Tag Archives: United States

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 →

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 →

United Kingdom

Would a Miliband-led Labour government be an improvement on British civil liberties?

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The troubling case of David Miranda, the partner of Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, who was detained by British police at Heathrow yesterday for nine hours under schedule 7 of the U.K. Terrorism Act, is now a full-blown fully international incident. United Kingdom Flag Icon

The case has implications not only for U.S. politics (Greenwald has been the chief source for the leaks about the U.S. National Security Agency’s Internet intelligence-gathering programs) and even Brazilian politics (Greenwald lives in Brazil with Miranda, a Brazilian native), but for British politics as well, where the issue of civil liberties has been contentious for the past decade and a half under both the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and the Conservative-led government of current prime minister David Cameron.

Political strategist Ian Bremmer is already suggesting that the United States and/or the United Kingdom may be preparing an indictment against Greenwald (presumably under the U.S. Espionage Act), which would explain why Miranda’s laptop computer and other personal effects were confiscated in London.  We already know that the United States, by the admission of White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest was given a heads-up by London prior to Miranda’s detention, though Earnest has denied that the United States requested or collaborated with the detention.  It’s equally plausible that overeager police officials in London jumped at an opportunity to gather information they thought top U.S. and U.K. officials would appreciate — if the United States and the United Kingdom really are pursuing an international case against Greenwald, you’d think they would be careful not to commit what seems like a prima facie violation of the U.K. Terrorism Act.

With both Scotland Yard and Cameron saying little about the incident, and with U.S. officials remaining relatively mum, most of today’s discussion has been dominated by vehement critics of the detention on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the most striking has come from Labour Party’s shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, a rising Labour star who may herself one day lead the party, who has called for an investigation into whether the detention was appropriate under the Terrorism Act:

Schedule 7, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, controversially allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals. Miranda was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual.

According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours. It has been widely criticised for giving police broad powers under the guise of anti-terror legislation to stop and search individuals without prior authorisation or reasonable suspicion – setting it apart from other police powers.

As we approach the annual convention period in British politics, pressure on Labour leader Ed Miliband is growing to draw a deeper contrast with the current coalition government on many issues, including civil liberties.  Soon after his election as Labour leader in September 2010, Miliband criticized his party’s overreach on civil liberties, identifying in particular the Blair government’s plan to hold suspects for 90 days without trial and the broad use of anti-terrorism laws.  At the time, Miliband argued that he wanted to lead Labour to reclaim the British tradition of liberty, though Miliband also indicated at the time he supported Blair’s widespread introduction of what are now over 4 million closed-circuit television surveillance cameras throughout the country.

As the parties begin to jostle for position for an election that’s now just 21 months away, Cameron certainly won’t be able to run for reelection on as vigorous a pro-liberty position as he did in 2010, though his junior coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, can point to their success in repealing Labour’s plan to introduce national ID cards and scrapping the Tories’ proposed communications data bill this year.

That leaves a key opening for Miliband to champion civil liberties, but given the durability of the British surveillance state and Labour’s role in creating the legal framework last decade for the British surveillance state, it is unclear whether Miliband will do so, though Cooper delivered a high-profile speech in July arguing for more oversight and protections in relation to the U.K. intelligence and security services.  It’s likelier, however, that a future Labour government will pursue many of the same pro-security policies that each of the Blair, Brown and Cameron governments have pursued.

British voters will certainly remember the truly dismal record of the past Labour government under Blair and Brown on liberty (whether the efforts made the United Kingdom more secure is another question) — the list of curbs on personal freedom is long, and it includes not only the push for CCTV cameras: Continue reading Would a Miliband-led Labour government be an improvement on British civil liberties? →

New York, United States

Is Michael Bloomberg the Silvio Berlusconi of U.S. politics?

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If you’re not familiar with U.S. politics, you may not have realized the huge decision that came down on Monday from the federal Southern District of New York declaring that the ‘stop-and-frisk’ approach of the New York Police Department is unconstitutional.newyorkUSflag

But the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that the Police Department resorted to a “policy of indirect racial profiling” as it increased the number of stops in minority communities. That has led to officers’ routinely stopping “blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white.”

The judge called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms, including the use of body-worn cameras for some patrol officers, though she was “not ordering an end to the practice of stop-and-frisk.”  In her 195-page decision, Judge Scheindlin concluded that the stops, which soared in number over the last decade as crime continued to decline, demonstrated a widespread disregard for the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, as well as the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

It’s a landmark decision, as far as trial court decisions go, that acknowledges the inherent racism of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program, which took off in 2002 under the Bloomberg administration.  Essentially, the practice allows the police to stop hundreds of thousands pedestrians annually, the majority of which are African-Americans and Latinos, and to frisk them for weapons (or, of course, drugs) without probable cause — or, under a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case from 1968, Terry v. Ohio, ‘reasonable suspicion’ that the person to be frisked is armed and dangerous.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was decidedly not pleased, and he lashed out in a press conference that was more befitting a toddler than the mayor of the largest city in the United States:

To one journalist — but really to all of them and any critic of stop-and-frisk, however moderate — Bloomberg exclaimed, “You couldn’t be more wrong!”

