Category Archives: Middle East

Obama’s Libya Speech was Good – UPDATED with Media

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Well done – reasonably clear and coherent, limited, nonimperial

 

Media Update: I spoke on a local radio show on the Libya intervention. Please go here to listen; the media player half-way down the page  (with the green label in Korean) plays back the interview. My comments begin around 14:00.

 

Call me a shill, but I am really warming up to Obama, at least on foreign policy most of the time. (He’s not yet serious about the debt though – but the neither is the GOP.) I thought this speech was an excellent example of a toned, measured foreign policy that fits US constraints (the huge debt, 2 other wars that no one likes, the rise of the rest) with US values (preventing massacres, trying to help others to democracy) and tries to embrace world opinion rather than strut. So well done.

 

1. There were no rousing calls to arms, American dominance, American exceptionalism, etc. This is probably the part the US right hated. They can’t forgive Obama for refusing to call America exceptional, and once again he showed yesterday that he really does see the US as part of a community of states, not someone standing above it as the most awesome place in world history with special privileges to tell others what to do. I don’t know why this angers Americans so much. Can’t we see that all this does is humiliate others and convince them that we are jerks? All you need to do is travel a little outside the US to see how much non-Americans find the discourse of American amazingness grating, insulting, pointlessly antagonizing. I see this all the time teaching Asians – who have their own long history they think makes them pretty great and unique too. What is wrong with talking to other as if we are normal and like them? Humility is a value too.

The US is just 3% of the world’s population. Lots of other countries – Iran, China, Russia, France, 19th C Britain and Germany – believe they are exceptional too. In an age of nationalism this is to be expected, but what is the actual value to all that, other encouraging people’s worst, most parochial chauvinistic attitudes about the country in which the were randomly born? This doesn’t mean the US can’t lead; I certainly agree that US dominance is reasonably benign (thank W that we even have to argue for that point though now). And the world is generally a better place for US leadership. But even the US makes mistakes – including really big ones like Iraq 2 or Dresden. So not posturing globally as the most awesome place, somehow entitled to special rules to intervene in other peoples business, strikes me as mature, adult, serious. As I have said before, if we want other to follow American leadership, we can’t do that by embarrassing or humiliating them that somehow America is uniquely positioned to overawe the planet. You don’t need to be a psychologist to know that will drive other people crazy. Besides, we don’t even have the resources or rep to talk like that anymore anyway. Bush and the Iraq told the whole world that American exceptionalism is just arrogance and hubris. It is in America’s interest to adjust to that and try follow the rules.

2. The speech explicitly defended saving countless lives in Benghazi. This was always the most important reason to go in – to prevent another Srebrenica. I can’t understand why the president and other western leaders aren’t getting HUGE credit for this. Once again, the West has prevented a mass slaughter (also in Bosnia and Kosovo – all Muslim populations it is worth noting too). Yes, we didn’t stop other slaughters, and we can’t do everything, but we did this, and it was good and right. This is real Western or American exceptionalism – we saved defenseless people from a madman. China wouldn’t have done that. I can think of few US uses of power of which Americans should be more proud. When people claim the US is a nasty, expansionist, torturing empire, we have counter-evidence now too. And the Germans should be downright embarrassed they abstained. I still have not read any convincing anti-intervention arguments on this issue.

3. Obama roughly fit US limited power to global expectations and rules. You hardly need to be a historian to know that US power is on the ropes at the moment. US debt is spinning out of control, the recession is brutal, the rise of the rest, especially China, limits our room to move. In such an environment, unilateralism’s costs go up, and Obama was right to state that very bluntly. Instead of Bush-style ‘mission accomplished’ machoismo, he said we are doing the best we can in a tough position, and that our reluctant hand was forced by the likelihood of a bloodbath. Isn’t that exactly the kind of leadership everyone wanted after 10 years of Bush and war and national exhaustion and division? How many people, in the US too, called for that for year as Iraq burned? This is why I don’t understand all the carping about Obama dithering or leading us into a quagmire. Doing the best we can in tough circumstances is a pretty good compromise response to a very hard issue. That is enough, at least for now, no?

4. A lot of the criticism strikes me as mean-spirited or trite. I like Krauthammer most of the time, but I thought calling this the ‘professor’s war,’ was just nasty – and not just because I am a professor supporting it (a fair riposte I suppose). I presume that means that trying to follow the UN rules, trying to go through international organizations like NATO, trying to build real coalitions of the willing, is some namby-bamby girlie man response to a war. Real men just kick a— with the 82nd Airborne, I suppose. But didn’t we learn from Bush that going from the gut is super-risky? How about the measured use of force that displays some contemplation of risk and reward? And isn’t it nice that we have some real allies this time around. Sure, they won’t do a lot of the heavy lifting, but compare Iraq 1 and 2. The first time through, the coalition of Bush 41 helped limit the cost and fallout of anti-Americanism. Lots of thinking and effort went into that. Then consider the course of Iraq 2.

Next, a lot of  the talk about quagmires and exit strategies seems awfully overheated to me this early in the game. As Kaplan notes, relax, we are just in the first week of this. It’s not Vietnam all over again, and the president made a strong commitment to avoid ground troops. So let’s cut him some slack to deal with a very hard issue. Conflict are never, ever clean – even the Iraq 1 blitzkrieg we all remember so fondly lead to a nasty semi-civil war in Iraq.

Finally, what’s up with this ridiculous ‘tough girls’ critique? How thoroughly irrelevant to anything, so just let Sjoberg walk you through how crude and practically insulting that is to the serious female advisors around Obama.

This flippancy, plus the general failure of realists to admit that Obama just saved, perhaps, 10,000 people, tells me that Obama more or less got it right. The best critique I have read of the ‘Obama Doctrine’ is here. The most serious problem going foward for any Obama Doctrine is the consistency problem. As one of my commenters has noted over the last few weeks, doesn’t the responsbility to protect (R2P) mean we should go to Ivory Coast next?

