by Mitchell Plitnick
With a 72-hour truce apparently holding in Gaza and Israel having ended its ground operation, now seems like a fair time to assess where things stand. Has anyone emerged from this war in a better position? Is there anything that can, at least in a cynical and Machiavellian sense, be [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
With a 72-hour truce apparently holding in Gaza and Israel having ended its ground operation, now seems like a fair time to assess where things stand. Has anyone emerged from this war in a better position? Is there anything that can, at least in a cynical and Machiavellian sense, be called a victory?
Palestine
It goes without saying that the overwhelming majority of the physical destruction was borne by the people of Gaza. At this point, the numbers are just horrifyingly grim: 1,968 dead — 1,626 of whom were civilians — and 7,920 wounded. While we don’t have a precise percentage, we do know that there are at least 2,111 children and 1,415 women among the wounded.
The already mangled sole power plant in Gaza was damaged even further, leaving most of the strip without electricity. The United Nations Development Program estimates between 16 and 18,000 homes were severely damaged or destroyed and over half a million Gazans (out of a population of roughly 1.8 million) have been internally displaced.
As one report put it, “…almost every piece of critical infrastructure, from electricity to water to sewage, has been seriously compromised by either direct hits from Israeli air strikes and shelling or collateral damage.”
This is clearly the worst hit Gaza has taken, demonstrably more severe than Operation Cast Lead (2008-09). Even so, there seems to be no appetite there for a return to the status quo ante from the mass media, social media or my own interactions; the call for an end to the seven-year Israeli blockade of Gaza as part of a lasting ceasefire persists.
Concomitantly, Hamas, though still facing the same problems as before (an inability to pay civil employees, increasing isolation in the region due to the decline of the Muslim Brotherhood and little leverage of their own to address Gaza’s economic woes) has been strengthened politically by Israel’s onslaught.
Once again, Hamas survived without conceding, and that grants them a considerable boost. It won’t last forever, of course, but they have re-established themselves as the leaders in confronting Israel. The unity agreement between Hamas and Fatah has also apparently survived the fighting, though in practice the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure makes implementation there much more difficult. Palestinian unity was the primary reason that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lied to the Israeli public about the fates of the three murdered Israelis in June — the event that sparked the spiral into this violence. That, too, can be counted as a victory.
The relationship between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas is very unclear. It seemed strained in June, as Israel swept through the West Bank under the pretext of looking for the three youths who they knew were already dead. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas continued his security cooperation with Israel during this time and even prevented demonstrations against Israel’s actions after the fighting started in Gaza.
But as the fighting wore on, Abbas, who at first supported Egypt’s ceasefire proposal that Hamas could not accept, began supporting Hamas’ demands to end the fighting. By the end, Abbas was accusing Israel of war crimes, threatening to sign the Rome Statute and thereby bringing Israel to the International Criminal Court, and calling for the blockade of Gaza to be lifted. Officially, the PA has not broken the unity agreement — another major victory for Hamas.
Yet Hamas could not have missed the signals of this round. They managed to increase global awareness of the blockade, but found themselves being pressured by the Arab League. Turkey and Qatar remain Hamas’ only allies, but they proved largely ineffectual against the United States, Egypt, and the Saudis (despite the Saudi rhetoric, which was varied and clearly unsympathetic to Hamas but sympathetic to Gazan civilians).
At this point, efforts again appear geared at getting the PA back into the business of controlling Gaza’s borders. For Hamas, that will be a mixed blessing. If it happens with the unity agreement intact, then Hamas will have won itself a clear place in the Palestinian political system, and Israel will have to accept it if they let the PA administer the border crossings. Israel won’t like that at all, but the US, Egypt and the Saudis may push hard for such an arrangement in the interest of stability. This would also be a step toward ending Hamas’ control over the strip, to the extent that there is anything that can legitimately be called Palestinian control in Gaza.
Israel
The Israelis are not buying into Prime Minister Netanyahu’s claim of decisive victory in this operation, but they are overwhelmingly supportive of his decisions. In part, this reflects an appreciation of reality — Israel did a lot of damage in Gaza, but didn’t do itself a lot of good. The other part is that most Israelis believe that Netanyahu didn’t really want things to go this far.
Bibi whipped his country into a racist frenzy when those young men were kidnapped. Knowing Israeli sensibilities as he does, Bibi knew that their deaths would end the story, but a kidnapping would continue to enrage hard-line sectors of the Jewish populace. The idea was to drum up popular support for a series of actions against Hamas which, Netanyahu hoped, would shatter the Palestinian unity deal.
But Bibi’s right flank immediately started pressuring for escalation. Bibi didn’t want that, but once Hamas started fighting back in earnest, the political pressure for a broader operation was more than he could resist. The pressure continued, as did Hamas’ firepower, probably more than Bibi expected them to use. As matters escalated, Netanyahu had to keep re-defining the mission’s goals. First it was punishing Hamas for the murders, then it was a “quiet for quiet” arrangement — in other words a straight up ceasefire.
That idea was not met with public approval. By this time, Israelis were considerably frightened. Hamas’ rockets were penetrating much farther into Israel than ever before, and while the Iron Dome defense system limited the actual damage, it did not limit the spread of fear. So, the Israeli goals became diminishing Hamas’ rocket ability and eliminating what Israel called “terror tunnels.”
The tunnels are very frightening to Israelis and Israel appears to have eliminated them. But there are two big problems with this narrative. Firstly, destroying the tunnels was the main focus of the ground operation, but Egypt managed to destroy hundreds of them without a military attack; they simply flooded them from the Egyptian side. The second problem is that, while Israeli fears about the tunnels are understandble, it’s worth noting that Israel has known about them for quite a while and Hamas hadn’t used them until this round of fighting began.
So what, really, did Israel achieve? It caused Hamas to use about two-thirds of its rockets, but those can be replenished, and at the point of the ceasefire, Hamas and other factions were still firing at will. Israel destroyed Hamas’ tunnels, but they had been there for years and were posing only a potential threat. Israel meanwhile failed to destroy the unity agreement, at least for now.
These gains were bought by Israel at the price of Palestinian blood, and a higher domestic death toll than Israel is accustomed to (67, including three civilians). As much as it appears like Tel Aviv doesn’t care about that price, it is clear that Israel’s image took a major hit in this engagement. Formerly sympathetic media showed injured Gazan children and destroyed neighborhoods. Even the United States expressed concern about the disregard for civilian life and called the attack on a United Nations school that was housing refugees “disgraceful.” The UK is now reviewing all military sales to Israel, and Spain has suspended all military sales.
Those things should not be overstated. England and Spain are merely expressing their displeasure at Israel’s total disregard for civilian life in Gaza and will re-commence their sales to Israel in due course. Despite its occasional statements, the US has repeatedly defended Israel throughout this episode and is using the ceasefire to send more supplies to its ally.
Still, Israel has definitely come out of this appearing far more villainous than Hamas. That’s going to make a difference going forward. Israel may no longer be able to bury the issue of the Gaza blockade, a form of collective punishment that has only helped solidify Hamas’ rule in Gaza and has deprived the people while failing to prevent the buildup of Hamas’ rockets. No one bought into the anti-Iran portion of Netanyahu’s rhetoric, another failure for Israel. Even in the US Jewish community, this onslaught shook a lot of pro-Israel faith and sent other Jews out of their living rooms and into the streets.
I see nothing but an illusion of victory here for the Israeli right. And for the rest of the country, the surge in extreme nationalism made Israel look a lot more like a fascist state than the Middle East’s “only democracy.”
The United States
There’s really little to say here. The US will look back at its actions in the Middle East in 2014 as one of the lowest periods in its diplomatic history. Secretary of State John Kerry failed to broker a ceasefire, and when he finally got one, it was broken within two hours. While both sides had different stories about who really broke the ceasefire, the Israeli narrative dominated and allowed Netanyahu to tell the United States not to “second-guess him” about Hamas.
Leaks to Israeli media disparaged both President Barack Obama and Kerry. The US again showed the world that while it does have the power to pressure Israel, it is not going to use it, no matter how bloody Israel’s actions become or how many times it insults its American patron. The US meanwhile stands alone in defending Israel’s actions.
