It’s been some time since I’ve commented on matters Middle
Eastern and Asia Minored in this space, though I have written of other things,
from the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the
Boston Marathon terror incident. It’s not that nothing has been happening in
the region—on the contrary—but most of it has been utterly predictable, so much
so that it tempts “I-told-you-so” references back to earlier posts.
So things get worse in Egypt and now some observers are
beginning to realize that the freefalling economy is more likely to touch off
disaster than the antics of high politics in Cairo. Check.
So Iraq is falling fast, once again, into sectarian
violence, in part because of the demonstration effect across the border in
Syria, in part because Prime Minister Maliki lacks—how shall we put it?—certain
democratic habits of the heart. Check.
So the situation in Afghanistan gets ever worse, but the new
ISAF commander, General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., waxes optimistic in interviews
for the press. That’s his job, so he may even believe what he’s saying. Check.
So the antipathy between Sunni and Shi’a radicals in and
around the Syrian cauldron is growing rapidly, lately manifested in the battle
of the shrines—wherein Sunnis destroy Shi’a holy sites (most recently one not
too far from Damascus) and proudly disinter centuries-dead bodies (or the dust
thought to have once been bodies), and the Iranian regime threatens holy
retaliation, which goads the Sunnis toward the next shrine, and so on. The
second Battle of Karbala is drawing ever closer, as I have said, so check.
The “I-told-you-so” tense, I’ll admit, does amuse me to one
degree or another, and it reduces my proneness to shift into curmudgeon mode.
But after a certain point it gets unseemly, since no one likes the sight of
solipsistic back-patting. So I have avoided it.
Over the past few days, however, some genuinely new and
interesting developments have popped into view, even if overlaid on
recognizable (if neuralgic) themes. And, as usual, the standard mainstream
media accounts—while helpful in delivering some of the facts—usually don’t get
readers very far toward understanding what’s actually happening. So let me meander through the three main
headline-grabbing items, in this order: Israeli airstrikes against newly
delivered Hizballah arms supplies in Syria; Benghazigate; and the prospect,
announced yesterday, of a Russo-American conference on Syria. In this meander
we thus will encounter, in turn, a tale of lesser evils, a descent into venal
surreality, and a complicated prospective diplomatic mugging.
The Israeli Strikes
This past weekend’s Israeli air strikes on newly delivered
munitions meant for Hizballah were nothing new. But these strikes were a little
more telegenic, and larger-living politically, than earlier ones. What’s going
on? Almost too much to explain simply.
Senior Israeli officials do not relish ordering such
attacks. They call attention to Israel when what is going on in Syria (and
elsewhere in the region anywhere east of Ramallah and south of Gaza City)
really has pretty much nothing to do with Israel. That attention whets the
addled diplomatic imaginations of people like John Kerry and other “linkers”,
who still think, despite all the evidence, that Israel and Jews and the whole
Jewcentric shebang of related influences are somehow central to every problem
in and beyond the region. Of course they’re not (not that they’re completely
irrelevant either…..it’s not simple,
as I warned).
Such attacks also raise the likelihood of a more intense
shadow war of revenge, probably against Israeli and Jewish targets in Europe,
Latin America and even places like Thailand and Goa. It’s simply not possible to defend against
most such attacks. The prospect, at least, could have a positive second-order
impact: finally persuading the Europeans to list Hizballah as the terrorist
organization it is. But one never knows with the Europeans, whose capacity for
supine behavior seems never to hit bottom. So this is a price that has to be
reckoned in the decision mix, and it is not a small price.
Such strikes also ease Hizballah’s political problems inside
Lebanon by making it look like what Hizballah is doing in support of the Assad
regime is really part and parcel of the effort to destroy Israel. Hizballah has
lots of trouble inside Lebanon right now, and that’s good up to, but not
beyond, the point where those and others’ trouble might combine to produce a
new Lebanese civil war (even if that’s likely anyway).
So why mount the strikes if the downsides are what they are?
