The General Assembly Vote on Palestinian Observer Status

I think the hardest tack for one to take over the Israel-Palestine Conflict is to be simultaneously substantive and humane.  It is certainly more-intuitive to simply take a side.  Take the recent violence between Israel and Hamas, which touched not only the Gaza Strip but also Israel’s largest cities: Israel supporters typically focus on Hamas rocket attacks launched in peacetime while at least declining to broadcast any opinions about the total blockade of a population the size of Manhattan or Israel’s continued construction of settlements in West Bank lands they have never made legal claim to; many Palestine sympathizers focus on the hundreds of Palestinians killed every time the IDF undertakes a major operation in the Territories, thereby claiming disproportionality in the use of violence–which implies, whether they will verbally admit to this or not, that months of prior attacks by Hamas with the express purpose of killing Israeli civilians (or Hamas’ strategic decision to hide in dense civilian neighborhoods) are morally and politically irrelevant in Israel’s decision to resort to violence.  There are the positive neutrals (“I hope that both parties are able to bring this conflict to a quick and peaceful solution”) whom are of course well-represented in the diplomatic corps, and the negative neutrals (“I wish these asses would just blow each other up already”) of whom you probably know a few personally.  I for one am frustrated by the State of Israel’s disingenuous foot-dragging over giving Palestinians more control over their land and their government, and making reasonable restitution for Palestinian land, property and life lost after taking the strategic upper hand in multiple wars.  I am also frustrated by what appears to be a total lack of discussion among Palestinian sympathizers of the harm done to the Palestinian cause by militants.  (Apparently the non-violence that worked for India, Black Americans in the South and Black Africans in South Africa would just never work for Palestinians in the Territories or abroad…But then the Territories have been under occupation for 45 years and armed struggle has actually spoiled proposed improvements in their status.)  Like the positive neutrals I am pleased to see the violence stop, but I  have a greater trepidation that these episodes are nothing but a perverse political negotiation in which some of the parties are both foreign and non-public.  (A certain Islamic Republic comes to mind, and if I am right it definitely isn’t helping.)  I share nothing of the negative neutrals’ animus in this case, aside from a mistrust of many of the powers that be–especially Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition and Hamas.

Yesterday the United Nations General Assembly granted Observer status to the Palestinian Authority.  Acceptance of the Palestinian Authority’s bid for recognition from the General Assembly was widely anticipated.  While this vote does not make the Palestinian Authority a full member in the UN and certainly does nothing substantive to make Palestine a functional state–full membership would have to be granted by the Security Council where the United States wields veto, and Palestinian functional statehood is unattainable without consent from the State of Israel–this vote represents the consensus of the General Assembly and would allow the Palestinian Authority access to a number of United Nations institutions–including, potentially, the International Criminal Court.

The International Criminal Court was organized to deal with charges of war crimes against individual persons.  The danger of the Court (which is the reason the United States is not a party to it) is that charges of war crimes can be issued on an inconsistent or politically-motivated basis.  Now that the Palestinian Authority gains Observer status at the UN, if it is granted access to the ICC it could bring charges of war crimes against IDF or Israeli government officials.  The United Kingdom, which ultimately abstained from the vote, had indicated that possible participation in the ICC was one of its greatest reservations against granting observer status to the Palestinian Authority.

I for one applauded the Palestinian Authority’s decision to pursue this acknowledgment from the United Nations, and I congratulate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on its success.  While my country and Israel both insist that nationhood can only be granted through negotiations between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, negotiations have effectively been frozen since the fall of the moderate Olmert government.  (Intransigence from the far-right Likud government is a major culprit, of course, but after former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s controversial withdrawal from multiple settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel has not committed to any further concessions.)

The simple fact is that Israel is taking advantage of the current situation.  As I have said before: This is Netanyahu’s fault for dragging his feet, period. He has never had any intention of granting Palestinians further rights or self-determination. This is why you negotiate in politics–yes, even with your “enemies.”

