Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Not the Best of All Worlds


I did not head off to work today meaning to write again about Syria, but some things just can’t be helped. I was launched into my current orbit by a remark in today’s Washington Post. After reporting that, “Activists have reported heavy casualties in recent days, with 84 civilians killed Monday, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, along with 19 members of the security forces and eight defectors”, the Post went on to say: “Hopes are rapidly dimming that a six-point peace plan that U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan negotiated with Syrian authorities can halt the violence.”


In the best of all worlds, this is a remark that would stun a water buffalo. Show me a sentient adult who actually held out hope that the Annan mission would have any effect other than to buy time for the Assad regime and I’ll show you one variety or another of a complete idiot. But this is not the best of all worlds, which is a world in which lessons learned at great pain over years, decades and centuries would not have to be learned all over again. Evidently, those lessons do have to be learned all over again, time after time after time—and still they are not learned. I don’t know why this is, and I suspect I never will.


Yesterday’s news illustrates that one thing, one very important thing, has not changed but that another very important thing has in the Syrian crisis. What has changed is that the violence is now spreading across borders. The Syrian regime is responsible for murdering a Lebanese journalist on the Lebanese side of the border, but that pales in comparison to the cross-border attack into Turkey on a group of refugees. At least four people, unarmed civilians, were murdered and at least 24 others wounded. Among the wounded were a Turkish policeman and a Turkish translator. The Turkish government characterized the upshot of all this as “a new stage” in the crisis. That is hopeful news.


What has not changed, at least in public at this point, is the attitude of the Obama Administration—and that is not hopeful news. The State Department made all the right noises about yesterday’s events, but Administration policy where it matters has changed not one whit. It is becoming ever more difficult, however, for the Administration to pretend that Annan’s diplomacy, or any other kind of diplomacy, is going to make this problem go away. The Administration remains in a logically impossible and an increasingly embarrassing situation, having demanded that Assad step down but then having subordinated its policy to Russian diplomacy, even though, as everyone knows, Russia is Assad’s main supporter in this crisis. The Administration appears to be practicing a form of policy Macawberism, so much beloved of those in all walks of life who don’t really know what they’re doing. They’re “waiting for something to turn up” to spare them any difficult decision that might impinge on the President’s political calendar. It’s not going to happen: Nothing is going to turn up for a while except a lot more dirt in the opening of many more fresh graves.



And the reason it’s not going to happen has to do with the rest of yesterday’s big news from Syria, in this case news from Aleppo.


It took the New York Times 14 paragraphs to get to it (the Washington Post did not report these facts at all), but it eventually related that 10 Syrian security personnel were killed and 11 wounded trying to quell a demonstration in Aleppo. A few demonstrators were killed, too, but only a few. The Times remarked in passing that Aleppo had been until yesterday a fairly quiet place compared to Dara’a, Homs, Hama and even Damascus.


At paragraph 14 (or not at all), it is not clear that the American press appreciates fully the significance of this news. Aleppo is a Sunni merchant town, above all else. Those who understand the country have been waiting for the breakpoint at which the Sunni middle-class finally gets off the fence and joins the opposition. That moment may be at hand, and if it is, the recent optic that the regime is winning will be reversed in due course, possibly very quickly.


It is impossible to say from afar just what has been going on in Aleppo over the past few days. We do know that opposition to the regime has been building for some time now, and that parts of the city have been effectively free of regime elements for some weeks. But the ability of demonstrators or activists or whatever you want to call them to take out 21 of the Syrian regime’s crack soldiers, killing ten of them, means that some in that crowd were organized, armed and very dangerous. One suspects the activity of the Free Syrian Army. As I said in an earlier post, just because United States refuses to arm the opposition doesn’t mean others won’t. To all appearances, they now have.


Is not clear whether the presence of armed support is what brought out the demonstrators in Aleppo, or if the will to demonstrate is what brought armed support to their side, but it doesn’t really matter how the match was made. A new reality on the ground now exists. Reports from inside the country suggest that Assad is kept in a bubble by his advisors and is told only good news, leading him to think that he is winning and that he could make use of Mr. Annan as a time-buying vehicle for mopping up. If Aleppo essentially goes over to the opposition, it is going to be very difficult for Assad to remain in that bubble for long.