Well, I suppose you would have to ask Israeli Defense Minister Bogie Ayalon
directly to get the real skivvy (assuming he’d tell you the truth), but some
elements of explanation are fairly straightforward.
Hizballah already has some 60,000 rockets capable of hitting
Israel. It has around 5,000 fairly well-trained day-job fighters and at least
15,000 reserve troops. Hizballah’s raison
d’etre is the destruction of Israel, so it is not too far-fetched for
Israeli decision-makers to assume that, sooner or later, there’s going to be
another fight with these guys. With sarin and VX in the mix with all those
missiles, what the Israelis are doing is essentially three-fold: diminishing at
the margin Hizballah’s capacity to kill Israeli civilians; thus making a war,
if it comes, shorter and hence less troublesome diplomatically; and signaling
to all concerned (and the signal travels all the way to Tehran) that Israel
will not hesitate to defend itself at times and places, and with means, of its
own choosing.
The signal Israel sent to Hizballah has a special twist, not
to be overlooked. Israel has essentially told the Hizballah directorate and its
Syrian associates that its intelligence on what is coming into Syria, whether
from Iran or indirectly from Russia, to the port of Tartus and then by land to
and across the Beka’a and thence into Syria, is pretty darned good. It is also
a message that should Assad fall and Hizballah’s weapons supplies be put in
jeopardy as a result, Israel can annihilate any Hizballah military
concentration from the air. What we have here is a kind of game of chicken: Think
you can harm us? You better think about what we can do to you, now and
especially in the not-too-distant-likely future, before you dare.
As important in this regard is the message on the crawl, so
to speak, that no one is going to stop Israel from doing what it regards as
necessary for its security. Israel demonstrated this past weekend the truth of
what President Obama and Defense Secretary Hagel have lately said while
standing on Israeli soil: Israel has the right to self-defense. Let it be noted
that not so much as one eyelash worth of criticism surfaced from U.S. sources
about those strikes. Very little mention has been made of that here, but be
assured that for those in the region the silence was deafening.
Benghazigate
It may be that, even as I am writing this very sentence, a
mid-level State Department official named Gregory Hicks is testifying before a
Senate Committee and, in effect, establishing a line of complicity and cover-up
with regard to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s role—never mind the
hapless Susan Rice—in the tragic events of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi,
Libya. You might be wondering, why am I writing about this before his testimony; how can I possibly know what will happen
during the hearing? The answer is that it doesn’t matter what happens during
this hearing, at least as far as Libya and U.S. policy toward Libya is
concerned.
This hearing is not really about Libya, or U.S. policy, or
what actually happened on September 11 of last year. This is about the
presidential politics of 2016. The Republicans, led by John McCain and
associates, are trying to smear the reputation of the person they think is the
odds-on favorite to be the Democratic presidential nominee: Hillary Clinton. Personally,
I’m not enthusiastic about the prospect of Mrs. Clinton as President, nor do I
think she was such a good Secretary of State. But it is fantasy to try to hold
her personally accountable for what happened during and after September 11,
2012 in Libya.
Vastly more important than that, it is besides the key
policy lesson we should by now have learned from that whole unfortunate episode.
Whatever the real mix of reasons that went into it, the Libya war was a
mistake. It has touched off a cascade of completely predictable misanthropies
(if I predicted them, which I did, I take it for granted that others, not least
then-Defense Secretary Gates and the JCS did too). It has, for just one example,
ensnarled the French in a real mess in Mali, probably made things worse in
increasingly ghoulish northern Nigeria, and it is already washing back into
Libya, threatening to alienate the southwestern, Tuareg chunk of Fezzan
permanently from the Libyan state (such as it is). The sin that Susan Rice and
Hillary Clinton (and others) committed was starting this stupid war in the
first place, and then having no plan whatsoever for a post-Qadaffi “Phase IV”
(remember Iraq?), because that is what began the sequence of events that got
Ambassador Stevens and three other American officials killed.
