Monthly Archives: August 2013

Libya, Syria, United States

How to distinguish Obama’s congressional vote on Syria from Libya example

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With a surprise twist on a holiday weekend in the United States, president Barack Obama announced that he would seek a vote in the U.S. Congress prior to launching a missile strike on Syria in retribution for last Wednesday’s chemical attack on the outskirts of Damascus.USflagSyria Flag Icon freesyriaLibya_Flag_Icon

Coming in the wake British prime minister David Cameron’s humiliating defeat over a resolution in the House of Commons authorizing the possibility of British force late last week, Obama argued that, while he has already made a decision to punish Syrian president Bashar al-Assad for the chemical attacks in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, he has also decided to seek authorization for use of force from Congress:

Having made my decision as Commander-in-Chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interests, I’m also mindful that I’m the President of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.  I’ve long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Obama’s surprise announcement postpones any US action until at least the week of September 9 — well after chemical weapons inspectors from the United Nations will report back next week about the nature of the attack and well after next week’s G20 meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, where president Vladimir Putin, an Assad ally, has repeatedly blocked action against Assad (a Russian ally) by the UN Security Council and earlier today, called the possibility of US and Western punitive strikes ‘utter nonsense.’

While Obama’s decision will hearten critics on both the American left and right who have called for a greater legislative role on the Syria question, it’s unlikely to satisfy hawkish critics like U.S. senator John McCain of Arizona who has pushed Obama toward supporting regime change in Syria, and it’s also unlikely to satisfy dovish critics who believe there’s no U.S. national interest in launching military strikes on the Assad regime.  It will also leave multilateralist critics dissatisfied, given that Obama stated clearly that he was willing to act without the backing of what he called a ‘paralyzed’ Security Council.

But it’s also an unexpected position for an administration that pushed the boundaries of the 1973 War Powers Resolution just two years ago when it ordered military action in Libya.  At first glance, Obama’s 2011 decision to support the UN-authorized, NATO-enforced effort to establish a no-fly zone and to arm rebels fighting against Libya’s late strongman Muammar Gaddafi without congressional authorization arguably violated his constitutional obligation to Congress, while a limited military strike on Syria lasting just a few days to a few weeks would not require congressional approval under any view of the War Powers Resolution.

So what gives?  How can the Obama administration reconcile its position on Libya with its newfound enthusiasm for Congress on the Syrian question?  The answer could transform the nature of U.S. foreign policy and the ability of the U.S. president to act decisively in the future. Continue reading How to distinguish Obama’s congressional vote on Syria from Libya example →

Ireland

Irish poet Seamus Heaney has died

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Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate and leading Irish poet, has died at age 74 after a very brief illness. Ireland Icon

If you have to ask the relation between Irish writers and Irish politics and history, you don’t know Ireland well enough — and it’s not enough to know that Heaney was friends with Ireland’s president Michael D. Higgins.  An obituary from RTE is here.

Here’s one of my favorite poems, ‘Postscript,’ perhaps appropriate enough for Heaney’s passing today:

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Syria, United Kingdom

Cameron loses House of Commons vote on Syria military intervention

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The joint US and European will to respond to last Wednesday’s chemical attack on the eastern outskirts of Damascus has received a blow after the British House of Commons voted narrowly 283 to 272 against a resolution that would have provisionally authorized British military intervention in Syria — a staggeringly rare defeat for a British government on a matter of foreign policy.Syria Flag Icon freesyriaUnited Kingdom Flag Icon

The vote comes as a blow not only to UK prime minister David Cameron, who suffered defections from nearly three dozen skeptical Conservatives as well as additional Liberal Democratic members of his own governing coalition, but also interventionists in the United States who are urging US president Barack Obama to launch an aggressive attack on the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.  It is very unlikely that the United States would proceed with unilateral military action without British support, which is unlikely to come anytime soon in light of Cameron pledge to respect the parliamentary decision:

I can give that assurance. Let me say, the House has not voted for either motion tonight. I strongly believe in the need for a tough response to the use of chemical weapons, but I also believe in respecting the will of this House of Commons. It is very clear tonight that, while the House has not passed a motion, it is clear to me that the British parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that and the government will act accordingly.

It’s a vote that has the potential to turn the US-UK relationship upside down, to turn Middle Eastern realpolitik upside down, to turn British politics upside down and even to turn US politics upside down.  For a sitting prime minister to lose a vote like this is a huge reversal in the relationship between an ever-more powerful British executive and an ever-more feeble parliament on issues like security policy and foreign affairs.

Most immediately, it means that a U.S.-led missile strike, which seemed imminent yesterday, will now be postponed until early next week, at the earliest, when chemical weapons inspectors from the United Nations have had an opportunity to provide their initial assessment of what happened in Ghouta and eastern Damascus.  The vote also comes after several news organizations reported that U.S. and allied intelligence agencies are assured that while the chemical attack came from pro-Assad forces, they are uncertain who ordered the attack amid indications that Assad and his top military brass were caught unaware.  Meanwhile, French president François Hollande has backed off earlier, more urgent calls for military action.

Cameron’s massive defeat does not necessarily preclude a vote next week after the United Nations reports back as to which party — and which chemical agent — is to blame for the horrific Damascus attack.  If the UN report, together with US and European intelligence, all points to Assad’s culpability, Cameron and Obama will have a much stronger case for an aggressive response, either inside or outside the United Nations Security Council.

Meanwhile, the vote is perhaps the largest political victory in Ed Miliband’s three-year tenure as leader of the Labour Party.  Miliband firmly opposed the resolution even after Cameron offered to submit to a second vote before authorizing military action, making today’s resolution essentially a vote for the principle of the British government’s potential military intervention.  The vote capped a tumultuous 24 hours in Westminster, with Cameron’s allies accusing Miliband of giving ‘succour’ to the Assad regime, which probably didn’t make it likelier that Labour would close ranks with the Tories over a potential Syria intervention.  It was a principled stand for Miliband and, though he’s closer to British public opinion on Syria than Cameron, it was also a courageous stand for a young opposition leader to oppose a sitting government on such a crucial matter of foreign policy.

