Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Syria Links -- August 28

CAIRO — The leaders of the Arab world on Tuesday blamed the Syrian government for a chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds of people last week, but declined to back a retaliatory military strike, leaving President Obama without the broad regional support he had for his last military intervention in the Middle East, in Libya in 2011.

While the Obama administration has robust European backing and more muted Arab support for a strike on Syria, the position of the Arab Leagueand the unlikelihood of securing authorization from the United Nations Security Council complicate the legal and diplomatic case for the White House.


Ten Pages pdf.
The Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM) is an independent think tank based in Istanbul. EDAM aims to contribute to the policy making process within and outside Turkey by producing and disseminating research on the policy areas that are shaping Turkey’s position within the emerging global order. EDAM’s main areas of research are :
- Turkish foreign and security policy,
- Turkey- EU relations,
- International economics and the management of globalisation,
- Energy and climate change policies


DAMASCUS // A heavy sense of dread pervaded Damascus yesterday, as the West mulled military action after alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian regime.

Jihan, a young mother, said she was convinced the first United States strike on Syria would hit Mazze military airport near her Damascus home, and had already packed her family's bags, ready to flee.

"They'll hit Mazze, I'm sure. The target makes sense," Jihan said of the airport, which Bashar Al Assad uses to travel within Syria.

Mazze is guarded by the army's fearsome Fourth Division, which the Syrian president's brother Maher Al Assad commands, and is responsible for protecting Damascus and its outskirts against rebel advances.  [More at the lnk.]
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Michael Gerson: In Syria, Sectarianism takes root
By Michael Gerson, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted August 27, 2013 at midnight
ZAATRI REFUGEE CAMP, Jordan — I ask a Syrian refugee named Isra why her 8-year-old boy isn’t attending the camp school. “He doesn’t like school,” she explains. At home in Daraa, an agent of the regime came into his second-grade classroom, forced her son to hold a grenade against his chest and told him, “Go home to your father. Tell him if he doesn’t stop fighting for the Free Syrian Army, I will come back next week and pull the pin.” 
It is a hint of the brutality just across the border, largely hidden from view. When the terror and killing finally calm, one suspects we will find a nation of Srebrenicas. 
Aid workers dealing with children in the camp report they are both traumatized and politicized. The FSA actively recruits within Zaatri. A young humanitarian worker running a sports program for restless young men in the camp was recently confronted by a religious leader. “They are having too much fun,” he told her. “They won’t go back to fight.” 
The Syrian civil war initially had more to do with tribe, family and power. But the regime and other actors in the regional proxy war have cynically encouraged religious and ethnic divisions. Sectarianism — carefully planted and cultivated — has taken root. 
Jordan, the region’s buffer zone, fears that the economic strain caused by massive refugee flows could someday become a security crisis. The government’s royal nightmare: Jordanian Salafists going across the border into Syria, getting weapons and experience, and coming back home. 
This may help explain why the flow of refugees from Syria to Jordan — 4,000 to 5,000 a day earlier in the year — has slowed to a trickle during the last two months. It is not because conditions across the border have improved. It is because the pipeline has been effectively plugged. At the height of the migration, the Free Syrian Army acted as the facilitators of safe passage, moving groups at night. The FSA is no longer playing such a role. Humanitarian and refugee officials generally believe this is the result of an agreement between the Jordanian government and the FSA. “The Jordanians are still letting people in,” one told me, “but not at uncontrolled rates.” 
American policy is making difficult adjustments as well. Since the worst elements in Syria have grown stronger over time, delay has complicated every course. At first, the Obama administration hoped that Bashar Assad would fall without being pushed. Then it adopted a policy of wait-and-see as the tide of battle turned in Assad’s favor, with help from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. Then a policy of arming selected rebels that doesn’t seem to have armed any rebels. 
President Barack Obama may finally be provoked beyond endurance by another Baathist regime prone to brutish miscalculation. But a cruise missile campaign to protest and deter the use of chemical weapons would do little to change the situation on the ground. And Obama will need to decide if this is his goal.  [More at the link.]
Chemical Attacks and Military Interventions
Images of dead bodies laid out on floors wrapped in white cloth, with no sign of blood or injury circulated across social and news media last week to signal another horrific stage of the Syrian war. As of 24 August, Doctors without Borders has indicated that many patients treated in the aftermath of the attack in eastern Ghouta had "neurotoxic symptoms" though they stressed they can neither confirm scientifically nor establish causality. Since then, several other groups—including the Violation Documentation Center—have left little doubt that some sort of chemical attack did indeed occur. The mass scale of suffering in Syria, upwards of 100,000 killed and millions displaced should not numb us to the fact that this was a major crime that, like other killings that have taken place inside Syria, should be impartially and independently investigated. 
The government accused the rebels of a false flag operation, as have other observers arguing for the implausibility of a government attack while UN inspectors were in Syria for the first time in over a year—stationed several miles away from the assault. Why should the government attack now when it seems to be winning the war with conventional weapons? If confirmed, it would be the only scenario that might trigger more aggressive US and/or European armed intervention. A rebel attack seems equally implausible. If rebels are indeed able to manufacture such a large scale chemical attack, and murderous enough to use these weapons on civilians, why not attack government forces and change the tide of the war, instead of choosing territory sympathetic to the uprising and outside regime control? Logic and reason are therefore not sufficient means of investigating such actions or attributing culpability. There are other interpretations that are also plausible: that the regime initiated the attack in response to a perceived or actual escalation by the rebels (including reported US and US-trained special operations units advancing towards Damascus); that defectors connected with the opposition and launched the attack to spur international intervention by implicating the regime; or finally, that the command structure is disintegrating within the Syrian government, a topic that consumed many reports of late.

