Michael Young confuses 1999 talks with Geneva; fails to unpack essential contradiction he himself raises
Interestingly Mike Young raises a point – and acknowledges the truth here, although he incorrectly attributes it to shepardstown talks rather than Geneva talks March 2000 – but cannot seem to acknowledge that in doing so it explodes his main thesis that Assad’s are genetically unreformable/unchangeable… suggesting that you got to deal with these particular arabs by the STRONG HORSE approach only.
Kudos for him essentially admitting the truth – that syria and assad wanted to go to peace in march 2000 and “clinton lied and the Israelis got cold feet” as uri sagi put it famously… BUT HE NEEDS TO EXPLAIN TO HIS READERS HOW this contradicts his main claims that these bad guys cannot be rationally dealt with via negotiations and bargaining.
He says they were going to peace, yes…. and this would shake up their order but were still willing to get it done…. so doesnt this mean the bargaining approach to assad was not a “HOAX” as Young claims?
Bottom line – as I argued one year ago in the NYT – had clinton gotten the israelis to do the deal in 2000, hizbullah would be disarmed and assad would likely have gone the moubarak route… heck, the whole resistance axis would have probably not existed!
From Young:
“…The inability to reform impacted on many fronts. Much has been made of Hafez Assad’s willingness to sign a peace treaty with Israel during the 1990s. Yes, the Syrians appeared genuinely willing to go quite far, while the Israelis backtracked at the Shepherdstown talks in December 1999, refusing to return the entire area of the Golan Heights to Syria’s sovereignty. However, it was never clear how the Syrian order would have adjusted to a settlement. This would have imposed a substantial overhaul and demobilization of the military and security edifice, shaking the very foundations of Assad rule. It seems apparent that Bashar Assad, despite welcoming a process of negotiations with Israel, knew that he did not have the latitude that his father enjoyed to manage the aftermath of a successful outcome….”
Lee Smith – Nasrallah cracking up! trying to step down
Anyone who missed this gem from lee smith, quoting… LOKMAN SLIM! No reference to who this great, neutral authority is! Great work Weekly Standard.”
“…Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hezbollah, wants out. Things have gotten so tense for Hezbollah, says Lokman Slim, an independent Lebanese Shiite activist, that according to well-sourced accounts of a meeting two weeks ago, Nasrallah “complained he no longer wanted the job.” It’s hard to blame him.”
How can Shadi Hamid argue this?
Sadly Shadi joins the ranks of folks who can effortlessly throw sentences like this below out there for mass consumption – i.e. THE CAKEWALK scenario….. very irresponsible.
I have a piece coming out shortly that argues strenuously against the liberal and neo-con consensus on syria…. we will see if it actually gets through in the venue I am aiming for…
from – http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/why-we-have-a-responsibility-to-protect-syria/251908/
“…Hastening Bashar al-Assad’s fall, aside from being the right thing to do, would also be squarely in our self-interest. The Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis would be destroyed. Iran would find itself significantly weakened without its traditional entry point into the Arab world. Hezbollah, dependent on both Iranian and Syrian military and financial support, would also suffer. A democratic Syria, meanwhile, would likely be more…”
The Israeli media offensive – Attacking Iran won’t be that bad; 2006 war went fine
Look how the disaster of 2006 – economically, politicially, militarily and socially (although the analyst is correct that the military damage wrought by hizbullah was relatively limited…BACK THEN) is downplayed!
NYT:
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Similar fears of retaliation were voiced before the Iraq war in 2003 and in 2006, during Israel’s war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In the latter, about 4,000 rockets were fired at Israel by Hezbollah, most of them causing limited harm.
“If you put all those retaliations together and add in the terrorism of recent years, we are probably facing some multiple of that,” a retired official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, citing an internal study. “I’m not saying Iran will not react. But it will be nothing like London during World War II.”
A paper soon to be published by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, written by Amos Yadlin, former chief of military intelligence, and Yoel Guzansky, who headed the Iran desk at Israel’s National Security Council until 2009, argues that the Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz is largely a bluff.