Miliband’s line boils down to one sentence from his statement earlier today: ‘Evidence should precede decision not decision precede evidence’: Continue reading Cameron loses House of Commons vote on Syria military intervention →

Syria, United States

Did Syria’s Assad regime have a Dr. Strangelove moment?

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January 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Stanley Kubrick’s dark nuclear war comedy Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.USflagSyria Flag Icon freesyria

It’s the charming tale of U.S. general Jack Ripper (Get it!?), who’s gone completely off his rocker and launches the world into a nuclear crisis as the United States and the Soviet Union bumble to stop the fallout from the chain of events that the wayward general sets in place.

In the U.S. war room, the meek U.S. president (played brilliantly by Peter Sellers) asks another general, ‘Buck’ Turgidson, why a renegade general somehow found a way to order the use of nuclear weapons outside the chain of command, given that the U.S. president is the only one authorized to launch a nuclear attack.

Turgidson replies, ‘And although I, uh, hate to judge before all the facts are in, it’s beginning to look like, uh, General Ripper exceeded his authority.’

It’s starting to look like last week’s horrific chemical warfare attack was a case of someone in the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad exceeding his authority as well.

Did Syria have a ‘Dr. Strangelove’ moment?

And if so, how should the international community ‘punish’ the Assad regime if it turns out that a rogue pro-Assad commander launched the attack and not Assad or his top guard?  Is there some sort of negligence per se standard for crimes against humanity?  Even as British prime minister David Cameron is backing down from the urgency of an immediate Syria strike (at least until the United Nations finishes its initial assessment of the chemical attack in the days ahead) and French president François Hollande is emphasizing a political solution to Syria, the case for an overhasty, unilateral military response from the United States is falling apart in favor of a multilateral, evidence-based approach that would otherwise avoid further internationalizing the two-year, sectarian Syrian conflict.

Late Tuesday, Noah Shachtman, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution broke the story in Foreign Policy that the United States and its allies are so certain that the Assad regime is responsible for last Wednesday’s attack on the basis of intercepted phone calls that largely show confusion and panic on the part of the Syrian regime:

Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by U.S. intelligence services, The Cable has learned. And that is the major reason why American officials now say they’re certain that the attacks were the work of the Bashar al-Assad regime — and why the U.S. military is likely to attack that regime in a matter of days.

But the intercept raises questions about culpability for the chemical massacre, even as it answers others: Was the attack on Aug. 21 the work of a Syrian officer overstepping his bounds? Or was the strike explicitly directed by senior members of the Assad regime? “It’s unclear where control lies,” one U.S. intelligence official told The Cable. “Is there just some sort of general blessing to use these things? Or are there explicit orders for each attack?”

Nor are U.S. analysts sure of the Syrian military’s rationale for launching the strike — if it had a rationale at all. Perhaps it was a lone general putting a long-standing battle plan in motion; perhaps it was a miscalculation by the Assad government. Whatever the reason, the attack has triggered worldwide outrage, and put the Obama administration on the brink of launching a strike of its own in Syria. “We don’t know exactly why it happened,” the intelligence official added. “We just know it was pretty fucking stupid.”

Of course, that calls into question the strident and unequivocal stance of many U.S. and European officials over the weekend and earlier this week, including British foreign minister William Hague and U.S. secretary of state John Kerry.

Today brings further news that top U.S. intelligence officials who have seen the U.S. report on the Assad regime’s culpability believe that it is not a ‘slam dunk’ case, a reference to the allegedly solid intelligence that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency held in 2002 that implicated Iraqi president Saddam Hussein — erroneously — with having a nuclear weapons program:

A report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence outlining that evidence against Syria includes a few key caveats – including acknowledging that the U.S. intelligence community no longer has the certainty it did six months ago of where the regime’s chemical weapons are stored, nor does it have proof Assad ordered chemical weapons use, according to two intelligence officials and two more U.S. officials.

But one senior U.S. official who read the report said Thursday that despite those caveats, the report assesses with “high confidence” that the Syrian government was responsible…. The official conceded that there is no proof listed in the report tying Assad personally to ordering the attack, but the official also said there was no mention in the report of the possibility that a rogue element could have been responsible.

That’s certainly very consistent with Shachtman’s report, and it makes intuitive sense.  With Assad generally winning the war and reclaiming ground against the disparate opposition, it makes no sense for Assad to draw the ire of the world by launching chemical warfare on civilians.  The timing, moreover, has always been suspicious given that United Nations chemical weapons inspectors were sitting in a Damascus hotel when the chemical attack occurred.  We know that the Assad regime has certain access to chemical weapons, and while there’s a possibility that some weapons have fallen into the hands of anti-Assad rebels, this explanation is certainly less harrowing than the alternative possibility that radical opposition elements launched a toxic chemical attack in the hopes of framing Assad and drawing the international community against him.

Although we’re still awaiting the intelligence report that the United States promised to release this week, the public British report released earlier today has been thoroughly panned:

In an echo of the buildup to the Iraq war in 2003, Downing Street took the rare step of releasing the assessment of the JIC to support its case that the Assad regime was responsible.  But the assessment was mainly based on “open source” evidence such as video footage of the victims and a judgment that the opposition does not have the capability to launch such an attack…

The JIC acknowledged that some of its assessment was based on “open source” evidence such as testimony from victims, doctors and video footage. But in a separate letter to Cameron the JIC chairman, Jon Day, said he had seen “highly sensitive” unpublished intelligence that supported their view that the regime had launched the attacks to clear the opposition from strategic parts of Damascus.