[Google translate:]
Germany asked Russia not to impede the adoption of the British UN resolution on Syria, reports Reuters . The corresponding statement was made by the German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle.  Earlier it was reported that the UK proposed UN Security Council resolution condemning the Syrian government.

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China -- Sky City, World's Tallest Building

What could go wrong, indeed?
This is not the first time for me to learn something from half-way around the world. When Nick Kristoff was speaking at a local university two years ago I learned of it via an Egyptian news bureau, not a local announcement. 
So a Korean blogger gets credit for the image and links. 
CNN also has a blurb.
Dubai's 828-meter Burj Khalifa has less than a year left as the world's tallest building.
China's projected 838-meter (2,749 feet) Sky City broke ground in Changsha in central China on July 20.  Astonishingly, the construction company behind it expects to top out in April 2014 -- a build time of just 10 months.  It took five years to build the Burj Khalifa.
"The speed is horrifying, how can that be possible?" said one user on Weibo, China's Twitter-like service. Another criticized the liveability of the homes within, calling the project a "giant stack of trailer homes." [Detailed  propoganda  description.]
But the building would appear to herald a new age in Chinese construction, one in which tall, fast builds become common.   [More at the link.] 
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Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Aron Lund -- The Non-State Militant Landscape in Syria

This is by far the most scholarly look at the Syrian conflict I have found. No one can read this research paper and imagine for a moment there is any quick way to resolve what may be the most convoluted matrix of challenges in the Middle East. There is a saying, attributed to Henry Kissinger, that in the Middle East there can be no war without Egypt and no peace without Syria. This paper helps explain that enigmatic remark. 

Aron Lund is a Swedish freelance journalist and researcher working on Middle Eastern affairs. He is the author of several books and reports on Syria, including Drömmen om Damaskus (The Dream of Damascus), a political history of Syria and its opposition movements.
The Non-State Militant Landscape in SyriaAug 27, 2013
Author: Aron Lund
The uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that began in 2011 has always been disorganized, and it has become increasingly reliant on foreign support. It has grown large enough, however, to push regime forces out of vast areas of Syria’s north and east. According to a recent estimate by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, an estimated 1,200 rebel groups are currently fighting against the al-Assad government. 
Most of these factions first emerged out of a narrow local context, typically in a rural Sunni Arab village or neighborhood. With the passage of time, however, many have merged into bigger formations and connected across provincial boundaries, creating a web of interlocking alliances. These unity efforts have typically been initiated and sustained by foreign actors, including states, exiled Syrian businessmen and activists, and Islamist aid groups, which thereby gained leverage over their ideological and political agendas. The result is an extraordinarily complex insurgency, trapped in a political dynamic shaped by parochial roots on the one hand and international influences on the other, but seemingly unable to develop effective national actors. 
This article identifies and profiles some of the most important non-state actors in Syria. It finds that the opposition remains severely fragmented. Although foreign-backed efforts to realize the long-standing goal of a central “Free Syrian Army” leadership for the mainstream insurgency have achieved some progress recently, the resulting Supreme Military Command has little internal cohesion and is held together almost entirely by outside funding. The Syrian regime has also begun to experience a fragmentation of its security apparatus, caused by its increased reliance on local and foreign militia forces, although these problems are still in their early stages.
Go to the link for a detailed listing of the principal groups, together with descriptions of their makeup, aims, leadership and convoluted loyalties. 
Conclusion 
Syria’s insurgent movement remains extraordinarily fractured, even after two years of warfare. The December 2012 creation of the SMC seems to have facilitated cooperation among the insurgents and established a framework for more effective unification, but it is still far from a functioning rebel leadership. Complicating matters further, several of the insurgency’s strongest factions—including the SIF, both al-Qa`ida wings, and the Kurdish YPG—actively oppose the SMC. The SMC’s influence is likely to grow only if it receives unified and sustained foreign support, including more advanced weapons, but the success of such a strategy depends on the uncertainties of American, European and Arab politics.  
Thus far, major infighting among Syria’s rebel groups has been relatively rare, but time will inevitably chip away at the insurgents’ original unity of purpose. Factional power struggles, economic interests, ethnic or tribal divides, and foreign-instigated proxy rivalries are all likely to trigger rebel-on-rebel fighting. Ideology also plays a part, but the media narrative of a looming war between al-Qa`ida and other rebels has likely overstated the role of doctrinal issues. Western and Gulf pressure on the SMC to confront al-Qa`ida is likely to be a more important cause of such conflict, if it eventually erupts. 
Bashar al-Assad’s government is also becoming increasingly dependent on paramilitary groups, including autonomous or foreign-led militias. Their support has improved al-Assad’s staying power in many areas, but it also underlines the regime’s gradual loss of sovereignty and cohesion. The Ba`ath government’s strict messaging discipline and the centrality of Bashar al-Assad himself has delayed and obfuscated this slow unwinding of the state, but not stayed it. If the war drags on long enough, the al-Assad regime is likely to devolve into a decentralized patchwork of sectarian and client militias, only superficially resembling Syria’s pre-2011 dictatorship.