Turkey’s ‘Neo-Ottoman’ Rise? (1): Turkey’s Drift from the West

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Wikistrat

Part 2 is here, and Part 3 will come shortly.

 

 

Regular readers will know that I participate as a partner-analyst with the geopolitical consulting firm Wikistrat. This month they rolled out a pretty cool scenario on Turkey’s rise, and what it means for the region. The particular focus is whether or not Turkey is pursuing an independent line from the West in the Middle East especially. It has, partially, bandwagoned with Iran and Syria in the last few years. It broke publicly and sharply with Israel after the flotilla debacle. The current ruling party (Justice and Development Party; AKP) is formally islamist (although not too much in practice). There is concern in the scenario that Turkey might pursue an populist, semi-islamist course, possibly even a neo-Ottoman posture toward the Middle East. Obviously this would create huge headaches for the West, especially Greece and Israel. In the last few weeks, Turkey has fought the NATO-imposition of the no fly zone over Libya.

The scenario set-up is worth a look; Wikistrat’s idea is to build a sort of Wikipedia of analysts all contributing to pages of game scenarios and editing each other. (If you think you can hack it, and you have some decent credentials, contact them. Good analysts are always in demand.) I didn’t quite get it at first, but now I like it more and more. It is a nifty collaborative idea but with way better quality than Wikipedia or wiki-Avatar. (Hah! yes, wiki-Avatar really exists; if you don’t know why Avatar is awful, read this.) Wikistrat follows the ‘Web 2.0’ idea, pioneered by Wikipedia, that more eyes looking at the same ideas/writing will find problems and new approaches. I find this clever and rich. But it runs totally counter to the closed scholarship/peer review model of a sole author, perhaps emailing colleagues before submitting a paper to a journal, where three more reviewers at most look at it. Wikistrat goes the opposite way and throws open your input to all and sundry. In passing, I think this will be a big challenge to traditional closed peer review in the future. And yes, I do get a small stipend if you sign up for the service through my website, but no I haven’t made a cent yet, so I am not trying to be a shill here. I genuinely think the analysis keeps getting better and better, despite my initial skepticism about the ‘wiki’ model – it’s so different than what I do normally in my writing. Anyway, judge for yourself, and note also their awesome list of topics to come: global air power projection, global sea power projection, water conflict, US missile defense – nice, especially for all you defense wonks out there.

Anyway, I just don’t buy it that Turkey is really going to wander far into some kind of islamist-populist mode a la Chavez or Ahmadinejad. I argued that eventually Turkey would return to the NATO-EU-US fold because the cost-benefit analysis is stacked toward it. But I took some serious criticism for arguing for continuity, so, following the wiki-bleg model, commenters here should give me some good ideas to help me save my reputation. Here is the first part of my write-up, starting from the scenario baseline of a ‘neo-Ottomanization’ of the Turkish government. The titles follow the Wikistrat layout.

 

Scenario Title: Continued Rise and “Shift back Westward”

 

Summary: Turkey’s rise continues as it shifts away from Iran, strengthening relations with US, Europe and Israel.

 

 

Scenario Outline: From Neo-Ottoman Back to Normality

 

The AKP overreaches by openly provoking the West or EU, perhaps on the Armenian massacre debate, or Israel’s behavior in the occupied territories. Vocal domestic opposition emerges – particularly from entrenched elite interests in business and the military, coupled with the educated, westernized Facebook generation watching Arab Spring on their laptops. Facing rising domestic anxiety over an increasingly overt break with the West, Prime Minister Erdogan goes for broke, publicly arguing that Turkey is a ME power whose ‘destiny’ lies with fellow Muslims and others pursuing ‘social justice’ in the region. Trips to Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, Russia, and China follow in the next years. Western leaders and westernized Turkish elements push back in the media; Western fora like the Community of Democracies and the European Parliament wonder out loud about Turkey’s commitment to democracy and human rights. US congressmen start complaining on Fox News. Turkey’s EU membership application is discreetly frozen. NATO becomes stand-offish. The IMF and World Bank start hedging Turkish loan proposals. Turkish stocks start sliding, as does the lira. Polarization akin to the red state-blue state in Turkey emerges, and the AKP loses the following election (possibly with hints of military blackmail). The succeeding government – corrupt, unpopular, unstable – mouths a mixture moderation and populist/semi-islamist rhetoric publicly for continuity’s sake, but bureaucratically tracks back toward western institutions.

 

 

Regional Implications

 

My scenario returns the region to the status quo ante (before the open flap with Israel particularly). The Turko-Israel relationship though will never be as close again. Iran and Syria will push back, deploying standard tropes of anti-Americanism and Muslim toadying to the West, but no listens much to that sort of boilerplate anymore. The real regional costs to Turkey will come from Al Jazeera, which will opine mercilessly on this for months, probably saying Turkey caved to Israel. Greece will be unhappy that its implicit competition has gotten worse again. The Cyprus stalemate will become a little easier. Arabs states, absorbed by Arab Spring and traditionally hesitant toward Turkish power, will say nothing much.

A Defense of Obama’s Limited Commitment to the Libyan Campaign

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The debate over the extent of US involvement in Libya is heating up, and a predictable cluster of analysts are claiming that we a backing into serious endeavor with no clear strategy, with confused ethics, raising process above substance, etc. I say predictable, because it looks increasingly like the ‘usual suspects‘ of liberal internationalist hawks and neo-cons who helped gin up the war on terror (GWoT) that by almost any benchmark has gone pretty badly astray. The gist of seems to be that Obama is a ditherer so we are drifting through this. Republicans of course will hammer Obama for this.

This strikes me as somewhat unfair (even though all the links above are worth your time and most of the points are fair). So here is a case for the limited, we’re-not-quite-sure-what-we-are-doing, we-hope-the-allies-and-Arabs-will-do-more intervention we just started. (For an R2P defense, try this.)