The Obama administration has occasionally had some good ideas about the Middle East, but has repeatedly shown it doesn’t have a clue about how to implement them. It paints itself as an advocate for peace, but shows no willingness to back up its words in the face of Israeli resistance. That’s why it’s more important now than ever for Europe or some other outside party to push its way past the US in dealing with this issue.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
The two ceasefire proposals aimed at ending the accelerated violence in Gaza and Israel also offer one of the best illustrations of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The circumstances and the content of each proposal demonstrates very well why outside pressure is necessary to end this vexing, seemingly endless struggle and [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
The two ceasefire proposals aimed at ending the accelerated violence in Gaza and Israel also offer one of the best illustrations of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The circumstances and the content of each proposal demonstrates very well why outside pressure is necessary to end this vexing, seemingly endless struggle and just how differently Israelis and Palestinians view both current events and the conflict as a whole.
Let’s look at the two proposals. Egypt, acting as the United States normally does, worked out the details of its ceasefire idea primarily with Israel. The deal reflects the Israeli and Egyptian agenda: it mostly follows the formula of “quiet for quiet,” essentially bringing back the status quo ante of early June. It offers Hamas a vague promise of future negotiations to address the siege of the Gaza Strip. But this is hardly something Hamas will put stock in. The 2012 ceasefire agreement, which was negotiated by then-Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, a man much friendlier to Hamas than the current Egyptian leadership, also made such a promise and it never came to anything. Finally, Egypt says it is willing to open the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt more widely but only if Hamas allows Palestinian Authority security to police it instead of their own people.
It’s not hard to see why Hamas viewed that offer, and its exclusion from the talks, more like a call to surrender than a ceasefire. Indeed, that’s what it was. The offer was likely made with the expectation that Hamas would refuse it. That is one reason, along with the fact that I don’t see them getting a better deal from continued fighting, that I thought Hamas should have taken it. But it is perfectly understandable that they did not.
Hamas recently confirmed its terms for a ceasefire: Israel should lift the siege it has imposed on the strip for the last seven years, and release all the prisoners it arrested last month during its sweep of the West Bank while the Netanyahu government was keeping the Israeli public and the world from immediately finding out that the three youths who were ostensibly being searching for were already dead. In exchange, Hamas would agree to a ceasefire.
Those terms are undoubtedly unacceptable for Israel, and Egypt for that matter. They won’t because they don’t have to. Each of them, by themselves, is far more powerful militarily than Hamas. Together, they are even more so, and they have the backing of the United States, quite openly. More discreetly, they also have the backing of much of the Arab leadership in Saudi Arabia and most of the Gulf states, which, with the exception of Qatar, generally despise Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’ ideological forebears.
Therefore, Israel and Egypt will follow the most basic rule of international politics: might makes right. They will ignore minor details like peace, security for both Gazans and Israelis, and most of all, international law. They will do this because they can.
But really, what is Hamas demanding? That they be set free from a crippling siege that has remained in full force with only minor and occasional amelioration through ceasefires and flare-ups alike. That seems like a perfectly reasonable demand, an expectation, even, especially since Israel claims that it is no longer an occupying power in Gaza. Inside, that may be true, but Israel controls the airspace, the offshore areas and the overwhelming majority of Gaza’s borders, except for the southern one, which Egypt controls. It permits only limited amounts of supplies into the strip, bars many things like chemicals and building materials entirely and allows almost no exports. According to most international law experts, Israel has the responsibilities of an occupying power proportionate to the control it exerts. Thus, Israel is not responsible for internal policing of Gaza, but it is responsible for the effects of its control — meaning the siege is illegal.
Hamas, and most Palestinians, surely see the demand to lift the siege as a minimal one. Hamas is not, after all, demanding that the entire occupation regime be lifted for a ceasefire to take place, nor that Israel, for example, repair the damage it has done to Gaza’s only power plant or compensate Gaza for the destruction of its airport.
But the majority of Israelis see the siege as a defensive measure. They believe lifting it will enable Hamas to reload with much more and better weapons and then they will strike much harder and might, at that point be able to deliver a real blow to Israel, something far beyond their ability right now. Most Israelis do not see the Egyptian proposal as a Hamas surrender, but rather as a very reasonable return to the status quo ante.
Israelis believe their leaders when they say they are not targeting Gazan civilians, despite the rather conclusive evidence to the contrary (such as bombing an open beach with children playing on it, destroying a hospital with patients in it, bombing the homes of Hamas leaders with their families inside, etc.). Palestinians see the destruction of civilians, homes, and Gaza’s infrastructure as justifying firing rockets at Israel. Israelis see Hamas as willing to sacrifice its own civilians in order to kill Jews. Palestinians see Israel as offering them a choice of being bombed to death relatively quickly or starved to death more slowly.
The point is not whether one view or the other is right or wrong (we all obviously have an opinion on that, myself included). The point is that these are two completely irreconcilable views. When we combine that with the massive imbalance of both political and, especially, military power involved and the sense both sides have that they cannot afford to be seen as letting the “violence of the other” dictate the terms of the ceasefire, we see the impasse. So where does that leave us?
Ultimately, it is more than likely that Israel’s overwhelmingly greater ability to cause death and destruction, along with the fact that Hamas (and Gaza in general) has very few countries willing to stand up for it in the international arena, will force Hamas to accept a deal that closely resembles the one they just rejected. But all that will do is reset the clock to ticking down to the next round.
If there were a genuine desire to find a way to stop this endlessly repeating loop, there would need to be forceful international mediation. Such mediation cannot come from those countries that stand with Israel against Hamas (Egypt, the US) nor those who have the reverse position (Turkey, Qatar). It can only come from an international delegation, either under the auspices of the UN or in the form of a committee from a variety of countries. There would need to be international guarantees and sanctions applied to both sides (and, crucially, actually enforced) for violations of any agreement.
That, of course, is not something Israel would ever accept. It has no reason to sacrifice its impunity, because it has might — militarily, economically and politically — on its side. And as long as that is true, it simply has no good reason to moderate its position. In this regard, it acts like any other country. And the ineffectual Hamas rockets, terrifying though they may be to so many in Israel, are not coming anywhere near giving Israel any incentive to change.
The bottom line: it is the United States, which unconditionally runs interference for Israel in the Security Council and which arms Israel and completely ignores the fact that Israel uses US-made weapons in blatant contravention of US law, that is fueling this fire. It will support Israel in its refusal to allow any other outside party to mediate, and will certainly ensure that Israel retains its impunity. And the US will do this against the better judgment of its president and secretary of state, both of whom are well aware that the security of Israelis and the very lives of Palestinians both depend on ending the 47-year old occupation, lifting the siege of Gaza and allowing the Palestinians to achieve their freedom. Such is the effect of domestic politics in the United States, and it is playing out in blood in the Gaza Strip right now.
Photo: Relatives and friends of the al-Kaware family carry 7 bodies to the mosque during their funeral in Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, on July 9, 2014. The father, a member of the Fatah movement, and his 6 sons were all killed the day before in an Israeli air strike that targeted their home. Credit: AFP/Thomas Coexthomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images/Used under a Creative Commons license
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
The fighting in Gaza will continue for some time, as a ceasefire agreement brokered by Egypt fell apart. Despite the bellicose language Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has employed over the past week, it was Hamas and not Israel that rejected the proposal. This was, to be [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
The fighting in Gaza will continue for some time, as a ceasefire agreement brokered by Egypt fell apart. Despite the bellicose language Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has employed over the past week, it was Hamas and not Israel that rejected the proposal. This was, to be sure, the direct result of that proposal not meeting any of Hamas’ demands for a ceasefire and, because as one Israeli official put it, “…we discovered we’d made a cease-fire agreement with ourselves.” The dynamics of this turn of events are important and tell us much about how the ground has changed in the region. We first must ask why Hamas rejected the Egyptian proposal. They have been rather clear about their reasons:
- Hamas felt, quite correctly, that Egypt had essentially negotiated this deal with Israel, then presented it as a fait accompli to Hamas. In fact, they said they first heard about it through social media.