But, of course, the British government isn’t providing the unpublished intelligence, so their rationale essentially boils down to, ‘trust us.’  Moreover, as Guardian commentators Ian Black and Ian Sample write, the intelligence reports boasts no scientific evidence and rests on little more than informed speculation:

In one passage the JIC appears to weaken its own conclusions by noting that there was “no obvious political or military trigger for regime use of CW on an apparently larger scale now” – given the presence of the UN inspectors. It wrote that permission to authorise CW had “probably been delegated” by Assad to “senior regime commanders, such as [*]”. It added: “But any deliberate change in the scale and nature of use would require his authorisation.” That language suggests the possibility, as reported in the US, of unauthorised or accidental use of CW munitions.

Rwanda

Rwandan election highlights tension between ethnic, economic stability and authoritarianism

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It’s hard not to have strong feelings about Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president.rwanda

The one-time rebel leader, who grew up in a Ugandan refugee camp after many Tutsis were pushed out of Rwanda in the 1950s and 1960s, marched into Rwanda’s capital in mid-1994 to take power as the international community dithered, thereby ending the country’s horrific genocide.  He spent the next six years working to pacify the country through various security measures and then set about modernizing Rwanda.  When he became president in 2000, he announced his Vision 2020 plan to develop the country.  Since 2000, his efforts have won the praise of everyone from former president U.S. Bill Clinton to Microsoft icon and philanthropist Bill Gates for rebuilding the country’s infrastructure,  developing Rwandan education and health care and restoring the rule of law.  He can boast an attractive record of foreign investment, and it’s hard not to credit Kagame for an average GDP growth rate of 8.1% in the past 12 years.

But Kagame has served as Rwanda’s de facto or de jure leader since 1994, and he presides over a country where political parties and freedom to assemble are severely restrained and press freedom is very low, a country where critics charge that he rules with an authoritarian style and where dissenters are forced into exile.  His angelic reputation among the international community has been tarnished by his support for the M23 rebels in eastern Congo who are fighting against Congolese president Joseph Kabila.

Suffice it to say that Kagame is a complex figure — Rwanda’s semi-authoritarian savior.  But as a rising power in eastern and central Africa and a touchstone for the failure of the international community to stop genocide two decades ago, the country’s political progress is just as important as its impressive economic progress.   Continue reading Rwandan election highlights tension between ethnic, economic stability and authoritarianism →

Syria, United States

On Syria, Obama administration prepared to shoot now, ask questions later

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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gives a

Even before the United States has provided any public evidence that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is responsible for what appears to be a craven chemical warfare attack in Ghouta last Wednesday, the United States is preparing to launch missile strikes against Syria and Assad in retaliation as soon as Thursday, with the support of French president François Hollande and British prime minister David Cameron.USflagSyria Flag Icon freesyria

That marks a failure of U.S. president Barack Obama’s foreign policy in at least four senses.

The first is that we still don’t know what happened last Wednesday.  We do know that a chemical attack of some variety ultimately killed many civilians, up to 1300, on the eastern outskirts of Damascus.  But we don’t know which chemical agent caused it (was it sarin? was it concentrated tear gas? was it mustard or chlorine gas?) and, more importantly, we certainly don’t know who launched the attack.  While the U.S., French and British governments assure us that Assad was responsible, the public evidence is far from certain.  While the U.S. state department claims that a full intelligence assessment is coming later this week, it assures us for now that it’s ‘crystal clear’ that Assad is responsible.  But how credible will that assessment be if it’s delivered hours or minutes before a U.S. military strike?  If it’s delivered after the military strike?  Will it contain forensics evidence gathered yesterday by United Nations experts?  No one knows.

While Assad’s certainly a prime suspect, there’s more than enough reason to believe, in the absence of further intelligence or forensic evidence to the contrary, that anti-Assad rebels could well have perpetrated the attack to frame Assad and draw the international community (or at least the United States and Europe) into the kind of response that now seems likely to happen in the next 48 hours.  At a minimum, the United States should wait for U.N. chemical weapons inspectors, who spent at least a short time on the scene of the attack yesterday, to draw what conclusions they can on the basis of hard evidence.  What happens if we learn in one year or five years that radical Sunni elements within the opposition were responsible for the attack?  That will only encourage false-flag attacks in the future designed to provoke the United States into inadvertently taking sides in a civil war.

The second is that it’s an uncharacteristically unilateral, hasty and severe response.  Assume that we had proof that Assad is responsible for the chemical attacks.  The next step would be to determine the appropriate response from the international community, and it is telling that the United States and its British and French allies believe that a military response should be the first step, not the last step.  There’s a panoply of various responses that the United States is ready to bypass, all of which could bear the stamp of legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council.  Those include a U.N. peacekeeping and/or further inspections forces, a NATO-led and UN-approved no-fly zone, a tighter regime of diplomatic and economic sanctions against the Assad regime, and a prosecution against Assad and his military leaders for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court.  Moreover, given the current stalemate, Syria is now essentially split into three disparate parts: pro-Assad territory along the coast and the Lebanese border, anti-Assad territory in the north and Kurdish strongholds in the northeast:

Main areas of control in Syria as of 3 June 2013

With Assad regaining ground over the past months, it doesn’t look like the end of the civil war will come from a military triumph but from a political settlement.  That makes an immediate military response (and not a political response) from the United States even more inappropriate.  By all means, use the threat of military action as a negotiating point with Russia and Syria’s other allies on the Security Council.  But by launching a hasty attack just eight days after the incident makes it seem to the rest of the world that the U.S. action is less concerned about punishment for chemical warfare, but rather salvaging the credibility of the Obama administration over an ill-advised ‘red line’ stand that Obama articulated last autumn in the heat of a presidential campaign. Continue reading On Syria, Obama administration prepared to shoot now, ask questions later →

China

With the end of Bo Xilai’s trial, is Xi Jinping co-opting the ‘Chongqing model’?

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It’s been perhaps the most sensational rise and fall of a top Chinese official in a generation, but the corruption trial against former Chongqing party leader Bo Xilai (薄熙来) wrapped up this week with plenty of surprises, China Flag Iconeven if his guilty verdict for bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power, is all but assured.

