Imagine trying to follow a critical
baseball or football game—a World Series finale or a Superbowl, say—without
being able to see it in person or even on TV, without knowing which players are
in the lineups at any given time, and without even having access to a real-time
eyewitness play-by-play over the radio or the internet. All you have to go on
is delayed second- and third-party accounts whose unbiased reliability cannot
be firmly established, and, worse, whose motive to obfuscate or “spin” the
facts has to be assumed. That’s a little like what trying to follow U.S.
foreign policy feels like right now, U.S. Mideast policy in particular. Things
are happening even amid some internal debate and disagreement. Assessments and
decisions are being made, and those judgments, large and small, are bearing
consequences. But for those who aren’t calling the pitches and flashing the
signs to hitters and base-runners, and who can’t even follow the game in real
time, it’s frustrating trying to figure out what’s going on because what we do
know of the decision-making process could conceivably fit into more than one
explanatory template.
The sports metaphor is obviously a
limited one. U.S. foreign policy is not a game. No score can be expressed in
numbers than makes any sense. There are more than two teams. Lineups are
neither symmetrical nor fixed. Offense and defense are not sharply
distinguished. The competition doesn’t ever exactly end. The rules are diffuse.
There are no umpires, aside, perhaps, from the unrelenting logic of strategic
interaction. But you still get the basic idea: Important stuff is going down,
but we on the outside can only infer what it is. And this is a “big game.” Unprecedented instability in the Middle East, whatever
else it’s doing, is teeing up an unprecedented number of generative decision
points for U.S. officials, creating path-dependent realities we’ll be living
with for decades. These are molten times, so the demands to “get it right” now
reach incandescent levels of intensity (or they should).
We know most of the discrete
decision points: What to do about the Syrian civil war? How best to stop or
limit the Iranian military-nuclear program? What to do about a re-fracturing
Iraq? How to stop the contagion from Syria and Iraq from spreading into Jordan
and Lebanon? How to handle the critical Turkish angle viz Syria and Iraq and the Kurds amid a new and potentially
far-reaching Turkish political crisis? How far and in which ways and with what
relative priority to push Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations? How to
influence post-“Arab Spring” political developments in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya,
Bahrain and elsewhere? How to think about the burgeoning sectarian cleavages in
the region and relate it specific countries? How the counter-proliferation
portfolio relates to the other challenges in the region? How to refashion the
U.S counterterror intelligence footprint given the withdrawal of so many
platforms and personnel from Iraq and, prospectively, Afghanistan?
What is striking about these
decision points is how many of them there are right now, and how diverse,
difficult and intertwined they tend
to be. This is not normal. That observation in turn leads to other questions:
Does the Obama Administration have a strategic theory of the case as regards
the region as a whole that can tie all of these discrete points together in
some overarching logical framework? And is that theory of the Middle Eastern
case, if it exists, consciously related to global strategic objectives of some
sort? If it does and if it is, whose theory is it? The President’s? The
Secretary of State’s? Someone else’s? Are the principals agreed or not—on some
of it, most of it, all of it?
This is not a simple set of questions
because different Presidents and principals have demonstrably different styles
of relating strategic abstractions to policy behavior. Some do have explicit
theories of the case and exert themselves consistently to match behavior to
strategy. The Nixon-Kissinger tenure was the quintessence of such an approach,
but, tutored by World War and disciplined by Cold War, the Eisenhower and
Kennedy-Johnson Administrations approximated it.
Some Administrations have had highly
abstract, often thickly moralist theories of the case, but these theories have
been too abstract to marshal consistent discipline in a policy process. They often
leave subordinates to guess and argue over what the President wants. That circumstance
typified both the Reagan and George W. Bush presidencies, and to some extent
the Carter presidency as well.
Some Presidents and their closest
advisers have deeply practiced intuitions about policy, but are not so keen on
formal strategy exercises or explicit strategies. The Bush-Scowcroft-Baker team
exemplified this approach, as did the Truman-Acheson team. A President can have
a disposition toward strategy without having a formal strategy as such, and in
very fluid times that may be most he can have, or should want. This is possible
because when discrete decisions come before the President, there are not a
large number of choices he can make by the time they get there. His instincts
can cause those decision points to cluster a certain way even if he cannot
fully or consistently articulate why he has decided as he has in a fashion that
would satisfy a Kissinger, a Brzezinski, an Acheson or even a Scowcroft.
Some Presidents seem to have no use
for strategy at all, are not adept or comfortable thinking in such terms, and so
tend to deal with unavoidable foreign policy decision points on a case-by-case
basis. The Clinton-Christopher period illustrates this approach.
And Barack Obama? Is this Administration’s
foreign policy just distracted ad hocery,
as many claim, as some evidence from the process side suggests? Or, agree with
it or not, does it have, as others claim, an explicit strategic theory of the
case that embraces the world and the Middle East as a part of it? Or, like the
George H.W. Bush Administration, does the Obama Administration have highly
intelligent (or highly misguided) instincts that fall short of explicit, formal
strategy, but that are nevertheless driving policy in a particular direction over
time? Which is it? How do we know? What counts as evidence?
I will answer these questions in
due course, but before an answer can make much sense we need first to
understand more about the novelty of a thoroughly destabilized Middle East, and
how it got that way. Then we need to look briefly at some of the aforementioned
discrete Middle Eastern decision points in hopes that a characteristic pattern of
Obama Administration decision-making emerges from them. Then, maybe, we’ll be
able to accurately characterize the Obama Administration’s approach, putting us
in a position to make some judgments about how wise it is, and what it’s likely
to lead to.
The Real Deal
Over the past seventy or so years a
kind of intellectual tic developed among casual Western observers of the
“Middle East” that has held the region to be “unstable.” (I put Middle East in
scare quotes to suggest that said casual observers have been casual, too, about
defining the region they mean.) Well, like a lot of things, a region is stable
or unstable only by comparison to some place else, or the same place at
different times. Hence, how one defines the area one is talking about obviously
affects comparisons.
