Foreign Policy In Focus

Cross-posted from the United to End Genocide blog.

There have been a lot of developments around Syria this week but ultimately landing the world in the same place.

Joint UN and Arab League Envoy Kofi Annan appealed to Russia and gained the explicit backing of the UN Security Council and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad accepted Annan’s plan, at least verbally. Yet the very next day there were widespread reports of military attacks on towns and villages by the Syrian army, adding to the more than 9,000 people killed so far, and UN human rights chief, Navi Pillay, said detained children are being tortured; hardly the ceasefire and military drawback stipulated in Annan’s peace plan.

Yet, the Friends of Syria meeting in Istanbul, Turkey on Sunday, April 1st, has the potential to change the stalemate. If Assad does not cease attacks against civilians by that time, there will be added motivation for the Friends of Syria group to view Annan’s gambit as a failed attempt for peace. Moving on could mean the announcement of new confidence in the unity of the Syrian opposition which has already met in Turkey this week, and greater pressure for outside actors to arm the opposition. The United States and United Kingdom announced again this week that they will be stepping up nonlethal aid to the opposition, but seems a long way from providing arms. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar may not be so patient.

On the other side, Assad may very well see this danger and seek to make symbolic withdrawals of his forces. Recent attacks may be just a final push to gain ground before a ceasefire locks in those gains. This could be a continuation of Assad’s strategy to buy time and stave off growing international condemnation. Whether a calculated short-term move against international pressure or the beginnings of a longer term self-interested rapprochement, it would have the advantage of stopping the killing at least for the immediate future and create space for diplomacy.

However, that also assumes opposition forces would be willing to accept the ceasefire. This is an unlikely scenario given the lack of unity, let alone clear command and control among the opposition, and even less likely if that opposition senses a willingness for other countries to provide it with arms.

What we are left with is a dangerous balancing act in which the international community is trying to entice Assad to move toward peaceful settlement, but wary of his intentions as it seeks to support an opposition that struggles to unify, without encouraging a protracted civil war. Key to this balance will be the stances of Syria’s key remaining allies, Russia and possibly Iran, both of whom have endorsed Annan’s peace plan. The visit of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to Iran this week adds to the intrigue.

Will Russia and Iran (perhaps with self-serving incentives) be willing to increase pressure on Assad if he does not draw back, or is this stalling the very strategy they are suggesting he follow? On the other side, can the Friends of Syria help to unite the opposition and convince them to agree to a ceasefire or will they, by word or deed, encourage further fighting?

As we wait for these questions to be answered, and hope that this weekend’s Friends of Syria meeting adds some clarity, there are at least some things that can be controlled by the United States. Russia continues to provide weapons to the Syrian regime that are being used against civilians and the U.S. government continues to hold contracts with the very same Russian state-owned arms dealer that is providing those weapons. Two weeks after 17 Senators sent a letter asking for clarification from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on this issue, there are still no answers to why this is happening. Join your voice to those calls by clicking here.

Daniel P. Sullivan is the Director of Policy and Government Relations for United to End Genocide. 

"As possible military action against Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program looms large in the public arena, far more international concern should be directed toward Syria and its weapons of mass destruction," writes the American Federation of Scientists' Charles P. Blair at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. "Syria likely has one of the largest and most sophisticated chemical weapon programs in the world."

Syria's chemical weapons stockpile is thought to be massive. One of only eight nations that is not a member of the Chemical Weapons Convention -- an arms control agreement that outlaws the production, possession, and use of chemical weapons -- Syria has a chemical arsenal that includes several hundred tons of blistering agents along with likely large stockpiles of deadly nerve agents, including VX, the most toxic of all chemical weapons. 

The arsenal includes 100 to 200 Scud missiles equipped, poison arrow-like, with warheads brimming with the nerve agent Sarin.

Here it is -- served up on a platter. Finally, an airtight rationale for military intervention against the Bashar al-Assad regime by NATO and the United States. Right?

Uh, not so fast. Let's review: VX and Sarin are weapons of mass destruction. What do they share with their big brother, nuclear weapons? By all rights, they should deter a wholesale assault. Conventional wisdom holds that Assad likely wouldn't use his WMD, as Saddam Hussein refrained from doing against the United States. But, backed into a corner, he might lash out at neighboring Israel, if only because it represents NATO and the United States. Nor, like his father, has he shown any compunctions about slaughtering Syrians.

The key question is: when a regime acquires WMD does it do so for the protection of the state … or the regime? Once again, commonplace, un-sexy diplomacy is recommended as not only the weapon of first resort but last resort.

Cross-posted from the United to End Genocide Blog.

The shocking stories of state-sponsored torture and murder coming out of Syria make it easy to feel helpless, but there are opportunities to take action.