If Aleppo develops into a de facto “no-go” zone for the regime, it also makes the prospect of the Turkish-led military scenario I laid out some weeks ago far more attractive. It seems clear by now that the Turkish willingness to discuss an active policy privately with the Obama Administration got nowhere thanks to the Administration’s refusal to consider it, but as time passes the likelihood grows that Turkey will act even without U.S. support. Had the Administration been willing to put U.S. strategic interests above the President’s political ones a month ago, it is at least possible that Assad would be gone by now and that all the civilians who have been murdered by the regime since then would still be alive.


But, as I say, this is not the best of all worlds. We must still pay for our lessons in blood.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

A Hegelian Moment in the Middle East

What do you think of when you see or hear the word “Tuareg”? Most Americans, I think, are left utterly blank by the sight and the sound of this noun. Those who do find some association with the word probably tend to think of a car, specifically a Volkswagen of recent vintage, but spelled “Touareg” for some no doubt very sensible Germanic reason. Most Americans do not read a newspaper or consult any other serious news source on a daily basis, so their heretofore blank Tuareg slates are unlikely to have been marked by the copy in today’s New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press dispatches in a host of other papers and electronic news sources. That copy, if read, arrests attention—or should.

It’s about events in and around Mali, where not only has there been a rare display of regional pressure on the two-week-old coup leaders of that country, but where, much more significantly and not at all coincidentally, the entire northern part of that vast land has fallen under the control of Tuareg rebels. Rebel control extends as of this past weekend to Timbuktu, that fabled city on the southern edge of the Sahara immortalized by the anonymous English-language phrase “from here to Timbuktu.” Reports from the Malian capital, Bamako, say that the Malian state has essentially ceased to exist in the vast northern part of the country. (Americans familiar with “ Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?” of course know where Bamako is……)

What does seem to exist, so far in unclear relationships, are two rebel groups now in loose control: the long-established and mainly secular National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, and a smaller Islamist group that sports a black flag as its banner, Ansar ud-Din. A series of questions, all of which start with the word “why”, may come to mind. Why was there a coup against the democratically elected government of Mali about two weeks ago? What does the coup have to do with rebel success in the north? Who or what is a Tuareg anyway, when it, he or she is not pretending to be a Volkswagen, and why should Americans care one way or the other about any of this?

These are all good questions, but before beginning to suggest an answer in brief to some of them, let me point out that the attempt to connect some of the many dots in this story reminds me of Hegel. Hegel once made a reference to “the phenomenology of fools.” What he meant by this phrase, if memory serves me correctly, is that it is a mostly worthless conceit of mediocre philosophers to insist that everything is related to everything else. In some way maybe it’s true, yes, but what Hegel was trying to point out is that this is a truth of a particularly useless sort. It gives one no purchase on any practical or philosophical problem, leaving one instead in a flattened plain of causal possibilities in which any supposition is as good as another. Hegel never said that connections don’t matter; he simply tried to point out that not all connections are created equal, or are equally obvious. Which of course leads us to Libya.

What is going on in Mali is a direct consequence of what went on over the past year and a half in Libya. Back on October 27, in the third of a four-part series on the Libya escapade, I noted in passing as just one of the problems that might arise in the post-regime chaos: “The Tuareg part of the country, toward the southwest, was aligned with the old regime and furnished part of Qaddafi’s shock troops. They may cause trouble or even in time try to secede if a new regime is not to their liking.” Since I mentioned the Tuareg only in passing, I did not stop at the time to comment on the situation in Mali, Niger, Chad and other neighboring countries. But I will say this now: If the Tuareg manage to dig in and set up shop in northern Mali, they will eventually set their sights on parts of southwestern Libya.

This is because the Azawad, as they call themselves in their Berber-family language, have an image of a homeland that stretches over several countries. If state structures are too weak to stop them, the Tuareg will take what they can while the taking is good. They are in the midst of what looks to be what the anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace called in 1956 a “revitalization movement.” Chances are that they won’t stop until someone stops them, because important congealing social purposes are being served by their effort. (They parallel to some degree those of the Berber revival in North Africa, that of the Amazigh: See Bruce Maddy-Weitzman’s excellent essay, “The Berber Awakening”, The American Interest, May/June 2011.)