So, if said casual Western observers
have meant by “Middle East” just the “Arab-Israeli” conflict zone alone (and
they often have), the wars in 1948-49, 1956, 1967, 1970-71, 1973, 1982 and so
on, “peacetime” periods speckled by acts of terrorism, reprisals, raiding,
assassinations and the like, probably qualify that highly area as unstable
compared to Europe, South America, and most of Asia during the Cold War. If
observers meant the Levant or the Gulf or North Africa or more broadly the
“Arab world”, or even more broadly
the “Muslim world”, the instability label fit a lot less snugly. Yes, there
were palace coups and assassinations and military interventions into politics
and a few insurgencies, civil wars and other incidents of mass political
violence within countries in all of these defined zones. But there was really
only one bona fied interstate war
that did not involve Israel, and none that pitted Arab states directly against
one another.
There were also some very long-lived, highly stable regimes:
Qaddafi in Libya from September 1969 to October 2011; the Assads in Syria from
November 1970 to date; Mubarak in Egypt from October 1981 to February 2012; the
Ba’ath in Iraq, mostly under Saddam Hussein, from July 1968 until March 2003,
and one could go on. Of course cemeteries are stable, too, so stability is not
always a good thing, as most of us imagine healthy civil societies. But I am
using “stability” in a descriptive, social science sense—no more, no less.
You can get some idea of how
relatively stable the Middle East has been for most of the past 60-70 years, dating
to just before the end of 2011, by comparing it to what’s going on now. Now the
region as a whole—all of it, pretty much, however you define it—is unstable. Really unstable. It could get even worse
and probably will, but this, folks, is what instability looks like—this is the
real deal. This is an entire region engaged in the political equivalent of a
demolition derby, except that no one seems to be having any fun.
Consider: There are no conventional cross-border wars
going on right now, but we’ve got just about everything else wherewith to make
an instability cocktail. Civil wars and active major insurgencies? Check:
Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia (the latter two if you include
non-Arab countries). Political violence just short of institutionalized
insurgencies? Check: Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Lebanon and, arguably, Algeria.
Merely frightened or weak governments to one degree or another? Check: Jordan,
Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Sudan and both Hamas in Gaza and the
Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Ordinarily well-institutionalized
governments in political crisis, and not in control of their entire national territory?
Check: Turkey. The only two major countries in the region (I’m excluding three Gulf
families or collections of families with flags: Oman, Qatar and the UAE) that
are in control of their national territory and are not in their own estimation teetering
on the brink of some internal meltdown are Iran and Israel. And long before the
rest of the region convalesces those two may go to war.
Moreover, as many observers have
pointed out, we’re not looking just at some two dozen countries in trouble,
we’re looking at more than a few whose very existence as polities is in
jeopardy. That certainly goes for Syria, and it probably goes for Iraq. The
existence of an integral Libya, Lebanon, Yemen and Sudan very long into the
future is no sure bet either. The prospect of regime upheaval (not government
administration change but actual regime change, properly defined) against the
monarchies in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Morocco is far from zero. The
rise of pan-Kurdish nationalism has implications for the territorial configurations
of Iran and Turkey as well as of Iraq and Syria. “Palestine”, less than a
polity but more than a figment of political imagination, has long been in limbo
and, current negotiations notwithstanding, is likely to remain there for quite a
while. So we’re not just talking about the sum of individual country troubles,
we’re talking about an entire regional state subsystem undulating and disintegrating
from the decay of some of its units and the growing weakness and
unpredictability of other units.
One good tic deserves another, I
suppose. Just as casual Western observers used to be quick to disparage the
Middle East’s instability, they were and remain determined to blame someone for
it. The American mainstream press operates biographically: who’s up, who’s
down; who’s screwed up and who hasn’t (yet). This saves journalists and editors
from having to actually understand issues, and, besides, they’re probably right
to think that most of their readers prefer it that way. High-brow gossip trumps
actual analysis, in spades.
The result of this habit is that,
depending on their politics mostly, some blame President Obama for the Middle
Eastern mess we behold today. He should, they archly declare, have intervened
early in Syria. He should have supported the Iranian Green Revolution in 2009.
He should have stood by Mubarak, even as Mubarak’s own colleagues were throwing
him over the side. And had he done all this and a nearly endless list of other
things he should have done but did not do, or that he did do but should not
have done, everything would be fine today.
Others prefer to blame George W.
Bush and the neocons. It was the Iraq War that caused all of this. I’m not
kidding; there’s a short essay called “What the War in Iraq Wrought” in The New Yorker, dated January 15, by
someone named John Lee Anderson that blames everything wrong in the region,
even by implication what’s happening in Egypt, on the Iraq War because that’s
what supposedly created the sectarian demon loosed on the Middle East today.
Some are more ecumenical in their
revisionism: The United States caused all the trouble, all the administrations
dating back as far as anyone can remember them. Or it’s the British, or the
French, or the generic West, or the Russians, or (of course, lest we forget)
the Jews. It rarely seems to occur that the peoples of the region might just
bear some responsibility for their own situation. And it virtually never occurs
that looking for someone to blame is perhaps not the best way to go about understanding
regional realities.
It is especially annoying when
people who really ought to know better do such things, doubly so when they do
it in “mea culpa” mode. I was stunned when I heard President Bush say in 2003, “For 60 years, the United
States pursued stability at the expense of democracy the Middle East, and we
achieved neither”, a statement that Condoleezza Rice repeated often while
Secretary of State (which inclination, more than anything else, led me away
from her service). In other words, the reason that Arab countries were not
democracies, and hence produced terrorists, is not because of thousands of
years of their own historical and cultural experiences, but because of U.S.
foreign policy decisions over the previous six decades. This is the argument
that leftwing critics of U.S. support for authoritarian regimes in a Cold War
context used to make; for avowedly conservative Republicans to start making it
was truly breathtaking, not least because, no matter who makes it, it is
absurd.