Bloomberg, who will leave office in January 2014 after 12 years as mayor of New York City, argued fiercely for the benefits of stop-and-frisk, downplayed the concerns over civil liberties, refused to make any changes in the NYPD operating procedures anytime in the near future and even implicitly accused the ruling of leading to future citywide deaths at the hands of criminals who would otherwise slip through the NYPD crucible.  Bloomberg also pointed to a 30% reduction in violent crime since he took office, though the fact of the matter is that New York’s crime dropped even more precipitously in the 1990s under Giuliani, who had his own civil liberties controversies, including the NYPD’s high-profile sodomizing and assault of Abner Louima and the fatal shootings of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond.

But Bloomberg’s performance on Monday afternoon, however, was less reminiscent of Giuliani than another longtime player in world politics — former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.  And not just because they are apparently summer neighbors on ‘millionaire’s row’ in Bermuda. Continue reading Is Michael Bloomberg the Silvio Berlusconi of U.S. politics? →

United States

Chris Christie, Rand Paul and the coming Republican fight over U.S. foreign policy

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I argue this morning in The National Interest that the recent spat between New Jersey governor Chris Christie and U.S. senator Rand Paul from Kentucky over foreign policy is a lot more complex than the ‘pro-security hawk’ versus ‘libertarian isolationist’ paradigm.USflag

Rather, the coming fight over foreign policy in the Republican Party as we approach the 2014 midterm elections and the pre-primary phase of the 2016 election will take place on three planes:

  • the familiar security/liberty fight over PRISM, whistleblowers, homeland security and other civil liberties matters;
  • unilateralists (in the mould of former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton) versus multilateralists like former World Bank president Robert Zoelick; and
  • the traditional IR theory fight between realists (who are often in line with Paul and other libertarians) and liberals (including hawkish neoconservatives as well as liberal interventionists).

While they may be on opposite sides of the liberty/security spectrum, we don’t know where any of the 2016 hopefuls may ultimately land, including Christie himself, to say nothing of U.S. senators Ted Cruz of Texas or Marco Rubio of Florida or U.S. congressman Paul Ryan:

We still don’t know where Christie’s ultimate views on international-relations theory lie because that’s not exactly one of the key concerns of a U.S. state governor. But given that the battle for the future of Republican foreign policy is actually three interconnected fights, it could well be that, despite their other disagreements, he and Paul find common cause against more aggressive neoconservative voices.

The bottom line is that we likely know where the Democrats will fall on all of these fights, especially if their nominee is former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton.  That makes the Republican Party an interesting laboratory these days for new ideas and original thinking in American foreign policy.

United States

‘VIPR’ squads are now protecting American rodeos as TSA expands beyond airports

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You can’t make this up.  From a story in today’s New York Times on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s expansion beyond airports:USflag

As hundreds of commuters emerged from Amtrak and commuter trains at Union Station on a recent morning, an armed squad of men and women dressed in bulletproof vests made their way through the crowds.  The squad was not with the Washington police department or Amtrak’s police force, but was one of the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response squads — VIPR teams for short — assigned to perform random security sweeps to prevent terrorist attacks at transportation hubs across the United States….

With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals. Not everyone is happy.

Later in the article:

The auditors also said that VIPR teams might not have “the skills and information to perform successfully in the mass transit environment.”

And all of this in the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, which was supposed to mark a 180-degree turn from the Republican administration of George W. Bush, and in an era of budget sequestration at that.  Good luck to whomever succeeds Janet Napolitano as the next secretary of homeland security — it would be just desserts for Obama to appoint former Democratic/independent/national security senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, seeming that the creation of the sprawling department was his legislative accomplishment back in 2002.

Notch up one victory for Sir Humphrey, self-perpetuating bureaucracy and path determination.

United States, Vietnam

Photo of the Day: Kerry meets with Truong Tan Sang

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Truong Tan Sang

From the U.S. Department of State comes this photo of U.S. secretary of state John Kerry toasting Vietnamese president Truong Tan Sang, who is visiting Washington, D.C. and met earlier today with U.S. president Barack Obama.USflagvietnam

For Americans (and Vietnamese) of a certain era, the fact that Vietnam’s president, who was a member of Vietnam’s ruling Đảng Cộng sản Việt Nam (Vietnamese Communist Party) in the late 1960s during the U.S. military intervention to support allied South Vietnam against the Communist North Vietnam, and Kerry, a veteran of the U.S. war in Vietnam, would be standing side by side toasting one another in Washington, D.C., is incredible.

