An unfinished revolution in Egypt, civil war in Syria and
Iran seeking WMD
Around the Right-Wing, Neo-Con world, the cry arises ‘why
doesn’t somebody do something about the situation in Syria?’ By ‘somebody’,
people have President Obama in mind even if they usually refer to America.
Start by taking a cool look at the latest events in Egypt.
There was a leader-less revolution, a popular uprising against Mubarak. Once
the protests started and the regime began to lose its grip on power, the
previously banned Islamist parties stepped into the developing power vacuum.
Due to their being organised, they won the election for the legislative body.
Now however, as the reality of what they have voted for begins to sink in, the
Egyptians have not voted en mass for an Islamist president. The people who
started the revolution are still not politically organised, and are
disappointed with the choices they have in the run-off presidential elections.
In the meantime former president Mubarak has been sentenced to life
imprisonment for causing the deaths of protestors, but the military commanders
who carried out his orders have been acquitted. The Military of course are
currently running the country so perhaps no surprises there. These verdicts
have predictably brought protests from those who are staunchly anti-Mubarak and
anti-military. There are fresh crowds in Tahir Square. It would be a mistake to
think that they are all there because of the court verdicts. Some will be there
because ‘their’ revolution has been hijacked, and gathering in Tahir Square is
the only form of protest they can make. They are still not organised, nor do
they have a defined leader, whereas the Islamists and the Military are
organised and have leaders.
Presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq, the last Prime
Minister under former President Mubarak and widely seen as 'the army's candidate', has accused his Islamist rival,
Mohammed Mursi, of wanting to create a sectarian state. Shafiq has accused
Mursi of intimidating Coptic Christians and of wanting to repress women. Mursi
has pooh-poohed this, saying that if elected he would resign from the Muslim
Brotherhood and that there is no intention to force Egyptian women to take to
the veil. Pull the other one Mohammed, that’s like saying the present Pope, who
before he became Pope and was merely Cardinal Ratzinger the Prefect of the Sacred
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the historical Inquisition, on becoming Pope resigned from the
Inquisition and no longer supports anything that he was previously charged with
upholding. I’m not quite sure how wanting to introduce Sharia Law squares with
not expecting women to dress ‘modestly’, i.e. wear a veil in public and Mursi
has not as yet explained. There will be some Egyptians who are thinking that
this is not why they overthrew Mubarak. Some of these people will be in Tahiti
Square but most will not. At least they won’t be until those calling for
Mubarak’s retrial and wanting the death penalty have found something else to
occupy them and left, then a new demonstration will most likely start.
In Egypt, America
supported the idea of democracy but was castigated in some quarters for
abandoning long-term ally Mubarak. Bugger democracy, the Neo-Cons wanted at all
costs a non-Islamist government. Didn’t America realise, so the argument went,
what would happen if Mubarak was overthrown? One wonders what these pundits
think America was supposed to have done? By America of course, they mean Obama.
By the Right’s reckoning, somehow or other America should have engineered a
transfer of power from Mubarak to a representative government that would
maintain the status quo vis a vis Israel, have popular support and keep the
Muslim brotherhood in check. A great trick if you can pull it off, but pretty
much impossible in reality. All America could do was to be seen to support
democracy, hold their nose and deal with whatever government was elected,
hoping to influence them after the dust had settled. The Right blames Obama for
throwing an ally to the wolves and thus, amongst other things, showing America
as an unreliable friend. This is a view shared by staunch democrats and now
nervous friends such as Abdullah of Jordan, the House of Saud and probably most
of the other Gulf rulers. Interesting bed-mates, assuming you think the Right is
actually interested in democratic democracy.
What should Obama have done? To try to influence events on
the ground was clearly a non-starter, so should America have done something
behind the scenes? The problem with this train of thought is exactly who do you
exert pressure on and to what end? Obama did put pressure on the Egyptian
Military to ensure that elections took place, to abide by the results and hand
over power once a president was elected and a constitution approved. What more
should he have been done? Nothing, frankly. Anymore would have been seen as
meddling in Egyptian internal politics, which would have been the kiss of death
for any candidates that America supported.
Teddy Roosevelt's advice to ‘speak quietly and carry a big
stick’ is apt here. Once there is a functioning government in Egypt, that will
be the time to try to influence events. Obama certainly has spoken quietly and
in the form of financial aid, he has a big stick. The question is, will he use
it if is in America’s interests that he do so? The Right of course say ‘no’.
Their view of Obama is that he is anti-American, anti-Israel and pro Islam. How
can an American president be anti-American? Simple, he doesn’t put his
country’s interests first, according to his detractors. By that, they mean he
doesn’t put what they view as America’s interests first.
Anti-Israel and pro Islam? The Right will point to the
fact that Obama has encouraged the formation of an Islamist Government in
Egypt, has not criticised the Turkish Government for it’s anti-Israel stance
and it’s meddling in Syrian internal affairs, has encouraged the nascent Syrian
opposition to include Islamist elements and has not acted fast enough over the
Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. They will assert that Obama has
pressured Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians whilst not applying
pressure the other way. All American aid to Israel, in whatever form it takes,
is merely a continuation of what was agreed by previous administrations and
Obama has watered it down where he can. That he has been largely unsuccessful
they say is due to Democrats’ support for Israel which even a Democrat
President cannot ignore.
