Category Archives: Middle East Geopolitics

Is Manaf Tlass the only ‘saviour’ of Syria?

Posted on August 4, 2012 | Comments Off

By Bronco – Syriacomment
The increased suspicions by the Western countries that neither the FSA nor the SNC are a reliable entity that could lead the country in the future after the fall of the regime, has changed the direction of the efforts.
There is a clear consensus appearing in the media that reflect the western and Arab government views, that nobody wants the removal of the whole regime anymore, they want the removal of the head as a scapegoat so a new phase of the relation between the opposition and the regime can start.
Nevertheless, unless the Syrian government is certain that the new phase will be a viable one for the Syrians and in particular for the Alawites and the other minorities, they would not sacrifice Bashar Al Assad.
So now we are facing two issues. One is the military, the other one is the the political.
The military is happening on the ground and will probably drag a few more weeks to become meaningful. If the rebels win and there is no political plans, the country will fall into a worst chaos. If they loose, then the regime will be able to hold for few more months until the next assault. In both cases there is a need for a political solution to stop the violence.
On the political side, intense efforts are made by the opposition and their sponsors to find a suitable opposition leadership to the ‘transitional entity’ that would be acceptable to the regime for future collaboration.
Manaf Tlass, the defected brigadier general, friend of Bashar Al Assad, seems to be the favorite, although the only one. Whether his defection was simply arranged by Bashar al Assad just for that purpose or whether the guy is genuine is irrelevant. He is a sunni representing the business Syrians as well as the army that are the two pillars of the Syrian state.
He is obviously the only such candidate and therefore the best to enter into a negotiation with the Syrian government.
No wonder Saudi Arabia, France and Turkey are pampering him.

The SNC who wants that role opposes Manaf and have no other candidate to propose. As an excuse they insist that they are busy preparing the tasks needed in the aftermath of the victory rather than looking for a leader. Leading a post revolution without a leadership figure is an illusion.

Therefore if the sponsors of the opposition do not agree on the only leader figure in town, Manaf Tlass, and are not able to force it on the SNC and the others than only the military failure or success will decide of the future of Syria that may be a continuous state of violence that would gradually affect all the neighbors.
It’s up to the Friends of Syria to find the solution. Will they?

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Posted in Middle East Geopolitics, Syria, Syrian Opposition

Propects of a transitional government in Syria?

Posted on August 1, 2012 | Comments Off

By Bronco on Syriacomment
-01 August 2012-

In view of the disaster of the military approach, and the FSA failure both militarily and psychologically to win the hearts and minds of the Syrians and the West, the new buzz word is now an urgent “transitional government”
Yet the options for any ‘urgent’ action are limited.

– The ‘government in exile” option: The SNC is unanimously recognized as a failure, with no legitimacy and unable to get the status of “a government in exile”. Any attempts by other opposition group to cater for a new leader (Haytham al Maleh) are boycotted by the SNC. Dead end.

– The ‘military transitional’ government seems impossible to create.
The Syrian Army is still cohesive, there are no massive defections which reflects the hesitant mood of the common Syrians. The FSA is daily discrediting itself with its methods and association to Islamist extremists. Result: Syrians and the West don’t trust the FSA’s ability and legitimacy to take over the country. Dead end.

– The “mixed-mode transitional government” including regime figures and opposition figures. In order to reach that, a ceasefire and a dialog are necessary between the two factions. The opposition refuses to talk to the regime, unless it stops the attacks. The regime will not talk to the opposition until it lays down its arms. Even if Bashar al Assad decided to leave to allow that a dialog materializes, the opposition and the regime figures need a long time to be able to deal with each other. Dead end

The only breakthrough could emerge from the outcome of the Aleppo battle.
If the Syrian army is able to control Aleppo, the military arm of the opposition will be weakened to such a point that they will either accept a ceasefire or be totally annihilated. That would trigger the political opposition to rush to an unconditional dialog with the regime. Under Russian and Chinese pressures, the regime will work to share power with the opposition

If the rebels continue to harass the Syrian army without seriously weakening it, the guerilla war will continue and Syria will become like Iraq with different factions killing each others and the country gradually dividing . In these circumstances, the regime will not negotiate with the opposition and will keep the power.

The question of Bashar Al Assad leaving or not is irrelevant as the regime will stay in power until a suitable transition gets implemented.

What is left now is to wait for the battlefield outcome.

http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/?p=15563#comment-321681

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Posted in EU-Syria, Syria, Syrian Opposition, Turkey, Turkey-Syria, US-Syria

Syrian war of lies and hypocrisy

Posted on July 29, 2012 | Comments Off

The West’s real target here is not Assad’s brutal regime but his ally, Iran, and its nuclear weapons
-Robert Fisk -Sunday, 29 July 2012

Has there ever been a Middle Eastern war of such hypocrisy? A war of such cowardice and such mean morality, of such false rhetoric and such public humiliation? I’m not talking about the physical victims of the Syrian tragedy. I’m referring to the utter lies and mendacity of our masters and our own public opinion – eastern as well as western – in response to the slaughter, a vicious pantomime more worthy of Swiftian satire than Tolstoy or Shakespeare.

While Qatar and Saudi Arabia arm and fund the rebels of Syria to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite/Shia-Baathist dictatorship, Washington mutters not a word of criticism against them. President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, say they want a democracy in Syria. But Qatar is an autocracy and Saudi Arabia is among the most pernicious of caliphate-kingly-dictatorships in the Arab world. Rulers of both states inherit power from their families – just as Bashar has done – and Saudi Arabia is an ally of the Salafist-Wahabi rebels in Syria, just as it was the most fervent supporter of the medieval Taliban during Afghanistan’s dark ages.

Indeed, 15 of the 19 hijacker-mass murderers of 11 September, 2001, came from Saudi Arabia – after which, of course, we bombed Afghanistan. The Saudis are repressing their own Shia minority just as they now wish to destroy the Alawite-Shia minority of Syria. And we believe Saudi Arabia wants to set up a democracy in Syria?

Then we have the Shia Hezbollah party/militia in Lebanon, right hand of Shia Iran and supporter of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. For 30 years, Hezbollah has defended the oppressed Shias of southern Lebanon against Israeli aggression. They have presented themselves as the defenders of Palestinian rights in the West Bank and Gaza. But faced with the slow collapse of their ruthless ally in Syria, they have lost their tongue. Not a word have they uttered – nor their princely Sayed Hassan Nasrallah – about the rape and mass murder of Syrian civilians by Bashar’s soldiers and “Shabiha” militia.

Then we have the heroes of America – La Clinton, the Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, and Obama himself. Clinton issues a “stern warning” to Assad. Panetta – the same man who repeated to the last US forces in Iraq that old lie about Saddam’s connection to 9/11 – announces that things are “spiralling out of control” in Syria. They have been doing that for at least six months. Has he just realised? And then Obama told us last week that “given the regime’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, we will continue to make it clear to Assad … that the world is watching”. Now, was it not a County Cork newspaper called the Skibbereen Eagle, fearful of Russia’s designs on China, which declared that it was “keeping an eye … on the Tsar of Russia”? Now it is Obama’s turn to emphasise how little clout he has in the mighty conflicts of the world. How Bashar must be shaking in his boots.

But what US administration would really want to see Bashar’s atrocious archives of torture opened to our gaze? Why, only a few years ago, the Bush administration was sending Muslims to Damascus for Bashar’s torturers to tear their fingernails out for information, imprisoned at the US government’s request in the very hell-hole which Syrian rebels blew to bits last week. Western embassies dutifully supplied the prisoners’ tormentors with questions for the victims. Bashar, you see, was our baby.

Then there’s that neighbouring country which owes us so much gratitude: Iraq. Last week, it suffered in one day 29 bombing attacks in 19 cities, killing 111 civilian and wounding another 235. The same day, Syria’s bloodbath consumed about the same number of innocents. But Iraq was “down the page” from Syria, buried “below the fold”, as we journalists say; because, of course, we gave freedom to Iraq, Jeffersonian democracy, etc, etc, didn’t we? So this slaughter to the east of Syria didn’t have quite the same impact, did it? Nothing we did in 2003 led to Iraq’s suffering today. Right?

And talking of journalism, who in BBC World News decided that even the preparations for the Olympics should take precedence all last week over Syrian outrages? British newspapers and the BBC in Britain will naturally lead with the Olympics as a local story. But in a lamentable decision, the BBC – broadcasting “world” news to the world – also decided that the passage of the Olympic flame was more important than dying Syrian children, even when it has its own courageous reporter sending his despatches directly from Aleppo.

Then, of course, there’s us, our dear liberal selves who are so quick to fill the streets of London in protest at the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians. Rightly so, of course. When our political leaders are happy to condemn Arabs for their savagery but too timid to utter a word of the mildest criticism when the Israeli army commits crimes against humanity – or watches its allies do it in Lebanon – ordinary people have to remind the world that they are not as timid as the politicians. But when the scorecard of death in Syria reaches 15,000 or 19,000 – perhaps 14 times as many fatalities as in Israel’s savage 2008-2009 onslaught on Gaza – scarcely a single protester, save for Syrian expatriates abroad, walks the streets to condemn these crimes against humanity. Israel’s crimes have not been on this scale since 1948. Rightly or wrongly, the message that goes out is simple: we demand justice and the right to life for Arabs if they are butchered by the West and its Israeli allies; but not when they are being butchered by their fellow Arabs.

And all the while, we forget the “big” truth. That this is an attempt to crush the Syrian dictatorship not because of our love for Syrians or our hatred of our former friend Bashar al-Assad, or because of our outrage at Russia, whose place in the pantheon of hypocrites is clear when we watch its reaction to all the little Stalingrads across Syria. No, this is all about Iran and our desire to crush the Islamic Republic and its infernal nuclear plans – if they exist – and has nothing to do with human rights or the right to life or the death of Syrian babies. Quelle horreur!

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-syrian-war-of-lies-and-hypocrisy-7985012.html#

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Posted in EU-Syria, Iran, Middle East Geopolitics, Syria, Syrian Opposition, US Middle East Politics, US-Syria

Syria’s many new friends are a self-interested bunch

Posted on July 11, 2012 | Comments Off

Charles Glass-
Jul 11, 2012-

Last week France hosted the third conference of the Group of Friends of the Syrian People, a collection of 107 countries and organisations modelled on the Friends of Libya who cheer-led Nato’s air war in that country.

In France, representatives of the US, Turkey, Britain, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, South Korea, the UN and the rest demonstrated their friendship in a communiqué as vague as it was biased.

The group urged more economic sanctions, humanitarian assistance to victims of violence and “stronger United Nations Security Council action.” It promised punishment for government war criminals, while neglecting to suggest that rebels who violate the Geneva Conventions should receive so much as a parking fine.

The Syrians are now surrounded by more new-found friends than a lottery winner. Not since the old Soviet Union signed all those “treaties of friendship” with everyone from Finland to Afghanistan has one country had so many new pals.

How did Syria become so popular that almost half of the members of the UN are scrambling to save it? What other country can claim more than 100 sovereign friends? What inspired this rush of affection for Syria?

Where have these friends been hiding for the past 50 years? What were they doing in 1967 when Israel seized the Syrian Golan? What support did they send to more than 100,000 Syrian citizens when Israel demolished their villages and expelled them from their homes? What was their reaction to Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan in 1981? Have they taken a stand against the 30 settlements that Israel planted on property stolen from Syrians? Are they calling for sanctions against Israel until it withdraws from Syrian territory, dismantles its settlements and permits Syria’s Golan citizens to return home?

You know the answers. So do the Syrians.

Would it be churlish to suggest that Syria’s friends want something from Syria for themselves? George Bush was eyeing Syria when he left the White House, and, as in so much else, the Obama administration is taking the policy further.

