Marc Lynch's Blog, page 102

On that plan to arm Syrian rebels

My column this week looks at the debate over the revelations that last summer the White House blocked a proposal by the Pentagon, Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus to arm Syria's rebels.   I argue that this proposal was very much an "Option C", a way to appear to be doing something but not something which anybody really believed would work.  That the idea was floated should shock nobody, but it's a pleasant surprise that the administration managed to push it back.  The proposal emerged at exactly the time when it should have: after the failure of Kofi Annan's peace initiative, when new ideas were needed.  And it was rejected just as it should have been when closer analysis suggested strongly that it wouldn't work.  This isn't a story of a dysfunctional process, it suggests that something worked. 

This is only a placeholder post for blog readers that the column's been published; discussion and commentary will follow later.   I'll only note here that this is obviously part of a long, ongoing debate.  I first made many of these observations about arming the Free Syrian Army almost exactly one year ago, and the debate has obviously continued more or less continuously.  My column a few weeks ago focused on how the changing situation inside of Syria should affect these policy debates, and a robust debate followed. 

My argument then, and now, was that the arguments against arming the Syrian rebels were now weaker simply because most of the negative effects of militarization had already manifested: the political horizon shut down, power devolved to the men with guns, proxy warlordism, massive humanitarian suffering.  This is much of what opponents of arming the FSA had hoped to avoid.  Now that the Syrian conflict is fully militarized, the arguments for managing that process correspondingly strengthened:  better a coordinated than an uncoordinated flow of weapons, better an arms flow attached to a coherent political strategy and legitimate emergent institutions than the alternative. 

But at the same time, we shouldn't exaggerate what providing arms would actually achieve:  an American flow of arms would not likely buy enduring influence with proxies, end the war quickly, crowd out competitors, or drive away the Islamist trend among the opposition.  Even if the negatives of arming the rebels can no longer be avoided, the positives aren't nearly as great as promised. 

Anyway, go read my column over at the FP main page. As I have been doing for the last few weeks, I will link to or publish the best of the responses and reactions I receive to the column -- so send me your thoughts over the next few days if you'd like to participate in the debate!

Round One of the Egypt Policy Challenge!

Last week, Egyptian human rights activist Bahieddin Hassan
penned an open
letter to Barack Obama which asked "that spokespeople and officials in your
administration stop commenting on developments in Egypt." After reciting the
liberal narrative on what ails Egypt (short version: the Muslim Brotherhood),
he concluded that "as long as they cannot speak the truth about what is
happening in Egypt," the United States should simply "keep silent."  He must therefore have been very pleased
with President Obama's State of the Union Address, which devoted only one brief
passage to Egypt and to the broader challenges in the Arab world. Who says we don't listen to Arab
liberals? 

Well, as they say, sometimes
you can get what you want and still not be happy.  Here's all Obama had to say about Egypt
and the Arab uprisings last night:  

"In the Middle East, we will stand with
citizens as they demand their universal rights, and support stable transitions
to democracy.  The process will be messy, and we cannot presume to dictate
the course of change in countries like Egypt; but we can - and will - insist on
respect for the fundamental rights of all people." 

Now, in my view that's pretty much where the U.S. position
should be: not seeking to dictate outcomes or take sides, avoiding the mistake
of constantly inserting itself unproductively or even counterproductively into
the daily turbulence of Egyptian politics, supporting the consolidation of
democratic institutions and laying out a normative benchmark on fundamental
universal rights.  Sure, I'd like
to see this stated more prominently and forcefully, with a fully
articulated strategy and vision for engagement and promoting democratic
change - but the State of the Union probably wasn't the time or place for that.

Still, his brief
comment, buried deep in the speech, is unlikely to satisfy an Egypt policy
community or an Egyptian public which generally wants to see something
more.  But what, exactly?  On February 1, I put out a friendly
challenge to the policy community to specify what precisely this more
robust policy might be.   I
don't think that the policy debate has really engaged with how the radically
changed Egyptian political landscape affects the value of the  standard toolkit of democracy promotion
- pro-democracy rhetoric, support for civil society organizations, and using
aid as leverage.  So I posed six
questions:  how to deal with
Islamists likely to fare well in elections; how to effectively support liberals
in the actually existing Egyptian political arena; how to differentiate between
supporting the democratic process and supporting the current government;
whether conditionality on military aid would have an effect given the current
political role of the SCAF; whether conditionality on economic aid was
appropriate at a time of economic crisis; and how to engage with a suspicious
and often hostile Egyptian public.

I got fewer responses from the policy community than I had
hoped for, but we're all very busy. 
I did get quite a few variations on the "we shouldn't be trying to
promote democracy" and "the U.S. isn't really interested in democracy" themes, which
are defensible positions but don't answer the questions posed. Egyptians seemed far
more likely than American policy analysts to offer some version of "Washington
should just butt out of Egyptian affairs." 

The most common
answer (for a good example see Juul below) was to more forcefully, consistently and vocally call out Morsi's
government when it abused democratic procedures and human rights.  I agree completely that such public
rhetoric should be deployed (I quite liked the consisently excellent Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner's comments today), but let's be honest: it probably wouldn't actually affect very much, it only
opens up the obvious next question of matching words with deeds, and nobody
seems to notice much when the U.S. does issue such criticisms (for instance, Ambassador
Anne
Patterson's critical comments in Alexandria this week, widely seen as a
departure, were actually virtually identical to Hillary
Clinton's comments in the same city last July). I'd like to see a bit more thinking here about step two:  after we've issued these public criticisms of the Muslim Brotherhood, or recognized their unconstructive role, what next?  What is meant to follow from this recognition or from the public rhetoric?  

At any rate, here are some of the best of the responses I
received: Elijah Zarwan gives sharp responses to five of the six
questions;  Peter Juul (on behalf
of the excellent team at the Center for American Progress) calling for more
public criticism of Muslim Brotherhood mistakes; Jeb Ober of Democracy
International calls to support liberal organizations and trends, but not
parties; and Joshua Slepin points to more effective ways to leverage ties to
Egypt's military.

[[BREAK]]

 

Elijah Zarwan,
Cairo-based analyst

1. The Islamists.    Whatever US
attitudes toward the Brotherhood, calls for barring its political party from
elections or refusing to deal with elected Brotherhood politicians would be
counterproductive and frankly obscene, given the solid relationship with the
previous dictatorial regime. Dropping relations with an elected government
after maintaining close ties with an unelected, corrupt, and often brutal
dictatorship is no way to support democracy. If the government of Egypt -- any
government of Egypt -- backslides on human rights or on democratic values (as
the current government has), the United States should certainly continue to
speak out, forcefully and clearly, but in the context of a frank disagreement
among partners with a shared interest in Egypt's prosperity and stability. The
old adage that in politics there are no permanent friends, only permanent interests,
applies: A stable, prosperous Egypt with regular, peaceful rotation of power
is, above all, in Egyptians' interests, but also in Americans' interests. It is
in no one's interest to see Egypt fall. If an Egyptian government -- any
Egyptian government -- makes serious mistakes, the United States may certainly
express its alarm. But such messages are more likely to be received if there is
an interlocutor on the other end of the line. 

