The Great Debate

The Arab world may be in turmoil, but its leaders actually need an enduring peace—now in Gaza and long-term with Israel—because regimes across the region are vulnerable as never before.

Whether they like it or not, that’s true for newly elected Islamists. And old-order autocrats need resolution to prevent protests at home from turning against them.

The challenge for Washington is taking advantage of the vulnerability to work with the new political roster — including players it doesn’t know all that well. The tectonic political shift over the past two years offers a dynamic opportunity.

Committed U.S. diplomacy could not only spur meaningful movement on the 64-year conflict. It could enhance Israel’s security and prevent a whole new type of tension with the region’s new governments.

The potential is visible in budding relations between President Barack Obama and Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate who has evolved since June from an unknown engineering professor to the most powerful Arab leader. They’ve talked often during the crisis. Mursi is now brokering what happens next.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney at the Monday foreign policy debate, should play to the Jewish TV audience like he was the star of a Borscht Belt revue.

Romney has a tempting assortment of issues he can tap to frame President Barack Obama as a leader whose policies are perilous for Israel. He can use the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran, Egypt and even Syria to make a case that Obama’s policies are wrong for the Jewish state.

Given the tenuous state of relations between Israel and the United States, it’s surprising that, according to a recent American Jewish Committee survey of Jewish opinion, 61 percent approve of Obama’s handling of U.S.-Israeli relations, while 39 percent disapprove. Those are numbers Romney needs to change Monday night.

As Syria’s civil war spirals into mounting violence, the Assad regime’s chemical weapons stockpile is generating increased anxiety throughout the Middle East and beyond.  Taking precautionary measures, the United States has reportedly placed 150 “planners and other specialists” in Jordan to work on contingencies — including the chemical weapons threat.

As odd as it may seem, however, we are lucky that Syria’s chemical stockpile marks Damascus’s most serious weapons of mass destruction risk.  Had Israel not bombed the country’s weapons reactor in 2007, the embattled nation — and the rest of us – could have been staring at the globe’s first civil war with a nuclear dimension.

Consider the domestic and international panic that could ensue if rebel factions, terrorists, government insiders or looters in civil war got control of nuclear weapons or their feedstock, or strike at a nuclear reactor to release radioactive contents.  Yet this is what we could indeed face if any one of three relatively unstable countries with nuclear infrastructures–Pakistan, North Korea or Iran– were to suffer the violent political disintegration we see in Syria today.  Equally disturbing — the international community does not have a reliable plan to cope.

Vladimir Putin sounded like the saber-rattler of old last week, when he accused the so-called historical West of trying to claw back its waning economic influence by waging “missile-bomb diplomacy” and “unilateral moves in violation of international law.” His stonewalling continued as he again refused to support further action on the Syrian crisis: Kofi Annan was greeted in Moscow this week with accusations of Western “blackmail,” and left without Russian backing for a future U.N. vote to sanction Syria. Putin even seems to be losing interest in the niceties of being a foreign leader, telling fellow G8 members, future Chinese premier Xi Jinping, and the Olympic opening ceremony that he was “too busy” to meet with them.

Only two months after its end, Dmitry Medvedev’s conciliatory presidency seems a distant memory. The ruling United Russia party (of which he is the ostensible chair) has passed a slew of authoritarian laws rolling back his liberal reforms. The most recent of these reintroduces criminal penalties for libel only a little more than half a year after they were dropped on Medvedev’s personal initiative.

Diplomats fear Putin’s return to the Kremlin means the “reset” of relations with the West under Medvedev will be lost along with it. During his election campaign, Putin accused Hillary Clinton of organizing anti-government protests. His party recently passed a law declaring any NGO that receives funding from outside Russia a “foreign agent.”

According to recent news reports, the Romney foreign policy team is trying to figure out what the presumptive Republican candidate thinks America’s role in the world should be. He’s been clear regarding the Iranian nuclear weapons program, promising that if he’s elected, Iran won’t get the bomb. But what about Afghanistan, say, or China? With less than six months left till Election Day, is he going to articulate distinctive foreign policy positions, or will he let Obama dictate the terms of the debate?

It would be understandable, given Romney’s desire to keep focused on jobs and the economy, if he were reluctant to get too far into the weeds on foreign policy. But come November, the American people will not be electing a financial adviser. They’ll be electing the leader of a world power.

Romney should not actually have much trouble outflanking Obama on foreign policy. The White House prides itself, rightly, on killing Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, and other jihadists who threatened U.S. citizens, interests and allies. But the national security strategy of a superpower with interests across the world cannot be reduced to counterterrorism. Nor can our global responsibilities be fulfilled, in the immortal phrase, by “leading from behind.”

Bashar al-Assad continues his war on the Syrian opposition, despite the presence of United Nations observers. His efforts have generated extremist reactions, including major bombings. The Syrian opposition continues to fragment, even as protesters manage to mount peaceful demonstrations in many parts of the country. The conflict is increasingly sectarian in character and has overflowed to Lebanon’s Tripoli.

There is no alternative in sight to the existing Security Council resolutions. Syria is not on the NATO summit agenda this weekend in Chicago. The Americans continue to need the Russians “on side” for nuclear talks with Iran that resume next week in Baghdad. Unilateral American action on Syria is not in the cards. Europe is preoccupied with its own financial crisis and is unable to act without American help. Qatari and Saudi weapons entering Syria are likely to increase violence and worsen sectarian tensions.