We did too achieve stability for those 60 years; by any
reasonable measure, U.S. Cold War-era Middle East policy was a success. Far
more important and to the point, it was never in our power in any case to turn
Arab states into democracies. This is something George W. Bush (I hope) has by
now learned the hard way, Dr. Rice too. It is astounding that even when we
criticize ourselves we do it with a dollop of hubris larger than Mt. McKinley:
It’s always all about us. Except that it isn’t. The United States is not and
never has been the determining factor in everything that goes on in the Middle
East, or anywhere else abroad for that matter (except maybe Panama for a time).
We need to get over ourselves.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that what Presidents
decide is totally without effect. For good or ill, the United States does
matter some most of the time, and a lot at least some of the time. The Iraq War
turned out to be ill-advised, certainly the way it was fought if not the
decision itself. The way we decided to operate in Afghanistan after the fall of
the Taliban regime amounted to another mistake, though it’s taken more time for
that mistake to become clear to most observers. Screwing up these two wars has
amounted to a strategic defeat for the United States in the wider region, and every
U.S. ally and partner has suffered from this defeat accordingly, just as all U.S.
adversaries and competitors have gained to one degree or another.
The Obama Administration inherited this defeat, decided
to cut U.S. loses, and we’ll see later if by doing so it has made things worse
or not. Certainly the oscillation between crusading interventionism and the
subsequent American recessional (if you don’t get Kipling allusion it’s not
important) under Obama has had its own disorienting impact. As to the broader
implications of recent U.S. policies, the Iraq War did stoke the coals of
sectarian division into a fire, but it did not create them. The recrudescence of
Sunni-Shi’a violence goes back proximately to 1973-74, the year that the
quadrupling of oil prices both set the stage for the collapse of the Pahlavi
regime in Iran and bankrolled Saudi wahhabism, setting up a collision to come
between extremist Sunni and Shi’a clerics (not that sectarian conflict in Islam
is exclusively theological in nature, anymore than the 16th century
Wars of the Reformation were). Had the Obama Administration early on and
effectively quashed the Syrian situation, it might have earned a delay in the
region’s sectarian clash—but probably no more than that, since the demon had
already broken its chains earlier in Iraq and had already made deadly
visitations as far away as Pakistan.
Factors inherent to the region explain most of what is
happening now. With few exceptions, the Arab states are weak relative to their
tribal societies and sectarian identities. These weak states, most of which are
heterogeneous ethnically or in sectarian terms, have been unable to devise
effective loyalty formulae or achieve strong records of economic growth or
social justice over the years. Many have been bitten hard by the resource curse.
The strongly patriarchal, authoritarian bias of these societies has hindered
adaptation to many aspects of modernity, not least their ability to create open
market economies in place of the radical elite-rentier distortions that have
characterized every single one of the Arab countries, republic and monarchy
alike, from the beginning of the independence era.
For all these deficiencies the Arab state elites have
preferred to blame the West, the United States and especially Israel, and the
only thing more bizarre than this is the credulity of so many Westerners in
believing them. Sure, the artificiality of many of the territorial states
created in the wake of World War I has not helped, but it’s not been the only
or the main impediment in most cases so many decades later, and it’s certainly
not something anyone can reasonably blame on President Bush, President Obama or
the United States in general.
Suffice it to say, messes like the ones we see today in
the Middle East have lots of causes, some remote, some more proximate. They are
hard to disentangle, and even harder to communicate to people who, frankly,
don’t care to know if it gets in the way of their blame game, which some pursue
because it’s politically useful and others pursue because they really just
don’t know any better. Look, you can lead a political partisan to knowledge but
you can’t make him think.
So Many Decisions
Let’s turn now to a few of the discrete decision points
enumerated above, and try to make our way through the policy thickets. Despite
the interconnectedness of much of the portfolio, we’re going to take the topics
one by one, and do our knitting as the need arises.
First Syria. The
best way to begin an understanding of U.S. policy toward Syria is to start with
Libya. In March 2011, before the upheaval in Syria really amounted to anything,
the President decided to throw in with Britain and France and start a war in
Libya. Administration counsels were divided as the mayhem in Libya increased.
Defense Secretary Bob Gates and all the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
opposed intervention. So did Vice President Biden and then-National Security
Advisor Tom Donilon, who was “Biden’s guy.” So did lots of others outside the
Administration, including the president of the Council on Foreign Relations
and, for what little it’s worth, me.
The President seemed ambivalent, and so he laid down a
series of strenuous conditions before he would countenance
intervention—included Arab League support and a UNSC Article 7 resolution. But
the President heeded the war party when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was
won over to it, and, perhaps to his chagrin, all of his conditions were improbably
met. While we’ll have to await candid memoirs to know for sure, my guess is
that the President soon regretted his decision in light of the many dour and
unintended consequences of the Libya intervention. Thanks to the allies’
failure, yet again, to plan for the post-combat phase of the war, some of these
dour consequences have affected Libya (and led to the September 2012 Benghazi
raid) while others have spread all the way to Mali, northern Nigeria and,
arguably, Algeria.
So when his aides divided again over Syria a few months
later, this time President Obama was determined to stay out. How much partisan
political considerations came into play as the 2012 election approached is hard
to say, but I think they probably mattered a lot (and I said so at the time).
In any event, even without election politics affecting his judgment, U.S.
passivity with respect to Syria was over-determined.
No doubt a good deal of analysis and spleen was laid
before the President early on over Syria. My own view, also in print, is that
the ricochet of excessive caution from Libya was unfortunate. An early exercise
of American leadership, in conjunction with Turkey and with NATO backing, could
have staunched the violence before it metathesized, radicalized into sectarian
camps and spread to other countries. U.S. boots on the ground and even early
no-fly zones were not necessary to achieve this, and were not even desirable. There
are means to exerting influence short of putting lots of U.S. troops in harm’s
way: that’s why we have allies, intelligence operations, special forces and an
array of cyber-dirty tricks. But the Administration discouraged the Turks, and
the policy of passivity it adopted has turned out to be the most expensive
policy of all.