On March 5, 2007 Seymour Hersh, whose American intelligence sources are second to none, wrote in TheNew Yorker:

“To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the administration has co-operated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hizbollah, the Shiite organisation that is backed by Iran. The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

Syria is a house on fire, and the US and Russia have turned up with flame-throwers.

Thus, arms have flowed in abundance to both sides – at least until this week when Russia stopped shipments.

A conflict which screams out for a diplomatic settlement perpetuates itself with outside help, for outside interests.

If Syria’s friends have set out to destroy the country, they are doing it well. Neighbour has turned against neighbour. People who thought of themselves two years ago as Syrians have now become Sunnis, Druze, Christians or Alawites.

The CIA is arming and guiding gunmen near the Turkish border, as it once did anti-Sandinista Contras along the Honduran-Nicaraguan frontier.

To avoid Congressional scrutiny as it did in Nicaragua, the US has turned again to Saudi Arabia. The British are running anti-Syrian government operations from Lebanon. France, my sources say, is playing a similar role from both Turkey and Lebanon. Russia and Turkey vie for influence in a country whose citizens hate them both.

Page 2 of 2

The killing is not only escalating but, mirroring fratricidal struggles from Spain in 1936 to Yugoslavia in 1992, is growing more personal and vicious. No hands are clean. No one, apart from the undertaker, is winning. Yet it goes on and on with each side certain of the justice of its cause.

There are many versions of this conflict. They are all true, just as they are all false. No one accepts the government’s insistence that its opponents are all foreign mercenaries. Too many Syrians in Homs and Idlib have died for the internal dimension of the conflict to be denied.

But opposition claims to have honoured the Annan plan’s ceasefire do not stand scrutiny. They have allegedly attacked security offices, checkpoints, buses and barracks, to cast blame on the government for responding.

They claim further that theirs is an entirely home-grown uprising, even as they receive weapons, training, advice, transport and funding from foreign governments and intelligence agencies.

The role of outside actors is as clear as it was when Britain used the so-called “Arab awakening” to expel the Ottomans from Syria in 1918. Just as those rebels discovered two years later, freedom and independence may not suit their powerful backers.

If the friends’ sanctions, arming of the opposition and dispatch of spies and supplies fail to settle the outcome in Syria, the friends will rely on the armed oppositions’ narrative to demand that the US launch an invasion.

“Whenever we engage in a war or move in on some country,” Edmund Wilson wrote in Patriotic Gore, referring to America’s seizure of many lands from Mexico to the Philippines, “it is always to liberate somebody.”

Charles Glass is the author of several books on the Middle East, including Tribes with Flags and The Northern Front: An Iraq War Diary. He is also a publisher under the London imprint Charles Glass Books

One-page article

You know the answers. So do the Syrians.

On March 5, 2007 Seymour Hersh, whose American intelligence sources are second to none, wrote in TheNew Yorker:

Syria is a house on fire, and the US and Russia have turned up with flame-throwers.

Thus, arms have flowed in abundance to both sides – at least until this week when Russia stopped shipments.

A conflict which screams out for a diplomatic settlement perpetuates itself with outside help, for outside interests.

The CIA is arming and guiding gunmen near the Turkish border, as it once did anti-Sandinista Contras along the Honduran-Nicaraguan frontier.

They claim further that theirs is an entirely home-grown uprising, even as they receive weapons, training, advice, transport and funding from foreign governments and intelligence agencies.

http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/syrias-many-new-friends-are-a-self-interested-bunch#full

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Posted in EU-Syria, Middle East Geopolitics, Turkey-Syria, US Middle East Politics, US-Syria

Is Islam to Blame for Freedom Deficit in Middle East?

Posted on July 8, 2012 | Comments Off

By Riaz Hassan-
July 8, 2012-
The age-old debate about Islam’s role in the political backwardness of the Middle East has returned to the fore. Dramatic developments of the Arab Spring, followed by re-emergence of authoritarian tendencies, reignite the debate. While debates will continue, a tentative answer can be offered: Flirtation with authoritarianism could be linked more to millennia of Arab history and culture rather than with Islam.

In his seminal work, Muslim Society, eminent British social anthropologist Ernest Gellner boldly asserted that, judged by various criteria, “of the three great Western monotheism, [Islam is] the one closest to modernity.” He goes on say that had the Arabs won at Poitiers and gone on to conquer and convert Europe, the modern rational spirit and its expression in business and bureaucracy could only have arisen from Islamic thought. A Muslim Europe would have saved Hegel from indulging in tortuous arguments to explain how an earlier faith, Christianity, is more final and absolute than a chronologically later one, namely Islam. And in 1770, Edward Gibbon had little difficulty imagining Islamic theology being taught in Oxford and across Britain.

But there’s an acute deficit in development and freedom in the Muslim world, evident from the United Nations and World Bank Development reports, giving rise to contentious debate about the causes. Culprits include Islamic theology and culture, oil, Arab culture and institutions, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, desert terrain and institutions, weak civil society and the subservient status of women.

Perhaps the most contested debates center on whether Islam is the main cause of these twin deficits of development and freedom. Evidence shows that, before the balance of power shifted after the European expansion in the 17th century, the Middle East was economically just as dynamic as Europe. Muslim merchants were just as successful in carrying their commerce and faith to far corners of the world as their European counterparts if not more.

According to the late economic historian Angus Maddison, in the years 1000 AD the Middle East’s share of the world’s gross domestic product was larger than Europe’s – 10 percent compared with 9 percent. By 1700 the Middle East’s share had fallen to just 2 percent and Europe’s had risen to 22 percent. Standard explanations for this decline among Western scholars include Islam’s hostility to commerce and its ban on usury. But these reasons are unsatisfactory because Islamic scripture is more pro-business than Christian texts, and for usury Torah and Bible do the same. The Prophet Mohammed and his first wife, Khadija, were very successful merchants. Many Muslims blame their economic backwardness on Western imperialism. So why did a once-mighty civilization succumb to the West?

Duke University economist Timur Kuran, in his book The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East, persuasively discards these and related explanations. He marshals impressive empirical evidence to show that what slowed economic development in the Middle East was not colonialism or geography or incompatibility between Islam and capitalism, but laws covering business partnerships and inheritance practices. These institutions benefited the Middle Eastern economy in the early centuries of Islam, but starting around the 10th century they began to act as a drag on economic development by slowing or blocking the emergence of central features of modern economic life – private capital accumulation, corporations, large-scale production and impersonal exchange.

An Islamic partnership, the main organizational vehicle for businesses of Muslim merchant classes, could be ended by one party at will, and even successful ventures were terminated on the death of a partner. As a result most businesses remained small and short-lived. The most durable and successful business partnerships in the Muslim world were operated by local non-Muslims. Inheritance customs hindered business consolidation because when a Muslim merchant died, his estate was split among surviving family members which prevented capital accumulation and stymied long-lasting capital-intensive companies. The resulting organizational stagnation thus prevented the Muslim mercantile community from remaining competitive with its western counterparts.

Likewise, research by Harvard economist Eric Chaney debunks theories that the root cause of the democracy deficit in the Middle East is Islam or Arab cultural patterns, oil, the Arab-Israeli conflict or desert ecology. The democratic deficit, as reflected in the prevalence of autocracies in the Muslim-Arab world, is real, Chaney notes, but it’s a product of the long-run influence of control structures developed in the centuries following the Arab conquests.

Unlike Bernard Lewis, who argues that Muslim “rage” for having lost cultural primacy that was once theirs to the West is the root cause of their current conditions, Chaney has a more grounded historical explanation. In the ninth century, according to Chaney, rulers across this region began to use slave armies as opposed to their native population to staff armies. These slave armies allowed rulers to achieve independence from local military and civilian groups and helped remove constraints on the sovereign in pre-modern Islamic societies. In this autocratic environment, religious leaders emerged as the only check on the rulers’ power. Religious leaders cooperated with the army to design a system that proved hostile to alternative centers of power. This historical institutional configuration which divided the power between the sovereign backed by his slave army and religious elites was not conducive to producing democratic institutions. Instead, religious and military elites worked together to perpetuate what Chaney calls “classical” institutional equilibrium – which is often referred to as Islamic law – designed to promote and protect their interests.

Regions incorporated into the Islamic world after they were conquered by non-Arab Muslim armies, such as India and the Balkans, and where Islam spread by conversion, for example, Indonesia, Malaysia and Sub-Saharan Africa, did not adopt the classical framework. Their institutions continued to be shaped by local elite which preserved political and cultural continuity. Consequently democratic deficit has remained an enduring legacy in the Arab world and in lands conquered by the Arab armies and remained under Islamic rule from 1100 AD onwards. But Islamic countries such as Turkey incorporated into the Islamic world by non-Arab Muslim armies or by conversions the democratic developments have followed a more progressive trajectory.

For the Arab Spring, history does not have to be destiny. Some optimistic signs suggest that it may be possible for the Arab world to escape its autocratic past.

The region has undergone structural changes such as increasing levels of education, urbanization and industrialization over the past 60 years which have made it more receptive to democratic change than any time in the past. The widespread uprisings of the Arab Spring since 2011, while an expression of this change, would not automatically lead to democracy. The events unfolding in Egypt and actions of the Supreme Council Armed Forces to grab power in the face of Muslim Brotherhood’s electoral victories sharpen the possibility of further violent confrontation. Failure of the UN monitors to stop the Syrian state from murdering and suppressing its people will only accentuate sectarian violence and bloodshed. It will take time to dismantle authoritarian institutions and mindsets of their minders.

But there is one clear sign that Muslim countries will follow different trajectories. Countries like Turkey, Albania, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia are more likely to defy history than the Arab countries, but poverty and weak civil institutions remain obstacles to democratic change.

Riaz Hassan is visiting research professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies National University of Singapore. His recent books include Inside Muslim Minds (Melbourne University Press) and Life as a Weapon: The Global Rise of Suicide Bombings (Routledge).

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2012/07/08/is_islam_to_blame_for_freedom_deficit_in_middle_east__100127.html

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Posted in Middle East Geopolitics, Religion

President al-Assad accuses Turkey for of helping Syrian “Terrorists”

Posted on July 4, 2012 | Comments Off

DAMASCUS- 04/07/2012 President Bashar al-Assad stressed in part 2 of the interview he made with the Cumhurieyt Turkish daily that the Government of Erdogan has gone beyond the fraternal relations with Syria to direct interference and to get involved later in the bloody events through providing logistical support to terrorists.

Following is part 2 of his interview with Turkish daily the Cumhurieyt:
Journalist: Mr. President, Syrian-Turkish relations were excellent in recent years on the political level as well as the personal and family levels between you and Prime Minister Erdogan. Could you please tell us what happened to these relations so that things reached the current situation?

President Assad: First of all, we have to identify who changed. Look at Syria’s relations with other countries and you’ll find that our relations with Iraq, Iran, Jordan and other countries have not changed and remain the same. On the other hand, you can see that Turkey’s relations with most countries of the region, not only with Syria, have changed.

As far as we are concerned, what changed on the Turkish side is that in the first stage of the crisis, Turkey transgressed against the brotherly relations with Syria and started to interfere directly in Syrian affairs, which is absolutely unacceptable for us in Syria. We are an independent country which respects itself and respects its sovereignty. That was in the first stage.

Later on, the Turkish government started to get involved in the bloody events in Syria by providing logistic support to the terrorists who have been killing innocent people. The Turkish government started adopting policies which are dangerous both to the Turkish people and the Syrian people. That is as far as the political aspects of the relations are concerned. I will not talk here about the personal characteristics of this man who, in his statements, has transgressed against the moral and ethical values that should characterize any politician in the world or even any human being.