 

1. The narrowing time window in Libya forced the West’s hand before a serious strategic discussion could be fleshed out. Ideally, we would have had something like Obama’s serious, months-long deliberation on Afghanistan in 2009. All the big voices could be heard – western militaries and parliaments especially. A public opinion debate in western media could have generated at least some basic consensus among elites and publics both within and across the coalition’s member states. But war of course does not wait for strategists and planners to hammer out all the details, or for long public debates. Just about any basic strategy course will tell you how much unpredictability conflict generates and how actors frequently have to ad-lib and flim-flam their way through these sorts of engagements. New events pop up out of nowhere (Arab Spring); wholly unforeseen consequences suddenly loom (like a Libyan bloodbath); previous ‘certainties’ evaporate as new actors, atrocities, resources, etc. enter the picture (who are the Libyan rebels anyway?). Sometimes, the pressure of time simply cannot be avoided. I argued last week that if Libya were to evolve into a Bosnian-style bloodbath, the West would have to intervene, and fairly quickly. Inevitably that means that the operation will be organized on the fly and be fairly sloppy. Yet the alternative was so much worse. So yes, this thing is a mess, but it’s not too bad so far – let’s be fair – and the alternative of Gadhafi’s Gestapo tactics in eastern Libya is downright chilling. To my mind, western leaders deserve genuine congratulations at this point for pulling together some kind of reasonably coordinated campaign that no one really wanted very fast that has achieved the stated goals of the UN Security Council resolution. That’s not bad at all actually…

 

2. The US use of force is increasingly de-coupled from anything but presidential decision, but constitutionally, democracies really needed to wait and ‘dither’ a little bit. Andrew Sullivan has made this point very well. The case for ‘dithering’ is actually a good one, because the democracies really should not change into war without some public debate and consultation. Anyone whose studied the evolution of US foreign policy since WWII knows the (and should worry about) the increasing presidentialization of US war-making authority. The US has not declared war since WWII. The US has fought Korea, Vietnam, Iraq 1 and 2, and Afghanistan without formal constitutional authority from Congress (Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution). No, this does not mean the US president is becoming a military dictator (read Chalmers Johnson if you think so), but it is unnerving and increasingly undemocratic. So I think Obama did the right thing, by American law, in waiting for a least little while so that their could be some debate in the Congress and US public on this. This would apply to France and Britain as well.

 

3. The US is overstretched. This should be so strikingly obvious to everyone – except neo-cons I suppose – that is a very good reason to dither and otherwise look for a light, low impact intervention before lots of grandiose rhetoric about Clausewitz and such. This is premature it seems to me. This is not yet a major national mobilization in the West for a huge war. Maybe we can move through this with minimal intervention. We don’t know, but why isn’t it worth a try? If have to really ramp up to pursue a Clausewitzian victory (win big through a massive military strike at the heart of the enemy and get the awful, unpredictable business of war over as fast as possible), we can. But remember that Clausewitz was writing for interstate war traditionally defined. He didn’t think too much about insurgencies or foreign interventions for limited political gains in a revolutionary situation. Clearly invading Libya (‘boots on the ground’) would be a major new commitment when we really can’t afford that, and the likelihood it would backfire is huge. In that sort of environment, bombing to stop atrocities is not such a bad compromise.

 

4. Kosovo is not such a bad model after all. In 1999, NATO bombed the Serbs into (something like) submission in Kosovo. We helped the Kosovo Liberation Army even the odds, and today Kosovo is not that bad. It’s not great, but at least there is no ethnic cleansing. The conflict had (some) multilateral legitimacy, and while it angered Russia, it did not provoke a new Cold War which a heavier footprint might have. This was organized by most under-appreciated general in recent US history – Wesley Clark (probably because he is a Democrat whom the GOP cannot lionize). If you haven’t read his book on his work in the Balkans, you should. It is the likely model for Libya, even if the GOP thinks it is wimpy, violates Clausewitzian rules, and cedes the initiative to the French and Arabs.

 

5. Iraq really should give everyone pause and does, very obviously, argue for caution and last-resort thinking, at least for now. Anyone even passably familiar with the US budget should know that US unipolarity is on the ropes. No, the US should not suffer from an Iraq or Vietnam syndrome. But the GWoT has become such a mess, that does anyone really think that US public opinion (not interventionist elites, mind you) want some huge commitment? Yes, Americans and the West want to stop horrific atrocities; the ‘CNN effect’ is real, and we should try where we can (Rwanda should have taught us that). But I can’t imagine that the US voter, who really wants to leave Afghanistan and Iraq, wants to hear about Clausewitz in Libya. We have to balance our desire to help with American exhaustion and reticence after a decade of war. Hence, Obama’s middling approach is actually a fair response to contradictory pressures, it seems to me.

 

If you consider all these factors – to go in early and hard against Gadhafi (when it would have helped the rebels most, and because America ‘leads’ not ‘dithers’) vs. to stay out altogether (because we have no idea what we are doing and have just thrown this together at the last minute) – I think Obama, Clinton, Sarkozy, and Cameron actually found a pretty good middle course that can basically be summarized as ‘bombing for human rights.’ Yes, that is confused, messy, hardly a rousing call to arms and patriotism, dithering, possibly oxymoronic, and so on. But it balances well all the contradictory pressures listed above, which must be awfully hard this late in the history of the GWoT and Arab Spring. So before we tear them apart on the op-ed pages, let’s at least give them a chance. We will continue to debate this as war goes on; we can change course if we really need to because of new circumstances; and the West (and even the Arab League!) should be proud of itself for having prevented an almost certain bloodbath. That seems like a pretty good record so far.

In Light of the Libyan Civil War, Give Mubarak his Due…

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No, I am not an authoritarian-sympathizer; I supported the drive to dump him as much as anyone. But the comparison of the Mubarak’s response to Arab Spring and Gadhafi’s is worth pondering. When push came to shove, Mubarak choose a vastly more civilized exit than most of his dictatorial ilk, and while he was clearly a nasty autocrat, he falls on the ‘gentle’ end of that spectrum. For a good article on how Mubarak ‘failed’ to learn the real Machiavellian prowess of staying in power from genuine sociopaths like Robert Mugabe, try here. For a list of the worst of the worst, against whom Mubarak scarcely compares, try here.