2.  Supporting Liberals.   US support -- overt or covert -- for secular Egyptian
political parties would be the surest way to ensure their failure. These
parties must already refute charges of trying to implement a foreign agenda and
of representing a westernized elite. Tarring them by association with the
United States, which remains broadly unpopular in Egypt among seculars and
Islamists alike, would be counterproductive. US politicians and officials
should absolutely continue to meet with and to advise the opposition, as they
should absolutely continue to meet with and advise the government, but material
support is a waste of political and financial capital. Few of the good
civil-society groups accept US government funding, on principle and out of fear
of criticism and legal reprisals. In the current moment, the US could best
support Egyptian civil society by expressing its concerns about the current,
restrictive draft NGO law, which human rights groups have correctly decried as
more restrictive than the law it would replace. 

3.  The Process.   Accepting
the results of elections does indeed risk being seen as support for the
victors. Many of the Brotherhood's opponents, including intelligent,
well-informed people, continue to believe that Shafiq won the presidential
elections but that the United States interceded on behalf of the Brotherhood.
This is perhaps unavoidable. Again, the United States can best support minority
rights in Egypt and respect for fundamental human rights by continuing to speak
about these issues, in public and in private. The current Egyptian government
has repeatedly stressed its commitment to international treaties. That is
generally taken as a byword for one treaty: that with Israel. US policy should
reflect an equal concern for Egypt's human-rights commitments. 

4.  Conditionality on military aid.  Threatening the
Brotherhood with the prospect of a cut to US military aid is in effect
threatening the Brotherhood with the prospect of a military coup, which would
be an inherently undemocratic outcome. Moreover, the US should not be in the
business of making threats it cannot realistically keep. As the question notes,
most of the money in US military aid changes hands in Washington; it is equally
a subsidy to the US military-industrial complex, funded by the American
taxpayer, as it is a strategic and foreign policy tool. The challenge for US
policymakers during this turbulent time will be to maintain good relations with
Egypt, the state and the people, without appearing to enter an impassioned
domestic political struggle. Military-to-military ties are an important
component of that relationship, but need not be the only component, or even the
backbone of that relationship. It is in the US interest to broaden and deepen
its ties to the nation of Egypt. Perhaps the correct approach is to continue to
foster ties on many levels: business-to-business, legislature-to-legislature,
jurist-to-jurist, student-to-student, scientist-to-scientist, farmer-to-farmer,
and religious-leader-to-religious-leader. 

5.  Conditionality on economic assistance.

Egypt's
economic crisis, and US influence in the Bretton Woods institutions,
superficially presents an opportunity for leverage. It is a dangerous game,
however. Since the 2011 uprising, the specter of economic collapse has hovered
menacingly in the middle-ground. It is now more immediate. Should the feared
economic meltdown occur, the results could be severely destabilizing, with
little guarantee that whoever succeeds the current government would pursue
policies more palatable to foreign governments or institutions. Acute economic
hardship and a breakdown in state services risk producing a sentimentality for
the old regime and undermining prospects for democratic reform. 

 

 

Peter Juul, Center
for American Progress:

The ongoing
political and security crisis in Egypt has spilled a lot of virtual ink in
the policy community here in Washington (see Brian Katulis, Ken Sofer, and my  take on the situation). We see Egypt
undergoing a perfect storm of political, security, and economic crises that
President Mohamed Morsi and the ruling Muslim Brotherhood have greatly
contributed to with their inept, self-interested approach to governance and
political transition over the last year. But the current crisis shouldn't be
cause for rash action by the United States - financial assistance shouldn't be
abruptly cut off, and the United States should maintain support for Egypt in
international financial institutions like the IMF. At the same time, however,
we argue that the Obama administration should respond more vocally than it has
to date to actions and rhetoric of President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood
that undermine the prospects for an inclusive political transition.

While Marc
Lynch's analysis ultimately delivers an overall recommendation similar to
ours - don't rashly cut off or otherwise reconfigure U.S. assistance to Egypt -
it comes from an analysis that appears too eager to absolve the Muslim
Brotherhood of its large role in Egypt's current mess and insists too hard that
the Obama administration hasn't made mistakes in its handling of the Muslim
Brotherhood and President Morsi.

Lynch's argument appears to be directed at those analysts who
contend that the Obama administration isn't being supportive enough of Egyptian
democracy or non-Islamist political parties and movements or hard enough on the
Brotherhood and President Morsi. (This
piece by Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is a
case in point.) He correctly notes that, contrary to the rumors that swirl
around the Middle East (and among more extreme conservatives here in the United
States), the Obama administration is no more "backing" President Morsi and the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt than it is "backing" Prime Minister David Cameron
and the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom. And he's right that the non-Islamist
opposition in Egypt is weak, fragmented, and feckless, and therefore unable for
the time being to present an effective political challenge to the Brotherhood
under normal circumstances like parliamentary elections.

But Lynch's analysis founders on the false dichotomy he
posits between two analyses of the current situation in Egypt. One the one
hand, he argues, are analysts like Trager who see the Muslim Brotherhood
driving to dominate Egyptian state and society by authoritarian means. This group,
Lynch says, wants the United States to distance itself from President Morsi and
the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government, support Egypt's fractious
non-Islamist opposition, and condition American aid on democratic and inclusive
government. On the other hand, Lynch sketches out what is presumably his own
position: a somewhat sympathetic view of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government
as a victim of circumstances largely out of its control. This government is
"weak, ineffective and paralyzed," can't control the bureaucracy, can't provide
basic security, and remains fearful of the military.

But Lynch's dichotomy is itself founded on a series of false
dichotomies.  There is no good
reason to assume that the propositions that the Egyptian government is "weak,
ineffective and paralyzed" and that the Muslim Brotherhood is attempting to
dominate the process of political transition and expand its control over the
Egyptian state are mutually exclusive. They can, in fact, be complementary -
the Muslim Brotherhood may be attempting to dominate the transition process and
Egyptian state because it is weak,
ineffective and paralyzed. The weaker President Morsi feels, the more important
it will be for him and the Brotherhood to extend and consolidate their control
over state and society. And this attempt itself fuels both active and passive
opposition to the Brotherhood among Egyptians.

Ultimately, though, the main flaw with Lynch's analysis is
that it fails to take into account the rather large role the Brotherhood and
President Morsi have played in creating Egypt's current predicament. The
Brotherhood-dominated parliament - nearly half the seats in the legislature are
filled by members of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party - failed not
once but twice to produce an inclusive Constituent Assembly to draft the new
Egyptian constitution. And when non-Islamists began withdrawing from the
Assembly in November and Egyptian courts threatened to dissolve it yet again,
Morsi granted himself wide-ranging powers immune from judicial review that gave
a now even-more Islamist-dominated Assembly cover under which to rush through a
constitution.

While Lynch admits the Muslim Brotherhood has "performed
abysmally in power," his overall analysis ignores the extent to which President
Morsi and the Brotherhood are themselves part of the problem. The Brotherhood's
exceedingly poor management of the constitution drafting process - in
particular the debacle of President Morsi's decree and the rushed passage of
the constitution - has contributed mightily to the current crisis of political
legitimacy President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated legislature now
face. Throughout 2012, the Brotherhood gave the appearance of riding roughshod
over other the interests and concerns of other political parties and societal
groups - non-Islamists in particular. In an era in which there are multiple
centers of power in Egypt (as we
at the Center have argued for quite some time), the Brotherhood's failure
to govern in an inclusive manner - the negative circumstances in which it has
had to operate notwithstanding - was bound to create some sort of reaction, if
not precisely the one we're seeing on the streets of Egypt today.