- Hamas has declared that they intend to come out of this round of fighting with some gains. In particular, they want to end the siege that Israel has imposed on the Gaza Strip since 2007, the release of all the prisoners who had been re-arrested recently after being freed in exchange for Hamas freeing Gilad Shalit in 2011, and the negotiation of a long term truce, as was agreed in 2012, but never acted upon. The terms of the proposal offered no such relief, or any real change to the status quo.
- Many among Hamas and other groups believe this proposal was deliberately put forth by Egypt as one Israel would accept and Hamas would reject, in order to legitimize further attacks on Gaza. The way things have unfolded, they may be correct.
Those reasons may show a certain rationality in Hamas’ refusal to accept a ceasefire. Wisdom and real concern for the innocents suffering under Israel’s bombings are far less apparent, however. In fact, Hamas’ refusal to accept the ceasefire completes the process of wiping from the memory of much of the world the fact that Israel initiated this round of fighting.
Rarely has Netanyahu been more accurate than earlier yesterday, when he said “[If Hamas] doesn’t accept the ceasefire proposal…Israel will have all the international legitimacy to broaden its military activity in order to achieve the necessary quiet.” Indeed, Hamas’ decision does exactly that. There will still be expressions of concern from various quarters, but for the most part, pressure on Israel to stop its onslaught from the US, EU, UN and even many Arab states will diminish essentially to zero. It is hard to imagine that the refusal is going to lead to a better deal. The only thing that might, and only might, do that is a massive uptick in civilian deaths from where the number is at now. Hardly something anyone would wish for. So, while Hamas may have had very good reason to reject this deal, it does not seem that rejection is a better option.
Indeed, one may argue that accepting the ceasefire deal with certain reservations may have put Hamas in a better position. At least the massive uptick in death and destruction in Gaza would have been stemmed, even if temporarily.
Egypt’s New Position
Hamas has issued a statement rejecting further Egyptian efforts to mediate a ceasefire. They will now accept only Turkey or Qatar in that role. Those are, not coincidentally, the only two significant states who support the political goals of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the new Egyptian regime joins Saudi Arabia and many of the Gulf States in despising.
Egypt has now demonstrated that not only has its position on Hamas hardened since the ouster of the Brotherhood and President Mohamed Morsi, it is even more antagonistic to Hamas than former President Hosni Mubarak. Given this, it is likely that the role Mubarak frequently played as a broker between Israel and Hamas is not one that the current General/President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi can assume, and this was a failed attempt to show that he could.
This will please Netanyahu, who is surely seeing the new Egyptian regime as much more to his liking than anything that ever came before it. But it is going to complicate matters for the United States, all the more so as Israel is not likely to accept Turkey or Qatar as an intermediary. Without Egypt as a broker, the US is going to have a much harder time stabilizing these periodic escalations between Israel and Hamas. This, again, may suit Netanyahu, who believes US President Barack Obama is much too quick to try to end conflicts. But it also makes Israeli decisions as to when to back off more complicated, as the US will not be able to give Israel a way out that shields its leadership at least a little from the political fallout of ending these operations while Hamas is still in control of the Strip.
Hamas’ weakened position
Hamas is facing serious isolation. Egypt was surely never very sympathetic to Hamas, even when Morsi was in office. It is now even more firmly in the US-Israeli camp. Hamas’ support for Syrian rebels and the slow thaw of relations between the United States and Iran has (to Netanyahu’s chagrin) cooled the Hamas-Iran relationship, and Qatar has had to back away to some degree from its support of the Brotherhood and its affiliates like Hamas due to pressure from other Gulf states. This is why, despite the forecasts by many that this latest round will end with the status quo more or less maintained, Netanyahu, and probably also Mahmoud Abbas, believes a severe blow can now be struck against Hamas.
Netanyahu believes, not without reason, that this can be done without resorting to the kind of all-out assault, and even re-occupation, which is being pushed by his right flank in Israel. Consider the Islamist group’s current position. It was already struggling to pay workers in Gaza and had been arguing with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah about who bears the responsibility. Egypt’s harder line has been stifling the “tunnel economy,” which was the only method for bringing many goods and supplies into Gaza that Israel would not permit to pass through its blockade. Hamas seemed to have nothing but rhetoric to offer to deal with the situation, and it was losing standing among the Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank.
Islamic Jihad and other, more radical Palestinian factions, which Hamas was generally preventing from taking violent actions against Israel from Gaza, were accusing Hamas of abandoning its revolutionary ideals. Add to this the loss of much of its support from the rest of the Arab and Muslim world, in the wake of the decline of the Brotherhood throughout the region, and it’s not hard to see why Netanyahu believes that, even if the outcome of the current fighting is merely an agreement to go back to the way things were, he will still come out a big winner.
He may be right. But it is more likely that Israel’s continued attacks will cause the various factions to rally together, as they have in the past, strengthening Hamas’ position. It is also more likely to exacerbate the already dire predicament Abbas is in, as he has cracked down in the West Bank to prevent anti-Israel protests during the fighting, sacrificing what little respect and confidence the Palestinians had left in the PA President.
To Cease or not to Cease
Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other factions fighting in Gaza can certainly make the case that they have successfully stood firm under Israel’s attacks while demonstrating that they can shoot their missiles throughout Israel. The rockets being used in many cases were actually made in Gaza, along with what they have been able to smuggle in from outside. The fact that the locally made rockets include some of the medium range ones that have been penetrating farther into Israel than ever before is one reason Hamas is perhaps in less of a rush than one might think to stop the fighting.
The calculus, though, is cold and fails on a number of levels. The most obvious failure is the suffering of the people of Gaza. Over 190 Gazans have been killed, the vast majority civilians. These deaths do raise a great deal of anger among Palestinians against Israel, but to what end? There does not seem to be any victory, or even small gains, on the horizon for which these people are dying. When the fighting dies down, Israel will be the same villain in Gaza it always was, but people are surely going to wonder why the fighting went on for as long as it did with no gains in sight. And that is really the nub of it — there seems to be no hope for Hamas to achieve any of its goals, such as lifting the maritime blockade on Gaza or easing the border crossings. If they are hoping that other forces — such as those in Lebanon, which have lobbed a few projectiles across the border and to which Israel has responded quite forcefully — will be opening another flank against Israel, they are not paying attention to events in Syria and Iraq, which are occupying the efforts of Hezbollah and other parties that might be willing to engage Israel.
There simply isn’t an endgame that represents progress for Hamas. In 2012, when then-Egyptian President Morsi brokered an agreement, Hamas could claim a few minor concessions from Israel (which never really materialized once there was no pressure on Israel to follow through with them). There will be nothing of that sort here, but Hamas seems to be desperately clinging to the hope that it can extract something to base a claim of victory on.
That’s a terrible gamble. It is much more likely that the refusal to agree to a ceasefire is giving Netanyahu exactly what he wants: the chance to deliver a blow to a weakened Hamas regime in Gaza. Hamas has given Netanyahu the means to do this without having to overcome the global opposition that was apparent at the beginning of the current fighting. Their refusal is understandable. Israel has repeatedly failed to live up to prior agreements, and this entire thing does look very much like a setup cooked up by Egypt and Israel.
Still, it seems like the rejection of the ceasefire plays into Netanyahu’s hands even more than going along with it would have. Hamas was faced with two bad options. Some may say they chose the lesser of two evils, but they seem to have opted for the path of salvaging some pride while losing more innocent lives and gaining nothing.
Photo: A school in Gaza after an Israeli bomb attack.
]]>by Shireen T. Hunter
The beleaguered Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, is the latest in the long list of the West’s favorite political leaders turned into pariahs. The conventional wisdom now is that Maliki’s flaws and wrong policies, especially his alienation of the Sunnis and dictatorial style of governance, are at [...]]]>
by Shireen T. Hunter
The beleaguered Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, is the latest in the long list of the West’s favorite political leaders turned into pariahs. The conventional wisdom now is that Maliki’s flaws and wrong policies, especially his alienation of the Sunnis and dictatorial style of governance, are at the root of Iraq’s problems, including its latest troubles with extremist Islamic militants.