Journalist: Mr. President, you said that you do not allow any foreign intervention in internal Syrian affairs. But Erdogan, in almost every speech he made, used to say that he told you, asked you, advised you; and that you promised him, or told him that you would do this and that. What did he say to you? And what did you promise him?

President Assad: First, what you are saying about these statements is evidence of what I said: that he was interfering in our internal affairs. Based on the principle that he has nothing to do with internal Syrian affairs, how could I promise him? Isn’t that evidence that he was lying?

He used to ask me and provide advice; and I have my vision of things which I have announced in my speeches. He used to advise concerning reforms; and we announced a package of reforms six days after the beginning of the events in Syria in March 2011. We have implemented everything we promised, even changing the constitution completely. If you ask him now, he might talk about reform. But let me raise the question now: if he were genuine in calling for reform, why didn’t he talk about it years ago, since the beginning of our relations with him in 2004?

Has he suddenly felt love, affection and concern for the Syrian people? Is it logical that he should feel more concerned for the Syrian people than I do?

What would you say about me if I told you that I am more concerned about the Turkish people than you are as a Turkish citizen? You would no doubt say that this is hypocrisy. Let Erdogan concern himself with his internal affairs and not with others’ in order to preserve what remains of the zero-problem policy that can be implemented.

Journalist: If you want to sum up, Mr. President, what did Erdogan want?

President Assad: In brief, he had an agenda wider than the Syrian issue. It concerns his personal position and the position of his team. He wanted the terrorists to have a free hand in Syria, that they shouldn’t be arrested or imprisoned, and that we do not defend ourselves. Then, things will be alright for him.

Journalist: What do you mean by the terrorists? Do you mean the Muslim Brothers?

President Assad: Years before the crisis, Erdogan was always concerned for the Syrian Muslim Brothers. He was concerned about them more than he was concerned about Syrian-Turkish relations. There is no doubt now that they are one of his main concerns in the Syrian events, namely defending and helping them. Of course, we do not allow this, neither for Erdogan’s sake nor for the sake of anyone else in the world.

Journalist: It seems that bridges between you and Erdogan have been destroyed.

President Assad: I think so, because he lost his credibility. Rebuilding these bridges depends on his ability to restore credibility on the Arab arena in general, not only in Syria, because this is not a personal issue. When he has the courage to stop and acknowledge his numerous mistakes at this stage, I don’t think the people of our region, and the Arab and Syrian people in particular, will have a problem in forgiving him. And I believe that the Turkish people will forgive him too.

Journalist: Mr. President, concerning Syrian-Turkish relations, there has been a number of incidents. An aircraft was downed; Prime Minister Erdogan threatened you, deployed forces on the borders and made all the noise you’re aware of. What is, in your opinion, the way out of the Syrian-Turkish crisis?

President Assad: The way out is that the Turkish government corrects the mistakes it made in dealing with the Syrian situation, not manipulating or exploiting any event in order to create big problems, and putting the interests of the Syrian and Turkish people before the narrow personal interests of their officials. So, the way out is there and the process is quite simple and not difficult at all. I am sure that the Turkish people, and the Syrian people, will support this, and at the forefront at these people will be the families of the two Turkish pilots. It is enough for Erdogan to listen to the statement made by the father of one of the pilots to find the way out.

Journalist: You said that Erdogan has changed. Why, in your opinion, has he changed? And what are the things which changed in him?

President Assad: The circumstances have changed, and these circumstances showed Erdogan’s reality. I’ll give you some evidence. For example, we heard a lot of shouting in defense of the Palestinians in 2008 when Israel attacked Gaza. But two and a half years before that, we did not hear that kind of shouting when Israel attacked Lebanon. The resistance was there in both cases, and Israel killed in both cases, and in both countries the number of martyrs was approximately 1500.

Journalist: Why, in your opinion?

President Assad: Because he showed his sectarian mentality. Because the difference between the two cases is only the sectarian aspect. Today, Erdogan is shedding the tears of hypocrites for the Syrian people. Why hasn’t he cried for those killed in some Gulf countries, although they are innocent, peaceful and unarmed? Why isn’t he speaking about democracy in some Gulf countries?

Journalist: Which country?

President Assad: Qatar, for instance. Why didn’t he do anything after the Marmara ship incident except shouting? Why did he challenge Israel, and then suddenly agreed to deploy the missile shield in Turkey? Did he deploy it in order to protect Turkey from the attack of a hostile country?

Did America build these bases in order to protect itself against this region? Which country in the region has the capability to threaten America?

No country. So, the answer is that he deployed it to protect Israel. These circumstances revealed Erdogan’s reality, no more, no less. Erdogan hasn’t changed. What has changed is the way the people of the region look at him. He has failed on the Arab arena. He no longer exists, neither him nor his credibility.

http://www.dp-news.com/en/detail.aspx?articleid=125299

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Posted in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Religion, Syria, Syrian Opposition, Turkey, Turkey-Israel, Turkey-Syria

Conversations on Diplomacy Moderated by Charlie Rose

Posted on June 29, 2012 | Comments Off

Interview:
Hillary Rodham Clinton: Secretary of StateFormer Secretary of State James A. Baker III
Washington, DC
June 20, 2012

MR. ROSE: I’m Charlie Rose. Thank you very much for coming this afternoon. This is, as many of you know, a second in a series of conversations with Secretary Clinton and previous secretaries of State. We hope that we will have a chance to do as many secretaries as we can here. And the point of this series is to look at foreign policy in the context of present challenges and options, but also historical lessons and experiences. Our intent is not to create some huge fight. However crafty I am, I am not that good. (Laughter.) But I do believe that two heads are better than one, and especially these two heads.

Secretary Clinton, it has been said that this Administration looks at the Bush 41 model in terms of some of their foreign policy. I think the President has said that publicly, and certainly, I’ve heard him say that. I think that Secretary Baker has said to me that he has found much to admire in this Administration’s foreign policy. He has some quarrels with economic policy, but this is about foreign policy. I hope that we will be able to be – to talk about the idea of diplomacy today. Clearly, we will because I’ll ask the questions. (Laughter.) A little bit like Churchill saying, “Yes, you’ll be good to him because he’ll write that history.”

But this is an interesting time, clearly, for diplomacy. And it is worth noting that there are 337 museums for the military and none for diplomacy. And it is time that we understand – and these two people understand it well and practice it brilliantly – the power and the need for diplomacy. It is soft power, but it is also powerful policy and powerful power that can be used. We have seen this most recently with Secretary Clinton in China, the possibilities in a very difficult and challenging time of diplomacy.

I want to begin with this notion: You both came to this building, to State Department, from politics. Is that a good background?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I certainly think so. That may not be surprising for Jim to hear, but it might be for some. There are lots of different routes to this job. And we can look back at our predecessors, the 66 that came before me, and see such accomplished men and then finally women. But I think bringing a political experience to the job, particularly in recent times, has been very beneficial, because everybody has politics. Even authoritarian regimes have their own brand of politics. And understanding what motivates people, what moves them, how to create coalitions, especially in the time that I find myself serving, has been extremely helpful.

MR. ROSE: Now, Secretary Baker, as I say, you were chief of staff, you ran political campaigns, but you also served in a number of positions, including Secretary of Treasury. But you know politics. Is that beneficial?

SECRETARY BAKER: Politics, you say?

MR. ROSE: Yes, sir.

SECRETARY BAKER: Yeah. It’s very beneficial. I agree wholeheartedly with what the Secretary said. In fact, I entitled my memoirs about my three and a half years as Secretary of State – I called it the “Politics of Diplomacy.” And in there, I said my experience, both as a lawyer, yes, but then in politics, I found grounded me very well for this job, because the job of Secretary of State is quite political. It’s very substantive. And I don’t mean to suggest that there’s a difference there, but it’s international politics. It’s politics, but it’s international politics.

MR. ROSE: You both also – it should be said, you had a very close relationship with President Bush. You had been his campaign manager; you’d been his friend from Texas. You couldn’t be closer than the two of you. Your relationship with President Obama was different. They use the term “team of rivals” to describe it. Talk about the notion of the relationship between the Secretary of State and the President.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, Jim has eloquently written about this. You have to have the President’s confidence. You have to have a sense of a shared mission, an understanding of what’s important to the President and the principles and values that he – or someday she – is fighting for. So it is in a different context where someone like Secretary Baker had a very long, close relationship with the first President Bush.

I was a Senate colleague of President Obama’s. We ran against each other. I was very surprised when he asked me to be Secretary of State. But it was interesting that the last time this happened, team of rivals, was a senator from New York by the name of Seward who President Lincoln asked to be Secretary of State. And I’ve spent a lot of time reading about Secretary Seward. And there was a meeting of the minds and a melding of purpose and vision that I feel very comfortable in representing this President and his foreign policy agenda.

SECRETARY BAKER: I agree with all of that. To succeed, I think, as Secretary of State, you need a President that will support you and protect you and defend you, even when you’re wrong. (Laughter.) And I had such a President. And it’s very important, because everybody in Washington wants a little piece of the foreign policy turf – everybody. And you need a President, when the stories come out in The Washington Post that the NSC is running foreign policy, who will pick up the phone and phone you and say, “Hey, Bake. I want you and Susan to come up to Camp David tonight, and we’re going to spend the weekend up there.” That ends all that kind of stuff. And you need that.

MR. ROSE: Yes. It’s (inaudible).

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah. That’s exactly right.

SECRETARY BAKER: And so it’s very – that relationship is critical in my view to the success of a Secretary of State.

SECRETARY CLINTON: In listening to Jim talk, I mean, the more things change, the more they remain the same. There are story themes, there is an appetite for conflict. Henry Kissinger, as he and I discussed when you interviewed us, said he couldn’t get over the fact that I wasn’t fighting with the National Security Advisor or the Secretary of Defense or you name it. And so you do have to not only work hard to make sure that the relationship with the President is positive and strong and perceived as such, but also to make sure that the whole team functions because you don’t want a lot of wasted time and energy.

I mean, the world is moving too fast. There is so much going on, and you have to be given the level of trust and confidence that enable you to go out there and make these decision. We were talking before we came out about what I had to do in China a month ago with negotiating once, negotiating twice, on the blind lawyer dissident. And you have to have people back in Washington who, when the inevitable second guessing and all the rest of it goes on, can say, “Look, we’re going to see this through, and it’s going to be okay. We’re just going to make sure that we’re on the same path together.” And that happens in every Administration, and the quality of that relationship is determined whether you stay focused and effective or not.

SECRETARY BAKER: And the President can stop all that sniping and second guessing. And that’s, of course, what you want. I’m reminded of the fact that in the first few months of our administration way back in 1989, we had a Chinese dissident who came to the U.S. Embassy and sought refuge and asylum, and we had to deal with a guy named Fang Lizhi. And it was almost the same kind of experience that Secretary Clinton had.

SECRETARY CLINTON: And every President says, “Oh, I don’t need this.” (Laughter.)

SECRETARY BAKER: That’s right.

SECRETARY CLINTON: And you just have to navigate through it and make it turn out okay.

SECRETARY BAKER: That’s right. (Laughter.)

MR. ROSE: How was it that it turned out okay?

SECRETARY CLINTON: On that particular – well, I think in the case of Chen Guangcheng it was in part because we did the right thing. I mean, it always helps if you believe you’re doing the right thing. We did the right thing by giving refuge and medical care to this man who had escaped from a brutal house arrest after an unjust imprisonment. It was something that was in accordance with our values, even though we knew that it was going to be a difficult diplomatic follow-through with the Chinese.

The fact that we have this Strategic and Economic Dialogue that had become very important to us both, both the United States and China, that I was on my way there for our fourth meeting, had everybody invested in trying to work through whatever the difficulties were. And I had also worked very well and on a lot of challenging issues, not all of which we agreed on, with my counterparts in the Chinese Government, most particularly State Councilor Dai Bingguo.