On the final day of what has been a sensation hearing by Chinese standards, Bo accused a top aide of becoming romantically involved with his wife, capping five days of what has been a spirited defense by one of China’s most charismatic 21st century party leaders.  Far from showing remorse, Bo (pictured above) has vigorously denied the charges and defended his actions:

He said he never cared for money. “The long johns that I’m wearing now were bought by my mother in the 1960s,” Bo said, suggesting he did not approve of the lifestyle Gu had created for their son, Bo Guagua.  “I have been working like a machine. I really don’t have time to care about air tickets, hotel expenses and travel expenses,” Bo said. He added: “The country did not pick me because I am a good accountant.”

That Bo has been allowed to mount such a public (and political) defense is not surprising, given his status as one of the second-generation ‘princelings’ of the Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党).  Even if Bo goes to prison for a decade or longer, the trial will have helped to cement his image as the leader of a ‘New Left’ movement within Chinese politics and society.

But what does that mean for the ‘Chongqing model’ that Bo championed as party secretary in Chongqing from 2007 to 2012?

The ‘Chongqing model’ is a vaguely neo-Maoist approach to governing China that involves a redoubling of state power and control, strengthening state-owned enterprises and aggressively attacking organized crime, while bringing back some truly unique vestiges of the era of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛泽东), such as encouraging the singing of revolutionary-era songs.  It’s often contrasted against the ‘Guangdong model’ — a leadership style that encourages private development to blossom instead of through state-sponsored economic policy and at least a passing respect for the rule of law and other institutional reforms.

You can place the two models on the familiar left-right ideological axis — the Chongqing model prioritizes equitable distribution among all classes, the Guangdong model prioritizes the highest economic growth possible.  In reality, however, the line between the two models is blurrier.  Though the ‘Guangdong model’ is associated with the relatively liberal former Guangdong party chair Wang Yang (汪洋), now a vice premier (though not a full member of the Politburo Standing Committee) in Xi’s government, it was Wang who served for two years as Chongqing party chair as Bo’s direct predecessor.  Realistically, the differences among China’s political elite remain smaller than their shared values.  Just as there’s little chance that China will return to the days of Mao-era socialist state planning, there’s also little evidence that economic liberalization and reform has led (or will lead in the future) to greater political freedom.

Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal reported that Xi Jinping (习近平), who took power as Chinese president earlier this year after assuming leadership last November as the general secretary of the party’s Politburo Standing Committee, is also lurching to the left in the first year of what is expected to be his ten-year stewardship of the People’s Republic of China: Continue reading With the end of Bo Xilai’s trial, is Xi Jinping co-opting the ‘Chongqing model’? →

Syria, United States

Kerry’s forceful remarks on Syria fail to explain why Assad’s to blame

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U.S. secretary of state John Kerry this afternoon emerged with some strong remarks about the unfolding international situation with respect to Syria, where chemical weapons were unleashed last Wednesday upon civilians in Ghouta in the eastern outskirts of Damascus and that killed up to 1,300 people.USflagSyria Flag Icon freesyria

Max Fisher at The Washington Post writes that Kerry’s remarks amounted to a ‘war speech,’ that the Obama administration has all but decided to respond to the chemical attack with air strikes.  I don’t disagree with that assessment, but the oddest thing about Kerry’s seven minutes on Syria was how much of it he spent arguing that the attacks were real — consider the following exchange:

Last night, after speaking with foreign ministers from around the world about the gravity of this situation, I went back and I watched the videos — the videos that anybody can watch in the social media, and I watched them one more gut-wrenching time. It is really hard to express in words the the human suffering that they lay out before us.  As a father, I can’t get the image out of my head of a man who held up his dead child, wailing while chaos swirled around him, the images of entire families dead in their beds without a drop of blood or even a visible wound, bodies contorting in spasms, human suffering that we can never ignore or forget. Anyone who could claim that an attack of this staggering scale could be contrived or fabricated needs to check their conscience and their own moral compass.  What is before us today is real, and it is compelling.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of John Kerry (pictured above) — he’s had a strong start at State and that follows a generally impeccable senatorial record of thoughtful engagement on foreign affairs.  But with all due respect, I certainly hope the chief diplomat of the United States of America is spending more time reviewing the intelligence that the U.S., British and French governments allegedly have that implicates the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in the chemical attack than watching shock footage on YouTube.

No one is arguing that the attack was contrived or fabricated — it’s a horrific slaughter that deserves a united and firm response from the international community conveying that the use of chemical weapons to kill civilians, including women and children, is unacceptable.  What remains at issue is determining who was responsible for the attack, and that’s why it was odd to watch Kerry spend more time knocking down a straw-man argument than explaining why the U.S. government is so sure that Assad was responsible for the attack.  Earlier today, Saleh Muslim, head of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), who has clashed with both pro-Assad and anti-Assad forces, said that he doesn’t believe Assad is responsible for the attacks.  It’s a real question, and the U.S. media and the rest of the world should demand an answer.

What’s staggering is that, with all signs pointing to U.S. and British military poised to launch some kind of strike against Assad, the Obama administration still hasn’t made the case for why it believes that Assad — and not anti-Assad extremists looking to draw the international community into Syria’s two-year civil war — is to blame.  As many commentators have written, the timing of last week’s attack is incredibly suspicious, given that U.N. weapons inspectors were in Damascus during the attacks and that Assad has generally been gaining ground against the opposition, and there’s plenty of reason why the more radical elements among the anti-Assad opposition want to provoke the world’s ire against Assad.

It’s generally undisputed that Assad has stockpiled chemical weapons in the past, while we don’t know if any rebel group of the opposition now have access to them.  But that’s hardly a smoking gun.