Clearly, Maliki has not been a successful prime minister. Yet have his very real and assumed flaws been the only, or even the main, cause of Iraq’s problems today? Could a different person have done a better job? Or have the real culprits been structural problems, Iraq’s long and more recent history, and the policies of regional and international actors? A further question: are the grievances of Iraq’s Sunnis solely attributable to the Shias’ desire to monopolize power? What about the Sunnis’ inability to come to terms with any type of government in which the Shias have a real rather than ceremonial function?
These questions are by no means posed to minimize or underestimate the impact of the current leadership’s mismanagement and mistakes, or the corrosive influence of dissension within Shia ranks among the supporters of Maliki, the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and Ammar al-Hakim, the head of the Islamic Council of Iraq. But if viewed impartially, the weight of evidence shows that other factors have played more substantial roles in causing Iraq’s previous problems and the latest crisis than Maliki’s incompetence and dictatorial tendencies.
The most significant factor behind Iraq’s problems has been the inability of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and its Sunni neighbors to come to terms with a government in which the Shias, by virtue of their considerable majority in Iraq’s population, hold the leading role. This inability was displayed early on, when Iraq’s Sunnis refused to take part in Iraq’s first parliamentary elections, and resorted to insurgency almost immediately after the US invasion and fall of Saddam Hussein. All along, the goal of Iraqi Sunnis has been to prove that the Shias are not capable of governing Iraq. Indeed, Iraq’s Sunni deputy prime minister, Osama al Najafi, recently verbalized this view. The Sunnis see political leadership and governance to be their birthright and resent the Shia interlopers.
The Sunnis’ psychological difficulty in accepting a mostly Shia government is understandable. After ruling the country for centuries, both under the Ottomans and after independence, and after oppressing the Shias and viewing them as heretics and dregs of society, the Sunnis find Shia rule to sit heavily on them. It is thus difficult to imagine what any Shia prime minister could have done — or could now do — to satisfy the Sunnis. For example, during the early years after Saddam’s fall, once they had realized their mistake of abstaining from politics, the Sunnis made unreasonable demands as the price of cooperation, such as taking the defense portfolio. Yet considering what the Shias had suffered under Saddam, there was no possibility that they could agree.
Iraq’s Sunni Arabs have not been alone in undermining the authority of the country’s Shia leadership. Masood Barzani, who dreams of an independent Kurdistan, has also done what he can to undermine the authority of the government in Baghdad, by essentially running his own economic, oil, and foreign policies. A factor in Barzani’s attitude has been his anti-Iran sentiments, which go back to the troubles that his father, Mulla Mustafa Barzani, had with the Shah.
Iraq’s Sunni neighbors, notably Saudi Arabia and Turkey, but also Qatar, also cannot countenance a Shia government in Baghdad. In addition to the anti-Shia impact of the Wahhabi creed that is dominant in Saudi Arabia and among the Qatari leadership, this Sunni animosity has derived from the perception that a Shia government in Iraq would change the balance of regional power in Iran’s favor. Yet Maliki is the least pro-Iranian of Iraq’s Shia leaders, with the possible exception of the now-notorious Ahmad Chalabi. During Saddam’s time, Maliki belonged to the Dawa party, a rival of Iraq’s Islamic Revolutionary Council that was supported by Iran, and he spent more time in Syria than in Iran. This is one reason why the US preferred Maliki to personalities like Ibrahim Jafari.
Moreover, Maliki tried to reach out to Turkey and to other Arab states, including Saudi Arabia. But Turkey snubbed him and supported his rival, Tariq al-Hashimi. The Arab states have also shunned him. Under these circumstances, Maliki had no choice but to move closer to Iran. Yet the idea that he has thus become an Iranian pawn is a myth with no foundation in reality. Even now, Iraq has not reestablished the Algiers Agreement of 1975 that regularized Iraqi-Iranian border disputes, an agreement which, before attacking Kuwait in 1990, Saddam had accepted. Iraq has not signed a peace treaty with Iran and competes with it in courting clients for oil exports. Iraq also has more extensive trade relations with Turkey than with Iran.
In short, by exaggerating the sectarian factor, Iraq’s Sunni neighbors have exacerbated Shia fears and made it more difficult for them to pursue a more inclusive policy vis-à-vis the Sunnis. Further, most killings in Iraq have been in Shia areas, undertaken by Sunni extremists of various kinds who are funded by Sunni governments in the region. The plight of the Shias has also not been limited to Iraq. Similar mistreatment in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan has gone unnoticed by the West, while the exclusion of Iraq’s Sunnis from leadership posts in Baghdad has been blown out of proportion. Western and especially US dislike of Iran has been a major cause for the disregarding of mass killings and assassination of Shias.
America’s conflicting policy objectives in the region have also led it to pursue policies in Iraq that have contributed to current US dilemmas. The most glaring example was the US courting of Sunni insurgents and tribal leaders, both of which were thus emboldened to commit acts such as attacking the Shia shrines in Samara in 2006 and frightening the Shias that America would again betray them as it did at the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Wanting to isolate Iran and perhaps to bring about regime change there, the US has also done virtually nothing to reign in the Saudis and others, including Turkey and Qatar, to prevent them from funding Sunni insurgents. Instead, Washington has blamed Iraqi unrest solely on Iranian meddling. Even today, there is no acknowledgement by the United States that the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) cannot achieve what it has been doing without outside help.
At an even more fundamental level, America’s efforts to achieve too many contradictory and incompatible goals have been at the root of Iraq’s crisis. To date, it has proved to be difficult — indeed impossible — to eliminate Saddam but produce a stable Iraq; to isolate Iran and possibly change its regime; to get rid of Assad in Syria without exacerbating its civil war; to forge a Sunni-Israeli alliance against Shia Iran; and to convince other Shias throughout the region to continue playing second fiddle to the Sunnis.
To summarize, Nouri al-Maliki is certainly flawed and has made many mistakes. But the real culprits have been Iraq’s considerable fault lines, contradictory policies pursued by the West, and the predatory approach of Iraq’s neighbors. Thus even if Maliki is removed from office, Iraq’s situation will not improve unless these fault lines are dealt with and the policies pursued by outside states in Iraq are remedied. Rather, the situation will get much worse because the Shias are most unlikely to once again accept living under a regime that can be characterized as “Saddamism without Saddam” or, worse, what they would consider a Salafi-Takfiri government that considers them heathens deserving death.
This article was first published by LobeLog and was reprinted here with permission.
Photo: President Barack Obama greets Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in the Oval Office of the White House on July 22, 2009. Credit: White House/Pete Souza
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
The comedy of errors that is US involvement in Egypt is reaching new heights. The Obama administration continues to be torn by conflicting preferences and concerns. This week its blunders reached new heights after it blessed the trip of Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham to Egypt. The [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
The comedy of errors that is US involvement in Egypt is reaching new heights. The Obama administration continues to be torn by conflicting preferences and concerns. This week its blunders reached new heights after it blessed the trip of Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham to Egypt. The ensuing farce was inevitable.
The GOP Senators are somewhat less obstructionist than others in their party; they have not always opposed Barack Obama’s policies simply because they were his policies. While many of the current Republican crew are virtually absolute in opposing anything Obama does, McCain, in particular, has only done that most of the time. But they are certainly not Obama’s allies, and, while the administration made it clear that the duo were not their representatives in Egypt, it was almost certain they would only complicate matters. So, they did.
By hypocritically (even if accurately) labelling the military’s ouster of President Mohammed Morsi a coup, McCain and Graham further aggravated the box of Obama’s indecision. If anyone believes the good Senators are sincere in their call for the interim government to engage with the Muslim Brotherhood, they need only recall McCain’s description of them in 2011: “I think they are a radical group that first of all supports Sharia law; that in itself is anti-democratic — at least as far as women are concerned. They have been involved with other terrorist organizations and I believe that they should be specifically excluded from any transition government.” Does anyone seriously believe his views have changed so much in two years?