Poor Reporting on Syria
Mona Alami at IPS throws around ledes like this below which say FULL BLOWN ARMED REBELLION is happening in Homs.
But how can we believe her when the NYT the day before is taken on a tour of that very city and we hear a very different assessment ON THE GROUND…. rather than from beirut!
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Cracks Widen in Syrian Economy By Mona Alami BEIRUT, Jan 24, 2012 (IPS) – As the Syrian uprising enters its tenth month, the country’s economy is suffering. Since last March, the Syrian government has been cracking down on pro-democracy protests, and the once peaceful uprising has morphed into a full-blown armed rebellion in areas such as Homs, Hama and Jabal al-Zawiya.
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NYT:
A government-sponsored tour of Homs on Monday provided a glimpse of the killings in the city, bloodshed that has served as a warning to Syrians and the world about what the end of the uprising might look like, if neither the government nor its opponents yield any ground.
It also provided a measure of the gap between narratives in the Syrian conflict. While protesters have spoken for months about the ferocity of the government crackdown, on Monday, at a military hospital and a city neighborhood controlled by the army, the only opponents people acknowledged were gunmen who they said were terrorizing the city.
What US officials (Feltman?) are saying on Iran in Arabic – we can take them out easy
Look at this – likely Feltman – bit of bravado…. so different than in English! The reason why I think it is feltman…. because he loves THE STRONG HORSE these of his friend Lee Smith….And this is a strong horse message to the arabs…
Incredible bits of bravado -
From our Mideastwire briefing today:
On January 20, the independent Al-Rai al-Aam daily carried the following report: “The American officials have never felt more relieved than now with respect to the process of the events in their confrontation with Iran during the past few years. A prominent official said during a private gathering that “anyone who brandishes the military option is in a weak position. We used to threaten Iran militarily in the past years and now, things have flipped over and it is Iran that is threatening us.”
“On the military level, it seems that there is no American fear from the Iranian military force or any other military force in the world. The numbers indicate that all the Russian battleships for instance “have a firepower equaling that of the sixth American fleet alone, which is based in the Mediterranean.” As for the Iranian threat to shut down the Hormuz Strait, “this is just media talk…” because the American officials have no doubt that, in the event of the breaking out of a military confrontation with Iran, the American force are capable of completely “finishing” its Iranian counterpart within a few days.
“The confrontation has always been a political one,” says the American official to his European diplomatic guests. He added: “Politics had never been a strong point for the former governments so Tehran came ahead of us. But today, we have the upper hand in the confrontation with the Iranians.” Diplomacy needs patience. The American official then distributed a report about the Iranian economy along with news clippings about the preventing of the Iranian government from carrying out banking operations outside the banks in an attempt at preserving the country’s foreign currencies’ stocks. “We had previously said that the sanctions against Iran have teeth and that they will bite.”
“…The official also said that Obama “is wondering how Washington had ever thought that the only existing solutions in the confrontation with Iran are only military solutions.” He added: “The president believes that if the country with the largest economy in the world (i.e. the USA) and the country with the largest number of allies and international relations cannot succeed in altering the Iranian nuclear oath, then no one else can win any diplomatic battle, no matter what it is.”
“The official then listed what he considered to be the “signs” of the Iranians’ backing away from their former stiff position that rejects the suspension of the nuclear enrichment. He added: “Tehran used to refuse any talk about what it dubbed its right to enrichment. Today, it is calling on the 5+1 countries to launch a discussion around this issue. It also promised to open its doors for the international inspectors.”
“Of course, the American official believes that Tehran is trying to “buy time” but the USA is in a relatively comfortable situation “because Russia and China can no longer blame us for using an escalated tone against the Iranians…[ellipses as published]. We told the Russians, the Chinese, and the world, that we are ready to launch a direct dialogue without any terms and the Iranians are the ones who rejected this offer and who clang to a tone of escalation perhaps because of arrogance or something like that…”
Debating Whom to Blame for Mideast Sectarian Clashes: Noe & Raad
From our Bloomberg column here:
As Western commentators discuss the potential for military conflict with Iran, those in the Middle East worry about another devastating possibility: sectarian war in the region.