Lynch's ultimate policy recommendations - "Stop the crisis,
fix the institutions, stabilize the economy" - are sound, but impossible to
accomplish given the way the Brotherhood has behaved in power over the last
year. They have shown no sign they are ready to be part of the solution rather
than part of the problem. Neither winning a legitimate election, nor a
fragmented opposition, nor a still-powerful military establishment absolves the
Brotherhood of its manifest failures in governance and shepherding a political
transition.

And while, as noted earlier, Lynch's ultimate general
recommendation - don't do anything rash - is in sync with those Brian,
Ken, and I proposed, the other general recommendation that the Obama
administration should keep doing what it has been doing is flawed. Lynch
rightly notes that Obama administration officials have exhorted Egypt's new
leaders to adhere to universal values like human rights and democracy. But
these exhortations - most definitely defensible at the time - have not been
matched with criticisms of Egyptian missteps, most notably during what we
called "the muted U.S. response to President Morsi's decree." Relying on
exhortations has not worked to shape, change, or constrain President Morsi's
and the Muslim Brotherhood's negative behavior thus far, and sharper criticisms
of their unhelpful and damaging actions would at very least help dispel notions
in Egypt and the wider region that the United States wants the Muslim
Brotherhood in charge of Egypt.

In short, Lynch posits a false dichotomy of analytical
frameworks for Egypt that ultimately lets the Muslim Brotherhood and President
Morsi off the hook for their large contributions to Egypt's current unrest. And
while we arrive at the same place in terms of not rashly changing our aid
relationship to Cairo, we differ in that we believe that seeing the Muslim
Brotherhood and President Morsi as part of the problem of Egypt's multiple
crises is critical to adjusting U.S. policy going forward. Exhortations to good
behavior are no longer adequate given a year's worth of ill will the Muslim
Brotherhood has accumulated as a result of its behavior in power.

 

Jed Ober, Director of
Programs, Democracy International

The short answer is, I think, that
leftists organizations want our support, but leftist political parties do not.
Shortly thereafter the fall of Mubarak I spent a significant amount of time in
Egypt talking to such individuals and organizations. It's important to make a
distinction here between Egyptian civil society and Egyptian political parties
and political organizations. Egyptian political parties and organizations are
wary to engage with U.S. democratic development organizations and are not
likely to accept such support. It's not that they don't want political advice
and guidance, it's that they don't want it from us for of fear alienating their
domestic constituency which would see such assistance as foreign interference
and as an example of foreign agents challenging Egypt's sovereignty. Egyptian
civil society is not averse, however, to working with American based
organizations and receiving assistance from USAID, MEPI, or other U.S. donor
organizations. Based on this reality, it would be smart for the U.S. to
continue to provide assistance to such organizations, albeit perhaps in a more
strategic way. Civil society assistance is often given through funding
mechanisms with broad scopes. USAID and MEPI would be well suited to think more
strategically about such assistance in Egypt and focus more on targeted
advocacy initiatives as opposed to broader civic participation activities. One
area of focus could be on organizations that aggregate and advocate for
specific interests - such as labor or trade unions - and thus engage citizens
in the political process in terms they can understand personally.



The Islamists?



We can't "oppose" the Muslim Brotherhood while supporting democracy
in Egypt, particularly if they continue to win Egyptian elections, as seems
likely to be the case. That policy is likely to sow more discontent in Egypt
and throughout the Middle East and will trigger a backlash throughout the
region similar to what we saw after the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections.
We must support the expansion of democratic freedoms and respect the results of
elections in Egypt and elsewhere, or else our ability to engage in democratic
development in the Middle East will wane. At the same time, however, we must be
willing to speak out when such rights and freedoms are threatened, as the
administration has done at times. Targeted support to civil society and other
interest groups is the best way to support opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood
and not necessarily threaten the potential for a productive working
relationship with the current Egyptian government.  We also must find a way to employ a more nuanced policy that
specifically empowers moderate voices in Freedom and Justice and more generally
recognizes the reality of political Islam. This is where the most thought and
work is needed.

 

Joshua
Slepin, Whitman College and independent researcher

The Egyptian military is one of the few
Egyptian institutions with which we have deep ties and long experience, though
Operation Bright Star and other initiatives. The US does not have much ability
to effect change (for the better or otherwise) in Egypt, but it should be able
to leverage military ties (via aid and other, less exploitative means) to
quietly work towards a beneficial situation. The SCAF has handed things off,
but it is still part of the regime - maybe the real regime, depending on how
you want to look at it - and the need to appease its top leaders is still real.
The US has never been squeamish about working with despicable parties, so I'm
not sure why either Islamist governments or publicly obstreperous militaries
would be different. It seems to me that the biggest obstacle is that by intent,
most of the US-Egyptian military relationships are one-sided. Egyptian military
personnel have long been ordered not to give too much away to their US
counterparts, and this holds true for informal friendships as well.
Consequently, we only have vague notions of how the military thinks. Correcting
this imbalance is the real condition that needs to be addressed for any
military aid to have effects beyond simply improving Egypt's military prowess
or largess. 



Beyond the military, and touching upon some of the other issues you've raised,
I'd recommend the US working for a Peace Corps presence in Egypt. Like the
above, the Peace Corps creates personal ties that over the long run do more to
promote friendship and US value-sharing, and even create the institutions and
organizations that the US may one day be able to leverage, than most other
diplomatic or economic means. A Peace Corps mission could help in shoring up
education and health systems badly in need of help, and at a fraction of the
cost of other solutions. It may also be able to operate "under the
radar," without raising hackles like more overtly political organizations
(NDI, IRI, or even USAID).

***

Thanks to all who participated, over Twitter or email or in person, and I'm completely open to offering a Round Two if more of you would like to offer your thoughts!

Oh, and on getting what you want, who could forget Pope Cerebus... thanks to whoever uploaded this.

Reactions and Responses: Twitter Devolutions

My column last week, Twitter
Devolutions: How Social Media is Hurting the Arab Spring, stirred up more
than the usual amount of discussion and responses.  Thanks to all of you who tweeted it, retweeted it, and
offered your thoughts.  My purpose
in writing Twitter
Devolutions wasn't to blame the internet for all the current problems
in Egypt or Syria, any more than earlier essays gave social media all the
credit  It was to push for a more
complete account of the specific ways in which the new internet based media
impact politics for better and for worse.  [[BREAK]]

Twitter Devolutions built
upon several earlier articles, some of them through the "Blogs and Bullets"
program at the United States Institute for Peace with an array of co-authors including Henry Farrell, John Sides, Sean Aday, and Deen Freelon. Our initial Blogs and Bullets
report, "New
Media in Contentious Politics", published in 2010 - well before the Arab
uprisings - had laid out five distinct levels at which social media might have
observable impacts on politics: individual attitudes and competencies;
intergroup relations, from civil society to sectarian or identity divides;
collective action and protest organizing; regime surveillance and control; and
external attention.  Our second B+B
report, "New
Media and Conflict after the Arab Spring", argued that social media had a
greater impact on shaping international attention to the uprisings than it did
on the organization of the protests themselves.   

Both of those reports highlighted many of the potential
negative effects of social media on transitional politics - polarization,
privileging protest over civil society and party building, transient attention,
regime backlash. Those potential impacts shouldn't have been a surprise, but they often got short-changed by the more optimistic narratives or by the many detailed empirical studies focused exclusively on the moment of revolutionary change.  Almost all
serious analysts recognize those realities, with the stylized debate between
so-called cyber-utopians and truth-telling cyber-skeptics being mostly for
show. But in practice, it seems, most research and analysis still seemed to
focus on the "positive" manifestations. 

