and the Gulf states: a ceasefire, a peacekeeping force made up of Muslim troops from the region, protections for Alawites and other minorities, U.N.-sponsored elections, and exile in a comfortable dacha for the Assad family.

None of this is likely.

It would take imaginative diplomacy of the kind that the Administration has shown little taste for in the Middle East. Iran would have to be convinced that it can’t win but also that it needn’t lose, and this would not be possible without deeper American engagement.

Judis nevertheless hopes for a diplomatic solution:

In Ha’aretz, Zvi Bar’el reports that Iran and Russia are working on a compromise proposal that could forestall an American attack on Syria. It would consist of a transfer of power in Syria in stages that would culminate in an election in which Bashar al Assad would not run and the transfer of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal to Russia or another country. … Who knows whether these proposals are genuine, but they could represent a constructive way out of the current morass.

And that, it appears, is what just happened. And this moment might offer Obama an opening with the new administration in Tehran – an opening we all desperately need to avoid another war in the region.

(Photo: Iranian President Hassan Rowhani attends a session of the Assembly of Experts in Tehran on September 3, 2013. Iran’s Assembly of Experts is a body that selects the supreme leader and supervises his activities. By Mehrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images.)

Lavrov’s Move

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/377095498445762560

The Russian foreign minister’s support for international control over Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal is a big deal, it seems to me. And the scenario for this sweet spot in dealing with Assad’s chemical weapons is not new. Here is Israel’s former intelligence head, Amos Yadlin, on how that compromise could turn a disaster into something far more constructive:

Were Putin to offer to take Assad’s chemical weapons out of Syria, said Yadlin in an Israeli Channel 2 news interview, “that would be an offer that could stop the attack.” It would be a “genuine achievement” for President Barack Obama to have ensured the clearing out of Assad’s capacity, and that would justify holding fire, said Yadlin. For Putin, such a deal would also keep the US from acting militarily in a state with which Russia is closely allied.

The UN Secretary General has also now endorsed the idea. And just in:

Syria welcomes Russia’s proposal for Damascus to put its chemical weapons under international control: Foreign Minister Walid Al-Moualem

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) September 9, 2013

Kerry gave a deadline of one week. That could be negotiated a little. But the key thing is that Russia is now pursuing an actually constructive proposal. That’s a huge win for president Obama’s strategy. And for the security of the world.

If Obama can take yes for an answer …

(Photo: Sergey Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, attends a meeting at the G20 Summit at the Constantine Palace at the G20 Summit on September 6, 2013 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Leaders of the G20 nations made progress on tightening up on multinational company tax avoidance, but remain divided over the Syrian conflict as they enter the final day of the Russian summit. By Roman Yandolin/Host Photo Agency via Getty Images)

Kerry Gaffes; The Russians Blink

In his latest stream of unpersuasive self-righteousness, John Kerry today threw out an idea. Instead of threatening an imminent military strike, Kerry actually got creative:

Asked if there were steps the Syrian president could take to avert an American-led attack, Mr. Kerry said, “Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week — turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting.”

He was, apparently, just being hypothetical. The State Department had to walk him back:

“Secretary Kerry was making a rhetorical argument about the impossibility and unlikelihood of Assad turning over chemical weapons he has denied he used,” Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, said in an e-mail to reporters after Mr. Kerry’s comments. “His point was that this brutal dictator with a history of playing fast and loose with the facts cannot be trusted to turn over chemical weapons, otherwise he would have done so long ago. That’s why the world faces this moment.”

I’d have thought a pretty basic qualification for being secretary of state is not to air hypothetical ideas in a public forum that the US does not intend to pursue. But Kerry, who is already doing a huge amount to make Hillary Clinton’s tenure at Foggy Bottom look magisterial, winged it. And the Russians immediately reacted:

“We don’t know whether Syria will agree with this, but if the establishment of international control over chemical weapons in the country will prevent attacks, then we will immediately begin work with Damascus,” Mr. Lavrov said at the Foreign Ministry. “And we call on the Syrian leadership to not only agree to setting the chemical weapons storage sites under international control, but also to their subsequent destruction.”

Wow. So we have the possibility of two things: that Russia might actually act decisively to rein Assad in, and also support the only viable policy to accomplish what Obama wants – protecting the world from these vile weapons. I have no idea whether this is a serious move by Lavrov – but it sure seems so, and it presents a fascinating non-binary option. It would manage to bring Russia in to solving this problem, without its having to acquiesce to what Putin regards as American grand-standing. And it would surely have some traction at the UN.