This past week saw a wave of deadly suicide bombings in Iraq that increased tension between Sunnis and Shiites, continued sectarian violence in Syria, and Sunni-Shiite unrest in both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Though he has championed anti-regime revolts in the Arab world, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was moved to caution, “The structure that has emerged is leading to a religious, sectarian and racist civil war. This has to be prevented.”
Columnist Abdullah al-Suwayji agreed, writing in Al-Khalij, a United Arab Emirates daily, that it seems Syria, in particular, “has started entering a very dark tunnel that will become even darker. If the situation continues, it will turn into a new Iraq or Libya or even another Somalia.”
As many as 6,000 Syrians have been killed since anti-government protests broke out last March, with some of the worst atrocities attributed to deepening divisions between Sunnis and Alawites, members of a branch of Islam some Sunnis and Shiites once regarded as heretical. Alawites compose the core of the regime led by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Like many other commentators, Suwayji expressed exasperation with the rising level of hatred and violence, including suicide bombings aimed at security services in Damascus, and frustration with the lack of remedies. He concluded his column with a simple, albeit unrealistic, plea: “The Syrian regime and opposition must realize that they cannot continue to live with this situation.”
Writing in the Lebanese daily An-Nahar, columnist Rajeh al-Khoury focused on the violence that has gripped Iraq, especially following efforts by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, to arrest leading Sunni figures. Khoury wrote that the U.S. holds primary responsibility for unleashing sectarian conflict through its governing decisions as Iraq’s occupier. Yet the country is on the verge of a nasty civil war now, he argued, because some Iraqis, guided by Iran, are “speeding up” the process of eradicating the last vestiges of the non-sectarian state. Maliki has been intensely attacked, especially by columnists aligned with Saudi-backed media, as a pawn in an alleged plot by Iran, which is mainly Shiite, to stoke sectarian divisions for its own benefit. Khoury wrote:
It is no secret that sectarian divisions went too far in Iraq before the pullout of the Americans, who are now not affected by the events that are going on.
He continued:
After Tehran’s man, Nouri al-Maliki, was imposed as prime minister, things proceeded towards additional division. And in two years, the Americans did nothing to change the situation. When they pulled out, they left Iraq as easy prey for the Iranians, their adversaries on the surface and their partners when interests intersect!
Now, with Tehran’s key ally, Syria, on fire, Khoury argued, the Iranians are asserting their power even more forcefully in Baghdad and beyond, creating a marked increase in conflict. Khoury concluded, “Is it too much for us to ask: Gentlemen, what is left of Iraq?!”
Writing in the Iraqi daily Al-Aalam, which supports Maliki, columnist Jamal al-Kharsan strongly disagreed that Iranian malfeasance was behind the rising sectarian violence and suggested that concerns over Iraq’s security were overblown.
The opposition coalition group the Al-Iraqiyah List, which includes Sunnis and Shiites, Kharson wrote, “usually harps on the prospect of an imminent security collapse occurring and a major sectarian civil war breaking out in Iraq whenever it feels upset at being denied a sizable share of the Iraqi pie. The fact that such warnings are often followed by spikes in violence makes it look as if Al-Iraqiyah leaders are capable of activating armed groups with a simple push of a button.”
Iraqiyah, he added, has a long record of anti-Iranian instigation and routinely vilifies its political rivals as Iranian proxies, even though, he charged, the group had recently reached out to Iran to help settle disputes with the Maliki government.
In the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi, columnist Madhawi al-Rashid also rejected the Iranian angle. She asserted it was Sunni-led Saudi Arabia that was behind the sectarian tension and uptick in regional violence.