The fact that Assad denied U.N. experts to inspect the scene for five days (and then allowed only 90 minutes of access today) is highly suspicious.  But in a court of law in the United States, that would amount to circumstantial evidence.  Remember that Saddam Hussein hedged over whether he had weapons of mass destruction in 2002 and 2003 mostly because he wanted to deter neighboring Iran.  Moreover, I can think of a half-dozen reasons why the Assad regime might hesitate to allow United Nations inspectors into the affected area.  (If Assad wasn’t actually responsible for the chemical attack, do you think he has enough control to guarantee the safety of U.N. inspectors from anti-Assad rebels?)

The international community deserves more from the United States, given its track record of failed intelligence over the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (notably nuclear weapons) in Iraq in 2003.  That ‘slam dunk’ intelligence justified an eight-year military effort that catalyzed massive amounts of violence in Iraq.  New revelations this morning from Foreign Policy detailing the U.S. government’s complicity and acquiescence in the use of chemical weapons by then-ally Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war against Iran in the 1980s only underscore the troublesome record that the United States has accrued on this issue. Continue reading Kerry’s forceful remarks on Syria fail to explain why Assad’s to blame →

Austria

In Germany’s shadow, Austria also prepares for late September election

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faymann

In central Europe, another German-speaking nation is heading to the polls next month in a race that will likely also result in a broad left/right ‘grand coalition.’austria flag

Austria’s parliamentary elections on September 29 will affect a population that’s just two-thirds that of the German state of Bavaria, but the campaign features many of the same dynamics as Germany’s federal elections that will be held exactly one week prior — a broad centrist consensus on economic policy, the likelihood of yet another ‘grand coalition,’ flush economic conditions relative to the rest of Europe and static polls all year long indicating a narrow center-left win.

But there are key differences as well — unlike in Germany, where Christian democratic chancellor Angela Merkel is favored for reelection, it’s Austria’s social democratic chancellor Werner Faymann who will likely return as chancellor.  Moreover, there’s a far-right component to Austrian politics that simply doesn’t exist in Germany.  While the far-right remains divided among three competing parties (and that makes it unlikely that they will form a government), the far-right parties could cumulative outpoll the center-left and the center-right.

Let’s start with the fundamentals — Austria’s economy grew by an estimated 0.6% last year and 2.7% in 2011, and though its growth this year has been virtually negligible, it dipped into negative growth (-0.1%) for just one quarter (Q4 2012), so it’s difficult to say that Austria has even suffered a recession, at least in technical terms.  Although the European Union’s unemployment rate, as of June 2013, remains 10.9% and the eurozone’s unemployment rate an even higher 12.3%, Austria has the absolute lowest unemployment of all 27 EU nations: at 4.6%, Austria’s unemployment is nearly a percentage point lower than the second-lowest, Germany, which has a 5.4% unemployment rate.

That means that the anti-incumbent moods that pushed out French president Nicolas Sarkozy last year and has already weakened his leftist successor, François Hollande, and that upended governments in Greece, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria and elsewhere over the past year, doesn’t have the same punch in Austria.

The latest Gallup poll from Austria dated August 22, is representative — it shows that Faymann’s center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ, Social Democratic Party of Austria) holds a narrow lead over its current coalition partner, the center-right Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP, Austrian People’s Party):

austriapoll

The three far-right parties, taken together, however, attract the support of 29% of all Austrian voters — the largest, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, the Freedom Party of Austria), is the longstanding anti-immigrant, anti-EU, extreme-right conservative party in Austria, and it was the party that the late Jörg Haider led controversially into a government coalition in 2000 with the ÖVP.

But Austro-Canadian businessman Frank Stronach, who returned to his homeland last year after decades as chief executive officer of his Ontario-based auto parts company, is leading an alternative populist, eurosceptic right-wing party — Team Stronach — that’s attracting between 8% and 10% of the vote.

Finally, the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ, Alliance for the Future of Austria), which Haider founded in 2005 when he left the FPÖ, is in danger of losing all of its seats in Austria’s parliament following Haider’s sensational November 2008 death and Stronach’s recent rise.

But most recently, Stronach and the FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache have made more headlines over shirtless photos than policy matters.   Furthermore, in March’s local elections in the southernmost state of Carinthia, where Haider had served as governor for nearly a decade, the Freedom Party’s share of the vote dropped from about 45% to just 17%, and the Social Democrats swept to power under its leader Peter Kaiser in alliance with the Die Grünen – Die Grüne Alternative (Green Party).  Nationally, the Greens are polling at around 15%, which would mark a 40% increase from their 2008 result.

Austrian voters also widely prefer Faymann to continue as chancellor over ÖVP leader and foreign minister Michael Spindelegger — Faymann took over just weeks after the global financial crisis in 2008, and he has pursued one of the most successful center-left policy agendas in Europe.  Like in Germany, Austria pursued work-sharing policies (e.g., shorter working hours for everyone) in the immediate aftermath of the crisis to avoid massive layoffs.  Faymann’s government has also enacted some of the world’s most successful job training legislation and other forward measures to assist workers remain competitive through Austria’s Arbeitsmarktservice (AMS, Austrian Employment Service): Continue reading In Germany’s shadow, Austria also prepares for late September election →

Syria, United States

U.S. says ‘very little doubt’ Assad responsible for Syrian chemical warfare, preps possible intervention

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The international response to last Wednesday’s chemical warfare attack on the outskirts of Damascus is fast congealing, with U.S., British and French intelligence all pointing to the regime of Bashar al-Assad as the culprit.USflagfreesyria Syria Flag Icon

An official in the administration of U.S. president Barack Obama said Sunday morning that there’s ‘very little doubt’ that Assad perpetrated the attack.  French president François Hollande said earlier today that there was ‘a body of evidence indicating that the August 21 attack was chemical in nature, and that everything led to the belief that the Syrian regime was responsible for this unspeakable act.’

Obama and U.K. prime minister David Cameron have discussed the possibility of some form of military intervention, according to The Guardian and other news sources.  Meanwhile, the Syrian regime, under pressure from its Russian and Iranian allies, has agreed to allow U.N. weapons experts to inspect the site of the attacks.  In a sour irony, U.N. inspectors were already in Damascus earlier this week when the attack occurred for the purpose of determining the extent of potential chemical warfare earlier this spring.