My outlining of the negative impacts of social media on the
Arab uprisings shouldn't be taken too far, however.  I believe that the underlying
transformation of the Arab public sphere enabled by the radical, rapid
spread of new information technology represents the single most enduring and
profound change of the last decade. It is one of the primary obstacles to the
return of traditional Arab authoritarianism, and to the emergence of a new
Islamist domination.  The effects of
that structural change, like those of any structural change, are complex and
unpredictable, and can't be reduced to reassuring narratives of
"democratization" or frightening narratives of "state collapse."  The new information environment
empowers politics, which do tend to
be messy and contentious and unsatisfying.  That's good, but it doesn't guarantee any particular
outcome.

One other point, which emerged at the McGill conference
where I first presented the essay. 
My analysis of how social media empowers activism more than it does
civil society building or political party formation, and that many activists
will continue to prefer street politics to democratic politics for the
forseeable future, does not mean that
I see no value to activism. Far from it. 
Indeed, in the absence of legitimate institutional channels for
political participation in places like Egypt (which still doesn't have an
elected Parliament) such activism remains the primary check on state power.  The persistent, effective monitoring and
publicizing of human rights abuses is a great example of a core contribution of
activists (online and off) which neither depends upon nor diminishes democratic
participation.  But I also don't
think that such activism can substitute
for democratic institutions.  The
hope would be that a robust civil society would take root in support of such
democratic politics, the fear is that they become rivals.

But enough from me. 
I received some extremely thoughtful responses to the column. I was
particularly taken by this email from Alec Ross, Senior Adviser for
Innovation, U.S. Department of State and one of the key architects of the
American strategy for digital diplomacy: 

"I believe that the
arguments in this essay are sound and almost entirely accurate. Unfortunately,
social media has proven to be more effective at tearing down leaders and institutions
down than building them up. There have been notable exceptions in the USA and
abroad, but they require the hard work of institution and leadership
development (even if that leadership is nodal and networked vs. individual and hierarchical).
The failure for that to occur to this point helps explain events as they
currently stand."  

That's an
important set of marching orders for those such as outgoing Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton who believe that nurturing internet
freedom is a key component of U.S. foreign policy.

Below, I feature some of the best responses to my column in
what I hope will become a regular "responses and reactions" feature.  All are published with the permission
of the authors.  Without further
ado... Ethan Zuckerman on social media mechanisms, Amal Hanano on the
distinctiveness of the Syrian experience, Hisham al-Miraat on Moroccan
frustration, and Brian Ulrich on historical comparisons.  

 

Ethan Zuckerman
(@ethanz), MIT Media Lab and
author of the forthcoming Rewired:
Digital Cosmopolitans in an Age of Connections:

What I
found helpful about your post was the willingness to move beyond a "social
media topples governments"/"social media empowers dictators"
dichotomy that's unhelpfully dominated debate in this space. Social media had
some positive impacts in the Arab Spring - I think it was critical in spreading
stories from within Tunisia, but I think Al Jazeera was probably more powerful
in reaching audiences throughout the region. And there are cases where social
media was likely damaging, even as protests unfolded, tipping authorities off
to protester's movement, and allowing governments to create astroturf
campaigns, as in Bahrain.

Where
almost everyone goes wrong in their analysis is in trying to overgeneralize
positive or negative impacts of social media. At the same time, it's hard to
learn from multiple takeaways. I wonder whether a formulation offered by Zeynep
Tufekci is helpful. She suggests that social media amplifies preferences. When those preferences are largely in sync -
it's time to oust Mubarak - we can see dramatic change. When those preferences
aren't in sync - do we want an Islamist or secular leadership to replace
Mubarak - what may be amplified is conflict and dissent. Like all
generalizations, this one may also be overbroad, but it offers one way of
thinking of a throughline connecting your helpful insights.

 

Amal Hanano (@AmalHanano), Syrian
writer

Your question, "Is Twitter helping to kill the
revolutions?" regarding the negative effects of social media on the Arab
uprisings, two years in, is a valid one. But as we have been constantly
reminded on how one Arab country differs from another Arab country, I must now
remind you: Egypt is not Syria. Your description of the Egyptian opposition's
pre-revolution political scene is an accurate one, the activists were
organized, connected, and most of all known, not only to foreign journalists
but to each other.

I'm sorry that Syrian social media activity is seen
as "divisive" and "unpleasant." I also apologize that our Twitter feeds were
flooded with videos of slaughtered children and tortured men instead of the
inspiring chants of Yemenis and Egyptians. And of course, there's the question
of credibility. Who are these unknown people who suddenly appeared on Twitter
and Facebook with pseudonyms and access to up-to-the-moment news from Syria?
What are these thousands videos that they post daily, that tell the same narrative
over and over for two years straight? And why didn't we meet these people the
last time we hung out in Damascus?

The reason why people like you didn't meet people
like us before is the same reason why Egypt isn't Syria: we didn't know we existed. The Syrian uprising is about
much more than toppling the Assad regime. After almost two years, we can now
look back and see who we have become: a society that has found its collective
voice for the first time. And after 40 years of silence, we have much to say
(and thus tweet).

Over the course of the revolution, the way we use
social media has changed. Many of us connect now with each other in other ways
than the anonymous Twitter handle we started with. We chat on Facebook, What's
App, Viber, and sometimes our cell phones.

As you say at the end of your article, empowering
people's voices to counter authoritarian silence is one of the Arab uprisings'
biggest achievements. Syrians are tired of the political opposition's endless
and public social media bickering, and some are vexed that the Syrian National
Coalition leader, Mouaz al-Khatib, announced his conditional "dialogue with the
regime" plan on Facebook, one day before an official NC meeting. (Naive or
brilliant? We're Syrian. We're still debating that. On Facebook!) For two
years, the international community condescendingly demanded the opposition have
a united voice. The world seems to be frustrated by this new, unmanageable crop
of Syrians they never had heard of 
- each with a different idea (and some, an agenda) for Syria's future.
It's complicated. We all know, as you state in your article, regional politics
of interest and not opposition fractures, is what dictates what's going on in
Syria today.

Syrians have found their voice and they found each
other. It was done by rebuilding their own (virtual) society and reclaiming
their media. This applies to Syrians across the spectrum from loyalists to
opposition. But we all owe it to the revolution. Tweeting was just a tool.

 

Hisham al-Miraat, Moroccan blogger, Global Voices Online

At the hottest hours of the Arab revolutions, social media sometimes
played a distorting part. It especially magnified the role of Egypt at the
expense of smaller but equally significant theaters of political and social
tension. The premise was that whatever happens in Cairo it will have ripples
all over the place. This drove journalists to assume that it was OK to focus
almost entirely on Egypt and pay only occasional attention to what was
happening elsewhere. It created an quasi addictive relationship: Tweeps and
bloggers in Egypt on the one hand, realized that the more dramatic their
account of the situation the more attention from international media they will
get, and journalists on the other, who couldn't get enough of it. It was a
bubble waiting to burst. "If a fly dies in Tahrir, CNN will certainly send
someone to cover the story," one frustrated Moroccan activist once tweeted.

At the height of their own struggle against dictatorship, Moroccan
members of the February 20 movement (a pro-democracy group, considered the
extension of the Arab spring) were craving for half the coverage Egyptians were
getting. They felt they deserved more attention and many believed that more
coverage could have helped them connect with their middle classes. Once the
dust of the revolution settled in Cairo, Tunis and Sanaa, revolution fatigue
started setting in. Bitter, irreconcilable ideological differences started
to emerge. By then the wind of the Arab revolution had ceased to blow and there
was no story of peaceful change to cover.