An unpopular but more charitable and in my view correct
assessment of Obama is that he has tried a different approach to Middle East
diplomacy, but that approach has been
overtaken by events on the ground. The question now is does he realise this and
will he be ideologically capable of changing direction, always assuming that he
is re-elected.
You might recall that Syrian President Bashar Assad is
quite happily massacring his own people, ignoring UN resolutions and clinging
on to power long past the time when most pundits had assumed he would be found
cowering in the sewer pipe of history. How can this be? Why has America, fresh
from the successful installation of a democratic government in Libya, not
bombed the living daylights out of Syrian Government Forces in support of the
Opposition? Why did they not either force a resolution through the UN or ignore
the UN and act earlier?
To answer that is actually quite simple. It’s a two- part
answer, and in part one I’m going to examine some arguments put forward by
politicians and journalists of a right-wing persuasion as examples of typical
muddled thinking. These arguments have appeared in various op-ed pieces around
the World, but without naming names, they regularly feature in the Jerusalem
Post. Israel is right next door, so the situation in Syria is of particular
immediate interest to them.
The argument goes that NATO/America/ UN/the West, take
your pick, missed an opportunity months ago to take decisive military action
against the Assad regime and thus establish some sort of democratic government
that would in some way or other be beholden to whoever had helped them and
might not be Islamist in nature. Think of the tens of thousands already killed
and others who may yet be killed when a civil war breaks out. All this could
have been avoided if America/NATO et al had only acted.
There are two immediate problems here. For many months,
there was civil unrest but no organised opposition, no ‘leaders of the
revolution’, a lot like the situation in Egypt, where their revolution is about
to enter it’s second phase. So exactly who should America support in Syria,
‘the people’? What happens after they bomb Syrian Government Forces? What do
‘the people’ do then? Where does the idea that American intervention would have
ensured a western-orientated or at least western-sympathetic government come
from? What evidence is there to support this notion? None, in a word.
Perhaps I should define ‘the Right’, or at least what I
mean by it. I don’t mean those who are ‘conservative’ in their politics. I do
mean those who believe that the interests of America and her allies are best
served by deploying troops to foreign lands and imposing a political system,
social norms and vaguely Judeo-Christian concepts of justice, law and order on
an unwilling population, largely unfamiliar with what is being imposed on them.
It took the West five hundred years to establish what we today consider as
democracy, it’s not something that you can simply graft onto a new vine and
expect it to flourish in five minutes.
Does any of this mean you shouldn’t defend your own values
and hard-won freedoms? No, of course not, quite the opposite in fact. Having
respect for other peoples’ way of life and religious beliefs doesn’t mean
rolling over and playing dead. Sometimes you’re going to have to fight for what
you believe in. Sometimes you’re going to have to insist that migrants coming
to your country have to accept your laws and your way of life or don’t come.
But sometimes you’re going to have to accept that others’ have different
concepts of justice and freedom. Now I happen to believe that in ‘The West’,
and you could substitute ‘democracies’ if you’re more comfortable with that
word, we’ve pretty much got it right and particularly totalitarian Islamic
countries have got it wrong, but I believe in leading by example, not by
hitting them over the head. At least, not as a first option. If you are
genuinely threatened then you have to respond, but not necessarily by invasion.
In Libya NATO intervened but by and large restricted
themselves to support from the air. The result was that the campaign to
overthrow Gaddafi took longer than it might have done, but the fact that
‘foreign boots’ didn’t overtly touch Libyan soil doesn’t seem to have made much
difference to the political landscape. The country is in a mess, and human
rights abuses continued to take place after the fighting was over. What finally
emerges is yet to be clear, but it shows no sign of being particularly fond of
the West or being more democratic than tribal in nature. At least, for the
moment, Libya remains one country, despite an attempt at regionalisation. Not
perhaps a stunning success, but as yet not a failure. The cynical would say
give it time and it will be. I would say think of the five hundred year
flowering of democracy in Europe, then dramatically shorten that timescale
because of instant communications, mass media and social media. Don’t
over-estimate the impact of facebook and twitter, but equally don’t dismiss
them out of hand as the playthings of a bored, decaying Western culture.
America and her
allies went crashing into Iraq and failed to impose a government particularly
grateful or well disposed towards the West. In fact, it’ll be something of a
miracle if the country holds together as a single entity, and there’s one clue
as to why nothing has been done in Syria. Iraq really can’t be portrayed as an
example of successful military intervention and America, in the quiet of the
night, realises it. If you are going to send in the troops, you have to buy
into the concept of nation building, with all that entails in terms of economic
burden and time. A strong case can be made for nation building in some
circumstances, but there is no ‘half-way house’. It’s all or nothing.
The evidence seems to point to the fact that American/NATO
intervention may staunch short-term bloodshed but doesn’t result in a
government that is well-disposed towards the West, or at least anti-Islamist,
Islamists being the big bogey-men of the Right just at the moment.
So why hasn’t America intervened in Syria? Has the ‘penny
dropped’ that the only way to intervene is by nation building? Probably not,
but there are other reasons why nothing has happened. In the second part, we’ll
take a look at some of those reasons.
@peterbernfeld
No comments:
Post a Comment