And so we were very frank. I mean, they didn’t like it that this man ended up in our Embassy. We stood our ground and said, “Look, this is who we are as Americans. We have a chance to make this better than it would be otherwise; let’s work together,” which we had to do not once but twice. But at the end, I think it showed a level of confidence and even trust in the good faith of each side that enabled us to work it through.

MR. ROSE: What ought to be our policy towards China today?

SECRETARY BAKER: I think the policy that we should be pursuing is pretty much the policy we are pursuing. I come, of course – I came over here with a Treasury hat on. I’d been Secretary of the Treasury for four years, interrupted by a political campaign. (Laughter.) But one of our big gripes today with China is that they manipulate their currency, and they do. Now, should we call them a manipulator or not? Or would we be better off trying to get over that hurdle quietly through quiet diplomacy and serious diplomacy and strength – strong diplomacy? That’s my view of the way we ought to be approaching that.

But with respect to China generally, Charlie, we’ve – we have a big interest in having the best possible relationship we can with China, and they have a big interest in having the best possible relationship they can with us. There are many areas of common interest: trade, regional security, energy, you name it, a lot of areas where our interests converge. And we should seek to magnify those and emphasize those. But we have areas of differences, too. We got Tibet. We got Taiwan. We got the currency problem. We got some – we got the Iranian —

MR. ROSE: (Inaudible) as opposed to China.

SECRETARY BAKER: — nuclear issue.

MR. ROSE: Right.

SECRETARY BAKER: No, where we differ, we have to manage those differences and – but continue to work with them. And that’s what diplomacy is all about, frankly. I mean, you don’t – you have to find a way to manage the differences and magnify the common areas of agreement.

MR. ROSE: Are you hopeful that you’ll be able to get them on board with respect to Iran and with respect to Syria?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, with respect to Iran, they are on board. One of the real successes of our diplomatic strategy toward Iran, which was to be willing to engage with them but to keep a very clear pressure track going, is that the Chinese and the Russians are part of a unified negotiating stance that we have presented to the Iranians, most recently in Moscow. I think the Iranians have been surprised. They have expended a certain amount of effort to try to break apart this so-called P-5+1, and they haven’t been successful. The Russians and the Chinese have been absolutely clear they don’t want to see Iran with a nuclear weapon. They have to see concrete steps taken by Iran that are in line with Iran’s international obligations. And we have said we’ll do action for action, but we have to see some willingness on the part of the Iranians to act first.

So I think it took three-plus years, because one of the efforts that we’ve been engaged in is to make the case that as difficult as it is to put these sanctions on Iran, and particularly to ask countries like China to decrease their crude oil purchases from Iran, the alternatives are much worse. And we’ve seen China slowly but surely take actions, along with some other countries for whom it was quite difficult – Japan, South Korea, India, et cetera. So on Iran, they are very much with us in the international arena.

MR. ROSE: Will they support an oil embargo?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, absent some action by Iran between now and July 1^st, the oil embargo is going into effect. And that’s been very clear from the beginning, that we were on this track. I have to certify under American laws whether or not countries are reducing their purchases of crude oil from Iran, and I was able to certify that India was, Japan was, South Korea was. And we think, based on the latest data, that China is also moving in that direction. And thankfully, there’s been enough supply in the market that countries have been able to change suppliers.

On Syria, so far they’ve taken Russia’s lead on Syria. But we’re working on that every single day as well.

MR. ROSE: Why did they do that? Why do they take Russia’s lead?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I think both Russia and China have a very strong aversion to interference in internal affairs.

MR. ROSE: Sovereignty issue.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yes.

SECRETARY BAKER: Yeah.

SECRETARY CLINTON: And so for the Russians, we – I was with President Obama in Mexico two days ago. We had a two-hour meeting with President Putin. They’re just – they don’t want anything to do with it. They find it quite threatening, and basically they reject it out of hand. So anything that smacks of interference for the Russians and for the Chinese, they presume against. There are other reasons, but that’s the principal objection that they make.

MR. ROSE: Would coming – both different countries and different points, but they somehow come together on these issues – Syria and with respect to Russia and the role they are playing.

SECRETARY BAKER: Yeah, yeah.

MR. ROSE: And the role that the United States is playing and the role that the region can play. What should we be doing and what is the risk of not doing?

SECRETARY BAKER: Well, I’ll answer that in just a minute. But first let me say if we’re going to have differences with Russia – and we do have some differences with Russia – it seems to me the most important difference we might have is with respect to Iran. And we don’t have that now, and that’s really important. And I don’t think we ought to create a problem with Russia vis-a-vis what we want to do in Iran about their nuclear ambitions as a result of something we might do in Syria. I just think the Iranian issue there is far more important really than how we resolve the Syrian issue.

How should we resolve the Syrian issue? I think we should continue to support a political transition in the government in Syria. But I don’t – but I think we ought to support it diplomatically, politically, and economically in every way that we can, but we should be very leery, extremely leery, about being drawn in to any kind of a military confrontation or exercise.

MR. ROSE: Does that include supplying them with arms?

SECRETARY BAKER: That – well, that’s a slippery slope. The fact of the matter is a lot of our allies are already supplying them with arms. Okay? It’s not something –

MR. ROSE: And our friends in the region.

SECRETARY BAKER: Well, I say our allies in the region. Yeah, they’re doing it. And it’s not something we have to do. I look at Syria and I think why are we not calling for something that we – this is – it may not be the right comparison, but in 1989, when we came into office, the wars in Central America were the holy grail of the left, political left in this country, and the holy grail of the political right in this country. We said if we can take these wars out of domestic politics, we can cure the foreign policy problem, and we did.

How did we do it? We put it to both parties – Daniel Ortega, the hardline, authoritarian dictator, if you will, in Nicaragua, and to Violeta Chamorro, the opposition candidate. We said if you’ll hold an election and both agree to abide by the results, that’s the way we’ll get out of this conundrum. That’s what happened. And both of them did agree, finally, to abide by the results. Ortega lost. President Carter was very instrumental in getting him to leave office. Why don’t we try something like that in Syria, I mean, and say look, political transition is what we’re looking for. Everybody – even the Russians, I think – would have difficulty saying no, we’re not going to go for an election, particularly if you let Bashar run. Let him run. Make sure you have a lot of observers in there. Make sure they can’t fix the election. Why not try that?

MR. ROSE: Why not try that?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, actually, that is the path that we are trying. And I spoke with Kofi Annan again today. He is working on a political transition roadmap. We are somewhat disadvantaged by the fact that I think Assad still believes he can crush what he considers to be an illegitimate rebellion against his authority and characterizes everyone who opposes him as a terrorist who is supported by foreign interests. He’s not yet at the point where he understands his legitimacy is gone and he is on a downward slope.

The other problem we have is that the opposition has not yet congealed around a figure or even a group that can command the respect and attention internally within Syria as well as internationally. So what we’re doing is, number one, putting more economic pressure, because that is important, and the sanctions and trying to cut off the Syrian regime, and send a message to the Syrian business class, which so far has stuck with Assad.

We’re also working very hard to try to prop up and better organize the opposition. We’ve spent a lot of time on that. It still is a work in progress. We are also pushing hard on having Kofi Annan lay down a political transition roadmap and then getting a group of nations, that would include Russia, in a working group to try to sell that to both the Assad regime and to the opposition.

So, I mean, the path forward is exactly as Jim has described it. Getting the people and the interests on that path has been what we’ve been working on now for several months.

MR. ROSE: Who would be in that group other than the United States, Russia? Who else?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, you would have to have the Arab League because Kofi Annan is a joint envoy of both the UN and the Arab League. You would have to have the permanent members of the Security Council because that’s who he represents in his UN role. And you’d have to have the neighbors. You’ve got to have Turkey involved because of their long border and their very clear interests. But when I spoke with him today, he’s going to be making another proposal to the Russians, the Turks, and other interested groups to try to get them to agree on this roadmap and then a meeting, in effect to go public with it, so that we can increase the pressure not only on the Assad regime but on the opposition as well.

MR. ROSE: Is there a role for Iran?

SECRETARY CLINTON: At this point, it would be very difficult for Iran to be initially involved. I mean, I’m a big believer in talking to people when you can and trying to solve problems when you can. But right now, we’re focused on dealing with Iran and the nuclear portfolio. That has to be our focus. Iran’s always trying to get us to talk about anything else except their nuclear program.

And then we also have the added problem that Iran is not just supporting Assad, they are helping him to devise and execute the very plans that he is following to suppress, oppress the opposition.

SECRETARY BAKER: If you get the – you’re going to get the attention of the Russians and the Chinese, in my view, in the Security Council if you come with some sort of a proposal for a political transition that might involve an election, if you’re willing to say anybody and everybody can run. That means, of course, you got to make sure that the election is not fixed. But that would put a lot of pressure – the only reason I mention this, it seems to be that would put a lot of pressure on the Russians to support this idea.

With respect to Iran, I agree with the Secretary. This is not the place to involve them. However, I would think there might be a place for them in a group with respect to Afghanistan. They helped us when we first went in there. We talked to them. They were helpful. I’ve never understood myself why we are doing all the laboring, pulling all the – doing all the labor in Iran, treasure, blood —

MR. ROSE: In Afghanistan.

SECRETARY BAKER: I’m sorry – in Afghanistan – treasure, blood. And yet, every country who’s surrounding Afghanistan has a huge interest in a stable Afghanistan. Why don’t we see if we – everyone needs to – we’re leaving now, and we’ve said that, and I agree with that. So why don’t we say, “Hey, look it here. You all want a stable Afghanistan? Come on in here and help us. Everybody contribute.” In that instance, I think we ought to have Iran at the table.

SECRETARY CLINTON: And we agree with that. We are part of a large group of nations, as well as a smaller segment of that. Just last week, my deputy, Bill Burns, was in Kabul. Iran was there. Other countries in the region and further afield were there. Because Jim is absolutely right. I mean, part of what the problem, as we look forward in Central and South Asia, is that, once again, Afghanistan is so strategically located. And in the neighborhood in which it finds itself, there’s a lot of interest at work that have to be in some way brought to the table in order to try to have as much stability going forward.

And Iran is at the table. Now, Iran oftentimes is not a constructive player, but we’re going to keep them at the table and try to do what we can on behalf of Afghanistan for them to be a more positive force.

MR. ROSE: This question about Iran: My understanding of the Administration’s position on containment is that dog will not hunt. Right?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yes.

MR. ROSE: Do you agree with that?

SECRETARY BAKER: I agree with that.

MR. ROSE: Containment will not work.

SECRETARY BAKER: I agree with that. My personal position on that is this: We ought to try every possible avenue we can to see if we can get them to correct their desire and goal of acquiring a nuclear weapon, but we cannot let them acquire that weapon. We are the only country in the world that can stop that. The Israelis, in my opinion, do not have the capability of stopping it. They can delay it. There will also be many, many side effects, all of them adverse, from an Israeli strike. But at the end of the day, if we don’t get it done the way the Administration’s working on it now – which I totally agree with – then we ought to take them out.

MR. ROSE: Secretary Clinton. (Laughter.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, we’re working hard. We’re working hard.

SECRETARY BAKER: And that’s a Republican. I said at the end of the day. The end of the day may be next year. (Laughter.) It will be next year.

MR. ROSE: I’m waiting.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah. Look, I think the President has been very clear on this. He has always said all options are on the table. And he means it. He addressed this when he spoke to it earlier in the year.

