Thoughts on Syria.

[Reposted with edits from January]

The Security Council finally met as a result of the Arab League’s decision to pull out of Syria and suspend its observation mission. It referred the matter to the Council for the first time, and so Western states worked to get a Resolution passed condemning the Assad regime in the most aggressive language yet. Russia vowed to veto it.

Clinton justified the move in a way that invokes very little moral rhetoric, and stays strictly concerned with the question of stability:

The longer the Assad regime continues its attacks on the Syrian people and stands in the way of a peaceful transition, the greater the concern that instability will escalate and spill over throughout the region.

This is interesting because on the issue of the Security Council using force, the UN Charter only has provisions for issues involving international ‘peace and security’. In the past, humanitarian concerns have thus been cashed out with reference to this phrase. Here, there is little attempt to talk first of the moral issues at stake.

Contrast that with Hague’s interview on Sky News, where he does explain the reason for the Council’s meeting by referencing the ‘appalling’ acts of violence perpetrated by the Assad regime on a daily basis.

Hague also stresses the fact that it is the Arab League that have called on the UN to act. Clinton mentioned this multiple times. She noted:

The Arab League is backing a resolution that calls on the international community to support its ongoing efforts, because the status quo is unsustainable.

There are several reasons for emphasising this, but no doubt the main thought is that it helps to keep at bay suspicions that this is a Western, imperialist, hegemonic project. Since we sat back as the relevant regional organisation observed, and only now become more active upon that organisation’s request, an aura of increased legitimacy is inevitable. This fits Jennifer Welsh’s suggestion that a norm seems to be implicit at the moment: without authorisation by a regional authority, UN action on a regional security issue cannot be legitimate.

The Resolution proposed is available here. A few things to note:

1. This is a Chapter VI motion, which means no coercive enforcement powers are being invoked and we’re staying strictly in the realm of calls for peaceful dispute settlement. This should help to calm Russia down, but also note the Resolution does not explicitly rule out military intervention in the future, if the Council so wished.
2. Paragraph 3 refers very generically to condemning all ‘armed groups’. Again, a pander to Russia that gives the brief appearance of neutrality between the violence caused by Assad and the opposition. But given the feel of the rest of the Resolution, this rings rather hollow.
3. Paragraph 7 speaks very boldly of calls for regime change, and a democratic transition at that. So much for calming Russia down.

On the question of Russia’s role here, note the awkwardness of Hague’s interview. He’s asked what the point of the Resolution is given they will veto it, and, true to form, he tells us what is probably the truth: we’ll be forcing them to play their hand and shout out to the world that they’re the only ones standing between the status quo and a unanimous UN Resolution denouncing a tyrannical regime. And this is awkward precisely because this is what Russia itself is! It can hardly get all moralising and humanitarian on Syria’s ass because it knows, if necessary, it would take such action itself.

The potential for logical hypocrisy isn’t the only thing holding Russia back though. I imagine that factor is accompanied by several other considerations making the veto a ‘wise’ choice:

1. America-bashing is cheap but great political point scoring. There’s nothing better than reinforcing the image to one’s population that you’re standing alone with your own will and hindering the imperialist bastards.
2. Arms deals, worth billions.
3. And – see the same article – a naval base resting on a warm water port.
4. Perhaps a touch less cynically, Russia might also have genuine concerns about a slippery slope in which the principle of sovereignty and non-intervention – upon which so much peace since World War 2 has surely rested – is being slowly eroded by such humanitarian concerns. If the precedent becomes too robust, what’s left to prevent a downward spiral back into full-scale global conflict?

Which brings us finally to the question – why is the West not pushing for military intervention as it did in Libya?

As already noted, it is only now that the Arab League has referred the regional case to the Council, and current norms suggest they would not consider such action until this decision was made. But it admittedly seems to be the case that even now there is little drive for the type of action we saw against Gaddaffi. So again, why is this so?

The evidence suggests that media coverage is crucial to triggering the domestic will necessary in a democracy to make leaders want to take action. And in the Syrian scenario, we don’t have the same nightly footage of bloodbaths, and Assad is hardly the belligerent and memorably imposing figure that Gaddaffi was. As long as the media struggles to show us what is happening and how upsetting it is, it’s unlikely that our leaders will want to act.

This is especially true given that America will surely refuse to make the first move. As with Libya, Obama will want to preserve the image of a refined America, no longer wanting to play the boisterous global bully it did during the Bush years. The will would have to begin, once more, in Europe, and for now Merkozy seem to have what they deem bigger fish to fry.