Kerry, a former Democratic senator from Massachusetts, along with fellow Republican senator and former Vietnam veteran John McCain, was instrumental in normalizing U.S. relations with Vietnam in 1995, over 20 years after the U.S. withdrew from the region.  The North Vietnamese quickly overwhelmed the South Vietnamese resistance and consolidated Communist Party rule in Vietnam’s entirety by 1976.

In recent years, Vietnam has emerged as one of southeast Asia’s leading economic performers.

I wrote last week about the Vietnamese government’s promising moves toward becoming potentially the first country in Asia to enact same-sex marriage.

Truong Tan Sang, who was jailed by the South Vietnamese government between 1971 and 1973, has been a leading member of the Vietnamese Communist Party since the 1990s, and formally became leader of the party and the Vietnamese president in summer 2011.

Egypt

ElBaradei set to become interim Egyptian prime minister in post-Morsi gamble for ‘reset’

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UPDATE: Egyptian officials are now distancing themselves from earlier reports that Mohamed ElBaradei will be Egypt’s next prime minister — that doesn’t incredibly change the analysis, though.  ElBaradei’s ties to the West, not to mention the other drawbacks mentioned below, help us understand why Egypt’s new military-backed government may have had second thoughts about ElBaradei, especially if they are hoping to bring Salafist Al-Nour Party leaders into the fold.

* * * *

Mohamed ElBaradei is set to become Egypt’s interim prime minister just four days after Mohammed Morsi was deposed as from the Egyptian presidency by the country’s armed forces.

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ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is a well-known figure whose international credibility runs far deeper than that of newly-installed interim president Adly Mansour, formerly the chief justice of the Egyptian constitutional court.  His selection as prime minister will bring instant gravitas to the emerging post-Morsi regime in Egypt, at least vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

But deploying ElBaradei into power is not risk-free — for either the new government or for ElBaradei’s reputation.

The danger is that his selection won’t be enough to ameliorate the governance crisis that has now accelerated with the Egyptian military’s decision to remove Morsi.  After all, though Morsi’s government had few allies after its troubled year in office, it’s hard to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood still doesn’t command the largest bloc of supporters within Egypt, and their wrath at the military’s turn against the Muslim Brotherhood may not be soothed by the appointment of any caretaker, no matter his seniority or even-handedness.  ElBaradei’s appointment comes just a day after pro-Morsi supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood staged a day of protest — the ‘Friday of rejection’ — demanding the return of Morsi to the presidency that met with tense, sometimes violent, resistance from the Egyptian military.  It’s too early to predict that Egypt is descending into a kind of civil war — despite a troubling lynching of four Shi’a Muslims last month, the largely Sunni Egypt doesn’t really feature strong Sunni-Shi’a schisms that have propelled sectarian violence more recently in countries like Iraq and Syria, and most Egyptians, even its more conservative Islamists, hold the military in high regard, for now at least.  But there’s no guarantee that ElBaradei can keep political violence from spiraling further out of control, propelling ever more turmoil to Egyptian industry, trade and tourism.

Even if no one will miss the ineptitude of the Morsi government, ElBaradei’s new power doesn’t come imbued with much of a mandate.  Though Egypt’s post-Mubarak transition was troubled from its inception, the successful conduct of free and fair presidential elections last summer was a key milestone on Egypt’s road toward a more democratic state.  While it’s true that the anti-Morsi protests had ballooned to a size even larger than those against Mubarak in February 2011, the more relevant factor is that Mubarak was never elected in a free election the way that Morsi was only a year ago.  So while political scientists debate whether last week’s events amounted to a coup (spoiler: yes, of course it was a coup, even if the U.S. administration doesn’t use the word ‘coup’), ElBaradei and his military supporters will come to power having undermined the most visible democratic credential that Egyptians could boast since the Arab Spring began.

By contrast, though French president François Hollande remains incredibly unpopular after just one year into a five-year term,  no one seriously thinks the French military is set to remove him from office to install a center-right president in France.  Moreover, ElBaradei will become Egypt’s new leader after having pulled out of last year’s presidential race, and it was not entirely clear that ElBaradei would have won in any event.  But it would have been better for the country today if ElBaradei had remained in the race to make a full-throated case for a secular, liberal democratic Egypt and to bring the fight to Morsi on the basis of the merits of his own ideas, not on the coattails of the military’s guns.

Unlike former foreign minister and Arab Council secretary-general Amr Moussa and former air force chief Ahmed Shafiq, ElBaradei is not tainted as felool — the ‘remnants’ of the government that Hosni Mubarak led from the 1980s until 2011.  But as the Tamarod (‘Rebellion’) movement has gathered steam in its efforts to oust Morsi, ElBaradei has managed to unite a disparate coalition of anti-Morsi interests, including Moussa, much of the former military establishment, elements of the so-called ‘deep state’ and supporters of former presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi, whose leftist, Nasser-style nationalism nearly vaulted him into last June’s presidential runoff.  If Monsour, ElBaradei and the new interim government succeed in organizing a new presidential election, Sabahi would certainly be the frontrunner to win it (unless ElBaradei himself runs, though he’s said he’s not interested in the presidency for himself).