Again, to head-off the skeptics and the shruggers with all their damned reasonable arguments: This certainly isn’t full recognition, let-alone functional statehood or a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, but fair play to the Palestinian Authority for peacefully asserting Palestinians’ rights.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s (and Likud’s) position remains that the Palestinian Authority must be unitary, accept Israel’s right to exist and renounce violence before the State of Israel will enter any new negotiations.  (These conditions sound entirely reasonable until one reflects on how many wars could never end if they were offered as preconditions for just talking.)  Fatah in the West Bank has met these conditions while Hamas has not. When Hamas narrowly won a majority in the Palestinian Parliament in the 2006 elections, Israel cut off all the tax revenues it was collecting on the behalf of the Palestinian Authority.  This led to a brief but decisive civil war between Fatah and Hamas, resulting in 2 separate semi-state entities in the West Bank and Gaza.  The Israeli government of Ariel Sharon may have felt it had no choice but to deny revenues to Hamas, but now the Netanyahu government refuses any negotiations with the Palestinian Authority because it “will not renounce violence.”  This is a fraud; Likud is just using the Palestinians’ internal divisions as a convenient excuse to leave them in legal limbo.

The Territories have been under military occupation for 45 years.  This would be a tragedy if there weren’t a short list of Israeli, Palestinian and Iranian government officials we can hold morally responsible for it.  The idea that “the Palestinians” must assume all moral responsibility for this state of affairs, while Netanyahu’s coalition government (which includes public figures who in the American political system would be called unabashed fascists) builds and maintains new settlements in the West Bank at will, is offered in such bad faith that I suspect its aim is to maintain this situation of military occupation always, in the vague and fantastic hope that over 4,260,000 Palestinian nationals will simply…go away.

No, I am not implying what you’re probably thinking.  I recognize no obtuse and offensive likeness between Israel and the Nazis.  I will be the first to admit that the State of Israel could do far worse than it has to the Palestinians at any time.  But there are limits to the pertinence of such a point.  It in no way changes the fact that the conditions the Palestinians must abide are awful.  If there is a consensus in Israeli politics that Hamas is illegitimate, that doesn’t explain why the State of Israel cannot negotiate further agreements (whether final or interim) with the Palestinian Authority through the agency of Fatah, at least to increase their control over and freedom within the West Bank.  But no further agreements have been inked with the faction of Mahmoud Abbas, which has probably wanted meaningful negotiations all along.  The real reason Abbas unilaterally pushed for acknowledgment through the UN General Assembly is because his receptivity to Israel has brought him nothing–not even evidence that any kind of political deal was possible.  He was pushed to this point.  Our government’s position was that Abbas’ action is “not helpful;” I say, he obtained something for Palestinians and did not have to use violence–indeed, used a legitimate international mediating institution–to do it.  What is there to gripe about, unless one wants the Palestinians to have nothing?

40% of the West Bank is either under IDF jurisdiction, is reserved for the settlements, has been unilaterally annexed by Israel or has been designated a nature preserve by Israel on the Palestinians’ behalf.  Palestinians cannot pass from 1 side of the West Bank to the other.  Palestinians cannot leave the West Bank at all except through Israeli-occupied territory.  Israel continues to build new settlements wherever it finds a water table.  Note that I haven’t said that the 1967 boundaries are sacred, or that everyone who claims descent from a Palestinian refugee should have a “right of return.”  I have only mentioned East Jerusalem implicitly.  I have made no argument that the State of Israel is illegitimate in itself, and I am not going to.  But should we expect the Palestinians to be entirely politically-passive?  Should we accept premises and offer arguments that assume they will be politically-passive?  We are supposed to believe that Bibi Netanyahu really just wants peace, but has tragically been frustrated for want of an honest negotiating partner among the Palestinians?  That is absurd.

I recognize the State of Israel’s right to exist and its right to defend itself.  In everything else it has done, I have long suspected the Netanyahu government of acting in bad faith.  Do not forget: Of President Obama–whose Ambassador to the UN vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning unilateral settlement expansion, and who just voted against granting Palestine Observer status in the General Assembly–Prime Minister Netanyahu sees such an obstacle to the sort of partnership he wants in the United States that he met with the new Republican House Majority Leader to get assurances of more help, and tried to stir-up pre-election controversy to help Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney–who had promised him unqualified support.

Observer status for the Palestinian Authority is far from an ideal status (and certainly isn’t profoundly-portentous)–but it is something.  I will not just shrug-off a nonviolent call for legitimate recognition by the Palestinian Authority.  If it causes Israel institutional headaches, that marginally increases the political prospect of some kind of concessions, whether negotiated or unilateral.  Even incremental progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been almost unheard-of since Prime Minister Sharon went into a coma.  This minimal level of recognition from the UN General Assembly creates institutional ties that reinforce the concept of and capacity for Palestinian statehood; as I am convinced that Netanyahu has absolutely no intention of allowing Palestinian statehood, this is the 1st development that improves the prospect of a 2-state solution since Sharon undertook the unilateral withdrawal of West Bank and Gaza settlements.