In all fairness, Syria was always a hard problem. Unlike
Libya, which is an island from a military point of view and a small country in
population terms, Syria is larger, harder to get at militarily and was known to
have chemical and perhaps biological weapons stocks. Stand-off weapons like
cruise missiles are not very good at cratering airfields or working in close
coordination with rebel ground forces, and JCS Chairman Martin Dempsey spoke volubly
about the need for 700 sorties to take down Syria’s air defense system before
U.S. planes could operate overhead. That’s a big number, and was made to sound
like it. Unlike Libya, however, some serious stakes attended the Syrian case,
most of them linked to Iran. That’s what made it hard: the combination of real national
interest stakes with no simple military options.
By the time the Administration got around to serious
consideration of arming the rebels (it started by helping to coordinate third-party
deals, like one from Croatia, and by getting the CIA to move some weapons stocks
from Libya to the Syrian rebels), radical Sunni jihadis started showing up in
large numbers, coalescing into Jabat al-Nusra. That made what was hard to start
with even harder. It was not foolish to be concerned about U.S. weapons ending
up in the wrong hands, and so non-lethal assistance became the preferred
currency of aid. But concern need not be paralyzing, unless one wants to be
paralyzed and have some reason to justify it.
Even the non-lethal aid was slow and small in coming,
leading some observers to suspect that the Administration now wanted the Assad
regime to survive (never mind that wayward “Assad must go” comment when it
looked like it would happen anyway) as a counterbalance to Sunni jihadis. It
has led some to claim further that passivity in Syria was a bargaining ploy meant
for Iranian delectation. Maybe so. Now that we know the extent and the dates of
secret contacts with Iran, run in part through Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman from
his station at the UN in New York, it’s plausible to imagine American body
language, if not also literal language, saying to the Iranians, in effect: Look,
do what you want in Syria; we Americans are not determined to interfere with
your interests in your own neighborhood. We don’t even have ambitions of regime
change, and here the Administration’s early “engagement” policy, one that led
to a standoffish U.S. attitude toward the surge of Green opposition in 2009,
could have been put forward as evidence of non-aggressive intentions.
We will return to the Iran portfolio below, but it is
important to understand that the Obama Administration, from the start, saw
Syria as a lesser-included problem set within a policy focused on Iran. In this
it was consistent with previous Administrations’ policies. The United States
has never really had a policy as such toward Syria. Syria has always been an
adjunct to more important policies—Arab-Israeli, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, and so
on. In the past, this tendency had some very unfortunate consequences, even
allowing the Syrian regime to kill Americans and otherwise attack U.S.
interests—as in Iraq, for example—and really pay no price for it. This time
around, it made at least a little more sense.
Of course, it can be argued that a more forceful U.S.
policy toward the Assad regime would have gained more with respect to Iran, but
that is not the approach the Obama Administration took. With Iraqi WMD programs
no longer something the Iranians feared, a rather ironic turn of events given
the President’s attitude toward the Iraq War, I suspect that the Administration
view was that if we no longer appear to be a mortal threat to the Iranian
regime, we will change the calculations in Tehran as to the costs and benefits
of acquiring nuclear weapons. With sanctions we will raise their costs, and
with diplomacy we will reduce the benefits of so risky a course—and then maybe
we can bank that new Iranian calculation in a formal agreement. But let’s stick
with Syria for now.
As U.S. passivity amid the Syrian civil war became
protracted, the tide of battle turned in favor of the regime. Clearly, one of
the reasons for initial U.S. passivity was the sense, confirmed by intelligence
assessments, that the rebels would win with or without U.S. help. High-profile
Sunni defections from the regime, like that of Manaf Tlas and others, were seen
as evidence of this verdict. But as has long, long been the case in Syria, the
Sunnis could not agree among themselves, and could not effectively cooperate to
move their successful early effort to the regime-kill phase. Meanwhile, the
Russians poured in arms and advisers, including advisers experienced fighting in
Chechnya, and the Iranians via Hizballah and the Al-Quds brigades began to
provide crucial help to Assad. The tide turned, and still the Obama Administration
did nothing—except now the policy focus moved to Syrian chemical arms, and the
White House drew the first of two “red lines” against chemical use.
My guess is that the President thought the first chemical
weapons red line was a freebie—a way to look strong and engaged without
actually risking anything. At that point no chemical weapons had been used in
combat and there was no military reason to think they would be used. This was a
fundamental misreading of the Alawi regime and its principals. The Administration
should have paid more attention to how much skill the Syrians applied to
humiliating Kofi Annan, and how much delight they took in doing it. Indeed, the
Syrian regime might never have used chemicals had President Obama not warned
them against it—in truth they did not really need to do so for strictly military
reasons. Sensing Obama’s timidity about military engagement, the Syrian regime
did what it does best: bullying, taunting, sparing psychologically with a less
committed party. And by using chemicals without paying any price, they signaled
to the rebels the highly credible taunt that the Americans will, in the end,
leave you hung out to dry.
Then came the second chemical weapons red line, and we
all remember what happened next. The Syrians, having shown only a very little
chemical ankle before, testing what the American response would be (there was
none), now used chemicals in a big way and for all to see. Some credulous
Americans (James Fallows prominent among them) were sure the opposition did
this stealthily in order to tar the regime, but this only exposed their
ignorance and bad judgment. The Russians leaned into that lie, too, but that was
to be expected of them as Assad’s lawyer.
Amid all this noxious virtual gas, the Administration strained
to ignore evidence of repeated chemical use, lest it be forced to act. This was
too embarrassing to persist for long, as evidence mounted from far and wide,
coming even from French and British intelligence sources. Then the
Administration suddenly got its back up and prepared to act, going so far as to
send six cruise-missile armed ships into the Mediterranean. But then, just as suddenly,
following the withdrawal of British support thanks to an unanticipated defeat
in Parliament, Obama decided to be no less democratic than Britain and go to
Congress for approval.