MR. ROSE: Meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yes. And also in public speeches that he’s given. Look, I mean, I think Jim and I both would agree that everybody needs to know – most particularly the Iranians – that we are serious that they cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. It’s not only about Iran and about Iran’s intentions, however once tries to discern them. It’s about the arms race that would take place in the region with such unforeseen consequences. Because you name any country with the means, anywhere near Iran that is an Arab country, if Iran has a nuclear weapon – I can absolutely bet on it and know I will win – they will be in the market within hours. And that is going to create a cascade of difficult challenges for us and for Israel and for all of our friends and partners.

So this has such broad consequences. And that’s why we’ve invested an enormous amount in trying to persuade Iran that if – as the Supreme Leader says and issued a fatwa about – it is un-Islamic to have a nuclear weapon, then act upon that edict and demonstrate clearly that Iran will not pursue a nuclear weapon. And we are pushing them in these negotiations to do just that.

MR. ROSE: But as you know, the question is not whether they will have a nuclear weapon, but whether they will have the capacity to quickly have a nuclear weapon.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, that is obviously the question, and that is why Jim said at the end of the day, maybe a year. I mean, these kinds of calculations are –

SECRETARY BAKER: It may be more than that.

SECRETARY CLINTON: It may be more than that. They are difficult to make. A lot of countries around the world have what’s called breakout capacity.

MR. ROSE: Right.

SECRETARY CLINTON: They have stopped short of it. They have not pursued it. They have found it not to be in their interests or in the interests of regional stability.

MR. ROSE: But do you think that’s what they mean and that’s what they intend?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, that’s what we’re testing. That’s what every meeting with them is about, to try to really probe and see what kinds of commitments we can get out of them. Now, at this point we don’t have them, so I can’t speak to what they might be if they are ever to be presented. But that’s why we have to take this meeting by meeting and pursue it as hard as we can.

SECRETARY BAKER: And the problem is not so much the threat they would represent to us or to Israel or to our allies somewhere in the region. It’s the proliferation problem, because it would really then be out of control. And that’s the real thing you have to guard, and that’s why I would say at the end of the day you just cannot let them have the weapon.

Now, what is – is that breakout time or is that after they make one or after they make three or four, or after you’re convinced they have the delivery vehicles? That’s all for the military to decide. But at some point you have to say that’s simply not going to happen.

MR. ROSE: I think I heard that loud and clear. But you’ve also suggested that the United States should do it rather than Israel.

SECRETARY BAKER: Absolutely. And the reason I say that is if you look at what Martin Dempsey said not long ago, he said if Israel —

MR. ROSE: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of —

SECRETARY BAKER: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said if Israel hits the Iranian nuclear facilities, we’re going to lose a lot of American lives in the region. Many people in the Israeli national security establishment have come out publicly now and questioned their leadership’s view that maybe Israel ought to do it. And they say no, Israel shouldn’t do it. There are a lot of unanticipated consequences that could follow from that, not least of which is strengthening the hand of the hardliners in Iran. I mean, you don’t want to do that. They’re having troubles now. The sanctions are not complete yet. We want to squeeze them down more. But they’re having an effect. And the government is having some problems, and you don’t want to lose all that.

SECRETARY CLINTON: In fact, I mean, what Jim is saying is a really important point, because we know that there is a vigorous debate going on within the leadership decision-making group in Iran. There are those who say look, these sanctions are really biting, we’re not making the kind of economic progress we should be making, we don’t give up that much by saying we’re not going to do a nuclear weapon and having a verifiable regime to demonstrate that.

And then frankly, there are those who are saying the best thing that could happen to us is be attacked by somebody, just bring it on, because that would unify us, it would legitimize the regime. You feel sometimes when you hear analysts and knowledgeable people talking about Iran that they fear so much about the survival of the regime, because deep down it’s not a legitimate regime, it doesn’t represent the will of the people, it’s kind of morphed into kind of a military theocracy. And therefore an argument is made constantly on the hardline side of the Iranian Government that we’re not going to give anything up, and in fact we’re going to provoke an attack because then we will be in power for as long as anyone can imagine.

SECRETARY BAKER: And Charlie, let me just explain why I said I don’t think the Israelis can do it but we can. The reason I say that is the Israeli Government came to the prior administration, the Bush 43 Administration, and then they asked for overflight rights, they asked for bunker-busting bombs, they asked for in-flight refueling capabilities. And the administration said no, that’s not in the national interest of the United States today for you to strike Iran’s nuclear facility. My understanding is they made the same request of this Administration. I don’t know the answer to that for sure. The Secretary would. But whether they did or not, that’s the reason I say if anybody’s going to do it, we ought to do it because we have the capability of doing it.

SECRETARY CLINTON: And hopefully we won’t get to that. (Laughter.) I mean, that would be, I think —

MR. ROSE: Because you believe there’ll be a change of behavior or a change of regime?

SECRETARY CLINTON: No, there’s – I’m not going to talk about a change of regime. I see no evidence of that. I think the Iranian people deserve better, but that’s for them to try to determine.

MR. ROSE: But there is this question too about Iran, and I want to move to some other issues. Looking back at the time of the protest over the election, do you wish you’d done more? Do you wish you’d been more public, more supportive?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, look, at the time there was a very strong, consistent message coming from within Iran that anything we said would undermine the legitimacy of their opposition. Now —

MR. ROSE: This is from the opposition?

SECRETARY CLINTON: This is from the opposition coming out to us. And one can argue, were they right, were they not right, but at the time it seemed like they had some momentum, they did not want to look like they were acting on behalf of the United States or anybody else. This was indigenous to Iran and to Iranians’ discontents. And that made a lot of sense at the time, because the last thing anybody wanted was to give the regime the excuse that they didn’t have to respond to the legitimate concerns arising out of that election.

And what we did do, which I think was very value-added, was to work overtime to keep lines of communication open. We found out that social media tools, one in particular, was going to shut down for a long-scheduled rebooting of some sort, and we intervened and said no, because the opposition uses you to communicate, to say where they’re going to have demonstrations, to warn people. So we were deeply involved in a lot of public messaging that we thought did not cross the line that the opposition didn’t want us to cross. That was our assessment.

MR. ROSE: Let me move to Egypt and I’ll come back to some of these other points. What’s happening there today, and what is your understanding – and I’ll begin with Secretary Baker and then come back – of what’s the risk for the United States and what’s the risk for the Middle East in terms of where the army is, where the people who created the Arab Spring is, and where the Muslim Brotherhood is?

SECRETARY BAKER: Well, I think the risks are quite large, because for some time we’ve been looking at Egypt as perhaps a textbook success case of how —

MR. ROSE: Of the Arab Spring?

SECRETARY BAKER: Of the Arab Spring. Yeah. Now, people say not an Arab Spring, it’s also an Arab Winter, because of what’s happening. And there’s some, in my view, potential for that to happen.

It is not, as we sit here today, not an unalloyed success, because the military have come in, they’ve taken power back, and it looks like they’re going to keep it. And then we have a question of whether the results of the election are going to be confirmed or observed. There are all these questions coming forward within the last, frankly, last week – week or ten days. So it’s a real problem, because if Egypt goes the wrong way, if we lose the Arab – if we lose the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty – and that’s possible if the more radical elements in Egypt end up on top after all that’s happening now – that would be a very destructive and destabilizing event.

MR. ROSE: That’s not, by definition, what necessarily will happen if Morsi becomes the president.

SECRETARY BAKER: No. Not just – not Morsi, but there could be – we don’t know who’s going – and we don’t know whether the president’s going to have power or whether the military is going to keep the power.

MR. ROSE: Well, the military suggested it might very well keep it, haven’t they?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I mean, Jim is right. We are concerned and we have expressed those concerns. We think that it is imperative that the military fulfill its promise to the Egyptian people to turn power over to the legitimate winner. We don’t know yet who’s going to be named the winner of the election, but we think that the military has to proceed with its commitments to do so.

And so the actions that they’ve taken in the last week are clearly troubling. And it’s been a fast-moving situation, because we’ve had Mubarak’s serious illness intervene; we don’t yet have vote totals coming out; we don’t yet know what the military really has meant by these statements and decrees. They’ve said one set of things publicly, then they’ve been backtracking to a certain extent.

But our message has been very consistent, that, look, we think, number one, they have to follow through on the democratic process. And by that, we mean, yes, elections that are free and fair and legitimate, whose winner gets to assume the position of authority in the country, but who recognizes that democracy is not about one election, one time. And we have very clear expectations about what we are looking to see from whoever is declared the winner, that it has to be an inclusive democratic process, the rights of all Egyptians – women and men, Muslim and Christian, everyone – has to be respected. They have to have a stake in the future of the democratic experiment in Egypt. The military has to assume an appropriate role, which is not to try to interfere with, dominate, or subvert the constitutional authority. They have to get a constitution written. There’s a lot of work ahead of them.

We also believe it is very much in Egypt’s interest, while they’re facing political turmoil and economic difficulties, to honor the peace treaty with Israel. The last thing they need is to make a decision that would undermine their stability. And furthermore, we think it’s important that they reassert law and order over the Sinai, which is becoming a large, lawless area, and that they take seriously the internal threats from extremists and terrorists. So they have a lot ahead of them.

SECRETARY BAKER: Plus, the dissolution of the parliament.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah.

SECRETARY BAKER: I mean, they’ve just come in and dissolved the elected parliament. How do you put that humpty dumpty back together?

MR. ROSE: But the impression – (laughter) – hard. The impression is that during the time of the revolution that was taking place that the lines between the American and the military was very good and very strong. And does that still exist?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, there certainly is a continuing effort to reach out. And in fact, I know that there are ongoing conversations between our military leaders and their counterparts in Egypt. But the message is the one that I just said. We expect you to support the democratic transition, to recede by turning over authority. And we are watching this unfold, but with some really clear redlines about what we think should occur, based on what the people of Egypt thought they were getting.

One of the stories that will emerge even more in the months ahead is that the people who started the revolution in Tahrir Square decided they wouldn’t really get involved in politics. And I remember being there – and this kind of goes back to your very first question – going to Cairo shortly after the success of the revolution, meeting with a large group of these mostly young people. And when I said, “So are you going to form a political party? Are you going to be working on behalf of political change?” They said, “Oh no. We’re revolutionaries. We don’t do politics.”

And I —

MR. ROSE: Exactly.

SECRETARY CLINTON: — I sat there and I thought that’s how revolutions get totally derailed, taken over, undermined. And they now are expressing all kinds of disappointment at the choices they had and the results. But the energy that went in to creating this participatory revolution, giving people a sense of being citizens in a modern Egypt, has to be rekindled because this – as hard as this has been, this is just the beginning. They are facing so many problems that we could list for an hour that they’re going to have deal with. And they have to somehow paint a picture for the Egyptian people about what it’s going to take to get the result of this hard-fought change that they’ve experienced.

MR. ROSE: That’s true about every country, isn’t it? Whether it’s Libya —

SECRETARY CLINTON: It is. Absolutely.

MR. ROSE: — or Tunisia or Egypt or whatever happens in Syria.

SECRETARY BAKER: Absolutely. We do not know.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Absolutely.

MR. ROSE: We will not know how it shakes out and who the leaders that will come to power will be —

SECRETARY CLINTON: No.

MR. ROSE: — and what they’re ambitions will be to play what role in the world scene.

SECRETARY CLINTON: That’s right.

SECRETARY BAKER: That’s correct.

SECRETARY CLINTON: In fact, Charlie, we have here what’s called the A-100 class. These are our new, up and coming, rising Foreign Service officers who are here taking stock of Jim and me. (Laughter.) And probably a lot of the work that —

MR. ROSE: Those are the ones that look like teenagers?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah. They do, don’t they? (Laughter.) They do.