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Morning Twitter Links -- August 27

At this writing US intervention in the Syrian civil war appears inevitable. While we wait to find out exactly what that means, here is a sampling of what's being linked in my little part of the Twitterverse.
Mr. Obama may instead bypass the U.N. and, as in the case of the 1999 NATO air war in Kosovo, assemble an ad hoc international coalition to support military action that would provide legitimacy, if not strict legal justification, for intervening to protect Syrian civilians. American officials are discussing the possibility that states like Turkey and Jordan may make a collective self-defense argument because they could be victims of Syrian chemical weapons.

If Mr. Obama does forgo the U.N., he will need strong endorsements from the Arab League and the European Union, and more countries than just Turkey, Britain and France should join the effort. And if he does proceed with military action, it should be carefully targeted at Syrian air assets and military units involved in chemical weapons use. This, too, will not be easy, but the aim is to punish Mr. Assad for slaughtering his people with chemical arms, not to be drawn into another civil war.

A political agreement is still the best solution to this deadly conflict, and every effort must be made to find one. President Obama has resisted demands that he intervene militarily and in force. Though Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons surely requires a response of some kind, the arguments against deep American involvement remain as compelling as ever.

These next two messages (and RT by Queen Nour) are interesting.
King Abdullah appears to be doing everything possible to manage the flood of Syrian refugees pouring into Jordan, already awash with those from Iraq and other parts of the Middle East.






==► Highly recommended reading...
Islamism is the illusion
By Khaled Diab
17 August 2013

But does centuries-old Islam, the world’s second largest religion, really need self-appointed defenders to shield it from “insult”, when the Qur’an itself welcomes doubt, questioning and even ridicule? 
And why do these self-appointed defenders of the faith contradict the example of the prophet they claim to emulate? For instance, Muhammad pardoned one of his scribes, Abdullah Ibn Saad, even after he claimed that the Qur’an was invented and Muhammad was a false prophet.
These examples highlight how Islamism, rather than providing the solution, as it claims, is actually built on an illusion. 
Islamist discourse, on the whole, holds that the reason for the Muslim world’s decline is its deviation from Islamic law and values. That explains why Hassan al-Banna, despite his attempts to inject some elements of modernity into traditional Islamic thought, fixated on questions of morality and Shari’a. One of his ideological descendants, Sayyid Qutb, went so far as to invent the dangerous idea that Muslims were living a period of modern “Jahiliyyah” (pre-Islamic ignorance).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Muhammad himself never established anything resembling what we would call an “Islamic state” today. His secular-sounding Constitution of Medina actually defines Jews, Christians and pagans – i.e. every member of Medina’s society – as being full and equal members of the Ummah. 
During what is widely regarded as Islam’s “golden age”, the political and social mechanisms governing the lives of Muslims were generally secular. Though the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs derived their claim to legitimacy from Islam, they were essentially secular rulers, presiding over secular governments. They were autocratic, not theocratic. 
In fact, their honorific title “commanders of the faithful”suggests that caliphs derived their authority from their Muslim (and other) subjects and not from Islam itself. Moreover, most enlightened caliphs were derided by conservatives and traditionalists as immoral and decadent.


Greg Mitchell's list...

Some liberals in the media have resisted, however. Then there's the issue of the country that still defends killing 100,000 women and children with a new radiation bomb in 1945 lecturing others on what's a "moral obscenity.'

I’ll begin collecting commentary, return for more.

• Eugene Robinson joins liberal hawks tonight in calling for strike on Assad at Washington Post.Admits history argues against it but we have to do it. “Must be punished.”