As ElBaradei has noted in the days leading up to and following Morsi’s forced removal, the Morsi presidency was far from perfect — ElBaradei had routinely accused Morsi of becoming a ‘pharaoh’ in office, and he mocked Morsi’s Islamist agenda by noting acidly that ‘you can’t eat sharia.’  Though Morsi won only a narrow victory last June over Shafiq, he triumphed by assembling a broader coalition that transcended his own Muslim Brotherhood supporters, and, in recognition of that reality, Morsi initially called  for a broad inclusion of diverse views in formulating policies in office.  One of his first steps in August 2012, in firing longtime army chief and defense minister Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, and replacing him with Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, was an incredibly successful masterstroke, temporarily at least, in marrying the political interests of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian military.  Ironically, it was El-Sisi, who owed his position as commander-in-chief of the Egyptian armed forces to Morsi, who green-lighted the action that toppled Morsi.

But as Bassem Sabry explained in illuminating detail on Thursday in Al-Monitor, the clear point at which Morsi lost control over the country was his ill-fated decision last November to push through a vote on the country’s new constitution.   Continue reading ElBaradei set to become interim Egyptian prime minister in post-Morsi gamble for ‘reset’ →

European Union, United States

Goodbye WTO, hello TTIP — United States and Europe hope to create world’s largest free trade zone

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Guest post by Michael J. Geary

The United States and the European Union expect to begin negotiations next month on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) in Washington, DC.  Their ambitious aim is to create the world’s largest trade and investment bloc that covers a combined consumer population of over 800 million people.  If the U.S.-E.U. talks prove successful, TTIP will become the biggest trade deal in history.USflagEuropean_Union

U.S. president Barack Obama announced, to mild surprise, in his February 2013 state of the union address before the U.S. Congress that the United States would begin TTIP talks with the European Union.  His announcement followed the publication of a report from the High Level Working Group, which had spent a year examining  various options for expanding transatlantic trade and investment.  The HLWG concluded that any deal between the United States and the European Union, in order to capture the most gains, would have to be comprehensive and include sensitive issues such as government procurement, a reduction in non-tariff barriers (NTBs), intellectual property rights, and employment and labour sectors.  In May, Obama nominated his close economic advisor and free trade proponent, Michael Froman, to become the next U.S. trade representative.  Froman’s selection was, therefore, an important sign that the Obama administration is serious about completing not only TTIP, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as quickly as possible.

The trade and investment pact features a number of ambitious goals.  At the most fundamental level, U.S. and European leaders hope to reduce the existing transatlantic tariffs and other barriers that amount to approximately 3.5%or less on a range of goods.  That will be by far the easiest element of TTIP to negotiate.  A recent report from the Bertelsmann Foundation showed that a 3.5% reduction in tariffs would increase German exports to the United States by 1.13% and increase German imports, respectively, by 1.65%.  Deeper trade liberalisation, including a reduction in NTBs would lead to even greater economic benefits in for U.S.-German trade.  That, in turn, will significantly affect traditional intra-European trade flows, such that trade between Germany and other member states will decline significantly upon the completion of a comprehensive TTIP accord. The Bertelsmann report showed that, in the long term, French exports to Germany would fall by 23%, Italian exports to Germany would decline by 30% and British exports to Germany would drop by fully 41%. Such a comprehensive transatlantic deal would therefore mark a major realignment of traditional European trading patterns, offset by access to a wider US market.  That pattern, moreover, is likewise is reflected in Bertelsmann’s assessment.  For example, exports from Ireland, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain to the U.S. increase by an average of 86%, which presents a major boost to those European countries most adversely affected by the ongoing sovereign debt crisis. Aside from the potential boost to transatlantic trade, the European Commission argues that TTIP will generate close to 2 million additional jobs, half of which would be created in the United States.

Securing a comprehensive transatlantic trade agreement, however, will not be easy.   Continue reading Goodbye WTO, hello TTIP — United States and Europe hope to create world’s largest free trade zone →

Lebanon, Syria, United States

U.S. move to support anti-Assad allies jeopardizes Lebanon’s stability

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Hassan Nasrallah

The United States doesn’t typically like to hand gifts to Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, the Shi’a militia that remains a key player not only in the domestic politics of Lebanon, but throughout the Middle East. freesyriaUSflagSyria Flag IconLebanon

But when news broke last Friday that U.S. president Barack Obama was preparing U.S. assistance to arm Syrian rebels in their fight against Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, that’s in effect what the United States has done by broadening the two-year civil war in Syria, a conflict that neighboring, vulnerable Lebanon has largely managed to avoid in the past two years.