The Saudi regime, Rashid wrote, is using regional and sectarian divisions “in a desperate attempt to contain the repercussions of the Arab spring and postpone the arrival of its winds in Saudi Arabia.” The Kingdom’s elite would be better off embarking on deep, structural reforms, she said, arguing, “the more the regime ignores this file, the deeper it is digging its grave with its own hands.”
Largely absent from the debate over who was to blame for the most recent sectarian trouble was the party that traditionally stands accused in such discussions: the United States.
After multiple bombings in Iraq and Syria killed and wounded hundreds, the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah directly blamed the U.S. for the attacks, arguing that America wanted to divide Arab societies. But Hezbollah was one of few voices taking this position.
Perhaps with the U.S. having withdrawn its last troops from Iraq, faulting America just doesn’t have the same currency it once had.
(Nicholas Noe and Walid Raad are the Beirut correspondents for the World View blog. The opinions expressed are their own.)
Syria and the dangerous myth of the inevitable collapse
In the middle of the beirut exchange now – and meeting people for and against and neutral on the regime in syria. There are some real principled people in this fight, including one we saw today who, if he wanted to, could be the opposition candidate and western selection for a Bashar replacement. He will not – though he could be a millionaire tomorrow – because of his conviction, beyond duress, about the nature of the changes and unrest in syria and the external interventions.
More on this shortly – but Washington and others will start to have to come to term with the poverty of the discourse which they almost immediately launched – that this regime will inevitablly (and some suggested effortlessly and/or with a manageable level of bloodshed) collapse.
Get ready for a long, tortured ride folks whose ends may very well hurt US and democratic interests intensely.
Sad that there was so little discussion in DC and elsewhere about alternatives (which there were).
Elaph runs piece which is GOOD for Syrian regime – first time in a LONG time
An important piece on the Saudi website that is regularly criticized for publishing silly, trashy stuff…. but this piece is GOOD news for the regime…. depending on the veracity.
Interesting to see more and more of these types of pieces in the media…
From our mideastwire.com briefing today:
On January 3, the Saudi-owned Elaph website carried the following report: “Syrian sources indicated that, amidst the upcoming scenarios that are being prepared for Syria, the number of the Syrian opposition hawks is growing thinner. The sources gave the supporting evidence of the shift in the speech of the “tough” oppositionists to a “moderate” speech… The sources gave the example of Syrian opposition figure, Haytham al-Maleh, who recently joined the National Council. The harshness of his speech dropped and it became more in line with the speech of the Council, which rejects external interference…and insists on the peaceful nature of the revolution…
“The sources further indicated that, as the Street is refusing Bashar al-Assad’s step down in return for abstaining from trying him, the sources are monitoring Syrian oppositionists who turned into doves in return for an interim cabinet or an upcoming ministerial post, or the desire to sit on the negotiations table with the regime under the pretext of halting the bloodshed or [responding to] a regional desire.
“It seems that the ceiling of the oppositionists has dropped months after the launching of the revolution; and the high pitches have toned down in fear of not having a post in the future Syria. Meanwhile, there is talk about a Russian scenario offered to the opposition doves. This scenario consists of coming up with a short-term time schedule in order to achieve the contents of the Arab League initiative and setting a near deadline for launching the negotiations around the new interim regime where Russia will take part in establishing this regime and it will be one of the guarantors for the existence and persistence of this regime.
“The observers believe that Russia is capable of playing this part and that “the opposition cannot hinder the role of Russia and that it has the duty of facilitating it…because, in any case, this is the best option available to us today as Syrians who love their country.”
“In commenting on that, the Syrian Oppositionist, Okab Yehia, told Elaph that “we are catching the smell and even the smells of several dishes being cooked on tricky fires with the aim of prolonging the life of the regime… These are attempts at stepping out of a deadly crisis for the regime. But [these attempts] will not succeed as long as the revolution is determined to sacrifice and not to regress and as long as the people are the decision makers…”
“He insisted: “We are all worth nothing if it wasn’t for the revolution. Therefore, all the opposition doves will see their wings broken if one of them dares to step into a shady situation. This is because the people who have sacrificed their blood and the convoys of martyrs will accept no less than the head of the regime, its bases, and its symbols, in addition to trying the murderers as war criminals…””
GCC Summit model for not much
From our Bloomberg column:
Dec. 27 — In a summit ending with a call for greater “union” rather than mere “cooperation,” the oil-rich, Arab monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council stressed threats emanating from Iran.