Consider the following points for why – within the awful world of dictators and psychotics ruling today – Mubarak was comparatively benign:

1. He didn’t shoot his own people. This strikes me as the most important distinction between the bad, and the truly worst. It is not clear yet if Mubarak did not order the Egyptian military to shoot the demonstrators, or if the army was so ordered, but didn’t do it. We will learn later. But even if he did, he clearly didn’t have his heart in it. The Egyptian military was on the streets for awhile, but didn’t do much. Regime thugs were also out there for a few days, but killed ‘only’ a few people by Gadhafi standards. The comparison with the many other dictators willing to butcher their own people en masse is striking. Consider China’s response to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, Gadhafi’s recent brutality, Syria’s 1982 Hama massacre, Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland repression in the early 1980s, Burma’s 1988 opposition massacre, North Korea’s disdain for the the 1990s famines that killed a million people, Iran’s 2008 repression, Saddam Hussein’s 1990s repression of the Kurds and Shiites, etc. Without excusing Mubarak’s police state, it appears that butchering huge numbers of his own people was a redline he would not cross. The strikes me as a fundamental moral distinction we should ‘credit’ him for.

2. He didn’t start a civil war. Again Mubarak had the sense, perhaps even ‘morality,’ to avoid plunging his country into a devastatingly destructive civil conflict. Gadhafi is the obvious comparison, but Idi Amin and Hussein went this route too, and Ceausescu and the Soviet 1991 coup plotters risked the same. Today Yemen and Bahrain seem to be sliding in this direction. By contrast, Mubarak did his national duty and resigned. For all his nastiness, he doesn’t seem like a total megalomaniac who believed the state exists solely to serve him. By contrast look at the ‘sun-king’ egomania of Gadhafi, Kim Jong Il, or J-B Bokassa, with their ridiculous titles and cults of personality. Mubarak at least knew that Egypt was larger than him and left; does anyone expect that from Bashar al-Assad? It could have been so much worse…

3. He didn’t trash the economy for (too much) personal enrichment and to keep power. Zakaria makes the point that Egypt has actually been growing for awhile. This too is opposite the usual line of the worst of the worst, like Mugabe, Mobutu, or Kim Jong Il. The genuinely extreme leaders with world historic pretentions of their own role – think Amin, Chavez, or Bokassa – almost always ended looting their own economies for extreme personal gain to justify their claims to be emperors, sun-kings, etc. Yes, Mubarak and his cronies lived it up; these guys usually do. But one need only look at North Korea or Burma to see how much worse it could have been. And in tolerating this growth, Mubarak also put into the Egyptian opposition’s hands the resources the fueled this year’s revolts. Credit him at least for not impoverishing the whole country simply as a strategy to retain power. Would you rather live in Zimbabwe or Egypt?

4. He didn’t eject the foreign media. Was anyone else struck by how western media figures like Anderson Cooper suddenly recast themselves as Danton or Robespierre after a few days in Egypt? I can’t say that Cooper ever expressed much interest in or knowledge about Egypt before, but a punch in the face by Mubarak thugs turned him into Lenin or the Tank-Man. Well none of that would have been possible without Mubarak’s tolerance for foreign media in country. He could have pulled a Latin American dictator trick and simply shot them. Or Mubarak might have tried to seal off the media permanently like NK. But again, this seems to have been a redline he would not cross, and it badly weakened his hand, especially overseas. The whole world could watch as Muburak’s writ crumbled; by contrast, CNN reporters in Libya are far fewer and wearing flak jackets.

5. He left when it was clear he could not stay. In line with points made above, Mubarak gave up when the options became intolerable. Gadhafi didn’t, and his historical reputation, already tarnished enough by autocracy and the sheer lunacy of his rule, is now forever ruined by his shedding of his own citizen’s blood. Whatever reputation Gadhafi might have claimed – first as an Arab-bloc leader, then later as an African leader, and recently by the rapprochement with the West after he surrendered his nuclear program – is now gone. Gadhafi is now just one more psychopath history will forget. If this sounds surreal, consider that Stalin still enjoys a reasonable reputation in Russia, and the South Koreans will still praise Park Chung-Hee, even though both are reviled globally as nasty dictators. But now, even this option is foreclosed to Gadhafi, where Mubarak might have a Park Chung-Hee-like chance of resuscitation later in Egyptian history books. At the end of Mubarak’s tenure and within the albeit awful moral framework of governance he created, he still did the right thing within that frame. Instead of a  Goetterdaemmerung, he gave up. Give him credit for that at least…

If Libya Becomes Rwanda or Bosnia, We’ll Have to Intervene…

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Like most of you – from Robert Gates down to just about every Westerner with memories of Iraq (and who can forget?) – I am super-wary of intervening in Libya: yet another conflict in a Muslim land, more white Christians killing brown Muslims, more US overstretch, an obvious threat of mission creep, the Iraq-style possibility that Al-Qaeda will come to fight us there in the chaos, etc. It could easily become a quagmire, a nightmare, yet another Afghanistan, etc. And regular readers of this blog will know that I think the US is badly overstretched, probably needs to get out of the ME, desperately needs to balance its budget with some defense cuts, and more generally should play a less ‘imperial’ role in the world. My own hope, like just about everyone else, is that the Libyan rebels can pull this off on their own and that Gadhafi might realize his time is up like Mubarak or Ben Ali (Tunisia).