SECRETARY BAKER: They’re the ones that are teenagers. (Laughter.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah. But a lot of the work that is going to have to happen – because this is a generational project. This is not something that’s going to be done in a year or one American administration. This is a generational project. And preparing these young Foreign Service officers for the aftermath of these revolutions, how we manage it, how we try to exercise influence, as hard as it is because we have to be so sensitive about it, that’s really what diplomacy is about. And we’re going to be doing that for a long time.

MR. ROSE: I once read where you said it’ll take 25 years before we will really know how this thing will shake out and the influence it’ll have over the long term.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Right. But we shouldn’t be surprised by that. I do think it’s important, as Americans, that we kind of remember our own beginnings. And shaping our country did not happen overnight. We had a constitution written that didn’t include me, didn’t include African American slaves. It didn’t include men – white men who didn’t own property. I mean, we had a lot of changes that we had to do for ourselves to realize the vision of our founders. But we had a vision. And that is what is so often lacking in a lot of these countries. They know what they’re against, but they can’t quite agree on what they’re for.

And so part of the challenge that they face, which we try to set an example for, is what does democracy really mean? How do you really institutionalize it? How do you protect human rights? How do you build an independent judiciary? All of those pieces which, frankly, took us a while. So we need a little humility as we approach this.

MR. ROSE: How would you like to see the United States over the next decade or two play a role in the region? And how can it play a role that will be positive, leading to the kinds of governments that we would hope would be —

SECRETARY BAKER: Well, I would hope that the United States —

MR. ROSE: — new but different?

SECRETARY BAKER: — would continue to play a leadership role not just in that region but in the world as a whole because I believe that when the United States is involved abroad, we are involved for good. We don’t look – we’re not looking to get into anybody’s sandbox or take anybody’s stuff. We have been – when we involve ourselves internationally, for the most part we have been a force for good. So I think the United States needs to lead. We need to be involved.

I totally agree with the Secretary, we’re not going to know how these things turn out in the Arab Spring for a long time. And some of them may turn out very badly, actually. It’s possible. You might get militant, radical Islamists taking over in some of these countries. On the other hand, you may – some of them may very well succeed. And I hope they will, and think they will. But I think it’s really important that the United States involved in the world. And part of that involvement is diplomacy. We’re here today to support the Diplomacy Center because, as you said in your opening, we’ve got a military museums and centers; we don’t have but – we only have one diplomacy. Diplomacy is a very important part of our international relationship.

MR. ROSE: But some – two things. Number one, first on the idea of diplomacy versus military, I mean, some people – and the late Richard Holbrooke used to make this point; he worried that the military was shaping the world, especially in Afghanistan, and to the exclusion of diplomacy. Do you have some concerns about that?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I wouldn’t say to the exclusion, but certainly —

MR. ROSE: An imbalance, perhaps.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I think that by most definitions, the power, the presence, the resources of the military are quite disproportionate to what we can field through the State Department and USAID. But what has happened in the last decade in Iraq and in Afghanistan has been quite important. The growing appreciation and cooperation between our military, our diplomats, and our development experts – I call it the three Ds of foreign policy – and both Bob Gates and Leon Panetta were real champions of this because they recognized that if we weren’t working as an American team, we were going to get out of balance. And it’s not been an easy relationship because there are different cultures, different expectations, about what we’re working for, what kind of result we’re seeking. But we’ve learned to not just coexist but cooperate in the field, on the ground.

I give out heroism awards. I’ve given out about 30 of them the last three and a half years. They’ve gone to diplomats who’ve saved soldiers’ lives in PRTs in Iraq, diplomats and development experts who literally have been on the front lines in Afghanistan. So we’re shaping an expeditionary diplomacy for the 21^st century that has to work hand-in-hand with the military.

SECRETARY BAKER: Your foreign policy has got to be supported strongly by the military, but it’s got to have a diplomatic component, a very important diplomatic component. I’ve always said that diplomacy is best practiced with a male fist. That’s where the military comes in. But you said something about the last 10 years. Well, the last 10 years we’ve fought two very long and expensive wars. So it’s natural, I think, that the military side of the equation would be emphasized.

I happen to believe – maybe I’m wearing my Treasury hat now – I happen to believe the American people are tired of wars. I know one thing: We’re broke. We can’t afford them anymore. We can’t afford a lot of things. And the biggest threat facing this country today is not some threat from outside. It’s not Iran. It’s not nuclear weapons or anything else. It’s our economic —

MR. ROSE: We’ve got to get our economic house in order.

SECRETARY BAKER: We’d better damn well get our economic house in order because the strength of our nation has always depended upon our economy. You can’t be strong politically, militarily, or diplomatically if you’re not strong economically.

SECREARY CLINTON: Well, amen to that because – (laughter) – I’ve had to go around the world the last three and a half years reassuring many leaders, both in the governments and business sectors of a lot of countries, that the United States was moving forward economically, that we were not ceding our leadership position; we were as present and as powerful as ever, but we recognized that we had to put our economic house in order.

I was in Hong Kong during the debt ceiling debate, and all of these billionaire moguls were at this event lining up and with real anxiety in their faces, asking me whether the United States of America was going to default on its debt. And I said oh, no. Then – (laughter) – had to hope that people were listening.

So yes, I mean, if we don’t get our economic house in order – and obviously, there are perhaps some differences about how to do it. But when Secretary Baker was Secretary of the Treasury, when President Bush 41 were in office, when my husband was in office, we actually compromised. I know that some believe that’s a word that has been banished from the Washington vocabulary, but I’m also spending a lot of time explaining to people in new democracies that democracy is about compromise. By definition, you don’t think you have all the truth all the time. And people of good faith of different perspectives or different parties have to come together and hammer out these compromises. And so, of course we’ve got to get back into the political work of rolling our sleeves up and solving these problems.

MR. ROSE: She’s singing your hymn.

SECRETARY BAKER: I don’t disagree with that at all. (Laughter.) No, you know that. No, siree.

MR. ROSE: Go ahead.

SECRETARY BAKER: On the other hand, I hate to tell you this, but based on my political experience and my public service experience, it ain’t going to happen till after November. (Laughter.)

MR. ROSE: All right.

SECRETARY BAKER: Why haven’t you asked us about Pakistan?

MR. ROSE: I’m coming to Pakistan. (Laughter.) As fast as I can.

SECRETARY BAKER: Well, you ask her. Ask her that. (Laughter.)

MR. ROSE: Let me ask, before I get to Pakistan, this point. She has said before that America cannot solve all the world’s problems.

SECRETARY BAKER: Absolutely.

MR. ROSE: But no problem can be solved without American involvement. Do you share that?

SECRETARY BAKER: Well, I think – I said a minute ago I think America has to lead, because when we lead, we usually see good results. And we’re a force for good when we’re out there leading. I wouldn’t say that no problem can be solved without American participation, but it’s hard to think of one. (Laughter.) It really is.

MR. ROSE: All right. So how do you assess what the state of our relationship with Pakistan, before I come back to the Secretary?

SECRETARY BAKER: I think it’s terrible. And I think it’s really sad, because for the duration of the Cold War they were our ally, and India was the ally of the Soviet Union, and now all of that is changed. But the relationship is very problematic in my view. It’s a tough job. I’m glad I’m not sitting there trying to deal with the Pakistani relationship. And I think we need to maintain a relationship with them. A lot of people are saying cut of all their aid, fire them and so forth. I think we need to maintain a relationship with them because they’re a nuclear power and because it’s really important that we not see nuclear conflagration in the subcontinent. And we don’t want to see any more proliferation than we’ve seen from Pakistan.

MR. ROSE: A lot of bad people –

SECRETARY BAKER: But guess what? They’ve been a very problematic ally. They really have. And we need to —

MR. ROSE: You mean by things like ISI and their activities?

SECRETARY BAKER: Yeah. And the proliferation that took place under Khan and the fact the Obama – Osama was living there in Abbottabad for all that time. And don’t tell me they didn’t know that. And the fact that they’ve now thrown this doctor in jail for 33 years who helped us find him. All of these – and they want to charge us $5,000 per truck. I mean, come on —

MR. ROSE: I’ll make this easy for you. What would a President Jim Baker do?

SECRETARY BAKER: I think I might do what I did when I was Secretary of State sitting in this office one floor down. The first month I was here, one of the assistant secretaries came in and said, “Mr. Secretary, you need to sign this.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “It’s a certification that Pakistan is not developing a nuclear weapon.” I said, “Well, they are, aren’t they?” And they said, “Yes.” (Laughter.) And like the greenhorn I was, I signed it. (Laughter.)

And the next year, at the same week, same guy came in. “Mr. Secretary, you need to sign this.” I said, “What is it?” “It’s the certification required under the Pressler Amendment that Pakistan is not developing a nuclear weapon.” I said, “ Well, they are, aren’t they?” He said, “ Yes, they are.” And I said, “Well, why do I have to sign it?” He said, “Because the White House wants it.” And I said, “Well, you take it over to the White House and tell them to sign it.” (Laughter.) And I didn’t sign it. And guess what, we cut off our aid.

Okay. Now, at some point we need to seriously think about doing that. We need to get their attention.

MR. ROSE: But I thought you just said you would not cut off their aid. Are you now saying that we —

SECRETARY BAKER: I said we need to maintain a relationship with them, but we need to get their attention. Okay? We shouldn’t break the relationship right now and sever the relationship totally, but we need to get their attention. And I’m very sympathetic to the people on the Hill who are saying wait a minute, we’re funneling – we’re broke, we’re giving taxpayer money to this country which is not treating us right.

MR. ROSE: So there. (Laughter.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well —

SECRETARY BAKER: That’s not fair to ask her that. (Laughter.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: No, look, I think that our relationship with Pakistan has been challenging for a long time. Some of it is of our own making. There’s a lot of concern looking back. We did a great job in getting rid of the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. But I think a lot of us – and Bob Gates has said this – looking back now, perhaps we should have been more involved in the aftermath of what was going to happen to the Pakistanis. They had embraced a kind of jihadi mentality in part to stimulate fighters both from the outside and within Afghanistan.

So we are living with a country that has a lot of difficult issues both for themselves and then for us and others. But here’s what I would say. First of all, I completely agree it is not in our interests to cut off our relationship. It is in our interest to try to better direct and manage that relationship, and there are several things that we’re asking the Pakistanis to do more of and better. Number one, they’ve got to do more about the safe havens inside their own country. I mean, everybody knows that the Taliban’s momentum has been reversed, territory has been taken back, the Afghan Security Forces are performing much better, but the extremists have an ace in the hole. They just cross the border; they get direction and funding and fighters, and they go back across the border.

And what we’ve said to the Pakistanis is look, if there were ever an argument in the past for your policy of hedging against Afghanistan by supporting the Haqqani Network or the Afghan Taliban or the LET against India, those days are over. Because that’s like the guy who keeps poisonous snakes in his backyard convinced they’ll only attack his neighbors. That is not what is happening inside Pakistan. They are losing sovereignty. They have large areas that are ungoverned. They’ve had a rash of terrible attacks. More than 30,000 Pakistanis have been killed in the last decade. They talk a lot about sovereignty. Well, the first job of any sovereign nation is to protect your own people and secure your own borders. And therefore that’s what they should be doing, and by doing so they would help themselves first and foremost, help the Afghans, help us, and others.

Secondly, they have to be willing to recognize that as we withdraw from Afghanistan, it is in their interest to have a strong, stable Afghan Government that only can come from being part of the solution, being at that table, as we were discussing earlier, to try to help with Afghanistan’s economic and political and security development, rather than doing everything possible to try to undermine it.

So these are big issues that they have to come to grips with, and that’s not even mentioning the need to prevent nuclear proliferation or a nuclear incident that could occur because of the problems within their own system.

MR. ROSE: For the historical record, you believe they knew that Usama bin Ladin was there?