Hezbollah’s recent military mobilization against the mostly Sunni rebels, however, in support of Assad, was already rupturing the national Lebanese determination to stay out of the conflict.  The U.S. announcement of support for the rebels, however tentative, gives Hezbollah a belated justification for having expanded its own military support to Assad, and risks further internationalizing what began as an internal Syrian revolt against the Assad regime.

The U.S. decision to support anti-Assad rebels

The United States is signaling that it will provide small arms and ammunition to only the most ‘moderate’ of Syria’s rebels, though not the heavier anti-aircraft and anti-tank weaponry that rebel leaders have said would make a difference.  But even if the Obama administration changed its mind tomorrow, the damage will have already been done in the decision to back the largely Sunni rebels.  No matter what happens, Hezbollah will now be able to posture that it’s fighting on behalf of the entire Muslim world against Western intruders rather than taking sides in a violent sectarian conflagration between two branches of Islam.

Supporters of U.S. intervention credibly argue that Hezbollah’s decisive intervention earlier in May and in June in Qusayr, a town in western Syria, led to an Assad victory that will inevitably make Syria’s civil war longer and deadlier.  Hezbollah’s decision to intervene on behalf of Assad was a key turning point that marked a switch from indirect and clandestine support to becoming an outright pro-Assad belligerent in Syria, which brings tensions ever closer to exploding in Lebanon.  Furthermore, Russian support for Assad, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasingly strident opposition to Assad, as well as implicit Iranian support for Hezbollah, means that Syria is already a proxy for geopolitical positioning, whether U.S. policymakers like it or not.

But that doesn’t mean that the active support of the United States will suddenly make things better in Syria — after all, the United States has a controversial track record over the past decade in the Middle East.  It’s winding down a 12-year war in Afghanistan that, though it pushed the Taliban from power within weeks in 2001, has done little to establish lasting security or foster a truly national government.  Its 2003 invasion of Iraq, which toppled one of the two Ba’athist regimes in the Middle East in removing Saddam Hussein from power, and the subsequent U.S. occupation still failed to prevent vicious Shi’a-Sunni sectarian fighting that approached the level of civil war between 2006 and 2008 and that still simmers today.

It’s the same familiar kind of bloody sectarian violence that now features in Syria, the remaining Ba’athist regime in the Middle East.

Moreover, the risks to Lebanon are now even more staggering.  Lebanon, which had been set to hold national elections last weekend on June 16, has instead postponed those elections indefinitely, because negotiations among Lebanon’s various religious confessional groups to draft a new election law have taken a backseat to the more pressing task of keeping the country together.

The U.S. came to its decision in light of a determination that Assad had used chemical weapons against at least a small segment of the rebels, thereby crossing a ‘red line’ that Obama established in August 2012 in the heat of the U.S. presidential campaign last year.  But as The Washington Post‘s Ernesto Londoño reported last week, U.S. advisers had already been working quietly with Jordanian officials for months in order to reduce the chances that Syria’s stockpiles of chemical weapons will fall into misuse by either the Assad regime or by the opposition.

It still remains unclear just what the Obama administration believes is the overwhelming U.S. national interest in regard of Syria — though the Assad regime is brutal, repressive and now likely guilty of war crimes, there’s not necessarily any guarantee that a Sunni-dominated Syria would be any better.  Last Friday, U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon indicated that he opposes the U.S. intervention in Syria because it risks doing more harm than good.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote in a scathing commentary last week, the forces that oppose Assad are a mixed bunch, and there’s no way to know who exactly the United States is proposing to arm:

More staggeringly, [Obama] is planning to put arms into the hands of forces that are increasingly indistinguishable from hardcore Jihadists and al Qaeda – another brutal betrayal of this country’s interests, and his core campaign promise not to start dumb wars. Yep: he is intending to provide arms to elements close to al Qaeda. This isn’t just unwise; it’s close to insane….

Do we really want to hand over Syria’s chemical arsenal to al Qaeda? Do we really want to pour fuel on the brushfire in the sectarian bloodbath in the larger Middle East? And can you imagine the anger and bitterness against the US that this will entail regardless? We are not just in danger of arming al Qaeda, we are painting a bulls-eye on every city in this country, for some party in that religious struggle to target.

I understand why the Saudis and Jordanians, Sunni bigots and theocrats, want to leverage us into their own sectarian warfare against the Shiites and Alawites. But why should America take sides in such an ancient sectarian conflict? What interest do we possibly have in who wins a Sunni-Shiite war in Arabia?