Why aren’t Republicans on the make making this
argument? Why can’t they connect these
obvious dots? Because they are in the main cheap hawks, wanting to use force
more or less promiscuously without worrying, to all appearances, about
aftereffects or how we’d pay for more major military operations in the region. Of
course, if they were in power, instead of in a position to lob partisan
propaganda grenades from the sidelines, they might adopt a more reasonable
perspective; but they aren’t, so they don’t. Whatever the reasons, that’s all
the Republicans have to offer these days on national security policy, unless
one wants to reference the small-minority Rand Paul isolationist wing of the
GOP (and please, let’s not do that).
Actually, if the GOP wants to give its inner-hawk room to
fly, there’s an obvious way to do it—and it’s not at all obvious to me why they
don’t jump on it with all four paws. Consider: It has been nearly eight months
since Ambassador Stevens’s murder, and the U.S. government has not done a
damned visible thing about it. We have a pretty good, if not necessarily
court-actionable, idea who was behind this—a guy named Ahmed Abu Khattala. Not
long after the murders, Abu Khatalla held a kind of informal press conference
at an outdoor restaurant in which he strutted, lied a lot, and seemed to take
pleasure, if not explicit credit, for the attack on the Benghazi consulate. Yes, it took us nearly a decade to find
bin-Laden—and in this light, and considering that Ayman al-Zawahiri is still
breathing, why anyone would think that this was some sort of glorious success I
swear I cannot understand—so eight months is not a long time in comparison. Yes,
but still…….
Now why is this? Well, I don’t doubt that Mike Vickers over
at JSOC is trying to figure a way to whack this guy (and possibly some of his
associates), but with the ROEs (rules of engagement) being what they are, and
with the divisions of lawyers sprawled all over the Defense Department as they
are, it’s not easy to get a clean shot. More important, no doubt, is that the
State Department probably opposes doing anything without the cooperation and
assent of the Libyan government. But the Libyan government is hopelessly
feckless. We have not even been able to “interview” Abu Khatalla; Libyan
authorities won’t pick him up or question him for fear of literal retaliation.
And it seems clear that achieving swift justice in this matter is not high on
the list of White House priorities.
So nothing seems to be happening, and nothing probably will
happen—which is predictable since it, too, is part of a very unfortunate
pattern. Consider that five U.S. ambassadors have been murdered in office since
1965, three of them in the greater Middle East. In 1973, the PLO murdered Cleo
Noel, Jr. in Khartoum, Sudan. No retribution was ever exacted for his murder.
In 1976, Ambassador Francis E. Meloy, Jr., was murdered in Beirut. No retribution was ever exacted for his
murder. In 1979, Ambassador Adolph Dubs was murdered in Kabul. No retribution
was ever exacted for his murder. And most recently Ambassador Stevens in Libya.
Well, if you hate the United States, why not murder an American diplomat or
three? There’s no price for it, apparently.
This is what the Republicans should be shouting about—the
abject failure of the Obama Administration to raise any deterrent to attacks
against American diplomatic personnel abroad.
But since it’s a lot less partisan an issue, they apparently can’t be
bothered to think that far along.
The Russo-American
Conference on Syria
Today’s big news is the announcement, by Secretary Kerry and
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, of plans to hold a conference on Syria
sometime this month. Now, if this conference—assuming it ever happens—can stop
the civil war and lead to a relatively smooth landing (“smooth” in this case is
a very elastic word) for the post-Assad future, it ought to be something that
interests us. Since we are wise to keep American boots far away from Syria, and
since the Administration may have blown a chance to engage Turkish force, with
NATO and Arab League support, to stop the bloodletting more than a year ago,
there are, as the President and others have recently said, no other good
options.
But let’s interrogate this proposition a bit more carefully,
shall we? First, let’s ask “why now?”
Why have the Russians agreed to this now, when they were so reluctant to do so
before? After all, this has been a central element of the Administration’s
policy, so-called, all along. And my
readers will please note that while, at the time, I lambasted the idea of
seconding U.S. policy in Syria to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin, a part
of avoiding any kind of pre-election kinetic response, I also granted that in
the fullness of time—after the battlefield situation developed further to
Assad’s detriment—this sort of ploy might prove useful as part of an endgame. [STAFF: I looked in vain for where I said
this, and I know I did; I hope someone can find it]. Will it?