Moreover, while Graham and McCain made it clear they consider Morsi’s ouster a coup, they also support continuing aid to Egypt, which would be forbidden under US law if there was indeed a military coup.
But McCain and Graham are only one side of the coin. On the other is US Secretary of State John Kerry and his ill-advised statement that the military acted to “restore Egyptian democracy” when they ejected a duly elected president. In other words, we had the administration’s lead diplomat angering the Muslim Brotherhood with his statement, and GOP senators infuriating the military and its current government with their own. A nice double whammy.
As I pointed out last week, this sort of snafu is the result of indecisiveness on Obama’s part regarding how to respond to the events in Egypt. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) represents the old Egypt, the one the US had a very cozy relationship with, and their announced agenda in the wake of deposing Morsi was for a new transition to a civilian government. But despite that, SCAF still ousted a democratically elected president in a military coup. The Muslim Brotherhood was one of a number of so-called moderate Islamist governments coming to power in the region in recent years, and might have represented a worrying trend for the Western interests of a potential region-wide alliance of states including Tunisia, Turkey and possibly others as change continues in the Arab world. The Brotherhood shot themselves in the foot by trying to impose their will on Egypt and attempting to re-establish a nearly dictatorial presidency and failing to take significant action on the economy. It seems, from current polls, that the Brotherhood has a lot less support in Egypt than they once did. But they were ousted in a coup, and while their protests are not winning over hearts and minds, neither is the harsh crackdown by the government.
What the US is seeing now is the potential for the Brotherhood to rebound from this major setback by taking up their familiar position of a besieged minority. Indeed, one of the greatest obstacles to reconciliation in Egypt is the Brotherhood’s willingness to embrace that familiar role again, and the government’s apparent willingness to use excessive force, which will enable the Brotherhood to regain some of the sympathy it has lost, if not now, at least in the long-term.
The military and Brotherhood seem both to be pursuing their agendas while remaining completely deaf to the interests and legitimacy of the other side. Indeed, while the Brotherhood is casting the military as just the latest in a long line of military usurpers in Egypt, the SCAF is portraying its adversary’s actions as a part of a “war on terror”, with the Brotherhood in the role of al-Qaeda. That will resonate in the West, which has a tendency to view all Islamists with the same lens. But such abject demonization is likely to have lasting and divisive effects, not only in Egypt, but throughout an Arab world already seething with conflict.
The words of McCain and Graham have perhaps chilled some of the US’ cozy relationship with the SCAF, but the SCAF leadership is well aware of the fact that the Senators do not speak for the Obama administration. In the end, their work will make Obama’s job a bit harder, mostly because they made the entire United States look foolish and poorly organized.
Kerry’s words, however, will prove to be a much greater impediment to US diplomacy in Egypt. By legitimizing the coup, Kerry may well have eliminated any chance for US mediation toward the goal of a truly inclusive government — the only alternative to anti-democratic rule by iron-fist or more spiralling chaos in Egypt. With the Brotherhood’s supporters continuing their protests, while apparently engendering only minority support among the Egyptian populace for such actions, and the military government continuing — and perhaps soon escalating — its crackdown on the Islamist forces it has recently characterized as terrorist elements, true mediation is needed now more than ever. But the waters are now so poisoned that the US and EU may be unable to help even with pure motives.
Considered together, the words of Kerry, Graham and McCain reflect the confusion of US policy in Egypt. It is an absence of policy, caused by a conflict between a desire to see the Middle East move toward moderate Islamist politics on the one hand and the understanding that a return to dictatorship, and the accompanying crackdowns on Islamists, is not going to bring the stability that, above all else, the West most desires. Those conflicting impulses have paralyzed US policymaking and brought about the comedy of errors we are now witnessing.
Ironically, the Brotherhood and related parties throughout the region were already marginalizing themselves and screwing up their chances at power. All the US and the Egyptian military had to do was let them hoist themselves on their own petard. Even now, freeing Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders in Egypt and allowing the people to vote again can well be expected to produce a very different result than it did in 2011. The deafness of all sides to the other — and the refusal to allow political processes to take their own course — has narrowed the options on all sides, leaving few good ones for anyone, especially the United States.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
It’s time to ask some tough questions about US policy regarding Egypt. The most pressing being what that policy is, exactly?
I agreed with the easily assailable decision by the Obama administration to refrain from labelling the ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi a coup. It still [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
It’s time to ask some tough questions about US policy regarding Egypt. The most pressing being what that policy is, exactly?
I agreed with the easily assailable decision by the Obama administration to refrain from labelling the ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi a coup. It still is my belief that doing so might be consistent with US law, but would not be helpful to Egypt. Instead of taking funding away from the military which, since it now directly controls the Egyptian till, would simply divert the lost funds from other places (causing even more distress to an already reeling Egyptian economy) it would be better to use the aid as leverage to push the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) toward an inclusive political process that would include drafting a broadly acceptable constitution and, with all due speed, re-installing a duly elected civilian government.
Yet, despite rhetoric supporting just such an outcome, the United States has done nothing to push for such an Egyptian future. The withholding of four F-16 fighter planes means nothing; the SCAF knows they will get the planes in due course and they have no immediate need for them. Mealy-mouthed statements from US officials calling for “all sides” to show restraint are boilerplate and meaningless, all the more so in the wake of the massive violence last weekend, where scores of Egyptian supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood were slaughtered.
What is the US’ desired outcome? Surely, the Obama administration is not comfortable with the level of violence we are currently seeing in Egypt. And equally surely, however much SCAF might be the familiar partner — the one we know and who can be counted on to cooperate with US policy initiatives — the administration must realize that a renewal of the sort of military dictatorship embodied by Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak cannot be re-installed permanently in Egypt anymore.
But it is also clear that the United States was not at all comfortable with the Muslim Brotherhood leadership in Egypt, or the rise, swept in by the Arab Awakening, of the moderate, anti-Salafist version of political Islam the Brotherhood represented. (Before there is any confusion, I do not believe the West did anything to hasten the downfall of Morsi in Egypt, nor to create the agitation against similar regimes in Tunisia and Turkey. But neither do I believe that Morsi’s failure elicited anything but satisfaction in Washington.)
The question of the US response to the coup in Egypt is not simply about Egypt. It is about the region more broadly. It is about Tunisia, the Gaza Strip, Syria and Turkey. The desire to pivot away from the Middle East, as well as Obama’s disdain for Bush-style “democracy promotion”, meant the US wouldn’t do much about the spread of political Islam. But when Morsi and, now, the Tunisian Ennahda Party, stumbled badly, they certainly didn’t mind.
The Turkish AKP seemed, at first, to have integrated some liberal values, including neo-liberal economics, with Islamist politics, but that too has frayed in 2013. US discomfort with Turkey was certainly sharpened by Turkish support for the Hamas government in Gaza. But it struck harder as Morsi’s Egypt and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s became closer and, using the historic prestige both countries have in the Muslim world, staked out regional leadership roles. There was every possibility that similar Islamist governments could emerge in Jordan and Syria, along with Libya. In time, the Gulf States could also see similar uprisings (as Bahrain already has) that, if successful, might give rise to Islamist governments. The possibility of that sort of regional unity must have given pause to policymakers in Washington, Jerusalem, London, Paris and even Moscow.
So it is not surprising that the US is lobbing rhetoric, rather than substantive pressure, as SCAF seeks to hammer the Brotherhood back into submission; back into an outlaw role. The declaration by SCAF Commander-in-Chief Abdel Fattah el-Sisi that the crackdown on the Brotherhood was part of a renewed “war on terror” was hardly lost on Western observers. Nor was the accompanying action against Hamas in Gaza, which is of a piece with the domestic battle against the Brotherhood. The US may feel that the SCAF is going too far with its tactics and risking long term instability, but they cannot object to the goal of neutralizing the Brotherhood and similar organizations in the region as a political force.
This is all a serious mis-read of the realities in the Middle East. Morsi brought the strife upon himself, with his bungling governance, his transparent attempt at a power grab and ignoring his campaign promises to create an inclusive government an restrain his own party’s Islamist leanings. The June 30 protest was a very real statement of dissatisfaction.