The outset burden on Western governments is to connect the dots to make clear why they believe Assad is responsible — a decade ago, U.S. and British intelligence claimed they had a ‘slam dunk’ case that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction,  launching a unilateral attack on what turned out to be incorrect intelligence.  If anything, there’s ample evidence in the revelations about PRISM and the Internet snooping by the U.S. National Security Agency that we shouldn’t necessarily take the governments of even liberal democracy at their word.

Remember that the timing of the chemical attacks is incredibly suspicious — Assad’s forces are generally winning via-à-vis the opposition forces in Syria, so it’s not incredibly clear why Assad would order a chemical attack now, especially under the noses of U.N. chemical weapons inspectors.  But given the Obama administration’s position that use of chemical weapons is a ‘red line’ that, if crossed, will merit an international response, there’s every reason for opposition forces to use a small-scale attack to try to draw U.S. and European power against Assad, and other radical Sunni elements sympathetic to both the anti-Assad forces and terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are more than happy to bait the West into intervening in the Syrian civil war.   But while it’s generally accepted that Assad has access to chemical weapons, it’s far less clear that any of the disparate rebel groups have them or have access to them.

Even if Assad is guilty of what amounts to a war crime, there’s still reason to tread lightly.  If Assad is responsible, he should face a wide berth of sanction under international law — those might include further tightening economic and diplomatic sanctions against Assad, his inner circle and the Syrian military, action sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons or destroy his ability to deploy them in the future (including a no-fly zone), a fully empowered U.N. peacekeeping force, and an indictment from the International Criminal Court against Assad and the top military or other Syrian officials directly responsible for the chemical attack.

But even though U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel is preparing for ‘all contingencies,’ and U.S. warships in the eastern Mediterranean are already positioning for a potential attack, the international community can still respond in an affirmative way short of immediate U.S.-led military action.  Moreover, if Assad were removed tomorrow, Syria would still face a power vacuum, the potential for even more intense fighting between Shi’a/Alawite and Sunni Muslims within Syria and jockeying among various opposition groups, which range from secular Assad opponents to very conservative Islamic fundamentalists.  Those are just the known potential downsides for Syria — the unknown consequences and the potential adverse reaction in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East are more reason to tread lightly.

The next week is likely to bring even louder calls for the United States and/or the United Nations to act. To do something.

But the challenge for the Obama administration is that foreign policymaking in real time is very difficult, while political soundbytes are as easy as they are worthless.  There’s obviously a role for U.S. and international leadership to register a stand for human rights and against crimes of humanity.  But don’t trust anyone — in the United Kingdom, in the United States, in the Middle East — who has a ‘clear’ answer in mind for how the international community should now respond.

Don’t let hawks like U.S. senator John McCain convince you otherwise — the response to the latest turn in Syria’s conflict is more complicated than the polar choice of ‘doing nothing’ and launching a U.S.-led attack on Syria, guns-a-blazin’.  Given the U.S. history of intervention in the Middle East, and the horrific sectarian violence that followed the U.S.-led removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, it would be less controversial for the United Nations — not the United States — to take the lead in the organizing the international response.  Also don’t let liberal interventionists try to convince you that the United States should act immediately in order to avoid a Rwanda-style genocide in the Middle East.  Though the international community largely stood aside while 800,000 Tustis were hacked to death by Hutus in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, they welcomed the belated French intervention that served to provide relief and refuge to the genocidaires themselves.

Syria, United States

Obama wisely treads softly in wake of Syrian chemical attack

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In the aftermath of what now seems like a devastating and lethal chemical-weapons attack against thousands of civilians on the outskirts of Damascus early Wednesday, U.S. president Barack Obama is treading lightly on the evolving turn in the Syrian civil war — at least until we know more about the circumstances of the attack.USflagfreesyria Syria Flag Icon

In an interview today with CNN, Obama measured his words very carefully about what action he believes the United States or the international community can or should take in the wake of what amounts to a violation of international law:

Asked about claims by anti-regime activists in Syria that Bashar al-Assad’s government used chemical weapons in an attack that was said to have killed more than 1,300 people, Obama responded that officials are “right now gathering information” and that “what we’ve seen indicates that this is clearly a big event of grave concern.”

“It is very troublesome,” the president stressed.  Obama said U.S. officials are pushing “to prompt better action” from the United Nations, and are calling on the Syrian government to allow an investigation of the site of the alleged attack outside Damascus.

“We don’t expect cooperation (from the Syrian government), given their past history,” Obama conceded.  He quickly followed up with a warning, however, that “core national interests” of the U.S. are now involved in Syria’s civil war, “both in terms of us making sure that weapons of mass destruction are not proliferating, as well as needing to protect our allies, our bases in the region.”

His words are certain to disappoint both neoconservatives on the U.S. right and liberal interventionists on the U.S. left (many of which populate key roles within his administration) who see the attack as a clear violation of international law and an invitation for an aggressive response from the international community.  Already, U.S. senator John McCain is renewing calls for U.S. military intervention in Syria.

But there’s good reason for caution, and although it’s politically easier to make bold statements at a time of international crisis, Obama’s statement on Friday wisely reflects the ambiguity that we still know very little about the Syrian civil war, the anti-Assad opposition, the chemical attack itself and the potential unintended consequences of a more muscular U.S. or European response.

No one is comfortable to sit idly by when a thousand civilians have been gassed to death.  But in a world where human rights activists and conservative hawks alike are quick to pass judgment on the Obama administration’s reaction, it’s worth taking a moment to applaud Obama’s restraint.