 

Brian
Ulrich, blogger
and Assistant Professor of History, Shippensburg University,

The communities that develop in new communication
environments tend to be simple actualizations of existing levels of
identity.  Muslims might not have though much about the idea of the umma before the late 1800's, but they
definitely had the sense that such a thing was out there and that they were
part of it.  Similarly, media such as Nasser's Voice of the Arabs and today's al-Jazeera
might have brought more people in touch with a common Arab experience, but they
did not create Arab identity, and in fact built on what was already there.



So when it comes to social media, we should not be surprised if what we see is
an amplification of existing identities and the potential for conflict that
entails.  Such media, furthermore, is not unidirectional, but create by an
array of individuals, meaning that it makes sense that it would fracture along
the lines of the existing potential identities within society, and that insofar
as people wind up relying on it, there develops a sense of epistemic closure
similar to what some have seen in the recent American media scene, where some
get their "information" entirely from e-mail forwards and social
media posts.

 

That Column About Twitter and the Arab Uprisings

This is just a placeholder post to point blog readers to my weekly column:  "Twitter Devolutions: How Social Media Hurt the Arab Spring." It's based in part on the talk I gave yesterday at McGill University, which hopefully will be available on video soon.  The premise is simple: if we accept that social media played some part, however small, in the Arab uprisings, then what role might it have played in the turbulence and struggles which have followed?   More discussion to come, as I take in the various responses from Twitter and the blogs, but for now I hope you'll go read "Twitter Devolutions"!

The Egypt Policy Advice Challenge

I've had some great feedback already on this week's FP column, What We Talk About When We Talk about Supporting Egyptian Democracy (Alt-T).  I'm not going to summarize the rather lengthy article here -- just go read it, please!  When you're done come on back, because I'd like to throw out a real, not rhetorical, challenge to those who
want the United States to effectively support democracy in Egypt
(that's not to deny the legitimacy of those who don't think we should be
promoting democracy there for one reason or another --- that's just not
today's question).  

Before I get to the challenge, one quick response to an objection raised by my right honorable friends Michael Wahid Hanna and Issandr el-Amrani. They argue that whatever it might have said at other times, the Obama administration badly misplayed its response to Morsi's November 22 power grab.   I don't really dispute their read of the initial response -- I think the administration was still primarily focused on Gaza at that point and didn't catch the significance of Morsi's domestic move quickly enough.  But I don't think that the overall trend of two years can be judged by one day, and would continue to argue that the administration has been far more consistent in its public and private support for Egyptian democracy than is generally remembered.  But still, point taken -- that was not part of my highlight reel. 

OK, now to the challenge.  I believe that most of the academic and policy community in Washington seriously wants to support democacy in Egypt, believes it to be both normatively valuable and important to American national interests, and thinks that the United States has not done enough to support it.   That same general description would have applied to pretty much any point in the last twenty years, regardless of the U.S. administration or Egypt's political conditions.  (The turmoil of the last two years and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood
seems to have driven at least some to rethink the goal of democracy, but
again that's a different argument).   

Most of the disagreements within this community, for better or for worse, are about how to promote such democracy. But I'm not sure that the debate about means has quite kept up with the dizzying changes of the last two years.   As I point out in the column, we still mostly hear about the same old chestnuts:  more pro-democracy rhetoric, more funding for civil society and democracy programs, more conditionality on military aid or financial assistance.  What seems to be missing is genuinely new thinking about what "getting serious" about democracy would actually mean concretely in the current environment.  How do you support democracy while opposing Muslim Brotherhood victories? How do you support liberal movements or parties without undermining their electoral prospects?  Does conditionality make sense at a time when the Egyptian economy is collapsing?  

So here's the challenge.  Below are six specific questions about how the U.S. should go about supporting Egyptian democracy.  They are meant as questions, not answers -- I don't believe that anyone, including me, has fully or persuasively answered most of them. I'm not looking for you to agree with me (not that anyone would!) -- I'm looking for real debate and good new ideas.  You don't need to answer all of them or write fully developed articles, but do try to think beyond the familiar answers that we can all recite by heart.  Next week, I'll write up and link to the responses if I get enough useful feedback.  And also feel free to pose new questions which you'd like to see addressed. 

Without further ado, the questions:

1. The Islamists.  It is frequently argued that the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology and organization renders it essentially incompatible with true democracy.  The Brotherhood won Egypt's post-transitional Parliamentary and Presidential elections, however, and is likely to perform well in (if not win) future elections.  How would you propose dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood's participation in democratic elections?  Should the U.S. call for barring the Muslim Brotherhood from fielding candidates or refuse to deal with its members if they do take office?  If not, then how would you propose dealing with the reality or prospect of their winning free and fair elections? 

2.  Supporting Liberals.  Most American policy advocates would like to support liberal trends in civil society and in the political arena.  The current Egyptian political arena (including many leftist activists) is quite hostile to foreign interference in general and to the United States in particular, however, and is likely to continue to be so for at least the next few years.  Even if the case against American democracy NGOs were to be thankfully resolved, it is unlikely that they will be able to operate in any significant capacity in the near future.  Given this, how do you think that the U.S. could most effectively support liberal or otherwise sympathetic political trends or groups?   Should the U.S. openly support such groups, and if so what do you think the effects would be inside of Egypt?  Should the U.S. attempt to quietly or covertly support them?  If so, do you think this is feasible in Egypt's current media environment, and what do you think the effects would be of exposure of such support?  Do such groups in fact want American funding and/or support, and would it actually help them win elections?  

3.  The Process. One alternative to supporting liberals or opposing the Muslim Brotherhood is to focus on the democratic process and institutions.  Support for the abstract principle of democracy, however, is often taken as support for the winners, so that "backing democracy" is perceived as "backing Morsi."  Do you believe that the MB's current dominance of Egyptian institutions means that seemingly neutral support for the democratic process is actually de facto support for Islamist rule?   Is there some way which the U.S. might support the democratic process which would not have that effect?  What, precisely, would that be?   Most agree that elections are not enough, and that effective inclusion and respect for minorities and core human rights lie at the heart of any real democracy.  How, specifically, could the U.S. most effectively push for such inclusion and rights? 

4.  Conditionality on military aid is often seen as the key mechanism for influencing the Egyptian political system.   Does it still make sense to focus on conditionality for military assistance now that the SCAF has transferred power to a civilian government?  Would conditioning military aid under the current political alignment mean weakening the military relative to the Muslim Brotherhood, and thus be counter-productive?   How credible and effective would such conditionality be given what we know about how military aid to Egypt actually funds American corporations and about how conditionality will always include issues related to the Camp David Treaty as well as to democracy and human rights?

5.  Conditionality on economic assistance, whether bilateral or through the IMF and World Bank, is also often seen as a key point of leverage.  Does the intensity of Egypt's current economic crisis make this the wrong time to talk about conditionality, given the urgent need to stabilize the situation?   Or does the crisis make this the perfect time to take advantage of the desperation of Egyptian leaders for external support? 

6.  Engagement. There is a broad consensus that the U.S. has been ineffective at communicating its support for democracy to the Egyptian public and that it should do more to engage broadly across the Egyptian public.  What, specifically, could the U.S. do to engage more effectively?  With whom should it speak, what should it talk about, and what policies should be changed which would make the engagement more effective with a broad cross-section of the Egyptian public?   