But since June 30, history has been re-written in Egypt. The Brotherhood was somehow cast as having been an illegitimate ruling party all along. Their electoral victory was supposedly a reflection of the fact that they were the only group that was organized and thus took advantage of hastily scheduled elections. This, of course, completely ignores the fact that the Brotherhood was not the only Islamist party to garner significant support. In fact, 368 of the 508 parliamentary seats went to Islamist parties. Only 115 were garnered by the liberals, centrists and leftists combined. The Egyptian people, having been burned by half a century of secular(ish) dictatorship, wanted to try something new. When that didn’t work, they protested and moved in a different direction. It’s called democracy.
And while June 30 certainly represented widespread dissatisfaction with the Morsi government, the numbers quoted have been called into serious doubt, and it is not at all clear that those demonstrating also supported a coup. What is clear is that the Brotherhood still has significant support in Egypt, along with major opposition. Driving them underground and labelling them terrorists is unlikely to produce a stable Egypt. A better tactic would have been to allow popular disenchantment with the Brotherhood to continue to grow and express itself in the ballot box.
In the last analysis, the US is largely standing by and watching rather than using the leverage it has with the SCAF to push for an inclusive political transition. The hope is surely that a stable Egypt will emerge after a death blow has been dealt to political Islam, not only in Egypt but throughout the region. That hope seems a bit too ambitious. The words of Professor Fawaz Gerges seem to encapsulate the larger view well:
The military’s removal of Morsi undermines Egypt’s fragile democratic experiment because there is a real danger that once again the Islamists will be suppressed and excluded from the political space. The writing is already on the wall with the arrest of Morsi and the targeting of scores of Brotherhood leaders. This does not bode well for the democratic transition because there will be no institutionalization of democracy without the Brotherhood, the biggest and oldest mainstream religiously based Islamist movement in the Middle East… As the central Islamist organization established in 1928, the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood’s first experience in power will likely taint the standing and image of its branches and junior ideological partners in Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and even Tunisia and Morocco. Hamas is already reeling from the violent storm in Cairo and the Muslim Brothers in Jordan are feeling the political heat and pressure at home. The Syrian Islamists are disoriented and fear that the tide has turned against them. The liberal-leaning opposition in Tunisia is energized and plans to go on the offensive against Ennahda. Even the mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Gulen Movement in Turkey are watching unfolding developments in neighboring Egypt with anxiety and disquiet. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to pen the obituary of the Islamist movement.
The US is allowing stability to be sacrificed in the hope that political Islam will be dealt a death blow. It is possible, of course, that its ability to affect SCAF’s behavior is limited, but this seems unlikely. SCAF is dependent on its good relations with the US and Europe; it won’t simply ignore significant pressure from Washington. More likely, that pressure is as absent in private as it obviously is in public. The US will probably pay a long-term price for such a short-sighted strategy. Par for the course in the Middle East. One can only hope that the recent efforts by the European Union, including a visit to Morsi by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, bodes some sort of change in Western policy with Egypt.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
The Turkish government and its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have only themselves to blame for both the widening protests gripping Turkey, and the negative, sometimes distorted, global perception of what they’re doing to their people. The heavy-handed response to what was an isolated demonstration has blown [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
The Turkish government and its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have only themselves to blame for both the widening protests gripping Turkey, and the negative, sometimes distorted, global perception of what they’re doing to their people. The heavy-handed response to what was an isolated demonstration has blown the cork off a pressurized situation in Turkey. The attempted media blackout has only served to magnify global disgust and raised a simplistic view of a very complex dynamic.
The protest that sparked all of the upheaval was a small one. In a sign of the real, underlying issues, the Turkish police reacted to the sit-in at Gezi Park with a large show of force, which prompted expanding and spreading demonstrations. Almost immediately, Turkish activists took to social media, because, miraculously, the protests were completely invisible on most of the major networks in Turkey (as well as, shamefully, some of the international ones). Turkey isn’t Syria, and it’s doubtful that the media blackout — even within the country — was all that effective. You see, Mr. Prime Minister, there is this thing called the internet…
The comparisons to the “Arab Awakening” are somewhat exaggerated, but the dynamic in Turkey is significant for precisely that reason. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) are legitimately in power. Erdogan is not a dictator, he has been elected three times in free and fair elections, and he’s won a bigger plurality each time. Erdogan and the AKP have, in the past, pushed reforms forward and managed a very solid economic recovery.
But in the past couple of years, more and more Turks, particularly those among the “other half” of Turkey that didn’t vote for the AKP in the last election, have grown more nervous. Three broad issues — growing authoritarianism from Erdogan, Turkey’s increasingly partisan role as a regional leader and the heightened influence of religion in Turkish law — have been on a rolling boil in recent years and overflowed in the past week. The Gezi Park protest was merely the triggering point.
Turkey has long struggles with serious shortcomings on significant human rights issues. It is to the AKP’s credit that for much of its first two terms in power, it made strides with a number of them. Notably, upon their initial election, the AKP eased some restrictions on the Kurdish language and culture, and capitalized on the existing cease-fire to ease some of the tensions, although they have gradually risen anew ever since. The AKP brought in neo-liberal economic policies, and in this case they have worked to strengthen an economy that was in severe crisis not long ago. On the other hand, the press, never free, has been increasingly harassed recently.
The hugely excessive police response to the Gezi Park demonstration and subsequent protests cannot be disconnected from the arrogant and tone-deaf response to these events from Erdogan himself. Dismissing the protesters as thugs, radicals and “foreigners” served only to display the very root of the problem with Erdogan. After three successful elections, he believes he has a mandate to lead the country where he sees fit, and need not concern himself with the many millions of Turks who see things differently.
The Syrian uprising is another worrisome issue for many in Turkey. No doubt most would agree that Turkey has a legitimate interest in the outcome in Syria, but so do many states. The question is: what should it do in response to that interest? Many Turks are unhappy with their government’s involvement in the Syrian civil war, and many are particularly concerned about what it means for Turkey’s regional policy. The AKP has a lot in common with the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the region, and has been supporting that piece of the Syrian rebel force. Thus, for many Turks, Turkish involvement in Syria has not just been about unseating Bashar al-Assad or protecting Turkey’s border, but advancing a regional agenda that, while certainly less worrisome than other religious ideologies fighting for supremacy in the Arab world, is not well aligned with Turkish values of secularism. This also casts a pall on what many Turks have been pleased to see as Turkey’s enhanced status in the region.
The increasing influence of religion has manifested itself in recent new laws restricting the sale of alcohol and public displays of affection. One of the points of pride for the AKP has been its ability to blend the strong secular tradition in Turkey with the rising influence of Islam in the country, but these laws have rekindled fears about Erdogan, who was imprisoned in his younger days because of his Islamist views.
Ultimately, all of this feeds into concerns about the upcoming presidential election, scheduled for 2014. Erdogan is hoping to amend the constitution to create a strong presidency that would replace the central position of the prime minister. And, of course, he very much hopes to be that president, a position he could hold for the subsequent decade. It is no wonder that so many in Turkey are concerned about Erdogan’s ambitions and willingness to cede power.
For all of these fears and matters of concern, though, it is important to keep in mind that Turkey is not Syria, nor is it Egypt or Libya. Erdogan is an elected leader, and he has gotten a lot of support in those elections. Whether he still has that support today, though, is a matter of some speculation.
At Al-Monitor, Barbara Slavin ascribes a lot of what has happened in Turkey to Erdogan overstaying his welcome in office. There is certainly a lot of truth in that point. It certainly explains the hubris of Erdogan’s reaction to the protests, the excessive force with which the protests were met from the outset and his attempts to marginalize such large swaths of the Turkish population.
But in some ways, Erdogan and the AKP are victims of their own success. Turkey under Erdogan has been praised by many (myself included) for the progress it made in integrating a large Islamist community with an overriding, and overwhelmingly popular, secular government. Turkey was being pointed to as the model for new governments in the Arab Awakening by some (many of whom, it’s fair to note, were in the US and Europe). As a result, Erdogan seems to have become convinced that it’s his economically and socially conservative base, and his party’s inclination toward a greater role for Islam in Turkish law, that should simply have its way because, after all, those with different ideas keep losing.