It’s still unclear whether Obama thought he would get
approval, or if he knew he would not and then be able to blame Congress for his
not doing something he never really wanted to do in the first place. Whatever
the case, the episode evoked Administration comments about an attack with
stand-off weapons being “incredibly small”—Secretary Kerry’s absurd and hurtful
remark designed to appease Congressional skeptics worried about a slippery
slope, and a remark the President felt obliged to contradict in public (“The
U.S. military doesn’t do pinpricks”). But the deed was done; the Secretarial
tongue had flapped, robbing a prospective attack of most of its impact before
anyone had so much as caressed a trigger. In the end, as we know, the President
did a bait-and-switch on himself, wrong-footing most of his own aides in the
process, forgoing the use of force for a charade of a chemical weapons deal
through Russian aegis.
There is nothing wrong with eliminating Syria’s chemical
weapons in the face of a possibly crumbling of the Syria state, but the deal
does not eliminate all of Syria’s chemical weapons. It may end up eliminating only
those the regime itself declared—and we have no reliable means of verifying the
existence of what was not declared. Very likely, the most up-to-date and lethal
munitions were not declared, leaving the so-called international
community—mainly the United States, as it predictably turned out—to play the role
of hazmat garbage collector, and foot the bill to boot.
Now, the process of watching the President go from red
line to red line to congressional ploy to Russian diplomatic life-preserver (an
idea that was not as impromptu as the Administration made it seem at the time)
was painful in the extreme. The new NSC Advisor, Susan Rice, was shown to be
essentially incompetent as she presided over, or tried to chase, the most
embarrassing excuse for a foreign policy decision process I have ever seen.
And what was the result? First, as many pointed out, the
chemical weapons deal legitimated Assad and turned him into a partner for
implementing the agreement—in direct contradiction to the “Assad must go”
policy. The same contradiction also emerged in the delay in getting any of the
chemicals out of the country. Why the delay? Well, Syria is a war zone, and the
ground-transportation needed to be made safe before the chemicals could be
brought to a port. Who made ground-transportation problematic? Our putative
allies, the Free Syrian Army and its associates. So we were put in a position
of complaining that our allies were causing a delay in implementing a deal we
had made with their and our enemy. In other words, the side we wanted to win
overall we now wanted to lose temporarily and locally so that a mostly decorative
arms control agreement divorced entirely from the rest of the civil war could
go forward. If that’s not proof of incoherent fecklessness in a policy, I don’t
know what is.
However this looked here in the United States, the FSA
interpreted it as a betrayal, and so did the Saudis. The Syrian regime
accelerated its military actions in the wake of the chemical weapons deal; now
that Assad was certain the United States would not use force, he went for broke
in trying to smash the opposition. He focused on the connective tissue linking
the Damascus area to Latakia province (where the battle for Al-Qusayr was
critical—just look at a map), and further north on retaking Aleppo. He has since
done well in both areas.
Why the hurry? Well, one reason is the Geneva II
conference, slated back in May to begin tomorrow.
In June 2012 nine nations met in Geneva, some
of the nine to try to work out a transition away from the Assad regime. Ah, but
two of the nine wanted just the reverse: no agreement on any such thing. The
Action Group meeting, as it was called, represented the last-ditch, tail-end
part of the Kofi Annan UN-sponsored effort to stop the war. Like all the rest
of the Annan effort, it failed, as everyone with eyes to see knew it would.
Russia and China blocked any language that called for Assad’s ouster. The
lowest-common-denominator agreed statement referred feebly to the need to
create a transitional regime. It did not explicitly state that Assad could not
be a part of that transitional regime. Indeed, it states that the transitional
regime “could
include members of the present government and the opposition and other groups
and shall be formed on the basis of mutual consent.”
The rest of the communiqué was pie-in-the-sky nonsense for
the most part about ceasefires that never were or could have been, about
democracy in a place that had never in four thousand years known it, and so on.
It was not without its unintentionally humorous aspects, however. As innocents
by the thousands were being butchered by their own government in Syria, the UN
drafters took time to include a demand that women be represented in all phases
of the transition. That’s nice.
In the run-up to Geneva II these past few days the wheels
have progressively threatened to come completely off the bus. Both the
fecklessness and the incoherence of the policy have been revealed anew for all
to see. Against the background of vicious internecine violence among rebel
groups, and that the regime has taken advantage of in the Aleppo area
especially, the U.S. government has been trying to get the FSA coalition to
attend the Geneva II meeting. But there are 144 groups in the coalition, and
the recent fighting against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has
riven the coalition even further. Most opposition groups do not want to go if
the terms of the conference do not stipulate that Assad must go, and that is
why Kerry in recent days has reiterated that this is the U.S. understanding of
the terms of the conference. But if any opposition groups go even as many do
not, the net effect will be to further divide and hence weaken the military coalition
on the ground in Syria.
How the State Department can read the June 30, 2012 communiqué
this way I cannot understand. It is not the plain meaning of the text, and it
is certainly not how the Syrian regime or the Russians read it. Kerry has
lately accused the Syrians of “revisionism” in interpreting the June 30, 2012
document, but the accusation just as easily fits headed in the other direction.
That is how UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon could at the last minute invite
the Iranians, an invitation the U.S. government both opposed and sort of
favored. After all, Kerry has been in recent weeks most solicitous of the
Iranians being in the conference mix, but not as attendees since they
supposedly did not endorse the U.S. understanding of the conditions for the
conference. But the Iranians can endorse them as laid down on June 30, 2012
without prejudice in any way to Assad’s future. Moon saw that—he can read,
after all. Hence the invitation.
This infuriated Kerry. No U.S. Secretary of State enjoys
having his knees cut out from under him by the likes of any UN type, especially
done without warning at a particularly sensitive moment. So the State
Department demanded that Moon rescind his invitation to Iran, even though it
was inviting U.S. body language toward Iran in the first place that probably
convinced Moon to issue the invitation. Moon complied, quickly but grudgingly.
Now some representation from the FSA might show up, and the rescinding saves
the U.S. government from having to withdraw from its own sponsored conference, an
event into which we have diligently stuffed so much futile, fake and frothy
hope in recent weeks.