But what certainly seems to be the case is that if the will arose, the inability to get Council approval because of a sole veto from Russia would not stop action. As demonstrated by Kosovo, NATO allies are more than happy to pursue what they deem to be moral interventions if a near unanimous global consensus backs them. And in the post-Soviet age, there would be nobody with the military might to stop them.

Building democracies.

Of the few things that I remember from studying comparative politics in first year, chief amongst them are the lessons to be learnt from observing how well democratisation panned out in Eastern Europe during the fall of the Soviet Union. The ease with which the transition transpired in states like Hungary and Poland were in no small part down to the existence of a vibrant civil society that predated the decline of autocracy. That is, it wasn’t the case that, as under true tyrants, it was apt to describe the relations as being between the government and then all the individual citizens. Rather, there were an array of intermediary organisations like opposition parties and movements and underground media institutions which were prepared to fill the power vacuum once change begun. And it seems to be close to an Iron Law in political science that a necessary condition for successful democratisation is the existence of such institutions. And these can never be built overnight. They have to grow organically and naturally from internal sources, rather than imposed artificially from outside.

Hence my hunch that if any state involved in the Arab Spring has a chance of succeeding with long-term change, Egypt will be the one to watch. That nation under Mubarak was hardly analogous to the tyranny of Gaddaffi. Iran, surprisingly, is another country with well-organised oppositional factions which stand as signs for optimism (see, for instance, Hitch here, and Laura Secor in the New Yorker recently here.)

All of this serves as a decent prelude to the question of whether humanitarian intervention, mentioned briefly in my last post, is wise. One need not be a cold-hearted egotist to carry doubts about the morality of charging into a foreign nation in the name of the greater good.

The problem is that, as we have seen, we still don’t have the know-how, assuming such knowledge is even hypothetically possible, to impose better governments on societies ill-prepared for them. Intervention in Somalia occurred almost twenty years ago, but it’s still an anarchic Hobbesian wasteland to this day. Short-term relief may succeed, but there’s far from a guarantee that things will turn out better than if we had left events to take their natural course, however hard it may be to sit by and watch foreign nations descend into slaughterhouses with the Great Leader playing Butcher.

There is also, of course, the concern that one of the major pillars of piece over the past few decades has been the establishment and nigh-categorical commitment to the principle of sovereignty, and thereby non-intervention: each state alone has authority concerning issues within its borders. One may worry that, as soon as you begin to add qualifications or conditions to such a principle, it erodes, and we return to a world of disputes which slowly turn violent a la World Wars 1 and 2.

A case in point is that despite NATO claiming a historic victory, Libya is still a hell-hole. This is just from earlier this month, over half a year since Gaddaffi’s demise:

“You know that security here is a big joke,” Fathi Baja, a council member, said at the time. With an antiaircraft gun mounted on a pickup truck, he said, “you can do whatever you want — nobody can stop you.”

Greenwald suggests:

One of the lessons from the attack on Iraq was that if foreign nations use military force to remove a long-standing despot and then fail to stabilize the country, it will be followed by extreme levels of violence, lawlessness, chaos, brutality and militia rule. That is precisely what is happening in Libya, and has been happening there for almost a year now.

As I wrote from the start of the proposed intervention, one cannot say that things have improved for Libyans by the mere killing of Gadaffi without knowing what replaces his rule (those who declared victory based solely on Gadaffi’s death were guilty of succumbing to the adolescent, Hollywood-manufactured tendency to view the supreme foreign goal as killing the “bad guys”; Chris Hayes wrote about that mentality a year ago). It’s still possible, of course, that the situation in Libya can improve, but it’s been fairly infuriating to watch the loudest advocates of the intervention, who flamboyantly claimed vindication upon Gadaffi’s death, simply ignore the aftermath. For obvious reasons, that conspicuous indifference seriously calls into question the role that “humanitarianism” actually played here.

Now, I don’t share Greenwald’s Chomskyian cynicism about Western motives for intervention, as I blogged before. I think it’s much more plausible to put this regular scenario down to good intentions gone wrong through bad planning, rather than bad intentions inspiring action from the outset. But it’s hard to deny how phenomenal it is that Western leaders still haven’t learnt their lessons.