So what is to be done? Here are some ideas for the Obama administration:

Lend wholehearted support to the Annan plan, which the United States has been badmouthing ever since the Security Council passed Resolution 2043 on Apr. 21. Talk with Moscow about ensuring that Russian vital interests in Syria, port access and arms sales, are protected once Bashar al-Assad is gone. The United States no longer needs to block Moscow’s access to a Mediterranean port, as it did during the Cold War. Russian arms sales to Syria are a small price to pay to bring down a regime that links Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Deploy civilian observers – including Americans – to Syria. The Security Council has already authorized a civilian component to the U.N. Supervisory Mission in Syria (UNSMIS). It would be too much to expect Syria to accept U.S. military observers, and the U.S. does not send its soldiers and Marines into harm’s way unarmed, as the UNSMIS observers are. But we have had good results with unarmed civilian observers in the Kosovo Verification Mission before the NATO-Yugoslavia war, when the lead observer spoke truth to power about a civilian massacre. Stop talk about arming the opposition. It isn’t what we should be doing or encouraging      because of the likelihood it will prolong sectarian conflict; we can’t control where the weapons end up; and there is no hope that an insurgency will defeat Assad anytime soon. Redouble encouragement for peaceful demonstrations, which are occurring every day in Syria, and try to ensure that the U.N. observers are present for them. Increase the flow of non-weapons aid to the opposition inside Syria, which claims to have received precious little so far, and provide intelligence on threatening movements of Syrian security forces. Present overhead video of heavy weapons in use against Syrian cities at the Security Council, along with other hard evidence of Annan plan violations. Anne-Marie Slaughter has proposed a U.N. website that would post video and photographs uploaded by Syrians. Tighten the application of sanctions, including implementing the draconian financial sanctions already adopted for Iran against Syria as well.

When the Security Council approved the Annan plan, the United States called for “swift and meaningful consequences … should the regime continue to flout its obligations.” The best way of getting those consequences approved in the Security Council is to support full implementation of the Annan plan. Then the United States can go to the Council in mid-July, when the observer mission has to be renewed, arguing that despite its sincere efforts, Bashar al-Assad has defied the international community and needs to be taught a lesson.

The United Nations estimates that since Syria’s uprising began over a year ago, more than 9,000 Syrians have been killed. A recent assessment from Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Elliot Abrams puts the total number of Syrian refugees at almost half a million. Worse, it appears that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces are continuing to torture, imprison and kill Syrian civilians. It also seems that the recent peace plan promulgated by U.N.-Arab League peace envoy Kofi Annan, which Assad’s government agreed to, is dead. According to Turkey’s prime minister, Assad “is not withdrawing troops, but he is duping the international community.”

The conventional wisdom holds that the international community is out of alternatives, short of another potentially dangerous military intervention or the risky prospect of arming Syria’s rebels. Syria’s government has already thumbed its nose at sanctions and condemnations from the Arab League, Gulf Cooperation Council, European Union and various U.N. organs and individual countries. The Security Council, thanks to the vetoes of Russia and China, is also constrained to issuing awkward joint statements rather than passing binding resolutions.

But there is another option that has received surprisingly little attention.

Specifically, the United States as well as like-minded delegations in the West and Middle East should consider calling for Syria’s suspension from the U.N.’s most democratic and representative organ, the General Assembly (UNGA), where all 193 U.N. member states normally get one vote. Such an act would entail zero material costs, avoid veto authority and be a critical step toward alleviating the humanitarian nightmare unfolding in Syria.

A year into the crisis in Syria, it’s time to admit that the world is prepared to allow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to slaughter his people. Unless force is used to back diplomacy, the international community will let Assad kill tens of thousands more than the 7,500 already lost.

We’ve seen this playbook too many times before — in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan. It is time to face three brutal truths about the crisis. First, no country sees it as sufficiently in its interests to use airstrikes and eventually send forces into Syria to stop the attacks by the Syrian regime — the only way to end the current slaughter. While well intentioned and perhaps saving some lives, all the surrounding activity — summits, special envoys, humanitarian corridors, safe zones, arming the opposition, and efforts to reach a ceasefire — serves as a smokescreen for the Syrian regime to finish the job of wiping out the rebel “terrorists.” These negotiations will not work unless backed by force.

Second, the international community must not be fooled by the regime’s trick of negotiating small sideshows to end the killing. Diplomats will spend days and weeks negotiating tiny windows of breaks in the killing to evacuate the wounded. More weeks will be lost arguing about the details of humanitarian safe zones and corridors. While those steps would help save some lives and are important, they will not stop the crisis — and in fact could well prolong it by diverting attention from the need for force.

By Ahed Alhendi
The opinions expressed are his own.

Twenty years ago, I was a school kid chanting with my peers, “Our leader forever, the father, Hafez Assad!” Back then, I could not have imagined that one day I would see his statues destroyed all over Syria by the people — a sight now common within the country.

Most of those demonstrating in Syria are young people who were taught to love and adore our only president, and later his son, Bashar. As young Syrians, we have always treated the Assads as something of a holy family. We all were forced to join the Baath Party Pioneer Organization at the age of six and we grew up soaking in the Assads’ propaganda — the school system, the single TV station, the official newspaper; they all had a picture of Assad as their logos.

Now, the voices of freedom are sounding louder than the engines of armored vehicles and the whistling of tanks shells. Bashar Assad thought that the military would intimidate and quiet the protesters, but the shout “Bashar must go!” is only getting louder.