The United Nations estimates that at least 7,500 Syrians have died at the hands of their government’s military. As the death toll mounts, people and governments around the world are looking for levers to escalate the pressure on Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

One such lever is the economic one: where does the regime get its money, who is bankrolling it, and how can we cut off the flow of funds?

Investors, consumers, workers, and governments have a moral responsibility to avoid complicity in Syrian atrocities. We also have a strategic opportunity to identify those sectors, such as weapons, from which the Assad regime derives its power—and disrupt business as usual.

And when economic sanctions are in place—as they have been against Syria for several decades—that legal obligation reinforces the moral and strategic rationales for action.

Rosoboronexport is hardly a household name. But the Russian state-owned weapons dealer highlights a dangerous disconnect between U.S. foreign and economic policy—in which our government’s purchasing power is undermining efforts to prevent mass atrocities in Syria.

United to End Genocide and our allies at Human Rights First have learned that Rosoboronexport—which earlier this year signed a deal to sell combat jets to the Syrian government—also has contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense worth nearly $1 billion.

Take action: tell Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to cut ties immediately with the Russian firm.

The U.S. should not be doing business with Rosoboronexport. Breaking these ties would send a strong message to the corporation, and to all other corporations, that the U.S. is serious about cutting off the flow of weapons and cash to murderous regimes. It will let Assad know that his days of murdering his own people are numbered.

Kathy Mulvey is the director of the Conflict Risk Network at United to End Genocide.

There are two tales about the crisis in Syria.

In one, the vast majority of Syrians have risen up against the brutality of a criminal dictatorship. The government of Bashar al Assad is on the ropes, isolated regionally and internationally, and only holding on because Russia and China vetoed United Nations intervention. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton describes Assad as “a war criminal,” and President Barak Obama called him a “dead man walking.”

In the other, a sinister alliance of feudal Arab monarchies, the U.S. and its European allies, and al-Qaeda mujahedeen are cynically using the issue of democracy to overthrow a government most Syrians support, turn secular Syria into an Islamic stronghold, and transform Damascus into a loyal ally of Washington and Saudi Arabia against Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Like most stories, there is truth and fiction in both versions, but separating myth from reality is desperately important, because Syria sits at the strategic heart of the Middle East. Getting it wrong could topple dominoes from Cairo to Ankara, from Beirut to Teheran.

There is no question but that last March’s demonstrations were a spontaneous reaction to the Syrian government’s arrest and torture of some school children in Deraa. What is more, that the corruption of the Assad family—they dominate the army, the security forces, and much of the telecommunications, banking and construction industries, coupled with the suffocating and brutal security forces— underlies the anger that fuels the uprising.

But is also true that outside players—specifically the monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and the U.S., as well as Sunni extremist organizations—all have irons in the fire. Indeed, there is the profound irony that, while the GCC condemns Syria for oppressing its citizens, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are crushing homegrown democratic movements in their own countries. Or that Washington should be on the same page as Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaeda.

And while there is no denying the brutality of the Assad regime, or that some 7,500 to 8,000 Syrians have died over the past year, Israel’s 2008-09 invasion of Gaza—Operation Cast Lead—killed a greater percentage of Palestinians per capita. When countries in the region tried to stop the Gaza War, it was the U.S. who blocked any UN action. In the Middle East, double standards and hypocrisy are par for the course.

The Syrian crisis is not a simple “good guys vs. bad guys,” democrats vs. a dictator, with the overwhelming majority confronting an entrenched, thuggish elite.

First, while the current uprising represents a substantial number of Syrians, the Assad regime has domestic support. As Jonathan Steele of the Guardian (UK) points out, a recent You Gov Siraj poll on Syria commissioned by The Doha Debates and funded by Qatar found that, while a majority of non-Syrian Arabs wanted Assad to resign, 55 percent of Syrians wanted him to remain.

The poll was hardly a ringing endorsement of Assad—half of that 55 percent wanted free elections—but it reflects the fact that most Syrians fear a civil war. That is hardly a surprise. The U.S. invasion and subsequent civil war in Iraq flooded Syria with millions of refugees and terrible tales of murder, torture, and sectarian bloodshed. And Syrians had a front row seat for Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.

A Syrian dissident, Salim Kheirbek, told the New Yorker: “No more than thirty percent of the people are involved in the resistance. The other 70 percent, if not actually with the regime, are silent, because it is not convincing to them, and especially after what happened in Iraq and Libya. These people want reforms, but not at any price.”

While the recent referendum on reforming the Syrian constitution was widely dismissed by the U.S., Europe and the GCC, it appears that close to 60 percent of the voters turned out to overwhelmingly endorse the proposals.