Sometimes, it seems, Kerry’s incompetence strikes gold. Here’s hoping.

(Photo: US Secretary of State John Kerry gestures during a joint press conference with Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague at the the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on September 9, 2013 in London, England. By Alastair Grant – WPA Pool/Getty Images.)

If Congress Votes Against The President

Douthat expects major consequences for Obama’s presidency:

It is to President Obama’s great discredit that he has staked this credibility on a vote whose outcome he failed to game out in advance. But if he loses that vote, the national interest as well as his political interests will take a tangible hit: for the next three years, American foreign policy will be in the hands of a president whose promises will ring consistently hollow, and whose ability to make good on his strategic commitments will be very much in doubt.

I think Ross is hyper-ventilating. The simple fact is that American power was largely destroyed by the previous administration: Bush and Cheney both managed to gut US credibility on intelligence and prove that our vast military supremacy counts for nothing when it comes to actually bending the world to our will (see Iraq). Obama inherited that destroyed soft and hard power and has done his best with it. But the destruction itself was instructive. After the end of the Cold War, with no huge conventional military rival or threat, the US war-machine was far too big for the needs it was supposed to serve; and global views of America had soured more profoundly than at any point since the Second World War. The result is too big a weapon with too little international support. That’s one reason why Syria, a very tough issue in any era, is so particularly difficult for the US right now.

Millman is less excitable than Ross:

Presidents Ford and Carter faced much more serious rebukes from Congress in foreign policy where there was far clearer damage to Presidential credibility. We don’t generally count their Presidencies as successes – but America’s foreign policy was not crippled. If President Obama loses this vote, he will just have to count his votes more carefully in the future before committing himself where America does not already have clear and binding treaty obligations. Why again would that be so terrible?

And are we so certain that the president didn’t game this out? We may end up with a very Obama-style conclusion: putting Assad on notice, isolating Putin, and shifting the center of power in Washington over war and peace to a more democratic and constitutional place. Drum echoes:

Presidents suffer defeats all the time. Obama lost on cap-and-trade. He’s lost on plenty of judicial and executive branch nominations. He couldn’t get agreement for a grand bargain. He lost on gun control. What’s more, Republicans have been opposing him on virtually everything from the day he took office. In what concrete way would a defeat on Syria change this dynamic in even the slightest way?

A War The American People Don’t Want

Attacking Syria is less popular than any other recent conflict was at the outset:

Ezra examines the polling:

The latest CNN/ORC poll shows that 80 percent of Americans believe Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his citizens. But even so, more than 70 percent of Americans say they oppose air strikes without congressional authorization and 55 percent say they oppose air strikes even with congressional authorization.

This, in a nutshell, is the White House’s problem: The American public believes the intelligence. They just don’t care. They don’t believe Syria poses a threat to the United States. They don’t believe the U.S.’s national interests are served by getting involved in Syria.

And they’re right, aren’t they?

New Frontiers In Propaganda

Megan Garber investigates the Assad family’s Instagram presence:

The account gives Syrians and non-Syrians alike a supposed little insight into the supposed little sitcom that is The Assads – that quirky family-next-door, comprised of people who are wacky and relatable in equal measure. The Instagrams attempt to humanize Syria’s first family, to place them in a familiar context – which is also to say, if you’ve been following the news out of Syria, a totally unfamiliar context. A context that is unfamiliar because it is untrue. It’s not, of course, that there’s no joy to be found in Syria, despite all the conflict and chaos in the country; it’s that syrianpresidency, with every implication of business-as-usual, commits a sin of informational omission. Which is all to say that this particular Instagram feed does what most Instagram feeds tend to do: It offers a carefully crafted performance of daily banalities. With the difference here being that most Instagram feeds, and most of their mundanities, do not belong to dictators.

Marin Cogan notes that the Syrian mass-murderer is hardly being creative:

Assad is the latest in what one news site has called “the dictators of Instagram.” Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has famously used the social-networking site as a platform to project his very Russian style of masculinity (photo montages of the impossibly barrel-chested despot weight-lifting and posing with wolves and wildcats.) The minions of Ayatollah Khamenei have posted several close-ups of Iran’s septuagenarian Supreme Leader on his photo-sharing page.