The mainstream press has a theory of “why now?” As Anne
Gearan and Scott Wilson put it in today’s Washington
Post, it seems that “Russian support for Assad has softened since the
emergence of new evidence that is government has probably used chemical weapons
on a small scale in the war.” It may well be that the Russians are finally
really to throw Assad to the wolves, but this simply cannot be the reason. The
idea that the Russian leadership has been shocked—shocked, I say—morally
affronted even, by the use of chemical weapons in Syria has got to rank as one
of the most hilarious statements I have ever read in a supposedly serious
newspaper. Are Gearan and Wilson kidding?
They adduce, too, that the protraction of the war in Syria
is complicating Russian relations with Israel and with the broader Middle East.
Not as funny, but just as silly.
And they observe that, “Kerry said that the administration’s
decision on whether to arm the Syrian rebels—a move Obama has resisted—could be
avoided if there is progress toward a political settlement.” Bingo!—now we’re
getting somewhere, except that Gearan and Wilson don’t know where. Could it be that
given the President’s tortured body language over his chemical weapons “red line”—reaching
a level of equivocation that puts him nearly in the same category as Bill
Clinton’s ruminations over what “is” is—the Russians are helping him to “just
say no”? Do ya think?
So maybe the Russians mean by all this no more than the
fabrication of a substitute for the ill-fated Kofi Annan mission, which had the
effect of buying time for Assad to murder his way out of his problem. The fact
that Putin reportedly kept Kerry waiting for three hours while he talked to his
cabinet does not bode so well, if you know how to read Putin’s body language. If that is the case, there will be no
conference, or in any event no real business to conduct at it if it ever does
convene.
But perhaps this is too cynical a reading. Perhaps the
Russians are finally ready to boot Assad, and hope that by participating in the
facilitation of a transition they can hold on to their base at Tartus and
retain some influence in the area, including selling weapons to an assortment
of patrons. Maybe they’ve concluded that
half a loaf is better than none, which is what they’d likely end up with if the
rebels win. If so, if the Russians are
serious about a conference, what sort of pre-conference deal might that portend
(and yes, please be serious, of course there would have to be one)?
The Russians know that the United States, Israel and the
West generally would benefit from Assad’s fall because Syria is Iran’s only
ally, and the main means by which the Iranian regimes exerts influence in the
Levant. Hizballah cannot readily maintain its strength without the Syrian
factor. So if the Russians prove willing to help us dump Assad and harm Iranian
interests, it’s a sure thing they’re going to demand something considerable in
return. Not only would they not be Russians otherwise, they would not be
competent diplomats of any description otherwise. So what would they ask?
Of course, I don’t know. But whatever they might suggest, I
could imagine a situation in which the Russians double-down diplomatically by suggesting
themselves (not exactly for the first time) as intermediaries in defusing the
Iranian diplomatic bomb as a way to ward off the mullahs’ attainment of a real
one. The Russians don’t hunger for an Iranian regime with nukes, though the
prospect of one complicates our lives a lot more than it does theirs—so Moscow
has been happy to stand aside and play risk-free irritant. And they see the
President’s body language here, too: Obama will do practically anything, they
suppose, to avoid having to take military action against Iran. That could put
Putin potentially in a situation where Russia can play diplomatic middleman,
able to extract quid pro quo
“commissions” from all sides—American and Iranian, European, Arab and possibly
Israeli, too. What a peachy prospect, huh?
In any event, time will tell if the Russians are preparing a
stall tactic, or if they really mean to deal.
Either way, those who think that the heavens have just parted, and that
rays of warm light are about to bathe poor benighted Syria in soft waves of
diplomatic altruism, are in for a disappointment. But hey, maybe they can get a
job writing news copy for the Washington
Post.
No comments:
Post a Comment