SECRETARY CLINTON: We have never been able to prove that anyone at the upper levels knew that. I said when I first went to Pakistan as Secretary in 2009 that I found it impossible to believe that somebody in their government didn’t know where he was – I still believe that – and that he took up residence and built this huge compound in a military garrison town. But we – to be fair, we have no evidence that anybody at the upper levels – and certainly if you talk about the civilian government, because the other goal that we have is to try to strengthen democracy and a civilian government inside Pakistan. And I have no reason to believe that the civilian government knew anything. So whether – who was in what level of responsibility in the military or the ISI, whether they were active or retired, because we do know that there are links to retired members, we’ve never been able to close that loop.

SECRETARY BAKER: And at the very least, they ought to stop double-dealing us.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah, at the very least. And —

MR. ROSE: And you ought to threaten them with removing aid in order to use that leverage to get them to stop?

SECRETARY BAKER: Well, I’m not sure we give them enough that that’s going to make them stop. But they need to know that we’re upset about this. They ought to stop double-dealing.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah. And they should release Dr. Afridi.

SECRETARY BAKER: Absolutely, they ought to release him.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Which is something that is so unnecessary and gratuitous on their part. This man was an international terrorist. The Pakistanis for years claimed he was their enemy as well as ours. And my argument to them is that this man contributed to ending the al-Qaida leadership that was in their country, and they shouldn’t treat him like a criminal.

MR. ROSE: There are so many issues that we could have talked about – international terrorism and how it’s moving, where it’s moving, whether it’s Yemen or other kinds of places. It just suggests that the role of Secretary of State in this country continues to be one in which you are just juggling a thousand balls all at the same time.

I want to thank Secretary Baker for coming up from Texas and sharing your ideas and your opinions with us, as we have done today.

SECRETARY BAKER: Thank you.

MR. ROSE: We hope that other Secretaries will be here, and to hear people at the top of American Government who’ve had important roles and to take advantage of their own experience, their history, and to funnel that through a consideration of the challenge that faces Secretary Clinton every day. So thank both of you for this time. (Applause.)

http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2012/06/193554.htm

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Posted in Iran, Iraq, Israel, Middle East Geopolitics, Russia, Syria, Syrian Opposition, Turkey-Syria, US Middle East Politics, US-Syria

The Five Stages of Egypt’s Revolution

Posted on June 16, 2012 | Comments Off

It matters little who wins the presidency this weekend — a much bloodier uprising is inevitable.

BY CHARLES HOLMES | JUNE 15, 2012

CAIRO – I was put on the spot by a wise old friend of mine in Washington several years ago. He wanted my pitch on Egypt in 30 seconds or less. “This is a town beset with attention deficit disorder,” he said, “so what have you got?” I gulped and offered up the “three Ms of Egypt”: the military, the mosque, and the masses.

Despite the popular revolt against Hosni Mubarak’s regime last year, it remains true that the only political contest that counts in Egypt has pitted its military generals against the mosque’s imams and leaders. Both want control over the masses — 85 million Egyptians. The recent elections highlighted these three Ms: However depressing for many reformers and activists, the culmination of nearly 18 months of mass protest now pits the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammad Morsi against Ahmed Shafiq, a retired military officer and former Mubarak prime minister.

Whether the military or the mosque wins the runoff this weekend, reformers and their supporters around the world need to consider some equally important potential futures scenarios. Their first step should be to dust off a copy of Crane Brinton’s An Anatomy of Revolution, a 1938 study that considers major revolutions in history, identifies the factors influencing them, and attempts to extrapolate certain “rules” for how such seismic political transitions play out. In the startling air of uncertainty pervading Egypt’s current impasse, it provides at least a framework — and often strangely accurate reference point — from which to contemplate events. And it serves as a guide, and a warning, to Egypt’s future. This week’s court ruling blessing Shafiq’s candidacy and dissolving parliament — reasserting the military’s grip on power and infuriating millions of Egyptians in the process — should only be taken as another sign that the center, hemorrhaging ever more legitimacy, ultimately cannot hold.

Brinton would tell you that in the long run, it actually doesn’t really matter who the next president of Egypt is. Morsi and Shafiq are doppelgangers: Both are ghosts of the past, circling each other, embedded in the old system that has defined and sustained them for decades. Of course, the man from the military and the man from the mosque each claim to be the true champion of the revolution. In truth, it’s likely that neither is — and that both will pass from the scene as the revolution’s pendulum swings inexorably to the extremes.

You may be asking: How can it not matter? While the mosque (in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood) and the military (in the form of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) stand triumphant, each risks losing its grip on political power. Both will inevitably be the victims of true political transformation and swept away, as Brinton would say, through the course of events. To read more…

Read more about Revolutions in The Anatomy of Revolution a book by Crane Brinton

Charles Holmes is a Middle East analyst and a director of Marcher International, a political research consultancy based in Washington, Cairo,
All contents ©2012 The Foreign Policy Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Posted in Egypt, Middle East Geopolitics

Romney’s Syria Problem

Posted on June 2, 2012 | Comments Off

By Andrew C. McCarthy
June 2, 2012 4:00 A.M.

Congratulations to Mitt Romney. In calling for “opposition groups” to be armed and trained for their ongoing jihad against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, the GOP’s presidential contender has managed to align himself with al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri and Muslim Brotherhood icon Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Like the legacy media, the McCain wing of the Republican party, and the rest of Washington’s progressive, Islamophilic clerisy, Governor Romney is reacting to a regime-engineered massacre last week. Assad’s forces reportedly killed 108 Syrians in Houla, a rural enclave outside the “opposition” city of Homs. Victims included women and children shot at close range, in summary-execution style.

There is no gainsaying that Assad is despicable or that the Houla episode was barbaric. Neither can it be denied, however, that Romney and his advisers have had little to say about the similarly barbaric attacks carried out by the “opposition.” About two weeks before Houla, for example, a car bomb killed 55 people in Damascus — targeting a regime intelligence building, but detonated at rush hour, in the al-Qaeda fashion, for maximum civilian carnage. A few days later, nine more people were killed when a suicide bomber exploded his device in a parking lot near a military compound in Deir ez-Zor, a notorious jihadist hub from which thousands of terrorists crossed into Iraq to fight against Western forces.

Yes, Assad’s minority Alawite Muslim regime is a key ally of Iran’s revolutionary Shiite-supremacist government. That does not alter the stubborn fact that the anti-Assad “opposition groups” are dominated by Sunni supremacists. Stubborn facts cannot be evaded by clever labeling — “opposition groups” in Syria having become the euphemism du jour that “rebels” was in Libya, “peaceful protesters” in Egypt, “uprisings” in Tunisia, and so on. Nor can we confidently assert any longer that what is bad for Iran must be good for us. Threats are dynamic, and much has changed in the last decade. The Iranian regime is not the only virulently anti-American revolutionary movement realistically threatening to enslave the Middle East in its version of totalitarian sharia and implacable anti-Semitism.

The Muslim Brotherhood, leader of the Sunni supremacists, has a hammer-lock on the Syrian National Council (SNC), the main opposition group the Obama administration has been courting — with the McCain wing cheering from the sidelines. Meanwhile, as trumpeted on the Brotherhood’s website, Sheikh Qaradawi has been organizing Syria’s Islamist revolt for months, reprising the starring role he is playing in Egypt. Al-Qaeda — whose help the Brotherhood is happy to have when it is expedient, as it was in Libya — put its muscle into the Syrian revolt months ago. As the invaluable John Rosenthal reported here at NRO, Obama’s national intelligence director, James Clapper, has acknowledged al-Qaeda’s infiltration of the Syrian opposition. The terror network’s hand in the recent string of bombings is obvious, even to the Associated Press. Its presence and influence at opposition rallies are also patent.

Washington can idealize the Syrian “opposition” into liberty-loving freedom-fighters; to Syrian Christians, they are the jihad. With churches being torched, families being terrorized by kidnappings and murders, and thousands of believers being put to flight, Christian are now suffering the same fate “Islamic democracy” held for the Christians of Egypt and Iraq. (Jews face no such problem; after decades of humiliating dhimmitude, they have long since been driven out of Syria.)

Yet, here comes Romney, jumping with both feet into the Islamist camp. This week, he slammed President Obama for purportedly failing to work with our two fabulous “allies,” the Brotherhood-tied Islamist regime in Turkey and the jihad-propagating Wahabist regime in Saudi Arabia, in order to oust Assad. Obama’s temporizing, according to Romney, had “merely granted the Assad regime more time to execute its military onslaught.”

This is a specious critique. Put aside that Romney is wrong — the administration should stay on the sidelines. The reality is that Obama has been working behind the scenes with the Saudis and the Turks. The administration is supporting the Brotherhood-controlled SNC — just as it threw its weight behind Islamists in Egypt and Libya. What Obama has been smart enough to do, at least to this point, is refrain from direct military aid, undoubtedly realizing that he would be blamed when, inevitably, it became clear that American arms went to America’s enemies. But McCain and the Brotherhood goaded the president into using force in Libya — where the victorious “rebels” quickly installed sharia law and parceled out Qaddafi’s arsenal to Hezbollah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. Another misadventure in Syria, it seems, is only a matter of time.

In their anxiety over our nation’s future, conservatives see the upcoming November election as a make-or-break crossroads. Thus, the Right’s indifference to Mitt Romney, the only alternative to Obama’s reelection, is striking. But it is not bewildering, and stories like Syria’s go a long way toward explaining it. Desperation to avoid the third Carter term does not translate into enthusiasm over the specter of the third Bush administration.

It was during George W. Bush’s second term that the original Bush doctrine of eradicating terror networks and their supporting regimes was fully superseded by the revised Bush doctrine of “Muslim outreach” and Islamist empowerment — gussied up as “democracy promotion.” It was during the second Bush term that the coherent, completed anti-terrorist mission of dislodging Saddam Hussein gave way to the incoherence of the “freedom agenda.” That was policy made of the pretense that Islamic hearts and minds could be won over by a kinder, gentler style of war-fighting, one that elevated the safety of hostile Muslim populations over the security of our troops and the vanquishing of our enemies. It was under Bush, not Obama, that the executive branch began indulging Islamist demands that the government purge references to Islamic doctrine in discussions of jihadist terror. It was Bush’s State Department, not Obama’s, that first sustained the Clintonian approach of appeasing Iran: a blind eye to the mullahs’ facilitation of terror against our troops and a blind faith in the capacity of sanctions to bring them to heel.

These policies were not merely unwise; they were immensely unpopular. Americans strongly favored military action against jihadists and their enablers. They never supported nation-building schemes and never agreed with the ruling class that propping up sharia states disguised as democracies was an appropriate use of our armed forces. And while official Washington lauds leaders of Islamist organizations as “moderates” who are willing to seek “change” through the political process rather than violence, Americans see them as extremists trying to sow sharia principles into our law and institutions. Thus, despite an unrelenting smear campaign by which Islamists — abetted by leftists — seek to silence their critics with accusations of bigotry and “Islamophobia,” Americans continue to support state initiatives to bar courts from relying on sharia law, to oppose provocations such as the Ground Zero mosque, and to applaud initiatives such as Senator Rand Paul’s worthy proposal to cut off U.S. aid to Pakistan because of its enforcement of such sharia strictures as the death penalty in blasphemy cases.

So unpopular was the second Bush term that it gave us, first, the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006, and then, in 2008, the Obama administration. The Republican establishment sloughed these electoral thumpings off to the country’s being “war weary.” But the country has never been war weary — when we are threatened, we want the threats dealt with decisively. What we are is Islam weary.