We still don’t yet know who is responsible for the chemical attack nor do we actually know exactly what the attack agent was (reports indicate it was perhaps sarin, mustard gas or chlorine gas, though we won’t know until soil samples and other evidence is examined).  Although British foreign minister William Hague has gone further than the Obama administration in blaming Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad for the attack, the public evidence does not point to the clear conclusion that Hague has drawn.  It’s widely accepted that Assad has access to chemical weapons, but after nearly two years of open civil war, it is not impossible for some of those weapons to have fallen into opposition hands — or worse. 

The timing, most of all, is incredibly odd, as BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner and others have noted.  If anything, Assad has been winning the civil war and reclaiming ground from the opposition.  The opposition’s repeated attempts to form a unified front against Assad have been mixed at best.  Meanwhile, a United Nations weapons inspection team was in Damascus this week to determine the extent of chemical warfare during the war.  It seems incredibly unlikely that Assad, who’s gained the upper hand, would launch a chemical weapons attack the very week when UN inspectors are merely kilometers away.  Allegations of previous chemical attacks stem from March and April — this is the first chemical attack in four months.

That opens the uncomfortable door to the notion that radical elements within the opposition, which ranges from secular Assad opponents to radical Sunni jihadists and al-Qaeda sympathizers, could have unleashed the attack.  Knowing that it is losing, the chemical attack might have been a false-flag gambit designed to inflame international opinion against Assad, especially given the position that Obama has taken that chemical weapon use is a ‘red line’ that will merit international action.  But it could be radical Islamic elements unassociated with the opposition, and it could be rogue elements of the Syrian army.

So far, Assad has refused to allow U.N. inspectors to examine the scene, which is an unacceptable response.  Even Assad’s allies like Russia are calling on him to allow U.N. access, and the longer Assad hesitates, the guiltier his regime looks.

But even if Assad was responsible for the attack — the worst chemical warfare since Iraqi president Saddam Hussein unleashed chemical weapons in the 1980s against his own people and on the battlefield against Iran — there’s still reason to tread lightly. Continue reading Obama wisely treads softly in wake of Syrian chemical attack →

Chile

Does the Chilean right have any chance in November against Bachelet?

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Earlier this year, before anyone had jumped into the Chilean presidential race, you could easily have thought that the inevitable candidacy of popular former center-left president Michelle Bachelet was a kind of dress rehearsal for Hillary Clinton’s potential 2016 U.S. presidential race.chile

After four years away from La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace, and fresh off a stint with the United Nations as the head of the newly created UN Women group, Bachelet was not only the overwhelming favorite to win the presidential nomination of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concert of Parties for Democracy), the coalition of Chile’s center-left parties, but to win the November 17 election outright, perhaps with enough support to win an absolute majority and avoid a presidential runoff for the first time in two decades. 

True to form, Bachelet returned to great fanfare in March, declared her candidacy for president and won the Concertación primary with over 75% of the vote, putting her on track to accomplish what no other former president has done in the post-Pinochet era — return for a second term at La Moneda.  While Chilean presidents are prohibited from running for reelection, they are not prohibited from running for a second, non-consecutive term.

But the path has only smoothed for Bachelet as the Chilean right has lurched from one crisis to the next, settling on its third-choice candidate for president, Evelyn Matthei (pictured above) late last month.

Her hasty selection ensures that the next president of Chile will almost certainly be a woman, but it also establishes a new dynamic in the race.

Matthei and Bachelet were once childhood playmates when their fathers served together in Chile’s air force.  Matthei’s father, however, supported Augusto Pinochet after the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende.  Bachelet’s father, a general who opposed the coup led by then-general Pinochet, was later imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet regime until he died in 1974 imprisoned.  Bachelet and her mother emigrated to Australia and East Germany, though Bachelet returned to Chile in 1979 to pursue a career as a pediatrician.

Matthei is not incredibly conservative on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, and she has a reputation as an outspoken, independent, and sometimes profane voice in Chilean politics.  Given that she’s more personable than the candidate she replaces, Pablo Longueira, a former senator and minister of economy in Piñera’s administration, she could well turn out to be a better standard-bearer for what was always going to be an uphill fight.  It also helps that she’s not burdened with having directly supported Pinochet in the 1980s, tedious baggage that Longueira would have carried with him into the election.  Pinochet’s toxic legacy is one reason that Piñera has been only the first right-wing president Chilean president since the Pinochet left office in 1990.  Piñera himself has become increasingly unpopular in office, though he’s bounced back from a 2012 nadir — the latest July Adimark survey gives him a 37% approval rating (with 53% disapproval).

Longueira abruptly withdrew from the race in late July after disclosing that he was suffering from severe depression.   Continue reading Does the Chilean right have any chance in November against Bachelet? →

Bavaria, Germany

Seventy years on, the politics of the Holocaust in Germany remain fraught with difficulty

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In what’s been perhaps the most boring campaign season in German politics since reunification, chancellor Angela Merkel made big headlines yesterday when she became the first acting chancellor to tour the grounds of the former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau.bavarian_flag_iconGermany Flag Icon

Merkel took a somber detour from her campaign to visit the site, where 41,000 mostly Jewish prisoners were slaughtered by the Nazi regime — the concentration camp’s location in the middle of Bavaria, in contrast to even more ghastly extermination camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka in what is today Poland, has always made it a particularly wrenching site in the postwar German memory.  Merkel laid a wreath in honor of the victims, and she met with several survivors, including 93-year-old Max Mannheimer, who was imprisoned at the camp at age 24 and today chairs the Dachau camp community association.  The visit won plaudits from German Jewish groups, who praised Merkel for pausing her campaign to reflect on the atrocities of what happened seven decades ago at Dachau, not just far to the east but in the southern heartland of Germany.

It is perhaps appropriate that Merkel, the first postwar East German chancellor, was the first active German leader to visit the site.  Merkel spent the first 35 years of her life behind the Iron Curtain, first as a physical chemist and increasingly, a pro-democracy activist when the Berlin Wall fell.  Though West Germany recovered rapidly after the end of  the Nazi era, East Germans suffered through four decades of authoritarian socialist rule under the heel of Soviet Russia.  In her brief remarks, Merkel noted that ‘the name Dachau is tragically famous as it serves as a model for the concentration camps,’ adding that ‘the memory of that fate fills me with deep sadness and shame.’