• Dexter Filkins joins liberal hawks in calling for attack in new piece at The New Yorker. After recounting a moving talk with journalist/witness to last week’s bombing, he admits our attack now could make things worse (and no rebel leader to trust)—but have got to try something. David Frum at Twitter, on the other hand, outlined several good reasons to resist this impulse.

• The New York Times, in an editorial posted late Monday, asked for a measured response after declaring: “This time the use of chemicals was more brazen and the casualties were much greater, suggesting that Mr. Assad did not take Mr. Obama seriously. Presidents should not make a habit of drawing red lines in public, but if they do, they had best follow through. Many countries (including Iran, which Mr. Obama has often said won’t be permitted to have a nuclear weapon) will be watching.”

• The Times also collected the mixed views of several experts in a Room for Debate online, including this warning from Stephen Walt: “Even if proven, the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government does not tip the balance in favor of U.S. military intervention. To think otherwise places undue weight on the weapons Assad’s forces may have used and ignores the many reasons that US intervention is still unwise.”

• The great Andrew Bacevich raises three reasons to pause. For one: we now aim to hit Syria—but we did little after the Egyptians, who we fund, killed perhaps as many civilians two weeks ago in non-chemical attacks.

• The Washington Post editorial: “Mr. Obama should deliver on his vow not to tolerate such crimes—by ordering direct U.S. retaliation against the Syrian military forces responsible and by adopting a plan to protect civilians in southern Syria with a no-fly zone.” Chicago Tribune: “If the Syrian government launched this chemical attack, will it be held accountable, not just by the U.S. but by countries in the Arab world and elsewhere? Will France, Turkey and other countries outraged by the attack impose a no-fly zone in Syria, along the lines of the NATO coalition that helped topple Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011? Or will world leaders shrug, await Assad’s next outrage, and debate the meaning of ‘red line’?”

* Will be hard to top Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal: "Should President Obama decide to order a military strike against Syria, his main order of business must be to kill Bashar Assad. Also, Bashar's brother and principal henchman, Maher. Also, everyone else in the Assad family with a claim on political power. Also, all of the political symbols of the Assad family's power, including all of their official or unofficial residences."
Meantime, down in Yemen... 

...moving right along... 


That's all from me for the moment. 
I have a dental appointment.
  
Haven't read Nasr's piece yet, but whatever he says is important. 
He really knows his stuff. (pdf) 
He was associated with the Pahlavi family.
From his CV... 
Born in Tehran of a prominent family, his father, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, was sent to an American preparatory school and became the first Iranian undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Seyyed Hossein Nasr stayed in this country for graduate studies also, earning a PhD in the history of science and learning at Harvard. But despite a job offer to teach at Harvard, he chose to return to Iran. By age 39, he’d been named president of Aryamehr University by the Shah. A year later, in 1972, another great honor: the Empress appointed him the first president of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. He built a great library at this important new learning center and engaged the participation of distinguished scholars from both the East and the West.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(ADDED LATER)
Vali Nasr's link was written a month ago but remains relevant.
His take on events in Syria is framed in terms of both Egypt and Russia. There is more, but this jumped out at me.
The Kremlin has dismissed talk of democracy in the Arab world as naive, seeing it as an opening for an Islamist power grab that would jeopardize Western and Russian interests alike. Islamist governments in Tunis and Cairo, the surprising popularity of Salafism and the proliferation of violent extremism in Libya or Syria have only confirmed Russia’s worst expectations of the Arab Spring. 
Syria in particular has evoked Moscow’s fear of rising Sunni militancy because of its potential to turn its fury on Russia’s Muslim periphery. President Vladimir Putin sees Syria through the prism of Chechnya — a violent jihadi insurrection that has to be put down at all cost. Just as Russia defeated Islamic radicalism in Chechnya, Assad could do the same in Syria. Putin has lost no opportunity to remind US officials who visit him that the case for ditching Assad is Western folly. He argues that Syria is not about to become a democracy, but a bastion of Islamic extremism if Assad falls. The West is foolishly supporting the very menace that it has been fighting for more than a decade. 
Washington does not like to acknowledge it, but it has been slowly but surely moving in Putin’s direction. The growing influence of extremist forces among the Syrian opposition has been a source of worry in Washington and an important reason why the United States has resisted greater involvement in the conflict. In private, the administration also admittedly fears that if it helps topple Assad, extremists will take over. 
American strategists see two wars in Syria today: the highly visible ghastly one between Assad and the opposition, and the less noticed, but potentially consequential one between the extremist and moderate wings of the opposition. For some time now, the view in the Obama administration has been that it is the second war that matters most to American interests, and if the United States is to intervene, it should do so to deny an extremist victory.
Or, it seems, an Assad victory as well.  

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Monday, August 26, 2013

Rami Khouri on Current Events

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