However, in the last few days it increasingly looks like Gadhafi might not only hang on, but win. We don’t know of course yet, but we need to start thinking about what to do, if anything, in the case of a Gadhafi victory. It seems very likely that if Gadhafi retakes the east, he will butcher his opponents en masse. I don’t want to go in there anymore than anyone else, but we could be looking at massacre of thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of people. Not only would the leadership elites – the Libyan National Council, the new town mayors and councils, the military and old regime guys who flipped, etc. – be wiped out brutally (imagine the torture, family killings, Gestapo tactics to come). But given that something like half the country has thrown in with the rebels, one can imagine a massive crackdown reaching deep into regular society. Think of bakers who gave their product away to support local rebels, or school principals who allowed their buildings to be used for meetings, or police officers who looked the other way as the revolt first gathered strength. Given the sheer nation-wide scale of the revolt, the post-Gadhafi victory purges could be downright ghastly – like Bosnia or Rwanda.

Yes, we have seen purges before – the PLA killed perhaps 5000 at Tiananmen Square, the Burmese junta killed perhaps 3000 in 1988, Mugabe did the same in Matabeleland in the early 80s – and did nothing. But Gadhafi could be on the verge of something yet more awful – plumbing the depths of brutality we associate with Milosevic or ‘Hutu Power’ in Rwanda. The revolt’s failure could generate extermination death-tolls we haven’t seen in 20 years anywhere. (And if you think it can’t get worse, I suppose we should be ‘grateful’ that Gadhafi is not Himmler or Pol Pot.)

My sense is then that we would just have to do something. Does anyone anywhere honestly defend the West’s realpolitik behavior toward Rwanda anymore – its too far away, would likely be a quagmire, we don’t know anything about the locals, we could be there forever? All this is true, but in the face of 800,000 dead, aren’t we ashamed? We feel no moral obligation? (If you still feel that way, go watch Hotel Rwanda again, followed by Schindler’s List, then get a morality transplant.) What is the point of NATO, Obama, human rights, etc. if we permit Rwanda, part 2? Why not just close the State Department, UN, etc. altogether?

The intellectual cover to intervene could be provided by the notion of “responsibility to protect” (R2P). And if the Chinese and Russians don’t like it, well, in the face of mass atrocities on this scale, then to h— with them. We went into Kosovo in 1999 on the basis of NATO, regardless of Sino-Russian callous, self-serving flim-flam about ‘non-interference.’ Not trying to stop butchery approaching genocidal levels, right on NATO’s doorstep no less, is a total moral abdication. This is beyond ‘realism;’ this will be an obvious, catastrophic moral failure that will rightfully haunt us all. This is a chance to stop a second Rwanda – probably the most awful event in human history since Pol Pot. I just can’t imagine that we should do nothing.

All this said, yes, we must limit our exposure. This is not Bushism – freeing the world from tyranny forever, democratic invasions, American empire, etc. This is a (very minimal) human rights-based argument in order to prevent the very worst. (This is hardly my area of expertise though; read this for a much better case.) My own sense is that the 1999 Kosovo air campaign (bombing without without ground forces) – which limited NATO exposure and helped the Kosovo Liberation Army even the odds – would be a preliminary model. Nor is this a call for immediate intervention. Maybe the rebels can still win, and it looks like we still have time to wait and see. The best outcome of all would be a rebel victory without NATO involvement. But if Gadhafi wins and a huge bloodbath ensues, we must do something…

 

Egyptian Revolution (2): The Egyptian Army’s Moral Superiority to China

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For part 1 of my thoughts on the Egyptian revolution, go here.

4. China shot its own people; Egypt has not. Much of the analysis has focused on possible parallels with Iran 1979. But another more recent parallel, especially relevant to this website, is Tiananmen Square 1989. In their moment of crisis, the Chinese turned their guns on themselves, and the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) will be forever stained by the blood of its own citizens en masse. This strikes me as major moment in the evolution of dictatorships. All dictatorships suffer from legitimacy problems, of course, but none want to openly rely on naked force. Militaries are usually the hidden albeit central prop in dictatorships, but they don’t actually want to do the dirty work themselves. That is for the paramilitary thugs and secret police. No officer wants to think the primary enemy of the a state’s military is its own people, not some foreign enemy. Their dignitary and right to rule is based on the whole idea that thy are defending the people, not massacring them; in fact this is the myth of 1952 Free Officers coup in Egypt itself. Hence the call by a dictator in dire straits to shoot the citizenry is a rubicon for any army that cannot be uncrossed. In 1989, the eastern European militaries balked; in China, the PLA did not. My sense is that the social costs to the PLA were lower though, because China is so big. The CCP purposefully brought in rural PLA units for whom Beijing was like another planet. But in small countries like Poland 1989 or Egypt today, army repression in the capital would immediately be felt and transmitted everywhere. So hear, hear to the Egyptian military (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence). For all its corruption, despotism, and insulation, it still did the right thing when the chips were down. Did anyone imagine even a month ago that we’d be speaking of the moral superiority of the Egyptian military to the PLA?

5. Beyond this evident parallel to Beijing 1989, this is whole things isn’t really that relevant out here. The news media coverage has been thin. The current El Nina cold snap in Northeast Asia has gotten more press time regionally than that Egypt. Not surprisingly the Chinese haven’t discussed Egypt much, but I am disappointed the the Korean and Japanese press seems so disinterested. Initial Korean media coverage focused on the possible loss of ME export markets (groan). From this I would draw two conclusions. First, for all the talk about a flat world, cultural hurdles still matter a lot. The parties caught up in the war on terror (the West, Israel, the Arab/Muslim ME) are riveted by this, but East Asian’s just aren’t, sadly. My experience in East Asia is that locals don’t really care much about the developing world. It’s far away, the languages and religions seem unintelligible, and the societies look backward, especially to East Asians obsessed with development. East Asians worry a lot about the US, and some about Europe, but there is tremendous ignorance of places like Latin America or Africa. Second, I think this disinterest is as much political as it is cultural. Newly wealthy places like Korea or China demonstrate their earned, rightful place in the OECD through an almost purposeful disdain for the third world. Koreans love to demonstrate how worldly they are by spending a year in the US or West; I’ve never met a student or teacher who thought a year a in developing country would be vastly more interesting. (It is.) So Barnett’s ‘new core’ flaunts its new status by forgetting its roots in the third world: disinterest as a mark of superiority.