Those congealing purposes also may explain something about Ansar ud-Din, for revitalization movements are most often bound up in religion and religious symbols. Not a great deal is known in the public domain about this group. The U.S. military has undertaken fairly quiet anti-terrorist training in Mali, Niger and elsewhere over the past eight or so years, and there has been some concern about al-Qaeda, or local al-Qaeda franchises, operating in this part of the world. So now we have evidence that at least one such franchise is up and running—indeed, prospering by the looks of things.

My guess is that the French intelligence services know as much or more about this group than we do, but just one note from an American, please, about the name. Arabic is redolent in historical–religious connotations, the vast majority of which go right past even most Westerners—military personnel, intelligence community officials, aid workers, and so on—engaged as part of their day job in such matters. The word “ansar” means “helpers”, but it refers specifically to the earliest allies of Mohammed, those without whom Islam could not have come into being. The ansar are deeply reversed figures, faithful and pious, and any organization that takes for itself that word to use in its name is doing so in order to borrow from its symbolic sanctity. The word “din” is notoriously hard to translate into American-mentality English. It means law, but it also means faith in a generic sense and it also means religion, because in the Islamo-Muslim world there is not as much difference between law and faith and religion as there is in the West. Islam, like Judaism, is a law-based system. There is no Arabic word that means “religion” as Americans understand the concept. What about the “ud-“? It just means “the”, as in “helpers of the faith”, but in Arabic the consonant before the noun in this indication of a coming direct object accommodates the first consonantal sound of the noun. So since “din” begins with a “d” sound, you get “ud-“ in transliteration. (That’s also why it’s properly “Anwar as-Sadat” in transliteration, not “Anwar el-Sadat”, “Haroun ar-Rashid”, and so on.) (More than you ever wanted to know about Arabic grammar, right?)

Anyway, to return to the main storyline, the collapse of the Qadaffi regime in Libya is what energized the Tuareg. They lost their main protector in Libya, and, grabbing as many weapons as they could carry––which was evidently quite a few truckloads of we’re still not sure exactly what––they set about helping their brethren across the border in Mali to carve out a new safe area for themselves. As the Tuareg bore down on Timbuktu, the military in Mali begged the government to let them have at the rebels. For whatever reason, the government’s response disappointed the military, which decided to take matters into its own hands before it was too late. Alas, the chaos caused by the coup seems to have accelerated the determination of the Tuareg to seize control before authorities in Bamako could figure out which way was up. Their control now looks to be something of a fait accompli.

One wonders what French officials these days are privately thinking about that. Mali used to be part of Afrique Occidental Francaise. When the French left sub-Saharan Africa, unlike the British, they didn’t really leave––at least not to nearly the same extent. Historically, too, the French had some very nasty run-ins with the Tuareg, not least in the southern parts of Algeria back toward the end of the 19th century. Every French student of history knows tales like the one where the Tuareg scouts amiably volunteer to lead the French expeditionary force south into the countryside, pointing out safe pathways between water wells, only to cut them off once deep into desert tribal areas and slaughter them by the hundreds. Oh to be a fly on the wall, so to speak, in a certain room on the Champs Elysées about now.

My guess is that French officialdom will not look kindly on the destruction of one of their successor Francophone African states. But it was their insistence on “doing” Libya that caused it, and it’s not clear by any means what they can do about it now. And if you want to read about the complete mess that Libya is these days, as its fragmented politics become increasingly militarized in advance of an election season, you can consult the front page of today’s New York Times, above the fold on the left, under the headline “Libyan Militias Turn to Politics, a Volatile Mix.” (The late Anthony Shadid wrote the prequel to this article on February 8, giving rise to my comments in this space “Remember Libya?”) No, everything is not connected to everything else, and the Tuareg in Mali were active raiding and rebelling for years before the fall of the Qaddafi regime, but Mali is most certainly connected to Libya. It took today’s New York Times article, “Neighbors Cut Off Mali Coup Leaders, and Rebels Capture Timbuktu”, to the very last paragraph to mention this, but I suppose better last then not at all….