Unsurprisingly, the Instagram presence of Bashar’s beautiful wife Asma has increased recently:

The Daily Mail, based in Great Britain where Asma al-Assad was born to affluent Sunni Muslim Syrian expats, and where she met her husband when he was an optometry student, called the photos a “sickening propaganda tool.” The paper blasted her as “a stooge in this shameless PR exercise,” a woman who “seems is all too willing to try and mask the horrific atrocities being carried out by her husband’s forces.” Unlike other news sites, which ran the Instagram photos as stand-alone image, the Daily Mail paired each with a picture of Syrian carnage. …

The first lady’s family of Sunnis come from Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, which has been largely destroyed by Assad forces, Tabler said. But because she married into her husband’s ruling Alawite family and is the mother of their three children, “she is not about to break ranks. If she did, that would be great.”

But fortunately Instagram doesn’t shield the photos from criticism. Regarding the photo seen right:

Patience, Mr President. Patience.

I have to say I found myself shifting a little – not a lot, but a little – after reading the transcript of the president’s press conference at the end of the G20 Summit. Do yourself a favor and read it. It will disappoint those who still believe the man cannot speak without a Teleprompter, but it’s a deep, nuanced, sober and earnest case for a limited military strike to make sure the world does not simply look away when hundreds of children are gassed by a dictator. That seems to me to be Obama’s strongest point:

My goal is to maintain the international norm on banning chemical weapons. I want that enforcement to be real. I want it to be serious. I want people to understand that gassing innocent people, delivering chemical weapons against children is not something we do. It’s prohibited in active wars between countries. We certainly don’t do it against kids. And we’ve got to stand up for that principle.

Yes, we’ve got to. And none of us are happy with this kind of atrocity being allowed to stand. But the point is: even with Obama’s proposed strike, it would still stand. If the war is restricted to a few strikes as a symbolic act, it may degrade Assad’s ability to use those weapons in the future. But he’d still have them; and he could still use them. Using them after an attack would prove the intervention essentially toothless, and even give Assad the anti-American victim card to play. Obama addresses the point explicitly here:

Is it possible that Assad doubles down in the face of our action and uses chemical weapons more widely? I suppose anything is possible, but it wouldn’t be wise. I think at that point, mobilizing the international community would be easier, not harder. I think it would be pretty hard for the U.N. Security Council at that point to continue to resist the requirement for action, and we would gladly join with an international coalition to make sure that it stops.

There‘s the weak link in the logic. He seems to think it would be crazy for Assad to continue using those weapons. But Assad is a crazy motherfucker with everything to lose. Of course, he could try again as an act of defiance. But he may be less predisposed to do that if we don’t launch a war, but fence him in. And if Obama wants to take a stand against Assad’s breaking of a long-held international norm with respect to using chemical weapons, then he has already. He came close at one point to bragging of it:

Frankly, if we weren’t talking about the need for an international response right now, this wouldn’t be what everybody would be asking about. There would be some resolutions that were being proffered in the United Nations and the usual hocus-pocus, but the world and the country would have moved on. So trying to impart a sense of urgency about this — why we can’t have an environment in which over time people start thinking we can get away with chemical weapons use — it’s a hard sell, but it’s something I believe in.

And by using the G-20 Summit to insist that this breach of core human morality and decency not be ignored, Obama has already done a lot of what a military strike would do to protect this norm, without any of the bad consequences of intervening in the Syrian civil war. The world is intently watching – and Putin and Iran would be increasingly embarrassed if their client were to use these weapons again.

Another major incident and Russia would be using up a lot of capital to protect the murderous Alawite. Ditto Iran, whose more moderate elements are clearly sending a message that here is perhaps some smidgen of a basis to talk to the Americans again.

The good news is that there was unanimity at the G20 that chemical weapons were indeed used; the forthcoming UN Report will doubtless underline the core facts; and there is also a clear consensus that the use of chemical weapons is anathema. This entire debate has helped buttress these international norms even as Assad has breached them.

Why is that not enough for now? Why does reinforcing this breach of norms have to be executed militarily? Why cannot we have some kind of probation period for Assad, as the world watches more closely? If Assad were to use those weapons again, in Obama’s own words, that would make “mobilizing the international community … easier, not harder.” But it would be harder if America had muddied the waters by previously entering the civil war while there was no international consensus.