6. A comment about the commentary: Frank Rich is right that far too few people have any idea what to say on Egypt because so much of the commentary is really about the US (or Israel). This Amero-centrism is why so many are saying the US should do this or that: the working assumption is that that US guides the world and can easily direct events. This is no longer true, so the mountain of US, rather than Egypt, -focused commentary creates unrealistic expectations that we can direct this thing.

Rich also makes the excellent observation that if Americans could actually watch al Jazeera, they might actually learn something about Egypt itself. Instead the mainstream commentary has revealed the embarrassingly nativist ignorance of much of the punditocracy on anything beyond US borders. In general I was very pleased to see how well academics requited themselves in the blogosphere on this; I think especially Walt, Mead, Cole and the Duck of Minerva have been super.

But if you read the op-ed pages, you got recycled banality and the usual suspects: Friedman gave you his typical, ‘this-is-a-defining-moment-in-the-ME’ schtick; Bush neocons desperate for rehabilitation strove to take credit and somehow blame Obama for…what exactly?; Palin blithered; Parker told us that the big story was really about the US media and Cohen that it was about Israel; Colbert King forgot the rest of the world exists; and Beck, well, you already know – just watch the loopy video from part 1. Score yet another point for blogging.

Without the informed blogging voices of people who actually know something about Egypt and revolutions, you really wouldn’t learn much about the events at all. You’d have just gotten an endless series of stories from a royalist, uncosmopolitan press in which Washington was the real story, because that’s all the pundits know how to talk about.  Douthat, for example – and whom I think is a pretty good writer usually – clearly had nothing to say, so he just gave up and wrote about Obama yet again under the guise of Egypt. How easy; this is how the press for a nation of untraveled monolinguists infatuated with their own power evolves. Its all about us. By contrast, here is an example of a non-expert, trained in traditional Washington self-obsession, who nonetheless tried. 

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ADDENDA:

The Japan Security Watch (JSW) blog of the New Pacific Institute has taken to cross-posting some of my stuff.  JSW is a good review of Japan, and a nice a compliment to my over-focus on Korea and China. They do on a lot on the nuts-and-bolts of hardware and deployment. Mil-Tech junkies on Asia will love it. JSW and I are working on some cooperation in the future. I want to thank them and commend readers to take a look at their good website.

BusanHaps, the big expat newspaper for Busan, SK, has also reposted some of my stuff. I want to thank them too and commend their site. Busan readers almost certainly know it already, but non-local readers will find it a good window on the way expats live here.

Finally, I want to point out that a published version of my remarks on North Korean shelling of Yeonpyeong Island is now available here (RINSA 15) from the Korean National Defense University (KNDU). If you really want to get into the details of SK defense against N, KNDU is the place to go. I want to thank them for soliciting me and thank readers for all the helpful comments that went into the final product.

Egyptian Revolution (1):We should Support the Uprising

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Good lord, Beck really is insane…

 

Part 2 is here.

Like all of you in the last few weeks, I have been glued to CNN regarding Egypt. It is pretty inspiring, and I can only hope that Mubarak leaves and something more genuinely liberal and democratic takes his places. Here are a few thoughts.

1. Regarding the video selected above, I did plan to post a good pic from Egypt, but you’ve seen that a lot already, so that would not have added much new value. This you probably haven’t seen though, and it is ‘important’ for the sheer insanity about US conservatives’ foreign policy concerns in the ME it reveals. Apparently the Egyptian revolution is an islamist plot that will turn the Mediterranean into an Islamic lake, allow Russia to control Northern Europe, and China to control India and Pakistan. Don’t believe me? Beck’s sweeping hand movements will explain all…    h/t: Center for a New American Security.

2. This is one of those critical junctures when observers should to go on the record about what to do. If all this somehow goes wrong, everyone will blame Obama in 20/20 hindsight. That will inevitably be partisan and unfair, because the Obama administration is making decisions under huge uncertainty. Credibility requires one to go on record now, when information is limited and we all have to make our best guess.

That US conservatives are badly split signals this huge uncertainty. Absolute moral certainty is a central pose of the American right’s self-image (tax hikes are always bad, Iraq 2 was a good idea no matter what), so if even the Right –  which IMO takes foreign policy more seriously than domestic-focused US liberals – is divided, that tells you just how confused everyone really is. For the neo-con take that this really is about democracy, try Gerecht (excellent); for the gloomy realism that we should hew to the Egyptian military, try Krauthammer (depressing, but also good). And for the downright bizarre conspiratorial stuff, watch the above vid.

So here’s my line: I’ll say that Krauthammer and the realists are wrong. The Iran parallel is inaccurate; this will not lead to a Muslim Brothers’ dictatorship. Further, the support of democracy is, in itself, an important value. Even if there was a serious risk of an islamist takeover, we should still pressure Mubarak to get out, nor support a military oligarchy (Krauthammer). Who wants to look back in 10 years and say we supported yet another authoritarian in one of the worst governed places on earth, that we didn’t take the chance to push for something better, even if it was risky? How awful and embarrassing for the US; what a betrayal of all those heroic people we’ve seen on TV. And if they want islamists in the government, well, it is ultimately their country. So long as it remains a democracy (the difference between Turkey’s islamists’ participation, and Hamas’ budding oligarchy), then we have to allow them to disagree with us as is their right. Risking fanatics in government is part of democracy (witness, ahem, Sarah Palin). If we believe in it for ourselves, then we must be true to it for them. So, no, this is not a result of George Bush’s foreign policy, but we should support it anyway.