The ‘rebels’ are, of course, a far from monolithic unit — the anti-Assad forces include all stripes of characters, including the Free Syria Army, a front of former Syrian army commanders dismayed at Assad’s willingness to commit such widespread violence against the Syrian people, but also including more radical Islamist groups such as the Syria Islamic Front, the Syria Liberation Front and even groups with non-Syrian leaders with global links to al-Qaeda, such as Jabhat al-Nusra, which is comprised of radical Salafists who want to transform Syria into an Islamist state.

Liberal interventionism strikes again

When Obama announced earlier this month that he was promoting Susan Rice as his new national security adviser and Samantha Power as his nominee to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, I argued that it was a victory for liberal interventionists within Obama’s administration and that it could mean that the United States takes a stronger humanitarian interest in Syria.  Many other commentators, such as Wonkblog‘s Max Fisher, downplayed that possibility, arguing that their promotions meant ‘not much’ for U.S. policy on Syria, and that ‘there is good reason to believe that Power and Rice are not about to change U.S. policy in Syria.’

That, of course, turned out to be a miscalculation.  Less than 10 days after the Rice/Power announcement, the Obama administration is now ratcheting up its involvement in the Levant on a largely humanitarian, liberal interventionist basis, with the plausible possibility that a U.S.-supported no-fly-zone could soon follow.

The key fear is that the Obama administration’s ‘humanitarian’ response may result in an even more destabilizing effect on Lebanon. Continue reading U.S. move to support anti-Assad allies jeopardizes Lebanon’s stability →

European Union, United States

Spying on the Europeans — PRISM repercussions as Obama heads to Europe

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stasi 2.0

Michael J. Geary and I argue in The National Interest this morning that the repercussions of reports of the PRISM program within the U.S. National Security Agency mean that U.S. president Barack Obama will face tough questions when he goes to Europe for the G8 summit in Northern Ireland and additional meetings in Berlin. USflagEuropean_Union

At a time when Europeans are already concerned about the extent of their own governments’ intrusion into their private online lives, the revelations of the voluntary cooperation of service providers like Facebook and the like in allowing U.S. surveillance of foreign communications are already being met with skepticism from top U.S. allies at a crucial and ambitious time for the Obama administration’s European agenda:

The timing of the scandal could not have come at a worse time in EU-United States relations, with both sides set to embark on negotiations for what would be a landmark free-trade compact, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Above all, German chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to seek assurances from Obama in their one-on-one meetings in Berlin.  But with Germany having this week agreed to TTIP negotiations (leaving France as the remaining obstacle), and with the eurozone crisis still not fully over, certainly the Obama-Merkel meeting should have more important business than PRISM.

Ironically, the NSA gathered more pieces of intelligence within Germany during the month of March than any other EU country.  A spokesman for Merkel, the first chancellor from the former East Germany, where memories of Stasi surveillance are still fresh, said she would raise the issue with Obama. Her justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger stressed, “the suspicion of excessive surveillance of communication is so alarming that it cannot be ignored. For that reason, openness and clarification by the US administration itself is paramount at this point. All facts must be put on the table.”

Ultimately, the Obama administration and the NSA will be less vulnerable to the wrath of European regulators than the companies participating in PRISM themselves.

But Microsoft, Google and other service providers, including Facebook, YouTube, Apple and AOL, could face even more blowback than the U.S. government or the Obama administration. Their apparently voluntary participation in U.S. government’s PRISM program could open them to European lawsuits or otherwise subject them to additional regulatory scrutiny. Significant elements of their businesses are already subject to restrictions within Europe—Google faces strict restrictions on its StreetView program and Facebook’s facial-recognition capability is banned altogether. As PRISM continues to dominate world headlines, Facebook on Wednesday opened its first servers outside of the United States in northern Sweden—its presence there, which like much of Scandinavia is a bastion of government transparency and personal freedom, will come increasingly under the thumb of EU regulators.

I argued yesterday that Sweden is unlikely to come to the rescue anytime soon with respect to Facebook and PRISM.  More likely is that the European Parliament will work to pass the new data protection directive that it’s been considering for the past two years and that would place additional restrictions on the processing of personal data, though time is quickly running short with European elections set for May 2014.

Photo above is a popular graffiti slogan in Germany, showing former interior minister (and now finance minister) Wolfgang Schäuble — critics claimed Schäuble’s focus on counterterrorism measures approached levels of civil liberties intrusion similar to the East German secret police and intelligence force, the Stasi.

European Union, Sweden, United States

Can Sweden save the European Union from the NSA spooks?