Hence these protests. Like those seen in recent years all over the world, including the United States, the groups are diffusive and diverse and there is no structured leadership. The demands are the same as well: more justice, more democracy. But the eagerness to label this as a “Turkish Awakening” misses the fact that Turkey, with all its very deep flaws, is a democracy. Erdogan is a legitimately elected leader, and he can still be voted out. Indeed, he may well have destroyed much of his own legitimacy with his reaction to these demonstrations and thereby endangered his own political future.
Turks are defending and trying to expand their democracy. Erdogan may well have become a threat to that democracy, but he has not destroyed it. The protesters want their press to be free, they want minorities to be fairly treated, they want the secularism that the government has been based on for years to endure (even while accommodating the large Islamist movement) and they want to make sure that even if a party wins a large plurality of the vote, everyone else’s interests won’t become meaningless.
There is more here as well: an objection to the excesses of Erdogan’s neo-liberal policies, even while most Turks understand that the AKP has done a lot of good for the country’s economy. Add to that the continuing march toward democracy from a government that was once a religious empire and later a secular but unstable government that had far too many features of fascism, some of which still remain and are being used by Erdogan (once a victim of that very discrimination); these include the government’s intimidation of the press as well as the misuse of anti-terrorism laws and the harsh discrimination faced by the Kurds, Alevis and many leftists.
Turkey is facing the problems of its past mixed with ongoing growing pains of its very real democracy. The country should be supported, and the goals of the protests need to be recognized as noble ones. The government needs to be rebuked sufficiently to deter it from its violent and anti-democratic course. But Turkey should not be confused with Syria.
Photo: Protesters gather in Taksim Square in Istanbul, not far from Gezi Park, where protests were sparked last week against the government’s most recent urban redevelopment project. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours
]]>At last the Obama Administration has found a reasonable Syria policy. The critics will continue to insist that the US provide arms to the rebels, but it will be difficult to get more traction for this while the initiative with the Russians holds out hopes, although slender, for the beginning of [...]]]>
At last the Obama Administration has found a reasonable Syria policy. The critics will continue to insist that the US provide arms to the rebels, but it will be difficult to get more traction for this while the initiative with the Russians holds out hopes, although slender, for the beginning of a process that could halt the slaughter of Syrian civilians. The present course of events is untenable and at least the President has been given a little breathing room from the charges that his policy has no substance nor evident purpose. Talk is an advance over conflict.
The conference, when it gets underway, will gather in the long shadow of Versailles at the end of WW l that determined the fate from European and American eyes of the vast Ottoman Empire and its multi-ethnic provinces. It could implicitly be a serious examination of the Sykes-Picot treaty that added to Versailles the division of spoils to the French and British empires.The conference, in other words, could be the opportunity for the inhabitants to redress old errors and egregious mistakes that were imposed upon them. Such daunting challenges will not be resolved at the outset nor easily but addressing them is a step forward.
But, before the opening of the conference is even firmly scheduled, the organizers — presumably the US and Russia — face major political and administrative tasks that could threaten its fate. Points of apparent agreement will, like Sisyphus’ burden, need to go up the hill again and again. Seemingly, little matters such as the size of the table, who sits where, allowed time for each participant’s statements, the right of reply and so on can roil the waters (recall the Paris peace talks on Vietnam).
Happily, there are experts who can deal with purely administration issues but the overt and subliminal political issues that will threaten the course of the labours right from the outset need top-level decisions and flexibility from domestic political forces.
The first issue to be handled is agreement by the US and its co-chair, Russia, on how to coordinate their responsibilities — never an easy task and particularly difficult at a time of renewed tension in the bilateral relationship. For Russia, the confab is a golden opportunity to become once again an important player in the Middle East, to reverse, if it can, its loss of influence with the ending of the Cold War. For the US, there is another chance to “lead from behind”, exhibit its renewed relevance in the affairs of this critical area and avoid the decision whether or not to supply lethal weapons to the rebels.
Beyond agreeing on how to divide their joint responsibilities, the parties must also decide on who will be invited to participate either as a principal or in observer status. There is no satisfactory solution to this conundrum. The battle in the conference room will mirror the deadly one within Syria. The representation from the Syrian rebels is a rats’ nest defying any rational decision. There are at least four or more main fighting groups and probably a dozen or more additional armed elements ranging from al-Qaeda terrorists to every shade of Salafist thought, and regional/ethnic loyalty to a local leader. How many seats must be reserved for this babel? How will participation of these disparate groups be established?
How is Hezbollah, along with Iran and Russia — the main outside supporters of the Assad government — to be handled?
Finally, what nations indisputably must be included as participants in addition to the Syrian Government? As a start, the neighboring states, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan will be on the list and it will likely include the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia could face Russian obstruction to balance our likely efforts to deny Iran a seat at the table.
The US faces an extraordinarily difficult dilemma with respect to Iran. Russia has already announced that it will insist that Iran be seated as a full participant and the Chinese might side with the Russians. Will the US risk the future of the conference to keep Iran excluded or will Congress take action demanding our non-appearance if Iran is invited? It could, of course, be an opportunity to recognize the regional importance of Iran and provide, as with the nuclear talks, a pattern of diplomatic contact.
Within the next two years a similar decision will probably be required, if before our departure, the US takes the initiative to get regional assistance for Afghanistan. James Dobbins, the recently appointed Special Envoy for Afghan-Pakistan matters, has indicated in past statements that he believes Iran must be a part of any multilateral determination on Afghanistan’s future.
In recent years, China has invested in the Middle East and is a major petroleum purchaser, particularly from Iran; its actions at the conference will be of special interest. Other than at the United Nations, this will be an opportunity for the the Chinese to play a special role in this turbulent area, once considered as the prerogative of the US with Russia on the edge striving to push-in and become strategically relevant. China may have its own policy of pivot — to the west.
In the weeks before the calling to order, we can expect each element in this vicious struggle to attempt to improve its military position to speak from a position of greater strength. Syrian government forces will undoubtedly continue recent efforts to create an area of firm control along the Mediterranean coast and show the rebels and the nations supporting them that the government has the necessary wherewithal to back its insistence that Assad and the Alawites will not surrender. The rebels will meanwhile continue to clamor for more arms and make an effort to seize more critical territories.
The negotiators, in sum, have a Herculean task in even launching the talks, but hopes for at least an end to the violence and for an uneasy peace are at stake.
Photo: Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (left) holds joint press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Sochi. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe
]]>WASHINGTON, May 18 2013 (IPS) – A nuclear-armed Iran would not pose a fundamental threat to the United States and its regional allies like Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, according to a new report released here Friday by the Rand Corporation.
Entitled “Iran After the Bomb: [...]]]>
WASHINGTON, May 18 2013 (IPS) – A nuclear-armed Iran would not pose a fundamental threat to the United States and its regional allies like Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, according to a new report released here Friday by the Rand Corporation.
Entitled “Iran After the Bomb: How Would a Nuclear-Armed Tehran Behave?“, the report asserts that the acquisition by Tehran of nuclear weapons would above all be intended to deter an attack by hostile powers, presumably including Israel and the United States, rather than for aggressive purposes.
And while its acquisition may indeed lead to greater tension between Iran and its Sunni-led neighbours, the 50-page report concludes that Tehran would be unlikely to use nuclear weapons against other Muslim countries. Nor would it be able to halt its diminishing influence in the region resulting from the Arab Spring and its support for the Syrian government, according to the author, Alireza Nader.
“Iran’s development of nuclear weapons will enhance its ability to deter an external attack, but it will not enable it to change the Middle East’s geopolitical order in its own favour,” Nader, an international policy analyst at RAND, told IPS. “The Islamic Republic’s challenge to the region is constrained by its declining popularity, a weak economy, and a limited conventional military capability. An Iran with nukes will still be a declining power.”