Americans are not predisposed against Muslims — in sharp contrast to mainstream Islam’s animus toward the West. We welcome with open arms anyone, of any creed, who is willing to assimilate to our culture of liberty — to the outrage of Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who regards asking Muslims in the West to assimilate as a “crime against humanity.”

We are exhausted, though, from defending ourselves against Muslim mass-murderers while walking on eggshells for fear of offending tender Muslim sensibilities. We are tapped out, emotionally and financially, from making enormous sacrifices on behalf of ingrate Muslim peoples, who gravitate to our enemies even as we labor to improve their lot. And we are sick to death of the suggestion that we need to apologize for our country when most of the violence that currently besets the world — a great deal of which is Muslim-on-Muslim savagery — is directly traceable to Islamic culture. We have never been at war with Islam, and we have no desire to conquer or occupy Muslim territory; but neither do we want any more entanglement with Islamic countries than is absolutely necessary. We hope Islam reforms, we hope Muslims stop killing each other. But we’re tired of that being our problem — especially since it’s a problem we can’t fix.

By refraining from American involvement in Syria — or, at least, overt American involvement — we have deprived the competing factions of the opportunity to unify around the superpower they love to hate. As a result, they are fighting among themselves. Hamas has pulled up stakes from Syria, its longstanding partnership with the Assad regime and Iran in tatters because of its support for the Syrian “opposition” (i.e., the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch). Relations between Hamas and Hezbollah, a key Assad ally, have frayed. Assad is increasingly crippled, which deeply wounds Iran. Erdogan’s honeymoon with Assad is over, and Turkey must tend to the strains in its formerly cozy relations with Iran and Iraq (while quietly replacing Iran as Hamas’s sugar daddy — proving, yet again, it is no ally of ours). The Saudis, who have bankrolled the Muslim Brotherhood’s global promotion of Islamic supremacist ideology, are panicked by the Brotherhood’s ascendancy, frosting their relations with Egypt and complicating their efforts to aid Syrian Islamists.

If we had tried to come up with a plan for simultaneously weakening all the anti-American, anti-Western players in the region, we’d never have been able to come up with something this effective. And it needn’t cost us a single American life or a single American dollar. All we need to do is stay out of it.

In Egypt, just across the sea from Syria, after the first “democratic” election yielded overwhelming Islamist control of the legislature, the next “democratic” election has produced a standoff between the Muslim Brotherhood candidate and the Mubarak regime candidate (to be decided in a runoff election later this month). That didn’t happen because of the United States. It happened because, in the Middle East, there is no freedom culture: The authentic democrats are vastly outnumbered by the Islamic supremacists. The only thing that prevents the tyranny of the Islamists is the tyranny of the strongmen — which is why 23 percent of Egyptians, deathly afraid of the former, voted for the latter.

As in Egypt, there is no good outcome for us in Syria. There is the atrocious dictator or the atrocious Islamists. There is no “better” side for Romney to choose. By throwing in his lot with the Islamists, he signals that he has failed to learn the hard lessons of the last decade. Americans do not want four more years of an administration that looks at enemies and sees friends. We don’t want “outreach”; we want out.

Romney’s support for the Syrian “opposition” will undoubtedly play well inside the Beltway. But the groan you hear is from the rest of the country, where elections are won and lost.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

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Posted in Iran-Syria, Syrian Opposition, US Middle East Politics, US-Syria

“Sunni” Turkey and the containment policy failure

Posted on April 26, 2012 | Comments Off

Thursday 26 April 2012–
By Adel Al Toraifi-

When the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited Tehran in May 2010, to offer support for the Brazilian project regarding the Iranian nuclear file, the conservative press in Iran described Erdoğan as an example of wise leadership in the region. Some newspapers also devoted extensive column inches to Erdoğan’s statements in support of Iran, particularly his critical stance towards Israel and the Western world’s view of Muslim states. Some commentators even considered Turkish-Iranian relations to be a model of stability and cooperation, arguing that since the signing of the Treaty of Qasr-e Shirin – or the Treaty of Zuhab as it is known in Turkey – in 1639 between the Ottoman and Safavid empires, borders have continually been respected; this agreement remains the basis for all border treaties between the two countries.
Over the past ten years, the government of the Turkish Justice and Development Party [AKP] has been able to converge with Iran and Syria, to the extent that Iran supported Turkey’s military campaign against the strongholds of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party [PKK] in 2006, and to the extent that Syria retracted its position regarding the Iskenderun region, and abolished the need for visas to travel between the two countries. Furthermore, Turkey has strengthened its economic ties with both Syria and Iran to exceed record figures in just a few years; even obtaining Iranian concessions in the oil and gas sectors. Perhaps this is what prompted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to preach of a pro-resistance Iranian-Syrian axis including both Turkey and Iraq, in the face of what he considered to be the counter forces of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf States (al-Hayat newspaper, 26 October 2010).
In truth, Turkey let down the expectations of observers after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime; it did not seek to fill the Sunni vacuum caused by the rise of Shia political Islam to power in Iraq, nor did it show any desire to restore its Ottoman heritage in old spheres of influence. On the contrary, Turkey’s Islamists adopted a more conciliatory tone with the Syrian Baathist party, and were less sensitive towards Iranian revolutionary activities in the region, perhaps because the “containment policy” [towards Syria and Iran] that Erdoğan and his party take pride in had reaped substantial benefits for Turkey. However, in the last year, this policy has been exposed to a sizeable tremor, forcing Turkey to significantly re-evaluate its relations.
When the popular uprisings began in some Arab capitals in early 2011, Turkey tried to wait before declaring its support for the masses, but showed resistance to foreign intervention in Libya, and Erdoğan himself issued strong criticism towards NATO. Even when the uprising began in Syria, Turkey dispatched its diplomats to Damascus in an attempt to contain the situation and convince al-Assad to conduct reforms, but with the rising death toll on the Syrian streets, Ankara issued a series of statements condemning the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Not long afterwards, Turkey was compelled to participate – logistically at least – in NATO operations in Libya, and this damaged its relations with Tehran significantly. Turkey’s stance seemed hesitant; while Erdoğan was releasing statements threatening direct military intervention, and threatening al-Assad with the same fate met by Gaddafi, Turkey’s diplomatic apparatus appeared more cautious and less zealous than the speeches of the Turkish leader. This prompted many observers to say that Turkey was witnessing a divide, either in the military institution or in the foreign affairs department, regarding the danger of intervention or regime change in Syria due to security reasons, and because of dimensions of ethnicity and sectarianism, which could extend into Turkey itself if Syria turned into a scene of sectarian warfare between Turkey, Iran and other Arab parties.
In order to understand the shift in Turkish foreign policy, we need to review some historical facts, and here I am alluding to three historical stages:
First: It is not true that the history of Turkish-Iranian relations has always been stable, as claimed by the Turkish advocates of rapprochement with Iran, because Turkish-Iranian relations remained troubled and unstable until the last decade. In his book “Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey” (2007), Soner Cagaptay indicates that there is an illusion with regards to the Treaty of Qasr-e Shirin, confirming that the tension inherent in Turkish-Iranian relations is based on nationalist and sectarian reasons, which have remained constant even after the emergence of a modern state in both countries. In fact, the Turkish-Iranian clash goes far beyond the four major wars between the two parties. It is true that Reza Shah was an admirer of Ataturk’s secular nationalist project, but at the same time both countries fought a war in 1930 that led to the amendment of the border treaty between them. After that, Turkey broke off contacts with Tehran, in order to orientate towards the West at the expense of the region.
Second: The Turkish position was clear in its rejection of the Iranian revolutionary model, and Turkey played a prominent role as a member of NATO in addressing Iran’s aspirations to export its revolution. Perhaps for this reason the Khomeini regime supported left-wing Kurdish, Armenian and Islamist armed groups, such as the Turkish Hezbollah, against Ankara during the 1980s, and the late Turkish Prime Minister Turgut ضzal led a clear policy in support of Pakistan during the Afghan war with the Soviet Union. Turkey remained skeptical of the intentions of the Iranian regime. The 1990s witnessed the assassination of several secular Turkish intellectuals and journalists, and Ankara accused Tehran of being involved.
Third: The idea of rapprochement with Tehran was the initiative of Necmettin Erbakan, leader of the Islamic Welfare Party, who is considered the godfather of converging relations with the Islamic Republic. He paved the way for the visit of President Mohammad Khatami, and the signing of oil and security agreements between the two countries. This approach was opposed by some leaders of military and secular institutions, who saw it as an attempt by the Islamists of Turkey to repeat the Khomeinist model in their own country. Perhaps this explains Erbakan’s visit to Tehran after his political ban was lifted in 2009, and also explains Ali Velayati, Iran’s former Foreign Minister and adviser to the Supreme Guide, saying that Erbakan has always been a friend of Iran.
Such historical milestones are important in order to explain the Turkish shift from a policy of containment towards Iran and Syria between 2003 and 2010, and the current state of verbal sparring between the two sides. In recent months, Erdoğan has received several opponents of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki such as President of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region Massoud Barzani, [Iraqi Vice President] Tariq al-Hashemi and Iyad Allawi. He has gone even further than this and accused al-Maliki of adopting a dictatorial and sectarian trend, whereby he excludes his opponents. In return, al-Maliki reacted to Erdoğan’s move by visiting Tehran, condemning what he termed the ”sectarian” – meaning Sunni – interference in his government in Iraq, branding Turkey as a “hostile” state in the region.
There can be no doubt that Turkey is re-evaluating its relations with Iraq and Syria. Yet, at the same time, I must emphasize that there are two currents within the Turkish policymaking sphere: one is eager to confront the Syrian-Iranian axis, and the other current – which includes figures from within Erdoğan’s own party – continues to warn against abandoning the containment policy that has been adopted towards these two countries.
Recent events have proven that the historical differences between the two parties still exist; no matter how Turkey has tried to use its containment policy, it has eventually been forced to resort to its “Sunni” identity and “Turkish” nationalism, even if indirectly. This is nothing new. When the Nagorno-Karabakh War broke out in February 1988 between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis in the Southern Caucasus, Iran and Turkey adopted contrasting positions towards the crisis, which sparked a diplomatic row between the two countries. Iran had sought to embrace the Azerbaijanis with open arms, welcoming them as Shiites and revolutionaries, whilst Turkey was wary of the expansion of Khomeini’s influence in the Southern Caucasus. This prompted Prime Minister Turgut ضzal to overtly declare, during his visit to the US in 1990, that “the Azerbaijanis are Shia, unlike the Turks, and hence, of more concern to Iran, since Turkey does not have pan-Turkic ambitions.”
Today, Turkish-Iranian disagreements over Syria are being renewed. The Turks have made no secret of their feeling that their interests will be jeopardized so long as the Bashar al-Assad regime remains in power. As for Iran, it considers the Turkish stance – especially Turkey’s sponsorship of the Syrian Transitional Council and the asylum it is granting to the displaced Syrian Sunnis – to represent a hostile approach towards its strategic interest, namely the survival of its Baathist ally.
There is no doubt that, for the most part, politics is governed by interests, which may explain Turkey reconsidering its containment policy towards the Iranian-Syrian axis, for its interests are now at stake. The Turks fear the danger of the Syrian Kurds rising to power after al-Assad is overthrown, and they fear that relations with the Alawite minority in Turkey may become strained, and they are therefore now seeking a Muslim Brotherhood alternative to rule Syria.
In 1985, Turgut ضzal expressed his disappointment at the future of Iran under the rule of the mullahs, and the Iranian press reacted by saying “Turkey is nothing more than a pawn for US interests.” 25 years later, Erdoğan directed similar words of criticism towards Iran, and this prompted the Iranian press to react by saying “Turkey is implementing an American agenda to spread the Turkish model of political Islam.”

http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=2&id=29406

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Posted in Iran, Middle East Geopolitics, Turkey

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