Part of the Assad regime’s support comes from minority communities, in particular Christians and Alawites, who make up 10 percent and 12 percent respectively, of Syria’s 24 million people. Alawites are a variety of Shiite, and the sect dominates the government. Sunnis make up the majority. Syria also has Kurdish, Druze, Armenian, Bedouin, and Turkomen communities. It is estimated that the country has 47 different religious and ethnic groups.

Alawites and Christians have reason for concern. As a recent New York Times story reported, demonstrators in Hom, one of the centers of the uprising, chanted, “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave.” Al-Qaeda routinely describes Shiites as “a bone in Islam’s throat” and targets Shiite communities in Iraq and Pakistan.

Nor is Syria isolated regionally or internationally. While the Arab League has condemned the Assad government, not everyone in the organization is on board. Damascus has support in Lebanon and Iraq, and neutrality from Jordan (Amman also remembers the chaos of the Iraq war). Algeria—North Africa’s big dog on the block—has been sharply critical of the League.

“The Arab League is no longer a league and it’s far from Arab,” Algerian State Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadam told Agence France Presse, “since it asks the Security Council to intervene against one of the [the League’s] founding members, and calls upon NATO to destroy the resources of Arab countries.”

On Feb. 15, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for Assad to step down, but countries like Brazil and India, while deploring the violence, have made it clear they oppose anything involving military intervention or arming the main opposition force, the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Even Turkey, while calling for Assad’s resignation, has begun hedging its bets, and dropped any talk of creating “safe zones” along its border with Syria.

Most countries fear that a Syrian civil war would spread to Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and maybe into the Gulf states.

While the situation on the ground in Syria is hardly clear, the Syrian Army and security services appear to be sticking with Assad for now. If that continues, the rebels may keep the pot  boiling, but, without outside intervention by NATO, it is unlikely they can overthrow the regime. On the other hand, after a year of fighting, Damascus has not succeeded in ending the rebellion.

It short, it looks like a stalemate, in which case the current campaign to aid the rebels and force Syria’s president out is exactly the wrong strategy and one guaranteed to prolong the bloodshed.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and several U.S. senators have called for arming the FSA, a particularly bad idea because it is not at all clear who they are. There are persistent reports that the organization includes a goodly number of jihadists from Iraq, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. In any case, handing out weapons to people you don’t know, to fight people you don’t like is a formula for repeating the Afghanistan disaster.

Second, the demand for regime change—and threats to charge Assad and those around him with war crimes—makes this a war to the death. Why would the Damascus government compromise if the end game is exile and prison?

The only solution to a stalemate is negotiations. The Russians have offered to host such talks, but so far the fractious Syrian National Council says it won’t talk until Assad resigns. The U.S. and the GCC have similar positions. However, talks will only work if both sides have an incentive to enter them, which means dropping the regime change demand, ending the sanctions, and shelving any talk of aiding the FSA.

Maybe events have gone too far, but at this point that doesn’t appear to be the case. Instead of condemning them, the Russians and the Chinese should be encouraged to negotiate a ceasefire and the opposition should take up the Russians’ offer to host talks with the Assad government. The recent referendum can serve as a jumping off point for re-writing the constitution.

For this to happen, however, the regional players, the U.S., and the European Union will have to stop using Syria as a proxy battleground. As Dan Meridor, Israel’s intelligence Minister, told the New York Times, supporting the Syrian uprising was important because, “If the unholy alliance of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah can be broken, that is very positive.”

For whom? Is this about freedom and democracy, or a calculated move on a regional chessboard?

For more of Conn Hallinan's essays visit Dispatches From the Edge. Meanwhile, his novels about the ancient Romans can be found at The Middle Empire Series.

Re-posted from Dissent's Arguing the World blog.

Before making the jump from academia to the world of policy making and punditry, Anne-Marie Slaughter compiled an impressive body of scholarship on law and international society. Her early work linking the common threads of international relations theory and legal research was nothing short of groundbreaking, and contributed meaningful insights to both fields of study. Later, Slaughter’s A New World Order revolutionized intellectual understandings of global governance by introducing network analysis and her anatomy of “disaggregated states” to mainstream academic circles.

When Slaughter has recently offered her ideas in public, however, they have been less impressive. This has been especially pointed with regard to the unfolding horrors in Syria. In an extended meditation for the Atlantic, Slaughter forcefully advocates for the application of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine, arguing that the minimum requirements for triggering intervention have been met. On top of that, she claims, failure to act would expose R2P “as a convenient fiction for power politics or oil politics, feeding precisely the cynicism and conspiracy theories in the Middle East and elsewhere that the U.S. spends its public diplomacy budget and countless diplomatic hours trying to debunk.”