The report reaches several conclusions all of which generally portray Iran as a rational actor in its international relations.
While Nader calls it a “revisionist state” that tries to undermine what it sees as a U.S.-dominated order in the Middle East, his report stresses that “it does not have territorial ambitions and does not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations.”
Further, the report identifies the Islamic Republic’s military doctrine as defensive in nature. This posture is presumably a result of the volatile and unstable region in which it exists and is exacerbated by its status as a Shi’a and Persian-majority nation in a Sunni and Arab-majority region.
Iran is also scarred by its traumatic eight-year war with Iraq in which as many as one million Iranians lost their lives.
The new report comes amidst a growing controversy here over whether a nuclear-armed Iran could itself be successfully “contained” by the U.S. and its allies and deterred both from pursuing a more aggressive policy in the region and actually using nuclear weapons against its foes.
Iran itself has vehemently denied it intends to build a weapon, and the U.S. intelligence community has reported consistently over the last six years that Tehran’s leadership has not yet decided to do so, although the increasing sophistication and infrastructure of its nuclear programme will make it possible to build one more quickly if such a decision is made.
Official U.S. policy, as enunciated repeatedly by top officials, including President Barack Obama, is to “prevent” Iran from obtaining a weapon, even by military means if ongoing diplomatic efforts and “crippling” economic sanctions fail to persuade Iran to substantially curb its nuclear programme.
A nuclear-armed Iran, in the administration’s view – which is held even more fervently by the U.S. Congress where the Israel lobby exerts its greatest influence – represents an “existential threat” to the Jewish state.
In addition, according to the administration, Iran’s acquisition of a weapon would likely embolden it and its allies – notably Lebanon’s Hezbollah – to pursue more aggressive actions against their foes and could well set off a regional “cascade effect” in which other powers, particularly Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt, would feel obliged to launch nuclear-weapons programmes of their own.
But a growing number of critics of the prevention strategy – particularly that part of it that would resort to military action against Iran – argue that a nuclear Iran will not be nearly as dangerous as the reigning orthodoxy assumes.
A year ago, for example, Paul Pillar, a veteran CIA analyst who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, published a lengthy essay in ‘The Washington Monthly’, “We Can Live With a Nuclear Iran: Fears of a Bomb in Tehran’s Hands Are Overhyped, and a War to Prevent It Would Be a Disaster.”
More recently, Colin Kahl, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) who also served as the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy adviser for much of Obama’s first term, published two reports – the first questioning the “cascade effect” in the region, and the second, published earlier this week and entitled “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran,” outlining a detailed “containment strategy” — including extending Washington’s nuclear umbrella over states that feel threatened by a nuclear Iran — the U.S. could follow to deter Tehran’s use of a nuclear bomb or its transfer to non-state actors, like Hezbollah, and persuade regional states not to develop their own nuclear arms capabilities.
In addition, Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst at the Brookings Institution whose 2002 book, “The Threatening Storm” helped persuade many liberals and Democrats to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq, will publish a new book, “Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy”, that is also expected to argue for a containment strategy if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon.
Because both Brookings and CNAS are regarded as close to the administration, some neo-conservative commentators have expressed alarm that these reports are “trial balloons” designed to set the stage for Obama’s abandonment of the prevention strategy in favour of containment, albeit by another name.
It is likely that Nader’s study – coming as it does from RAND, a think tank with historically close ties to the Pentagon – will be seen in a similar light.
His report concedes that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would lead to greater tension with the Gulf Arab monarchies and thus to greater instability in the region. Moreover, an inadvertent or accidental nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran would be a “dangerous possibility”, according to Nader who also notes that the “cascade effect”, while outside the scope of his study, warrants “careful consideration”.
Despite Iran’s strong ideological antipathy toward Israel, the report does not argue that Tehran would attack the Jewish state with nuclear weapons, as that would almost certainly lead to the regime’s destruction.
Israel, in Nader’s view, fears that Iran’s nuclear capability could serve as an “umbrella” for Tehran’s allies that could significantly hamper Israel’s military operations in the Palestinian territories, the Levant, and the wider region.
But the report concludes that Tehran is unlikely to extend its nuclear deterrent to its allies, including Hezbollah, noting that the interests of those groups do not always – or even often – co-incide with Iran’s. Iran would also be highly unlikely to transfer nuclear weapons to them in any event, according to the report.
]]>Listening, on 15 April, to the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on US policy towards Iran put me in mind of the inscription Dante imagined over the entrance to Hell: “Abandon hope all you who enter here”.
There seemed no notion among members of the committee that territories beyond the borders of [...]]]>
Listening, on 15 April, to the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on US policy towards Iran put me in mind of the inscription Dante imagined over the entrance to Hell: “Abandon hope all you who enter here”.
There seemed no notion among members of the committee that territories beyond the borders of the United States of America are not subject to US jurisdiction – still less that reasoned persuasion and reciprocity can be more effective tools for achieving US foreign policy goals than sanctions (how the good Congressmen love sanctions!) and the infliction of pain.
Wendy Sherman, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs who heads the U.S. delegation in the P5+1 negotiations with Iran, must have come away from that hearing with the feeling that she has an impossible task. Congress will howl if the administration makes the slightest concession to secure Iranian agreement to non-proliferation assurances and restrictions on nuclear activities. Yet if Iran is offered nothing in return for measures it deems to be voluntary, because they lie beyond the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it will continue to defy the US and its allies.
Still, it is hard to avoid the thought that the administration could have made more of this opportunity.
Ambassador Sherman’s opening statement contained no reference to the US intelligence community’s confidence that Iran’s leaders have not taken a decision to acquire nuclear weapons. Instead, it referred to the need for Iran to “change course”, which the congressmen could be forgiven for taking as confirmation of their chairman’s opening assertion that Iran is trying to build a nuclear arsenal.
On top of that, Ambassador Sherman fed the Congressmen’s appetite for a penal approach by stressing that the goal of US policy is to have Iran live up to its “international obligations”. The Congressmen were left undisturbed in their conviction that Iran is entirely in the wrong and most certainly should not be rewarded for mending its ways. The opportunity to start helping their Honours to understand that the reality is more complicated went begging.
I hope LobeLog readers who know what lies behind that last sentence will forgive me for explicating it.
Iran’s “international obligations” come in two forms. One lot of obligations stem from the provisions of the NPT. Iran accepts that these are genuine obligations under international law and is ready to comply fully with them without reciprocity. Indeed some observers believe Iran is already fully compliant.
The other lot stem from the provisions of four Security Council resolutions adopted under article 41 of the UN Charter. Iran refuses to accept the legally-binding nature of these, not unreasonably, given that, when they were adopted, the Council had not determined that Iran’s nuclear activities represented a threat to international peace and security. Instead, Iran offers to proceed on the basis of reciprocity, volunteering the steps specified in these resolutions in return for recognition that Iran has NPT rights as well as obligations, and also for the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions.
The third missed opportunity was ethical in nature. The administration had no need to indulge in misrepresentation and distortion but succumbed to temptation.
The Congressmen were told that Iran is “isolated”. In reality, Iran maintains full diplomatic relations with some 100 states. Iran’s Foreign Minister is received courteously almost everywhere in Asia and Europe apart from the US, the UK and Israel. Just this week Iran assumed the chair of the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Currently Iran presides over the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement
Ambassador Sherman implied that responsibility for the appalling civil conflict in Syria must be ascribed to Iran, “a destabilising influence across the entire Middle East”. The initial supply of weapons to the Syrian opposition by Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia was not mentioned. Some Middle Eastern states are allowed to have interests beyond their borders, it seems, and others are not.
Oh, and in Syria all the violence against “the Syrian people” is being inflicted by the Assad regime, supported by its Iranian ally. Perish the thought that the opposition has shed a single drop of Syrian blood!
Most Europeans yearn for the objectivity and ethical agnosticism that underlay the US opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union, and the final flurry of US/USSR agreements heralding the end of the Cold War. That sort of objectivity should come naturally, one might think, when the adversary is Iran, a state so very much weaker than the US. Alas, the opposite seems to be the case!
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