3. Israel should not drive our policy toward Egypt. Has anyone else noticed how much of this discussion has gotten hijacked by the ‘what-will-happen-to-Israel’ externality? (Try here, here, here, here, and here.) This is embarrassing and almost sycophantic. You can’t blame the Arabs for disbelieving we’re an honest broker when the fate of 6 million people in a different country outweighs the 85 million of the country that is actually the center of the story. Really? Should the US point of origin for yet another Middle East event be Israel’s benefit? We are two separate countries, right? Maybe we should care about the Egyptians themselves, right? Israel does have the finest military in the region, nuclear weapons, and a take-no-prisoners lobby in the US Congress, right? Don’t misunderstand me. I realize that Israel’s security is important for the US and that it is the only democracy in the region (although that is increasingly under question). I want Israel to be secure too; I’ve traveled there 3 times and unconditionally support its right to exist. If it would help, usher them into NATO or the EU, or extend formal US deterrence guarantees, even nuclear. But it’s long-overdue time that we break the habit looking over our shoulder to Israel on ME issues, and it’s extremely immoral to support continued Egyptian authoritarianism on the (likely correct) premise that a democratic Egypt will push Israel harder. That sells out the admirable sacrifice of 85 million for 6 million who voted for an openly provocative right-wing government.

2011 Asia Predictions (2): Middle East, South Asia, Russia

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Russia to the World – Bite me!

 

For my 2011 East Asia predictions (predictions 1-3), try here.

Last year, I put up 2010 predictions for Asia and Korea. Last week, I evaluated those predictions. This week come my 2011 predictions. It’s a fun exercise, if only to see how bad you blow it 12 months from now…

4. The Middle East peace process will go nowhere.

Why: Ok, this is not a particularly challenging prediction. Yet, we can always hope, but my guess is our hopes will once again be dashed. There are no elections coming up which might open possible policy shifts, and none of the big players seem to be rethinking much. Indeed, everyone seems fairly comfortable with the status quo, the current mix of intransigence and inaction. Particularly the Israelis seem to be fairly comfortable with the drifting-toward-apartheid status quo. And Obama, like so many POTUS before him, seems burned out with trying to resolve this tangle. So I don’t see anything suggesting real movement by anybody. Indeed, I increasing think that the two-state solution is pretty much gone; as Pillar says, wth are the Israelis thinking? So the status quo is pretty much the future: stasis.

5. India will back off on Afghanistan to give some room for US success and less Pakistani paranoia.

Why: This prediction is a little gutsier. If India continues to intervene in Afghanistan to encircle Pakistan, then Pakistan will never properly democratize, nation-build itself, or repress its Islamist-Taliban buddies, because they will remain a tool to use against India and to control Afghanistan after we leave. My sense is that there is growing recognition of this ‘AfPak’ logic. Increasingly it is clear that the Afghan war is irresolvable without some kind of Indo-Pakistan rapprochement. That is not likely and not my prediction, but I do increasingly see the Indians talking as if they are already a great power. If so, then Pakistan isn’t that important anymore. If India is just a regional power, then Pakistan is big trouble. But if India is a great power, then Pakistan is just a sideshow. So if India is growing up as a great power – they got Obama to support a UNSC seat for them last year – then Pakistan is the past. Far more important for India is the relationship with China and America, and Indian moves to encircle Pakistan in Afghanistan ultimately harm the US and aid China (by pushing Pakistan toward China) – exactly the opposite of its preferred outcome if it is a global power. Yes, India wants to reduce and humiliate Pakistan as it has Bangladesh, but I reckon the Indians increasingly see the costs of such pointless ideological satisfactions. India cannot retake Pakistan. Even without Pakistan’s nukes in the way, an Indian reabsorption would be colossal expensive and permanently delegitimize it as a great power. In short, global India has increasingly little to gain by provoking regional Pakistan. Even Kashmir isn’t really worth it: poverty, mountains, and fanatics – why bother? India has already won the Indo-Pak competition, as just about everyone knows. Pakistan is a paranoid faux-democracy riven by militarism, religious fanaticism, and terrorism. India is none of those things, so it can just savor Pakistan’s implosion and move on. Pakistan to India today is less like East Germany to West Germany, and more like Mexico to the US.

6. Russia will stay a Corrupt Mess, and Putin will genuinely reemerge.

Why: For several years now we have all been hoping that Putin might actually recede from the spotlight, that Medvedev might actually become a meaningful figure, that law might slowly push back corruption there, etc. All this was captured by the Obama administration expression ‘the reset.’ By 2011, it is time to admit this is over. The signal moment for me last year was the open farce of the Khodorkovsky trial – rather than the various gas tricks with Eastern Europe, stomping on local NGOs, or journalist murders (awful as all that is) – because ending ‘legal nihilism’ (ie, corruption) was Medvedev’s signal political promise. Well here was the big chance to show that with just a bit of movement on the biggest court case in Russia in a decade, one the world was watching. A little restraint might have convinced people that Medvedev wasn’t wholly a marionette of the old man. Instead, as Ioffe notes, Putin didn’t even both trying to cover up the sham. If I were an investor, I’d dump my rubles today. Putin just gave Wall Street (and the West) the finger. So I predict in 2011, that it will become widely acknowledged that Putin is still the chief, that he will be yet more public in preparation for reassuming the Russian presidency in 2012, that Russo-US cooperation will therefore slide, and that Russia’s political economy will stay a black market nightmare. To be sure, these aren’t exactly gutsy predictions, but it does seem to me that 2010 was an important year regarding the direction of the Putin-Medvedev tag-team, and the year’s events clearly downgraded the latter for all the world to see. We now know that Medvedev is a joke. So in 2011, given the looming presidential election and Putin’s consequent need to reassert himself for it, Medvedev will fade to black.

Stand with “South Park” vs Sharia Orwellianism

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SouthPark

By now you know that not even “South Park” is immune from salafism’s insistence on terrifying and alieanting the rest of the world. You may love or hate the show, but the defense of free-speech is a central values breakpoint between liberal modernity and reaction, between the best traditions of the West and the worst of Gulf Islam. This is an important part of the battle of ideas in the GWoT, as is defending the Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the Mohammed cartoonists in Denmark. Ali, herself a terrible victim of this paranoia, has a nice summary of the explicit free-speech threat of Muslims exporting sharia onto non-Muslims.