To round this one off, here’s Democracy Arsenal commenting in the context of the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan:

A recent review of some of the post-conflict frameworks that were created to help ensure that our “whole of government” programs worked revealed that in spite of our deep knowledge about what it takes to rebuild war-torn societies, we have not yet succeeded in actually putting all the pieces in place.   We have all the pieces to do the job: government programs, a better inter-agency process, and a larger generation of trained professionals, civilian and military.  What we lack is an assembly manual for state building.

Are BBC and CNN to blame for UN silence on Syria?

Nicholas Wheeler might argue so.

In a carefully researched essay, he debunks the Marxist, Chomskyian myth that humanitarian intervention is merely a cloak under which the US justifies its hegemonic status and continues to pursue its interests by simply asking how the hell such a theory can make sense of why the Bush administration of the early 90s decided to suddenly back action in Somalia, despite a total absence of any strategic interest there whatsoever.

In fact, if you study carefully the change in US policy on this matter and trace the direction in which officials went, and – crucially – what they said about why they adapted as they did, it becomes clear that television footage was key. The media mobilised the population into concern for the plight of distant foreigners for the first time, and as this spilt over into Congressional and Presidential concerns, the will grew to back a new norm: sovereignty as a responsibility, which if abused in this way, requires intervention.

And I can’t help but think this helps to shed light on the disparity we see at the moment: Libya and Syria are undoubtedly moral equivalents. Both have humanitarian crises on an unimaginable scale. And yet for one we pounced with surprising pace and efficacy; on the other, the Council has kept largely quiet.

Which have we had more coverage of? Libya. The press were all over it. Syria, in contrast, has been impossible to report on in the same way because of travel restrictions, the absence of visas.

The lesson seems to be that tyrants would do well to adopt a policy of Keeping Journalists Out.

Ethical window dressing.

Greenwald plays the cynic on Libyan intervention:

They are almost always sold by appeal to human rights concerns — Iraqi babies pulled from incubators and Saddam’s rape rooms — but that is very rarely their actual objective. When the West invokes human rights concerns to justify an attack on a dictator whom it has long tolerated (and often even supported), that is rather compelling evidence that human rights is the packaging for the war, not the goal. The fact that it is not the goal means more than just another war sold deceitfully based on pretexts: it means that human rights concerns will not drive what happens after the invasion is completed. The materials interests of the invaders are highly likely to be served, but not the human rights of the people of the invaded country.

On Syria and Iran:

Obviously, the regimes in both of those countries are serious human rights abusers, but no more so (and, compared to Iran, less) than some of the U.S.’s closest allies in that region. Although it will be easy to sell, the U.S. is not interested in regime change in those two countries because of human rights or democracy concerns; its steadfast support for the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and other repressive tyrants conclusively proves that.

The link on ‘material interests’ is to an NYT article highlighting American business interests now being pursued in post-Gaddafi Libya, and so the implication is that since intervention in Libya was so ad hoc, it evidently wasn’t for the professed reasons of protecting civilians. Rather, this was just a cover for the carving out of some investment opportunities.

Oh, please. What kind of loopy causal story is Greenwald envisioning here? The White House ponders contributing to a third US military intervention in a decade in Islamic affairs, and they decide to gamble on action on the basis that some American businesses might do well if they pull it off. So Obama is an amoral fraud who lied through his teeth. He has no concern for the slaughter of civilians, and conducts foreign policy only on the basis of a financial calculus.

The fact that only Libya was intervened in does nothing to show the reasons given were lies. Indeed, given the conspiratorial nature of the alternative hypothesis, the moral language being genuine seems hugely plausible. The ad hoc nature of the intervention can reflect a lot of things: the realities of the potential for Council approval if multiple interventions were attempted and a precedent was seemingly established  (China would veto it in a second); the desire to avoid perpetuating the image of America as imperial, global hegemon; and, indeed, military interests which no doubt explained the silence on Bahrain, given the US base there.

But how does a concern for strategic interests in Bahrain show that the concern for rebels being massacred in Libya was utterly fake? People who insist on seeing moral language in foreign policy in this way cannot make sense of the world. They cannot explain why such an elaborate normative vocabulary would be constructed and so consistently used, given it is allegedly so easy to see through. They cannot explain interventions in places like Somalia, unless some tenuous business transaction can be dug up. They cannot explain the sanctions on South Africa during Apartheid. The US lost millions in trade as a consequence of this, so if Greenwald is right, why would they bother? That this school of thought is known in academic circles as ‘realism’ is quite laughable.