But the headlines are not entirely positive — and some are downright hostile — because Merkel scheduled the visit as an aside from a reelection whistle-stop tour.  After visiting Dachau, Merkel was off to visit a beer tent in the nearby town of Dachau and delivered a political speech alongside a Bavarian brass band in traditional costume.

A leader of the opposition Die Grünen (Green Party), Renate Künast, harshly attacked what she called a ‘tasteless and outrageous combination’:

“If you’re serious about commemoration at such a place of horrors, then you don’t pay such a visit during an election campaign,” she told the daily Leipziger Volkszeitung.

But Merkel’s main opponent, Peer Steinbrück, the chancellor candidate of the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, the Social Democratic Party), has not criticized her, and Jewish groups have universally cheered Merkel for her gesture, so it’s unlikely that the visit, or the controversy surrounding it, is likely to cause any lasting political damage.  Voters generally understand that incumbents running for reelection have two jobs — chancellor and candidate.

It’s a reminder that, despite Germany’s efforts to come to terms with the Holocaust, it’s not always an easy topic to navigate for German politicians, even 68 years after the end of World War II and even for a politician as skilled as Merkel. Continue reading Seventy years on, the politics of the Holocaust in Germany remain fraught with difficulty →

Czech Republic

Czech parliament dissolved, October elections likely to strengthen ČSSD, Zeman

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In a widely anticipated move, the Czech parliament voted to dissolve its lower house yesterday, clearing the way for fresh elections in October and ending what had been a constitutional battle between president Miloš Zeman and his opponents since the collapse of former prime minister Petr Nečas over a corruption and surveillance scandal. czech

In a blow to Nečas’s Občanská demokratická strana (ODS, Civic Democratic Party), its one-time ally Tradice Odpovědnost Prosperita 09 or ‘TOP 09′ (Tradition Responsibility Prosperity 09), a liberal party led by former foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg joined with the Czech Republic’s center-left parties to dissolve the 200-member Poslanecká sněmovna (Chamber of Deputies).

Zeman is likely to announce elections for October 25-26 and a formal date is expected by the end of the week.

Polls show that the Česká strana sociálně demokratická (ČSSD, Czech Social Democratic Party) holds a wide lead going into the elections, which means that its leader Bohuslav Sobotka (pictured above) is widely favored to become the next prime minister of the Czech Republic.  The Social Democrats outpoll each of the Civic Democrats, TOP 09 and the Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy (KSČM, Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia) by something like a 2:1 or 3:1 margin in most surveys of voter opinion.

Even before the Nečas government fell, however, the Civic Democrats had become extraordinarily unpopular due to the poor performance of the Czech economy and the government’s push to raise taxes and cut spending — a familiar story throughout much of Europe these days.  The Social Democrats are expected to campaign on a platform of spending more funds on infrastructure instead of further budget cuts, and they may be able to do so now that the Czech economy appears to be moving from recession to growth in the second quarter of 2013.  But because the Social Democrats have also committed to positioning the Czech Republic for membership in the eurozone by the end of the decade, their capacity for wide budget deficits will be constrained.

Here’s the most recent survey — an August 19 PPM Factum poll that understates Social Democrat support compared to most polls:

czechpoll0819 copy

Sobotka, a former deputy prime minister and finance minister, has ruled out a formal governing coalition that will include the Czech Communists, but even Sobotka even concedes that a potential Social Democratic government would depend on the Communists for support for the first time since the end of the Cold War, which will result in tricky negotiations with the largely pro-EU Social Democrats and the eurosceptic Communists.  But the high number of voters who remain undecided and support none of the major parties underlines the broad disillusionment among Czech voters for the entire political system.

Zeman initially appointed Jiří Rusnok as a caretaker prime minister in July, though Rusnok narrowly lost a vote of confidence earlier this month, leading to yesterday’s dissolution vote.  Zeman’s decision is widely viewed as an attempt to expand the influence of the Czech presidency vis-à-vis the Czech parliament — Zeman became president earlier this year after the first direct presidential elections in Czech history, and he has argued his direct mandate entitles him to a more sweeping role.  Despite the failure of the Rusnok government to win a confidence vote, Zeman has skillfully muscled his way to dominating Czech politics throughout the summer, though early elections hold risks for him as well.

Though Zeman easily took advantage of the collapse of the Civic Democrats, he faces a different and more difficult challenge with respect to the Social Democrats, a party he once led as prime minister from 1998 to 2002.  But Zeman left the Social Democrats in 2007 and he now leads a small splinter group which literally calls itself the Zemanovci, or ‘Zeman’s people.’  But Zeman’s small party seems unlikely to win the 5% support necessary to enter the Chamber of Deputies, the threshold required under the Czech electoral system, which relies solely on proportional representation to determine the lower house’s composition.

It makes the Zeman-Sobotka relationship the most important in Czech politics right now.   Continue reading Czech parliament dissolved, October elections likely to strengthen ČSSD, Zeman →

Austria

Photo of the day: Austrian Freedom Party leader (nearly) bares all

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There’s just something undeniably homoerotic about the Austrian far right.austria flag

It all started when octogenarian Austro-Canadian businessman Frank Stronach, the leader of Team Stronach, a new eurosceptic party contesting Austria’s upcoming parliamentary elections, bared his chest over the weekend while talking to reporters from his lakeside home.  But Heinz-Christian Strache (pictured above), the leader of the more established far-right Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Freedom Party of Austria), felt the need to show even more skin in an uncharacteristic race to the bottom.

Declaring himself at top fitness going into the campaign, Strache uploaded the photo to his Facebook page over the weekend as well, with his party poised to win nearly one-fifth of Austrian voters next month. Continue reading Photo of the day: Austrian Freedom Party leader (nearly) bares all →