Everyone with a blog should do as Jon Stewart did on April 22 and explicitly defend the right of free speech, especially the right to ridicule and mock religion. Religions as a body of thought deserve as much scrutiny as any another paradigm, intellectual system, or philosophy. And religion certainly needs this criticism if it is not just to be superstition and received ascientific silliness, repackaged as ‘time-honored tradition,’ and codified by some book written a long time, then repackaged as ‘divine revelation.’  Even the faithful know this in their heart of hearts. Consider this counterfactual: if your friend told you that snakes could talk, that people came back from the dead, or that bushes burned without disintegrating, wouldn’t you be pretty incredulous – unless you heard it at Sunday school? I never had a teacher in my Catholic grade school who could answer that one, which was a pretty big let down.

If you don’t know the story of Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, it is an object lesson in this healthy interchange between religion and criticism. Read the Confessions for the whole story, but the short version is that the young Augustine found Christianity ridiculously primitive, intellectually soft, and superstitious. Trained in Greek philosophy and the high Latin of the great Roman authors, he found the writing of the New Testament poor and unconvincing. The story of how Augustine still came to Christianity and helped drag Christianity into a meaningful interaction with Greek philosophy is intellectual gripping, spiritually provocative, and more likely to convince you of Christianity’s veracity than any of the Palin-esque, family values TV preachers who masquerade today as authorities on Christianity. (If you want a 20th century version of this back-and-forth, read about CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein’s lengthy discussions of Christianity.)

The point is that religions, most especially today Gulf Islam (and American evangelical Christianity), desperate need their Nietzsches, South Parks, Hirsi Alis, and Christoper Hitchens to force them to stay up to par. Defending “South Park” is not just about free speech. It’s also about the larger point made by the New Atheists in the last 10 years: that religion must find a way to live in a the modern, plural, ‘impure’ multicultural, scientific, democratic world. If it can’t, if it simply lashes out to demonize (Benedict XVI) or butcher (salafism) its opponents, then trained people will never take it seriously. And that is the greatest ‘disrespect’ the faithful should really fear – when even the mildly educated think you’re like the Raelians or something – simply ridiculous and unworthy of meaningful consideration.

Addendum: It should be noted that the Islamic prohibition against imagery of Muhammad is far less totalist than the Gulf Sunni salafists would have you think. Shi’ites don’t care a whit, and Southeast Asian Sunnism was pretty lenient on this too until Saudi oil money and clerics start bringing the ‘pure’ (i.e., ‘arid-as-the-Gulf-desert’) version of Islam in the last generation. ISLAM DOES NOT HAVE BE MONOPOLIZED BY THE JIHADIS.

Just How Hard Will Afghanistan Be?: ‘We Issue Pens to Afghan Soldiers’

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afghan-soldiers-2

Robert Kaplan has a nice new piece on Afghanistan over at the Atlantic. As usual, it is worth your time. Kaplan travels to places most of us in IR could only dream of visiting, so his work’s got a verite feel that our modeling and endless quotations of one another never do. (This is why people read him, not us.) Unfortunately Kaplan repeats the same motifs again and again, so its not clear if we are reading about Afghanistan, or just Kaplan’s expansive Americanist ideology again. In this way, he is becoming like the Kagans. You already know his answer: geography is a huge constraint on international action; America’s NCOs and infantrymen are kick-a—; we should win the GWoT at even huge expense; and US empire is probably good for the world, even if others resent it.

This time around, Kaplan lays the groundwork for Stanley McChrystal’s presidential bid. What is it with conservatives and the lionization of generals? Just read Kaplan’s purple prose. No one doubts Petraeus or McChrystal’s military talents, but I am pretty sure the US right’s cult of personality tendency for military machismo is unhealthy for the democratic process. Also, is it really admirable that McChrystal only sleeps four hours a day? How many of us could make good decisions living that way regularly? That told me less that McChrystal is super-committed, and more that he is overworked, under-resourced, and under-staffed. That sounds like the Bush-era GWoT all right…

But the money quote from Kaplan’s piece has go to be this from a NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) interviewee:

The recruits may not know how to read, but they are incredibly street-smart. They’re survivalists. Basic soldiering here does not require literacy. We give them a course in how to read and issue them pens afterwards. They take tremendous pride in that. In Afghanistan, a pen in a shirt pocket is a sign of literacy.

Note the use of the military verb ‘issue.’ Yes, the $.50 plastic pen you forgot in the coffee room yesterday is a formally issued piece of military hardware that signals prestige in the wider Afghan society. WOW.

Consider all the information that short anecdote conveys to you about education, poverty, and governance in Afghanistan:

1. Afghans are so poor, they can’t afford pens. ISAF has to issue them, and only qualified soldiers get them.

2. Afghans are so illiterate, no one really needs them.

3. Widespread illiteracy and poverty means the Afghan state, even down into the local level, cannot meaningfully connect to the citizenry.

If illiteracy is so widespread that pens are a mark of social prestige, then Afghanistan can hardly be expected to have complex institutions or national centralization. If you can’t write bills or receipts, what kind of markets will you have? If you can’t read laws from Kabul, much less correspond with state organs, how do you know what the rules are, where to pay taxes, etc? If education is that non-existent, how can you build an army, infrastructure, courts, etc?

None of this means the US and other wealthy states should not help Afghanistan. Indeed, your heart should break when you read that Afghans are issued pens. Nor is this a verdict on the utility of ISAF; maybe we should still go, despite the huge hurdles this very revealing anecdote makes clear.

But this anecdote told me more about how hard the Afghan operation really will be, than Obama’s surge speech last year, or any of the other fearless, ‘we-can-do-it’ prose of Kaplan’s piece. This is way beyond Iraq. Afghanistan doesn’t just need counter-terrorism/insurgency, it needs nation-building on an order that took the US two centuries to achieve.

Obama didn’t include anecdotes this revealing in his Afghan surge address last year. Did he white lie by not showing us just how high the slope is? It kinda seems like it…