I, however, feel duty-bound to mention this loudly in the spirit of unvarnished schadenfreude, because, as my readers know, I opposed the Libyan operation from the very beginning and have warned of dire outcomes now for more than a year. Some people, however, still don’t want to listen. A friend of mine, an officer in the United States Air Force who will remain unnamed here, still thinks that Libya was a nifty little war. No Americans got killed. The bad guy did get killed. We won, you see. More important, as he explained to me, from the U.S. military’s point of view––and to some extent from the White House’s point of view––the real justification for U.S. participation in this escapade was to respond to pleas from our European allies to help them out in a pinch. The basic idea is, look, we unwittingly suckered them into Afghanistan, which has proved neither militarily nor politically a very happy place to hang out, so now we have to help them out in their hour of need. (This same narrative, by the way, appears in James Mann’s forthcoming book The Obamians.) One hand washes the other; alliance comity prevails, everyone feels chummy, and anyway all’s well that ends well.

Except it hasn't ended and things are not really so wonderfully well: read, most recently, black flags flying over Timbuktu. I understand the argument, and I don’t want to diminish the extent to which this motive actually functioned in U.S. decision-making. I was at least dimly aware of it at the time when the decisions were made. But I never elevated it to a first-priority motive because it never made any sense to me to repay one foolish set of decisions by reciprocally supporting another foolish set of decisions. If that is what NATO solidarity has come down to, God help us all. (I think I saw the movie: It was called “Dumb and Dumber.”)

And finally for today let us come to Syria. As many have noted, Syria ought to be connected to Libya, but it isn’t. The Administration told us that it went to war in the Libyan case not for the sake of NATO comity but to prevent genocide in Benghazi. (Were they kidding us?) No one has ever been able to seriously argue that there was a vital national interest anywhere to be seen in Libya. In Syria the humanitarian crisis is if anything greater. It certainly is larger; far more innocent civilians have been murdered by the regime than ever was the case in Libya, and the numbers we have now are most certainly underestimates. The strategic stake is obviously great, too, for what is going on in Syria, if you like an historical metaphor or analog, is the Spanish Civil War-phase of a larger struggle looming on the horizon between the United States and its Middle Eastern alliance system on the one side and that of Iran on the other. Syria’s future is a key tipping point in this struggle. If after our declaring (foolishly perhaps) that Assad must go he ends up hanging on, then Iran wins and the United States loses this prelim.

This is why it is so puzzling at first glance that the United States would contract out its Syria policy to, of all parties, Russia, a country that has armed Syria and whose basic policy goals are directly in opposition to our own. The Russians only support Kofi Annan’s mission because they know it is completely hopeless—just in practice a means for Assad and his thugs to buy time to “mop up” the rebels. So much for diplomacy when there is obviously no will to mutual compromise, and the good intentions of the clueless, very predictably because hardly for the first time, morph into valuable assets for murderers.

But it is puzzling only at first glance. It might seem strange that United States would go to war in a Middle Eastern case where no strategic vital interests are at stake, but refuse to do so in a case where there are such interests (despite, admittedly, many other differences between the two cases). If that were all this is about, then Henry Kissinger’s plaint in last Sunday’s Washington Post––that we seem to have substituted pseudo-humanitarian goals determined by internet fads for an analysis of national interest––would suffice. But Henry, I think, knows better than that.

The reason that the Obama Administration has stiff-armed the Turks and refused to arm the Syrian opposition, doing everything it could below the line of sight at the April 1 “Friends of Syria” meeting in Istanbul to harm that opposition, is that the White House has made it clear: no military excitement in or near the region before the first week in November, lest oil prices spike and the President fail to get reelected. That’s the relevant connection here; this is about politics in its rawest form.

Every President, indeed every national democratic leader, can plausibly make the argument to himself and his supporters that his failure to get reelected would be a national security catastrophe, and national leaders in democratic countries often sincerely believe this. Barack Obama is no innovator here, nor have Republican incumbents been immune to this particular temptation. But any rationale that puts partisan political interests ahead of the national interest is still ultimately an argument of scoundrels. I wonder what Hegel, he the discerner of History itself, would say about that.