That Gareth Evans—the godfather of R2P—and others have argued that the minimum threshold for action in Syria has in fact not been met seems of little consequence to Slaughter, nor the fact that she is ready to suspend the writ of international law by acting without a Security Council mandate for the purpose of saving international law. As David Rieff points out, “Slaughter seems to be willing to undermine the structural foundations of international order, which, for better or worse, is based in large measure on the Security Council, in order to further it. Peace is war; war is peace. George Orwell, call your office.”

In Sunday’s New York Times, Slaughter returns with a condensed version of the same argument, this time sprinkled with some new ideas for resolving the crisis in Syria, though curiously not explicitly within the R2P framework. Which might be just as well: her opening statement is enough to make R2P advocates shudder. “The mantra of those opposed to intervention is ‘Syria is not Libya,’” Slaughter writes. “In fact, Syria is far more strategically located than Libya, and a lengthy civil war there would be much more dangerous to our interests. America has a major stake in helping Syria’s neighbors stop the killing.” Slaughter’s emphasis on American national interest rather than human rights is all the more curious given her awareness that humanitarian intervention is frequently seen, especially in the Global South, as a Trojan Horse designed to smuggle imperial intent past the gates of state sovereignty.

Slaughter’s argument quickly descends from there into self-contradiction. She warns against “simply arming the opposition,” which “will bring about exactly the scenario the world should fear most: a proxy war that would spill into Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan and fracture Syria along sectarian lines.” But then just a few sentences later, she boldly asserts that her plan “would require nations like Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to arm opposition soldiers with anti-tank, countersniper and portable antiaircraft weapons.” Slaughter also calls for special ops and spooks to enter the fray. Presumably, these regional and European “advisers” would keep the tinder box of sectarianism from exploding and, without a hint of irony from Slaughter, help opposition fighters expand so-called “peace zones” by killing and capturing government forces.

“Although keeping intervention limited is always hard,” Slaughter admits, “international assistance could be curtailed if the Free Syrian Army took the offensive. The absolute priority within no-kill zones would be public safety and humanitarian aid; revenge attacks would not be tolerated.” And if they happened anyway? Slaughter does not entertain worst-case scenarios of this sort, and thus excuses herself from having to confront the very real possibility that flooding Syria with more guns might actually make matters worse, not better, if things got out of hand.

Instead, Slaughter suggests that “Turkey and the Arab League should also help opposition forces inside Syria more actively through the use of remotely piloted helicopters, either for delivery of cargo and weapons—as America has used them in Afghanistan—or to attack Syrian air defenses and mortars in order to protect the no-kill zones.” This drones-for-peace approach is dubious on its face and, more startling, opens the door for what sounds like direct interstate conflict of the sort that could ignite the very regional confrontation Slaughter fears most.

Absent in Slaughter’s comments, and in the comments of the majority of pundits pressing for intervention, is the third pillar bolstering R2P: the responsibility to rebuild. Discussion of a potential long-term commitment requiring investments of blood and money—especially in the wake of a global economic crisis and the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan—would likely dampen enthusiasm for the rush to war. Slaughter, a skilled ideational entrepreneur, is undoubtedly aware of the public opinion pitfalls a warts-and-all assessment might present, which makes her argument doubly problematic and dishonest. One has to look no further than post-intervention Libya to understand just how prone previous efforts in the name of “responsibility” are to failure, not to mention abandonment by the “international community.”

And that’s the rub. Popular sentiment—if not always political will—in support of intervention can be quickly mobilized by the outrage of human rights abuses and crimes against humanity. As a result, there’s no shortage of ideas offering moral justification for a call to arms. But this abundance of ideas actually represents the poverty of discourse surrounding schemes to coercively defend human rights in Syria, a set of arguments that paper over very real, and often morally hazardous, dangers that can result when the dogs of war are let off the chain.

Protecting civilians from murderous regimes does not end with military action. Nor can it be an a la carte process of selective response with no thought given to the long-term responsibilities that attend coercive engagement across borders. Instead of offering a half-baked defense of skirting international law for the purposes of maintaining it, Slaughter might want to consider sketching out possible roadmaps of action for the moment hostilities cease. That way, in Syria at least, solemn pledges of “never again” might need never again be pledged. A serious outline by prominent intellectuals of what the rebuilding process might entail (and how it can be driven by widely supported local actors) could assuage concerns that R2P is nothing more than an elaborate excuse for invasion.

To be sure, comprehensive post-conflict plans would do little to quell concerns that humanitarian intervention serves as an invitation to violence and control in the colonial dominions of western power. Nevertheless, without due diligence and thorough consideration of all three pillars of protection—the responsibility to prevent, react, and rebuild—prospects for truly ethical humanitarian intervention will be doomed to a holding pattern of half-measures and hand-wringing that offers no escape from the suspicion and realpolitik that mark our current debate.