My answers to at least some of these questions are here, but as I said I'm really looking for new, specific ideas here.   I'm pretty sure that there will be a highly interested audience within the government as well as the policy community for any good new ideas about these questions.   Please email me your thoughts and comments, or a link to any you post
at your own outlets, and if I get enough responses by early next week
then I will write them up.    So fire away!

 

 

Talking Egyptian democracy

 Or my Alt-Title:  What We Talk About When We Talk About Supporting Egyptian Democracy. 

This post is simply to point my blog readers over to my weekly Thursday column, which is entitled "The Egyptian Treadmill: Why Washington Isn't Panicking About Egypt's Latest Crisis."  It looks at how the Obama administration views the ongoing crisis in Egypt and the various proposals for what it should be doing about it.  More discussion later but for now, I just hope you go read it! 

Is Mali part of the Middle East?

A few minutes ago I asked Twitter: should the Middle East Channel cover the events in Mali?  The first wave of responses was sharply negative: "Muslim =/= Middle East. Struggling to believe that this is a real question" (@lindsayiversen); "Sure, it's right next to Afriganistan" (@jimmysky); "Don't think I've ever seen a definition of "Middle East" that includes Mali"(@drjoyner) ; and a coveted "#headdesk" from Africa expert Laura Seay (@texasinafrica).  But not everyone agreed: Andrew Exum asked whether the Sahara should be seen as a natural boundary or as a highway;  Issander el-Amrani mused that "it is an issue on the periphery of the ME that can affect it, so yes."

When I asked the question, it wasn't because I misread my maps (see above, where Mali isn't part of the Middle East) or because I hoped to steal an exciting new conflict from my Africanist colleagues.  Nor was it because I think that "the Middle East" should be expanded to include anyplace where jihadist movements pop up, or where Western countries intervene militarily (hence FP's AfPak Channel, which is different from the Middle East Channel).  It was mainly because I've been receiving some excellent article submissions focused on the Mali policies of Arab states -- mostly, but not exclusively,  Algeria.  I'm still undecided as to whether that merits inclusion on the Channel -- right now, I'm leaning towards "Algerian foreign policy, yes; French realization that they are trapped in a quagmire they didn't think through, no."

But the Mali discussion then led to an ancillary, arguably more interesting one:  should Algeria be counted in the Middle East?  On what grounds?  Now, I think there's a very strong case for inclusion of North Africa in our conception of the Middle East.  If nothing else, the widespread regional impact of the Tunisian revolution should have settled that question.  I believe that Algeria's aborted democratic experiment of 1988-91, where the army's decision to step in to prevent Islamists from winning Parliamentary elections helped spark an exceptionally gruesome five year civil war, remains one of the least appreciated and most central events in the modern evolution of Islamist politics.  (See my POMEPS Conversation with Oxford University North Africa expert Michael Willis for more discussion of this). And of course, Morocco was invited to join the Gulf Cooperation Council.... just kidding. 

But just for fun, could there be a case for excluding North Africa from "the Middle East"?  It wouldn't be unprecedented. I recall some serious intellectual debates in the 1980s about Maghrebi exceptionalism.  North Africa had an entirely different experience of colonialism than did the states of the Levant or the Gulf (people tend to forget that Algeria was actually part of France for more than 100 years).  The EU's "Euro-Mediterranian" project and Barcelona process launched in 1995 offered an alternative institutional framework for these states which some thought might spark the evolution of a distinct Mediterranean identity (that didn't really pan out though).  Its economies, particularly its vast labor migration and remittance economies, connecting North African states to Europe far more than with the rest of the Arab world. 

What about realist definitions based on security complexes?  East of Egypt, the Maghreb doesn't really share the same security
environment as the Levant or the Gulf, with little at stake in the great
regional conflicts surrounding Israel, Iran, Iraq or Syria.  Political definitions? Tunisia may have hosted the PLO in exile, but it would be a stretch to argue that any North African country has really been central to the great political issues of the Middle East.  Sure, the Maghreb states are members of the Arab League, but so is
Djibouti (and the exclusion of non-Arab Israel, Iran or Turkey rarely
makes people define them out of the "Middle East").  And then there's the general incomprehensibility (to non-Maghrebis) of the local dialect despite the formal "Arabic is the mother tongue" thing (not to mention the Berbers, plus the political implications of the large Francophone communities). 

The Middle East Channel is going to keep covering all the countries of
North Africa, no worries.  To me, the similar political institutions and dynamics of authoritarianism and opposition, the common language and membership in regional organizations, and the manifest belief on all
sides that it is part of the Middle East are enough.   But it's an interesting thought experiment -- one which applies not only to Algeria or Mali but to other potential candidates:  South Sudan, after the secession?  Afghanistan?  Cyprus?   How does this fit with those intense political battles to refuse the "normalization" of Israel, and by implication its full membership within the "Middle East"?  Or with Gulf Arab campaigns to define Iran as Shi'a rather than as an authentic part of a "Muslim" (i.e. Sunni) Middle East? 

So no, Mali isn't part of the Middle East.  But thinking about it can be fun for the whole family!  And the discussion did produce one broad consensus which I whole-heartedly endorse:  FP should find somebody to run an Africa Channel.  

Debating the Saudi Exception

I returned earlier this week from a week in Saudi Arabia. I got to meet with a wide range of Saudi academics, journalists, activists, human rights lawyers, and former government officials. I had a long conversation with the leading reformist Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani, who faces a prison sentence over his efforts to form a human rights NGO and his hard-hitting tweets. I traveled out to the Eastern Province and met with a number of leaders from Qatif. And, as recounted in yesterday's FP column, I got politely chewed out by Prince Turki al-Faisal and a legion of Saudis for my views on Bahrain.

My column seeks to focus attention on the challenge posed by America's alliance with Saudi Arabia to any policy based on promoting reform or meaningful change in the region. Washington and Riyadh simply see the region's politics very differently, have different priorities, and have often been working at cross-purposes -- especially with regard to the Arab uprisings, not only in Bahrain and the GCC but across Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, North Africa, and beyond. And Riyadh's own domestic institutions and practices are, as will surprise nobody and as fully described in the State Department's annual human rights reports, manifestly incompatible with the vision of universal freedoms and rights which President Obama has frequently articulated.

At the same time, it's easier to diagnose the problem than to prescribe a solution. Washington cannot easily think past its reliance on Saudi Arabia for its current approach toward Iran, the flow of oil, and the broader regional status quo, and the transition costs of moving toward something else can't be wished away. My column urges focusing more on protecting and supporting the emergent Saudi public sphere which is already giving voice to a wide range of political and social challenges. I believe that the rapid emergence of a radically new kind of Saudi public sphere over the last two years represents a more fundamental challenge than is generally believed -- not that it is going to necessarily lead to revolution, but that it deeply disrupts the existing political institutions and norms. Pushing publicly and privately for an end to the prosecutions over political speech of figures such as Qahtani and Turki al-Hamad, as well as the legions of less well-known young Saudis detained over their Facebook and Twitter postings, would be a start. There's more, including getting serious about the repression in the Eastern Province and the discrimination against Shi'a and women.

But is this enough? Two of the keenest American observers of Saudi Arabia are skeptical.

Greg Gause, author of the December 2011 Council on Foreign Relations task force report "Saudi Arabia in the New Middle East" and a vocal skeptic about the idea that the kingdom faces significant instability anytime soon, comments:

I think you are trying to have it both ways here. "Liberal vision" AND the existing security structure of American regional policy. I don't think that you can have both. The middle ground of talking about pushing for reform and the like in Saudi Arabia without really doing anything about it opens us up to legitimate charges of hypocrisy.