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facebook goes arctic

Even as the media continues to debate leaks revealing the secret surveillance program of the U.S. National Security Agency, code-named ‘PRISM,’ one of the chief private-sector actors in the PRISM scandal opened its first non-U.S. site on Wednesday, giving one European nation a key jurisdictional hook to regulate future data privacy.USflagEuropean_UnionSweden

According to news reports from The Guardian, Facebook, has been cooperating voluntarily with the NSA’s PRISM program since summer 2009, thereby exposing the private data of both U.S. and non-U.S. citizens alike to the purview of the NSA under the authority of the U.S. PATRIOT Act passed in the aftermath of the 2001 al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

But Facebook also opened a new facility to host its servers in far northern Sweden on Wednesday (in part to use the chilly Arctic weather to more efficiently cool its European servers).  Despite the awkward timing, it is Facebook’s first server hall outside of the United States, and its opening comes when European Union leaders are pushing for answers on the extent to which NSA has been permitted access to private, personal data by Facebook, Google, YouTube, Apple, AOL and other service providers and while the European Parliament is considering a new data protection directive that would enhance protection of the personal data of EU citizens.  Assuming that the European Union cannot stop U.S. government agencies, it means that European regulators could target U.S. technology companies in greater measure — after all, the EU already places restrictions on Google’s StreetView program and has already banned the European use of Facebook’s face recognition software.

So does that give Sweden a unique opportunity to ensure that the private data of EU citizens is not caught up in the NSA snare?

After all, Sweden is virtually synonymous with good government, right?

According to Transparency International, it’s among the least corrupt countries is the world.  In the middle of the 18th century, Sweden essentially invented the concept of freedom of information with the Freedom of the Press Act of 1766, and its leaders over the past two decades championed a EU-wide freedom of information regime.

But a reputation for transparency doesn’t necessarily connote a reputation for protecting privacy.  Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was so worried that Swedish authorities would extradite him to the United States that he chose to hunker down in Ecuador’s London embassy instead of allowing British authorities to transfer him to Sweden for a trial on a sexual harassment charge.  Swedes have also raised concerns with EU policymakers that the push for more robust data protection could actually harm government transparency by limiting the Swedish government’s ability to provide open access to documents.

Moreover, the current center-right coalition headed by prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt of the Moderata samlingspartiet (Moderate Party) has introduced greater levels of Swedish surveillance.  In 2009, it narrowly passed legislation that would allow the government’s Försvarets radioanstalt (the National Defence Radio Establishment) to wiretap and access all international telephone and internet traffic, even if all  ultimate parties in the traffic are Swedish.  Though the legislation, know as the ‘FRA law’ passed only narrowly by Sweden’s parliament, the law had its genesis in the prior center-left government of the Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti (Swedish Social Democratic Workers Party).  It essentially codified into Swedish national law much of what PRISM has been purported to do within the United States.

The law caused some amount of concern, especially in neighboring Finland because all of its Internet and phone traffic at the time routed through Sweden.

Sweden’s foreign minister Karl Bildt earlier this week protested that Swedish activities under the FRA law are not similar to what’s been reported PRISM, in part on the basis that the FRA law was debated publicly and enacted by a duly elected parliament.  In that regard, Bildt’s right — it was clear just what was at stake when the Swedish parliament adopted the FRA law; in contrast, Facebook wasn’t even developed until three years after the U.S. PATRIOT Act.  In addition, Bildt expressed a healthy hint of suspicion about other ‘certain states,’ presumably including the United States:

 

Continue reading Can Sweden save the European Union from the NSA spooks? →

United States

Reframing the issue of Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing: public vs. private

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Edward_Snowden

Eleven years ago, in the wake of the Enron debacle, Congress passed protection for whistleblowers as part of a wide-ranging set of public company reforms within the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.USflag

Now consider that, instead of a former National Security Agency Central Intelligence Agency employee and, until very recently, a Booz Allen Hamilton employee, Edward Snowden (pictured above) were instead a disgruntled Facebook or Google employee, he knew about the voluntary cooperation with PRISM, and he honestly believed that Facebook and/or Google were enabling the NSA’s illegal activity.

If he (1) reasonably believed that his employer was breaking the law by cooperating with the NSA and (2) engaged in whistle-blowing activity as defined by Sarbanes-Oxley, would he have a claim under Sarbanes-Oxley for adverse employment action if Facebook or Google had fired him instead of Booz Allen?

Though the definition of whistle-blowing is relatively circumspect under Sarbanes-Oxley, let’s assume that for purposes of our example, Snowden ’caused information to be provided’ to a ‘government body conducting inquiries’ related to a ‘rule or regulation of the Securities and Exchange Commission.’  It’s a stretch, but certainly the participation of Facebook or Google in PRISM and the PRISM activities are material information to any potential investor and certainly affect shareholder value.

Would he have a Sarbanes-Oxley case against his employer for retaliating against him?*

More importantly, would John Boehner or Eric Holder or the American public generally be more sympathetic to him if the whistle-blowing came from within Facebook or Google and not from within the public sector?  Would the 1984 tropes be replaced by Atlas Shrugged tropes?

For the record, I think Snowden neither hero nor traitor, but I do immediately suspect the agenda of anyone who is certain of either.