In other words, there is a sweet spot here that we could yet reach – a reinforcement of the norm, a gathering of evidence at the UN, a probation period for Assad, and the US guiding the rest of the world to keep on life-support this norm against using chemical weapons. Military action would be deferred and predicated on a clear violation in the future by Assad or, indeed, his opponents, if they get their hands on the stuff. The achievement of threatening to strike was getting the entire international community to wake up and pay attention.

Patience, in other words, is not the same as doing nothing. Sometimes, it is the only way to do something in a way that actually works.

(Photo: US President Barack Obama gestures during a press conference in Saint Petersburg on September 6, 2013 on the sideline of the G20 summit. By Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty.)

The Massacre Of Christians We Might Unleash, Ctd

Julia Ioffe is uncomfortable with Rand Paul focusing, almost exclusively, on the effect Assad’s fall could have on Syria’s Christians. Dreher spots a double standard:

What she ought to understand is that Paul is a Republican politician trying to explain to a big part of the GOP base — conservative Christians — why they should pay particular attention to the Syria situation, and oppose the US government’s plans to enter the war on behalf of the Islamist rebels. I very much doubt Ioffe would complain about Jewish politicians speaking to American Jews to rally them behind an American foreign policy proposal that protected the interests of their co-religionists in Israel, or US Muslim politicians like Keith Ellison doing the same when talking to American Muslims about his co-religionists in the Mideast, and American foreign policy. And she should not! Why must Christian politicians only speak about US foreign policy in universalist terms? Why do people like Ioffe consider it immoral for a Christian politician to speak up for Christians?

Mark Movsesian is like-minded:

In a pluralistic society, people have multiple commitments–religious, ethnic, ideological, familial—that cut across national borders. Everyone knows these commitments influence people’s decisions about foreign policy. African-Americans cared deeply about US policy with respect to South African apartheid in the 1980s and care deeply about US policy in Africa today; Americans Jews care deeply about US policy toward Israel; American Muslims care deeply about US policy toward Palestine; and so on. Should Christians alone check their commitments at the door? Should they alone be embarrassed to raise the dire situation of co-religionists in other countries? Where’s the sense in that?

Dreher seconds him.

The Risks Of Rushing To War

National Review continues to support war with Syria. Jim Manzi dissents:

[F]orcing Assad from power represents a far larger and more uncertain undertaking than has been publicly discussed.

This is the course of action advocated by the editors: “a broader, longer-term plan to topple Assad and defeat his allies.” Those are smooth words for a rough job. How would we accomplish this? How many people would we kill, and how much public money would we spend? Why do we believe that the rebels would form a government that would not be worse for us? How would Iran attempt to counter such an intervention, since they have an extremely strong interest in the outcome? And so on. The litany of costs and dangers ought to be familiar to anybody after Iraq and Afghanistan. Would you voluntarily take on one-tenth the cost in deaths and money of either of those wars to replace Assad with whatever is likely to follow him? Wandering into that kind of a commitment based on what has been presented to the American people so far would be extremely rash.

(Photo: A protester holds up her hand, which is covered in red paint, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry testifies during a hearing on “Syria: Weighing the Obama Administration’s Response” before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on September 4, 2013. By Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Going To War Over A Gaffe

Walter Mead panics that a “no” vote on Syria will destroy US credibility in one fell swoop:

Foreigners will no longer know when and whether to take anything this President says as representing American policy rather than his own editorial opinions. We hate to say it, but that is so dangerous that there’s a strong argument for Congress to back the Syria resolution simply to avoid trashing the credibility of the only President we’ve got.

Ezra is skeptical:

[N]o one — not Assad, not Iran, not North Korea — has any confusion about what would happen if they deployed chemical weapons against our troops or embassies, or if they handed them to terrorists who used them to attack us. They would be annihilated. And our credibility on this score is overwhelming: After 9/11, we invaded Afghanistan, which had given safe harbor to al Qaeda, and then we also invaded Iraq — just because we were so angry. Pinprick strikes against Assad change nothing about the incentives of using chemical weapons against the United States.

Shibley Telhami likewise denies that a strike will bolster US credibility:

Despite the talk of not being taken seriously, America remains a feared superpower in the Middle East, and Washington’s hand is seen in almost everything big and small. For Arabs in Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere, the problem is not American credibility on the use of force; rather, they have a deep mistrust of U.S. aims.