And Toby Jones, quoted in my column as the leading academic pushing for a wholesale rethinking of the American posture in the Gulf, responds to my sense that critique has to be framed within the terms of what Washington might realistically consider:

I think you're right, but we don't have to let DC's inertia and inability to see clearly as a pretext to soft-peddle on the best options in the Gulf. I'm not suggesting you're doing that, but a lot of people do. I'd like to see very clear justifications for why the status quo policy or at least continued emphasis on security, rather than a more robust kind of political engagement, is necessary. Lots of assumptions are made about Iran, about oil, etc., and almost none of them stand up to really close scrutiny.

I think Gause is somewhat too sanguine about the stability of Saudi Arabia and perhaps insufficiently impressed by the depth of the challenge posed by the new information environment and youth frustration. And I remain unsure of precisely what alternative American posture Jones would like to see in the Gulf and how it might get there without major disruptions along the way.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, the experienced journalist Ellen Knickmeyer suggests
that the crucial question is really the sustainability of the patronage
state -- which I think is right, and which along with the question of expatriate workers and Saudization of the workforce consumes the attention of most of the Saudi businessmen and economists I met. That's a whole other set of issues which need to be addressed, and I've seen some pretty alarming -- albeit contested -- numbers put forward on it. Maybe I can get the scholar who produced those numbers to publish them on the Middle East Channel … (hint, hint, scholar who produced those numbers?).

At any rate, Saudi Arabia does lie at the heart of the challenge I posed in my first FP column: What does the Obama administration want the Middle East to look like when it leaves office in four years, and how will its policies help to create such a region? I hope that this week's column helps to spark more debate and ideas.

The Syria debate, continued

My
column last week arguing that American intervention would probably not have
helped Syria has generated a lot of discussion, both positive and negative. Some of the discussion has been productive and
useful, even if some has been of the predictably low caliber which anyone who
has has been immersed in the Syria debate over the last two years would
regrettably expect. Robin Yassin-Kassab published a particularly thoughtful
rebuttal yesterday "Fund
Syria's Moderates" on FP, which offers a good opportunity to respond to
some of the major objections which have been circulating. [[BREAK]]

It's easy to empathize with the anger of
people horrified by the carnage and desperate to see something done about it. But as
satisfying as moral outrage might be, it's not enough and is rarely a guide to good policy. For a policy to effectively respond to moral
horrors, it has to have a reasonable chance of actually working. The massive human suffering and the
deterioriating conditions in Syria do
compel greater efforts. But they do not compel misguided actions which would
ultimately have little effect or make things worse at great cost. My opposition
to intervention, explained at length in this February 2012 CNAS report,
has always been based not on a moral judgement about whether to be outraged
about Syria, but on the analytical judgement that the actions which might
plausibly be taken would not be likely to bring an end to the conflict and would
probably make things worse. It's true that I'm strongly predisposed against American military interventions in the region, and that my views are deeply shaped by the experience of Iraq -- but that didn't stop me from supporting the intervention in Libya where there was a clear opportunity to do good at an acceptable cost.

The reality is that at this time last
year, nobody who looked seriously at
the strategic landscape believed that a limited military intervention could
easily resolve the conflict. The best overview of which I was aware came in
March 2012, from four
Brookings scholars not known for their anti-interventionist views (Dan
Byman, Ken Pollack, Michael Doran and Salman Shaikh). They reviewed six policy options including
diplomacy, arming the opposition, a Libya-style air campaign, and
invasion. They concluded that "ousting Asad will not be easy.. every policy option to remove him
is flawed, and some could even make the situation worse." They offered
detailed, sharp analysis of all six options and found all of them bedeviled by
serious flaws. Those risks might have been worth taking, and the escalating
costs worth paying -- Doran, in particular, emphasized in a Twitter exchange yesterday
that he had always backed more aggressive action despite the risks, which I fully believe - but that is a
different argument than the one which pretends that easy solutions ever
existed. They didn't.

I remain unconvinced
that either limited intervention or an earlier arming of the opposition would
have made things better in Syria, and continue to believe that the slim chances of a political solution justified the effort. And I don't agree that the situation would have been different if only the West had more aggressively armed the opposition, as Yassin-Kassab urges. That may have somewhat shifted the balance of power in their favor, but would likely have produced most of the same dynamics we have seen over the last six months, including the shift of power to the men with guns, the hurting stalemate on the ground, the intra-rebel clashes, and the regime's tactical escalation. But we can't really know, and that's the past. What about the current situation? Several commenters asked the critical questions whether the changed strategic terrain changes the
calculus of intervention. Clearly, much
has changed over the last two years, and many who once opposed intervention now
support it or have grown bitter with international inaction.

Some things have not changed. There are
still almost no conditions under which a direct American or NATO military
intervention would be wise, as Yassin-Kassab acknowledges. There is still little reason to believe that
limited measures would suffice to tip the balance of the vicious struggle on
the ground, which leaves the problem of a slippery slope towards ever deepened
involvement unchanged. Arming the
politically disorganized and internally divided opposition is unlikely to
rapidly end the conflict, guarantee Western influence, or make Jubhat al-Nusra
and other radical forces disappear. And overall, policy choices have to be guided by a sober assessment of the likely risks and costs.

Three big things have changed in
significant ways, though. First, the virtually unbelievable scope of human suffering gives profound urgency to the crisis, while the hopes for a political solution have largely ended. There was a logic behind the diplomatic efforts, of seeking to avoid
militarization, isolate Assad at home and abroad for his war crimes and
inhumanity, reach out to the Syrian majority in support of a political
transition, and prevent a collapse into anarchy. But those have almost entirely disappeared, and conditions on the ground have radically changed. If it must be war then we need to recognize that reality.

Second, the
regime's growing use of airpower against not only rebels but civilians does
change the calculations over some kind of de facto no-fly zone or
incapacitation of the regimes air capabilities. Last year, when Assad's
forces were rarely using airpower, a no-fly zone made little sense, but the
rapid escalation of such attacks does very significantly increase the value of
somehow countering it. The risks of a
slippery slope towards quagmire remain real, and I am not advocating such a move. But this is one area where the
arguments in favor of such action have clearly grown stronger and need to be
carefully considered.

Third, with the political track
essentially dead and the transition to an insurgency and civil war complete,
the objections to arming the rebels have largely faded. It would have been better by far had Syria
not taken this wrong turn, but thanks to Assad's brutality it did and there is
no going back. That suggests a more
hands-on approach to coordinating and increasing the flows of aid into the
hands of an organized political leadership. Yassin-Kassab
in the end argues in favor of "funding the moderate
Islamists and secularists of the Syrian National Coalition, which will then
feed the hungry and fund the fighters, empowering them to buy the weapons they
need". On this, we
actually agree.

Yassin-Kassab misinterpreted
my argument that "The United States should lean even harder on its Gulf
allies to stop funneling weapons and cash to its local proxies for competitive
advantage," which he calls a recipe for mass slaughter. But my point was not to cut off those
funds, but rather the urgent need to coordinate and rationalize those flows. The uncoordinated, often competitive, financing
of favored proxies by outside players has actively contributed to emergent
warlordism, intra-rebellion clashes, and absence of a coherent political
strategy. My recommendation was more
along the lines of recent American efforts to help organize a mechanism for
directing aid through a centralized opposition political-military
framework. Those efforts, by most
accounts, have
withered on the vine, and might not work, but they should be a diplomatic
focus. But there should be no illusions
that this will lead to easy success. There are virtually no examples in modern history of the external arming
of rebels succeeding - no, the support for the Afghan jihad most certainly doesn't count given what followed -- and many
examples of such aid making conflicts bloodier, longer, and more intractable. But we are where we are.