I also think that the answer tells us much about how incredibly different U.S. politics is from world politics — that this is a relevant question is only possible in a highly individualistic culture like that of the United States, where distrust of government runs so high that one political party’s essential worldview for three decades has been ‘government is the problem.’

I don’t think re-framing the issue in these terms would make much difference in France or Brazil, let alone China, but I think it does in the United States.

* Theoretically, because Booz Allen is publicly traded, he might still have a case for retaliation, but I wanted my example here to be from the ‘private sector’ and not from the ‘public sector,’ though it’s obviously clear how blurred the line has become, even in a place like the United States, which we don’t think of the government as a large Venezuela-style actor in the private sector, and we like to talk about the ‘private sector’ and the ‘government’ as if there are bright lines between the two. (UPDATE: A commenter notes that when Snowden was revealed to have leaked the PRISM documents, the U.S. government would have revoked his clearance, which may have made him simply unable to carry out his duties under Booz Allen’s contract with the NSA, casting more doubt on why Snowden’s Sarbanes-Oxley case as a Booz Allen employee would be more farfetched.)

Germany

As U.S. awaits DOMA decision, Germany’s constitutional court weighs in on gay rights

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merkelwesterwelle

By the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court will render decisions in two of the most important legal cases to affect same-sex marriage in the United States: Hollingsworth v. Perry, which could result in the repeal of California’s Proposition 8, a ballot measure that overturned the state legislature’s enactment of same-sex marriage, and United States v. Windsor, which could strike down the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act.  DOMA, a 1996 law that prohibits same-sex couples from federal benefits of marriage, has been struck down by lower U.S. courts as a violation of the ‘equal protection’ clause of the 14th amendment of the U.S. constitution.  Others have argued that it violates the right of states to determine their own marriage laws and the ‘full faith and credit’ clause of the U.S. constitution that requires states to recognize the law, rights and judgments of the other U.S. states. Germany Flag Icon

Both decisions are among the most highly anticipated opinions of the Court’s summer rulings.

But Germany’s top constitutional court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, got out in front of the U.S. Supreme Court last week with a landmark decision of its own that in many ways mirrors what proponents of same-sex marriage hope will be a harbinger of the U.S. decision on DOMA.

In a decision that could place pressure on chancellor Angela Merkel in advance of Germany’s federal election in September, the constitutional court ruled that same-sex couples in registered civil partnerships are entitled to the same joint tax filing benefits as those in opposite-sex marriages, exactly the rights that DOMA was originally enacted to prohibit in the United States.  The decision put the fight for German same-sex marriage on the front page of European newspapers in a summer when the parliamentary battles to enact same-sex marriage in the United Kingdom and France have otherwise dominated headlines.

It’s surprisingly in many ways that France and the United Kingdom have been more progressive on same-sex marriage rather than Germany.  Although polls show nearly two-thirds of the British and the French support same-sex marriage, a February 2013 poll showed that three-fourths of Germans support same sex-marriage.  Moreover, UK prime minister David Cameron is the center-right leader of a Conservative Party that faces its most pressing political pressure today from the right, not from the center, and the virulent anti-marriage rallies in France and the widespread opposition to same-sex marriage on France’s center-right means that French president François Hollande’s push for marriage equality, a policy that he campaigned on in 2012, has met significant turbulence.

But Germany’s evolutionary approach to marriage equality has taken a more subdued path through the constitutional court in Karlsruhe as much as through the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament.  Former chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his coalition partner Volker Beck successfully pushed for the enactment of the Life Partnership Act in 2001 when the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party) controlled the government in coalition with Beck’s Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (the Greens).  Following the German constitutional court’s blessing of the law in 2002, the Bundestag followed up in 2004 with revisions to the law that increase the rights of registered life partners, including rights to adoption, alimony and divorce, though not parity with respect to federal tax benefits.

Since taking power in 2005, chancellor Angela Merkel has not pushed additional rights for same-sex couples, which puts her at awkward odds with her coalition partners, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), which supports marriage equality and whose former leader Guido Westerwelle (pictured above with Merkel), Germany’s foreign minister and its vice-chancellor from October 2009 to May 2011, is openly gay.

Both Merkel’s Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) and the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria, the more socially conservative and Catholic-based Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria), have been traditionally opposed to gay marriage, and as recently as March, the CDU and the CSU reaffirmed their opposition to extending tax benefits to same-sex partners, even though the February 2013 poll showed that two-thirds of CDU-CSU supporters favored same-sex marriage outright.

Despite parliamentary inactivity in Berlin, last week’s decision by Germany’s constitution court, however, is just the latest decision from Karlsruhe that has edged same-sex registered partnerships ever closer to full marriage equality.  Continue reading As U.S. awaits DOMA decision, Germany’s constitutional court weighs in on gay rights →