Commentators were quick to add that popular revolt prompted by a lack of democracy should also be of concern to the Arab kings.
Made up of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain, the GCC was set up in 1981 as a mechanism to balance against Iran, which the U.S. in October accused of plotting to murder the Saudi ambassador in Washington. The council has accused Iran of instigating unrest in the region. Bahrain has seen months of sometimes violent protests for greater democracy tamped down by a GCC force led by Saudi Arabia, which has itself aggressively countered unrest in several of its oil-rich, eastern provinces. But that’s not the full story, wrote columnist Hussein Ali al-Hamdani in a piece in the Iraqi daily Al-Mada headlined “The Gulf Summit, Unity Instead of Reform”:
The Gulf states realized that the West and America in particular were no longer morally able to support regimes violating human rights. They felt that in order to survive, they must unite. I do not know why these states did not consider reform, democratic transition and a respect for people’s choices instead, especially since they kept defending the Libyan people’s right to freedom, are now leading a wide-scale campaign to impose democracy in Syria and presented a reform initiative in Yemen!
Underscoring Hamdani’s point, one leading pro-monarchy commentator, Tariq al-Homayed, in his recent column about the GCC, dropped all mention of political reform. Writing last May in his capacity as the editor-in-chief of the Saudi-owned, London-based Asharq al-Awsat, Homayed had praised the council’s decision to invite Jordan and Morocco to join, writing:
Politically speaking, the entry of the two monarchies Jordan and Morocco can be considered a message that the countries of the council do not object to political reform, as Jordan and Morocco are constitutional monarchies. In addition to what is happening in GCC countries such as Kuwait, Bahrain, and elsewhere, it also means that the time for political reforms in all GCC countries has come, without exception.
By last week, however, much like the GCC — which made it clear Jordan and Morocco were not likely to gain entry to the group any time soon — Homayed had changed course, omitting any mention of the membership issue and the need for reform. Instead, he wrote:
The GCC states are currently facing genuine danger, and the greatest threat in this regard is their lack of clarity regarding a vision for the future. All of this calls for the Gulf states to take similar – although not necessary uniform – policies and decisions, for our security is under threat, as is our oil sector and our people.
The Gulf states are different from other countries in the region, Homayed wrote admiringly, since, “despite any flaws and shortcomings,” they have remained “the same today as they were yesterday,” prior to the popular revolts that have shaken other parts of the Arab world.
For columnist Jameel Theyabi, writing in a rival Saudi-owned daily, the London-based Al-Hayat, such pronouncements will no longer do. He wrote:
Every year, officials do not hesitate to describe their summits as being exceptional and historical. The Gulf citizens have become sick and tired of this broken record. The leaders of the GCC states are aware that their countries are facing real challenges. However, they will be unable to overcome them unless it is through the accomplishment of domestic achievements, starting with granting the people their rights and meeting their aspirations.
Failure to go down the road of domestic political reform, Theyabi concluded, “would be like planting bombs that could explode at any moment.”
Similarly, Abdel-Beri Atwan, editor-in-chief of London’s Al-Quds al-Arabi, advised Jordan and Morocco to embark on reforms as a reaction to the snub by the GCC — which allocated $5 billion in aid to be divided between them, a sum Atwan dismissed as meager compared with their economic problems and the income of the Gulf monarchies. He urged:
The Jordanian-Moroccan response to this insult should be more democratic reforms and wise governance based on justice, equality, an independent judiciary, an insistence on addressing the key causes of the nation and ending all forms of affiliation with external parties. This is the right way to present an honorable archetype that the Gulf populations will seek to emulate.
Now there’s an interesting idea: model behavior as the best form of revenge.