But maybe that would have been best. Given the state of
the battlefield and the unwillingness of the United States to do anything even
remotely effectual about it, this conference cannot possibly achieve what the Administration
hopes for it. The antagonists insist on a zero-sum attitude, and the conference
sponsors do not agree on first principles as regards to purpose. That was clear
already many weeks ago. U.S. failure will thus be seen throughout the region as
a confirmation of U.S. impotence, and as a victory for Assad, the Iranians, the
Russians and utterly ruthless brutality against civilian populations. Why we
should ever have been willing to be an accomplice to that I swear I cannot
understand.
The plaint that this round of Geneva diplomacy doesn’t
stand a great chance of success, “but it’s the only thing we have left to
try”—and words to that effect have actually been uttered in public by U.S.
officials—just shows once again that, yes, diplomacy can indeed be harmful if
leaders fail to grasp that force and diplomacy are complements, not opposites. Bleatings
that this is only the beginning of a long process, or that the conference will
encourage defections fro the regime, or that an alternative vision to war is
itself useful amount to so much mental rubbish. You cannot stop a full-fledged
civil war with strongly worded Hallmark cards and silly pabulum about “getting
to yes.” All this conference has done, is doing and will do is end up getting
more people killed as all sides jockey for battlefield advantage.
Want another example of how harmless one-eyed diplomacy
can be? In the run-up to Geneva II the United States has formally joined with
Russia is trying to persuade both sides to declare pre-conference ceasefires as
a means to ultimately end the war. Bur we have indisputable evidence from the
ground that what the Syrian regime is offering are not local ceasefires, but
terms of surrender. The regime is offering dribs and drabs of food and medicine
to besieged civilians in return for allowing the Syria flag to fly over this or
that neighborhood, but as soon as regime operatives get inside they are
demanding information about rebel fighters’ whereabouts, they are arresting
some people and they are simply shooting others who try to walk away. This is a
Chechnya-style “ceasefire.” Can John Kerry possibly not know this? If he does
know it, how can he encourage it? Is he so cynical that knowingly betraying
U.S. allies is a price he’s eager to pay to end the war?
However exactly it turns out, the spectacle of Geneva II
is already a disgrace to the great tradition of U.S. statecraft. Would that its
dark shadow remain confined to the Middle East, but one has to wonder what,
say, Japanese decision-makers are thinking privately these days. As to Kerry,
all he is saying, apparently, is give appeasement a chance.
Which brings us back to Iran. Since I last wrote on the Iran nuclear deal, on December 30,
the technical teams have reached agreement and the deal was supposed to begin
implementation yesterday, January 20. This is good, tentatively, despite the
fact that the agreement itself is flawed. The deal’s short term (just six
months) and the fact that the West gave in on the principle of uranium
enrichment, seen together, makes an eventual Iranian bomb more likely, not
less. As I have explained before, only the prospect of a change in the
U.S.-Iranian relationship outside the four corners of any document may make
those risks worth running. How likely is that?
Not zero, but not very high. If, as explained above, the
Iranians no longer fear U.S. efforts at regime change, and if they believe that
this U.S. Administration, at least, is not obsessed by the bogeyman of Iranian
regional hegemony, then maybe they will reason that they don’t need a
full-fledged nuclear weapons capability to deter us. Problem solved, at least
for the next three years: There will be no Iranian nuclear breakout as long as
this diplomatic engagement persists. If the United States needs to pay over and
over again for it to persist, as seems quite possible, it’s still a small price
to pay—so the thinking may go—to avoid a war. And make no mistake: The
Administration is still on record, as the result of a bruising and protracted
but presumably ironclad ultimate Presidential decision, that the goal of the
policy is and fully remains prevention, not deterrence. (Then again, we have
Bob Gates’s remark that “the word of this White House means nothing.” You work
out the sum.)
Now, this sort of pay and pay and pay again as you go approach
reminds me of a wonderful line from William Saroyan’s My Name is Aram: “If you give to a thief then he can no longer
steal from you, and he is therefore no longer a thief.” But I do not mean to
imply that Obama Administration policy toward Iran is pure appeasement. That’s
one construction of its motive, but there is another way of looking at this. It
requires, however, a creative mixing of levels of analysis.
Maybe, as some have argued, the Obama Administration has
a grand theory, an ambitious strategy, that sees an entente with Iran as the
best way to protect the region and the world from the protracted threat of
Sunni jihadi radicalism. Maybe the Administration wants generally to lean Shi’a
as a means of counterbalancing the proliferation of al-Qaeda franchises in and
beyond the region, and thinks the short-term price of doing so is worth it. The
price would include a severe deterioration of relations with Saudi Arabia,
which we’ve already seen but, supporters might say, so what? Where else can the
Saudis go for protection? The price also includes a strain of ties with Israel,
which we would have to ask to trust us to ultimately have its back if things go
wrong. This makes the Israelis nervous, but as power politics go it’s not an
outlandish proposition—and of course the Israelis have to worry about Sunni
jihadis as well as Iranian-inspired Shi’a enemies.
The complement to this argument is that fears of Iranian
hegemony are vastly overblown. Iran is not ten cubits tall. Its annual military
budget falls short even of U.S. supplementals in recent war years. U.S.
technical military superiority over Iran is so huge as to be nearly
incalculable. Far more important, just what does Iranian regional hegemony
actually mean? What are its likely and natural limits?
A power that is Persian and Shi’i evokes natural
antibodies in a region that is Arab and mostly Sunni. Iranian influence could
make a big difference in Bahrain, where a Sunni minority regime rules and
oppresses a Shi’a majority, and it could make a difference, perhaps, in al-Hasa
province in Saudi Arabia, which is where most of the country’s Shi’a and oil
are both located. We already know about Iraq—Iran can have a fair bit of
influence in Baghdad as long as Shi’a are in power, but that doesn’t mean it
can dictate and control everything that happens there. Iran can mess around
inconclusively in Lebanon, but Lebanese politics are structurally
inconclusive—so there’s not much lasting benefit in doing that. The Iranians
can supply weapons to the Shi’a Houthis in Yemen, as they are in fact newly
doing; but what vital interest does the United States have in Yemen short of
preventing it from becoming an al-Qaeda breeding ground? And of course the
Iranians can ally with Alawis in Syria, not that Twelver Shi’a and Alawis have
anything in common except antipathy to Sunnis.