I'm glad that my essay has prompted so
much debate, though too much of it continues to fall along well-established
fault lines. I had acknowledged some
of my own mistakes in the hope of sparking similarly self-critical analysis in
a policy debate where nobody has done especially well. The
fiasco in Syria cries out for an open mind and creative thinking, and last
week I urged readers to carefully consider a number of alternative
proposals currently in circulation (including those by by Andrew
Tabler, Fred Hof, and Salman
al-Shaikh and Michael Doran). I hope this debate continues and can find a more effective response.

The Syria Debate, Continued

My
column last week arguing that American intervention would probably not have
helped Syria has generated a lot of discussion, both positive and negative.  Some of the discussion has been productive and
useful, even if some has been of the predictably low caliber which anyone who
has has been immersed in the Syria debate over the last two years would
regrettably expect. Robin Yassin-Kattab published a particularly thoughtful
rebuttal yesterday "Fund
Syria's Moderates" on FP, which offers a good opportunity to respond to
some of the major objections which have been circulating.  [[BREAK]]

It's easy to empathize with the anger of
people horrified by the carnage and desperate to see something done about it.  But as
satisfying as moral outrage might be, it's not enough and is rarely a guide to good policy.  For a policy to effectively respond to moral
horrors, it has to have a reasonable chance of actually working. The massive human suffering and the
deterioriating conditions in Syria do
compel greater efforts.  But they do not compel misguided actions which would
ultimately have little effect or make things worse at great cost.  My opposition
to intervention, explained at length in this February 2012 CNAS report,
has always been based not on a moral judgement about whether to be outraged
about Syria, but on the analytical judgement that the actions which might
plausibly be taken would not be likely to bring an end to the conflict and would
probably make things worse.  It's true that I'm strongly predisposed against American military interventions in the region, and that my views are deeply shaped by the experience of Iraq -- but that didn't stop me from supporting the intervention in Libya where there was a clear opportunity to do good at an acceptable cost.  

The reality is that at this time last
year, nobody who looked seriously at
the strategic landscape believed that a limited military intervention could
easily resolve the conflict. The best overview of which I was aware came in
March 2012, from four
Brookings scholars not known for their anti-interventionist views (Dan
Byman, Ken Pollack, Michael Doran and Salman Shaikh).  They reviewed six policy options including
diplomacy, arming the opposition, a Libya-style air campaign, and
invasion.  They concluded that "ousting Asad will not be easy.. every policy option to remove him
is flawed, and some could even make the situation worse." They offered
detailed, sharp analysis of all six options and found all of them bedeviled by
serious flaws. Those risks might have been worth taking, and the escalating
costs worth paying - Doran, in particular, emphasized in a Twitter exchange yesterday
that he had always backed more aggressive action despite the risks, which I fully believe - but that is a
different argument than the one which pretends that easy solutions ever
existed.  They didn't.

I remain unconvinced
that either limited intervention or an earlier arming of the opposition would
have made things better in Syria, and continue to believe that the slim chances of a political solution justified the effort.  And I don't agree that the situation would have been different if only the West had more aggressively armed the opposition, as Yassin-Kassab urges. That may have somewhat shifted the balance of power in their favor, but would likely have produced most of the same dynamics we have seen over the last six months, including the shift of power to the men with guns, the hurting stalemate on the ground, the intra-rebel clashes, and the regime's tactical escalation.  But we can't really know, and that's the past.  What about the current situation? 
Several commenters asked the critical questions whether the changed strategic terrain changes the
calculus of intervention.   Clearly, much
has changed over the last two years, and many who once opposed intervention now
support it or have grown bitter with international inaction. 

Some things have not changed. There are
still almost no conditions under which a direct American or NATO military
intervention would be wise, as Yassin-Katib acknowledges.  There is still little reason to believe that
limited measures would suffice to tip the balance of the vicious struggle on
the ground, which leaves the problem of a slippery slope towards ever deepened
involvement unchanged.   Arming the
politically disorganized and internally divided opposition is unlikely to
rapidly end the conflict, guarantee Western influence, or make Jubhat al-Nusra
and other radical forces disappear. And overall, policy choices have to be guided by a sober assessment of the likely risks and costs. 

Three big things have changed in
significant ways, though.  First, the virtually unbelievable scope of human suffering gives profound urgency to the crisis, while the hopes for a political solution have largely ended. There was a logic behind the diplomatic efforts, of seeking to avoid
militarization, isolate Assad at home and abroad for his war crimes and
inhumanity, reach out to the Syrian majority in support of a political
transition, and prevent a collapse into anarchy. But those have almost
entirely disappeared, and conditions on the ground have radically
changed.   If it must be war then we need to recognize that reality. 

Second, the
regime's growing use of airpower against not only rebels but civilians does
change the calculations over some kind of de facto no-fly zone or
incapacitation of the regimes air capabilities.  Last year, when Assad's
forces were rarely using airpower, a no-fly zone made little sense, but the
rapid escalation of such attacks does very significantly increase the value of
somehow countering it.   The risks of a
slippery slope towards quagmire remain real, and I am not advocating such a move.  But this is one area where the
arguments in favor of such action have clearly grown stronger and need to be
carefully considered.

Third, with the political track
essentially dead and the transition to an insurgency and civil war complete,
the objections to arming the rebels have largely faded.  It would have been better by far had Syria
not taken this wrong turn, but thanks to Assad's brutality it did and there is
no going back.   That suggests a more
hands-on approach to coordinating and increasing the flows of aid into the
hands of an organized political leadership. 
Yassin-Katib
in the end argues in favor of "funding the moderate
Islamists and secularists of the Syrian National Coalition, which will then
feed the hungry and fund the fighters, empowering them to buy the weapons they
need".  On this, we
actually agree.

Yassin-Katib misinterpreted
my argument that "The United States should lean even harder on its Gulf
allies to stop funneling weapons and cash to its local proxies for competitive
advantage," which he calls a recipe for mass slaughter.   But my point was not to cut off those
funds, but rather the urgent need to coordinate and rationalize those flows.  The uncoordinated, often competitive, financing
of favored proxies by outside players has actively contributed to emergent
warlordism, intra-rebellion clashes, and absence of a coherent political
strategy.  My recommendation was more
along the lines of recent American efforts to help organize a mechanism for
directing aid through a centralized opposition political-military
framework.  Those efforts, by most
accounts, have
withered on the vine, and might not work, but they should be a diplomatic
focus.  But there should be no illusions
that this will lead to easy success. 
There are virtually no examples in modern history of the external arming
of rebels succeeding - no, the support for the 
Afghan jihad most certainly doesn't count given what followed - and many
examples of such aid making conflicts bloodier, longer, and more intractable.  But we are where we are. 

I'm glad that my essay has prompted so
much debate, though too much of it continues to fall along well-established
fault lines.   I had acknowledged some
of my own mistakes in the hope of sparking similarly self-critical analysis in
a policy debate where nobody has done especially well.  The
fiasco in Syria cries out for an open mind and creative thinking, and last
week I urged readers to carefully consider a number of alternative
proposals currently in circulation (including those by by Andrew
Tabler, Fred Hof, and Salman
al-Shaikh and Michael Doran).  I hope this debate continues and can find a more effective response.