In other words, the idea that somehow the Iranians could
recreate thoroughgoing imperial territorial control on the order of the Achaemenid,
Sassanid or Safavid empires in today’s Middle East, even with the Arabs as
dysfunctional as they are, is a fantasy. They can make trouble for selected
locals, but without a robust nuclear order of battle, Iran cannot successfully
attack or conquer Palestine or any other Levantine or Gulf real estate. In a
century or two more than 280 million native Arabic speakers will still be
native Arabic speakers, not Farsi speakers. So if U.S. policy can keep Iran
below a robust nuclear order of battle, what real danger is there in letting
Tehran enmesh itself in enervating conflicts unending with assorted Arabs and
Sunnis? And if the Russians want to help them, it’s their privilege to stomp
around futilely in the sandbox as well. They’ll probably live (and die) to
regret it.
Let’s not wax too glib. There are clearly risks when the
United States, which has supplied common security goods to the region for
several decades, suddenly decides that it’s “overinvested” in a region, to use
Ben Rhodes’s intemperately leaked language, that is increasingly harder to
manage. Some associates begin to contemplate posterior-protecting deals, while
others look to new forms of self-help. Saudi Arabia getting a nuclear bomb from
Pakistan is not something we want to see happen. More problematic still,
sectarian war tends to breed radicals and sideline (or extirpate) moderates,
and that’s not in our long-term security interests either. Tacitly siding with
Assad and his Iranian sponsors, or just being seen to do so, can only feed Sunni radicalism in and beyond the
region. So it’s one thing to imagine that natural balances will bracket dangers
in the Middle East if only we get out of the way and let them form, and quite
another to survive the transition from one kind of security regime to another.
I suspect that Administration principals understand all
this reasonably well. I am skeptical that Obama and Kerry “surely dream of a
‘Nixon to China’ masterstroke” regarding Iran, and that they “undoubtedly see
Iran and its Shiite allies as potential partners in the fight against Sunni
jihadism.” Those who sat in at the highest levels of first-term deliberations
on such matters describe the President as very leery of ambitious ploys and very
skeptical of Iranian motives. Words like “surely” and “undoubtedly” really do
not belong in a discussion like this. When, more recently, Obama gave the
nuclear deal no more than a 50-50 chance of working out in the end, he was
speaking in similarly skeptical, reserved tones.
So I don’t think the President has any explicit
strategic theory of the case on the Middle East. I don’t hear any Kissingerian
gears turning. His orientation to the region is more like that of George H.W.
Bush: He has intuitions, instincts. And those instincts tell him that getting
what we want in this part of the world is very hard, and getting harder as the
one-stop-shopping opportunities we used to “enjoy” with stable authoritarian
Arab allies are not what the used to be. I think Rhodes was for all practical
purposes channeling POTUS when he wrote Jeffrey Goldberg as follows:
The United States makes decisions about our foreign policy
based on our interests. It’s not in America’s interests to have troops in the
middle of every conflict in the Middle East, or to be permanently involved in
open-ended wars in the Middle East. It is in our interests to spend significant
diplomatic effort—and resources—seeking to resolve conflict and build the
capacity of our partners, which is exactly what we are doing. This notion that
there was a previous age when we dictated the internal affairs of countries in
the Middle East is not borne out by reality. When we had well over a hundred
thousand troops in Iraq, we weren’t able to shape the political reality of that
country, or to end sectarian hatred. Moreover, the notion that we are disengaged
doesn’t make sense when the United States is engaged across the region in ways
that no other nation is—to reach an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program,
advance Israeli-Palestinian peace, destroy Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles,
counter al-Qaeda and its affiliates, secure Israel and our Gulf partners, and
support transitions to democracy from Yemen to Libya.
Now, Rhodes was writing to a journalist, so there is
spin here—especially toward the end. Our “engagement” is mostly for show, for
the purpose of managing impressions, because, in the absence of a willingness
to put and keep real skin in the game, that’s all it can be. The Syria
diplomacy is deeply problematic, the Arab-Israeli diplomacy will not bring
peace, the Iran deal may or may not have a happy ending, there are not going to
be democratic transitions in Libya or Yemen, and so on. So this is one of those
many statements that is true as spoken but false as intended. It’s intended to
make passivity look like something other than it is, and to make it seem both
wise and prudent at the same time.
The truth is that we have a classical Goldilocks
problem: We don’t want to do too little, because that runs risks, and we don’t
want to do too much, because that runs risks, too. Finding the level and specific
focus that’s “just right” is hard, and even honest and well-informed people can
disagree about it. Personally, I think the President underestimates the cumulative
costs and risks of doing too little, which need not be limited to then Middle
East. But I don’t think it moves the ball to ascribe very ambitious and
controversial goals to those who do not have them. Way too many presidential
“doctrines” have been created by outside observers trying to impose more coherence
on an Administration’s views than really exists. Let’s please not invent an
Obama Doctrine out of mostly thin air.
And of course, even if the Administration were pursuing
some grand new regional balance with the mullahs as the Persian mean, the
President has to know that there’s no guarantee that some new regional order
will be so appealing as to obviate a need for policy. The collapse of Syria and
Iraq as states poses gray-zone problems for counter-terrorism; the same could
be said, prospectively, about Libya and some other countries. Our being less
intrusive in the region would not necessarily make us less popular targets;
indeed, our being seen to be in bed with Iran could make us more popular targets. Local balances
will not solve all our present problems, and may even create some new ones.
Which conveniently brings us to Iraq. Since I wrote on December 30 all hell has broken loose (again)
in Iraq. Al-Qaeda, in the form of ISIS, is back, and it’s still in control of
Ramadi and Falluja. Efforts directed from Baghdad to get tribal leaders to
persuade ISIS to leave the cities have not succeeded, and may have even
resulted in a new Sunni pact directed against Maliki in Baghdad. As of this
writing, too, al-Qaeda has forced Baghdad into lockdown mode: the demons are
getting closer. And everyone in Iraq still privately believes that one Sunni
desert tribesman is worth a hundred cowardly Shi’a villagers in a fight. That’s
the lore, that’s the perception and hence to some extent that’s the reality.
Could a Sunni vanguard force, whether Islamist or not, just ride roughshod over
a much larger on-paper but disintegrating Shi’a army all the way to Baghdad? Damn
right it could. Anyone who doubts that, after all these years, still doesn’t
know the first thing about Iraq.
So, then, should the Obama Administration accede to
Prime Minister Maliki’s request for U.S. weapons and training? It’s tempting.
Having failed to get a SOFA agreement, we might now be able to guarantee that
Iraq’s order of battle remains American for many years, and we might be able to
salvage something of the working relationship we envisaged having with Iraq
some years ago. If we help him, we might be able to get him to shut down the
air corridor from Iran to Syria (or do we really want that corridor shut
down?). Most Americans who were invested in the war policy want to do this, and
they say they can get some of the right stuff delivered fast.
I understand the motive, and to some extent I credit it.
Maliki needs us, so maybe we can help him in a way that persuades him to govern
more inclusively. So far he’s been a blundering sectarian ass. We have an
interest in Iraq not disintegrating utterly, and a more fully national rather
than sectarian-minded government in Baghdad is instrumental to that. But what
if no matter how many weapons we send and how many Iraqi officers we promise to
train, the Sunnis cannot be kept at bay?
What will the President decide, and when will he decide
it? If he agrees that we are overinvested in the region, and if he doubts the
capacity of outsiders to engage purposely in a place like Iraq, he might be
tempted to ignore Maliki. If Iraq falls completely apart he can do what he does
best: blame it all on George W. Bush. (What he should do if that happens is
coordinate with Turkey to recognize the Kurdish Regional Government as an
independent state; but he won’t.)
On the other hand, the collapse of the Iraqi state is
bad for us in its own right and either collapse or a radical Sunni victory there
will make things even worse in Syria, too. It’s a tough decision, and no
overarching theory of the case can make it much easier. In the end, my guess is
that politics will prevail, as it usuall does in this Administration. When the
President anticipates the optic of U.S. weapons and U.S. soldiers returning to
Iraq—even if just as trainers—he’s got to cringe. I think he’ll balk. I wonder
if Secretaries Hagel and Kerry have a view about this, and I wonder if it’s the
same view. Oh to be a fly on the wall at a PC (principals committee) meeting
over this one.
A Theory About Theory
Now, finally, if I’m right to argue that President Obama
has instincts and intuitions, but no ambitious grand strategy for the Middle
East, does he have anything more definite in mind that places the Middle East
into a more expansive global framework? I promised you I’d answer this
question, and so I will.
The answer is the same: The President is not a man, I
think, who trusts formal strategy exercises, but he’s not a completely
distracted case-by-case guy either. He probably believes that, indeed, the
United States is overinvested in the Middle East and underinvested in Asia.
Hence the pivot, and never mind the botching of the idea’s presentation as an
either/or proposition. For all I know he once asked himself what’s the worst
case in the Middle East? What if everything goes wrong? How would that really
affect vital American interests? Not
traditional commitments, not reputational capital, not obligations that flow
from habit instead of fresh thought—but genuine vital interests? And for all I
know, his answer was that, short of a WMD proliferation chain-reaction, not
much.
Again, I’m skeptical that Obama consciously deploys any
explicit or formal strategic logic here, or accepts any academic theories of
benign realism or natural balancing. But I think he senses that the world is a
messier place generally after the relative stasis of the Cold War, and that the
degree of control one can get over any major issue area through traditional
state-to-state relations has declined as popular and populist mobilizations,
aided by new cyber-technologies, have grown on both sub-state and trans-state
levels. Certainly the Middle East is a lot messier, even if much of the rest of
the world isn’t (yet).
In my estimation, this intuition has made President
Obama generally more risk averse, and risk adverse in an area where he is in
any case short on experience and, privately, confidence. When his advisers are
divided, he has been noticeably uneasy. Like a judge, he has tried to find the
common ground among them, which is fine for community activist work but not
necessarily for making foreign policy. When his advisers engage in groupthink, as
they done more and more with Gates and Donilon gone, or when no one strenuously
objects to something (like Kerry’s whimsical pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian
peace), he’s content to engage in image management—the twitterization of U.S.
foreign policy, so to speak—because he knows he can’t just ignore all these
things.
The President’s sensitivity to limits also tends to make
policy reactive and its real goals modest. So in the mess that is the Middle
East today he wants Iraq to be governed more inclusively. He wants Syria and
Libya to be governed, period. He wants Egypt to be stable, and he’s not too
picky about how. He wants Iran to not have nuclear weapons, and he’s willing to
bend a lot to prevent it via diplomacy because he probably thinks that Iranian
leaders cannot exert their will beyond their borders with any more consistent success
these days than we can.
The one subject on which he seem to have a definite view
and is willing to act preemptively has to do with preventing terrorist attacks
that kill American civilians, especially on U.S. soil. That explains his
affection for drone attacks, his toleration for GITMO, his refusal to
emasculate NSA collection programs except at a small margin, and his unstinting
support for quietly creating small but powerful special-forces bases far and
wide.
Taken all together, this is neither appeasement nor
isolationism. It’s obviously not strategic maximalism either. It’s something in
between, and in that in-between space, suspended between expectations inherited
from the past and hesitations generated by a fuzzy future, things sometimes get
weird or uncomfortable in the face of an unprecedented avalanche of decision
points. Weird like Geneva II.