I don’t think the distinctions I have made here are brilliant, profound, or novel.  I do think they are unusual, and require some measure of courage on one’s part to say all at once.  This is because the many unqualified supporters of either side have dumbed-down this debate, preferring to speak to the like-minded and invoke their respective cases of victimhood rather than seek help with their own moral blind spots.

I have not pretended to be an “objective” or “unbiased” observer of these events, whatever that means.  But I am trying to support the policies and the attendant sentiments which I consider most-humane.  I have often seen no choice on the part of the State of Israel but to use military force against Palestinian militants.  This has earned me consternation from friends who support the Palestinians.  On a day to day basis, or in an event such as this when the Palestinian Authority peacefully seeks further concessions or brings claims against the State of Israel which the latter finds embarrassing or damaging, I find myself referring to the same litany of abuse or neglect which advocates of the Palestinians claim.  This seems to puzzle or frustrate friends who support the State of Israel.  I only claim a preference for those policies and goals which I think most-humane.  The thing I like least is manifest violence; the thing I like next-least is oppression.  I also find invocation of historical grievances useless, especially after generations have passed and the principal victims and perpetrators are dead.  We should find it outrageous that there isn’t a serious discussion about the terrorism Hamas regularly perpetrates or attempts against Israel; we should find it outrageous that the Palestinians have had to live under military occupation for 45 years.

We should also find it outrageous that so little passion is contributed to holding both sides to account simultaneously.  I should have more to say about this, but I feel burdened with general points on which there should be agreement but which are usually just a signal of one’s politics.

The Arab Spring’s Unappreciated Progress

POLITICAL PROGRESS IN LIBYA: Mohammed el-Megarif, the President of the Libyan National Assembly, eulogizes United States Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens on September 20th. The Arabic on the picture reads “Thank you, Chris.” Some of the more-ignorant and reactionary among us will tell you that violent protests in the Middle East means that the Arab Spring is a front for the march of radical Islamism; those who are actually paying attention see elected leaders decrying violence and promising the United States–and their own people–that they will enforce the law. Associated Press photo by Abdel Magid al-Fergany.

I’ve heard my fill of all the very solemn prognostications about the Arab Spring.  We have to take the long view, Conservative skeptics solemnly say; implicitly the long view is that the revolutions we have witnessed in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and still in process in Yemen and Syria are just way stations towards Iranian-style Islamic Republics.  Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), in an opening volley for an embarrassingly-short presidential campaign bid last year, warned us in early 2011 that failing to support Egyptian President-for-life Hosni Mubarak would deliver that country over to the extremist enemy.  In an odd bit of McCarthyism, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) told us there were Islamist radicals in the State Department; Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX) featured prominently among the few in Congress sufficiently quagmatic in their ignorance to double-down on these suspicions.  Gohmert, for his part, saw fit to warn us following mid-September riots and the Benghazi militant attack that these events marked the emergence of “a new Ottoman Empire” in the Middle East, a hysterical narrative that won fittingly-epic derision from The Colbert Report last week.

At the very least, we need not listen to admonitions about taking the political long view from people who can neither observe nor imagine much difference between a dozen countries with millions of people apiece and a single very-different country 33 years ago, namely Iran in the twilight of the Shah.  These are Muslim countries in the midst of revolution, after all; to small minds the threat they pose is exactly the same–the absence of explicit anti-Americanism or an extremist religious figure remotely approaching the importance of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran notwithstanding.

After mid-September’s violent protests against an anti-Muslim video produced by a private citizen in the United States–and the militant plot in Benghazi, Libya that occurred under their cover–some have argued (rather obtusely) that the Arab Spring has devolved into Islamist mayhem.  These people exhibit a lack of historical perspective about such events.  The “Cartoon Riots” which followed the publication of mocking images of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper exceeded the scope of these protests; early this year in Egypt soccer riots in the city of Alexandria claimed 74 lives–followed by large protests in Cairo against the lack of security provided by the Ministry of the Interior.  But no, there were some protests against a video 2 in mid-September, so now those who always looked askance at the capacity of Muslims to form a government for themselves for reasons of ideology or prejudice conclude that Egypt is about to be submerged in a new Caliphate.

Then there’s Libya.  Initial reports of a riot killing US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, another member of his diplomatic staff and 2 Americans in diplomatic security at the US consulate in Benghazi–the power base of the 2011 Libyan Revolution–brought to mind that the revolution there was in fact some kind of a brilliant cover for al-Qaeda to seize power.  Now it appears the attack on the Consulate was the premeditated work of Ansar al-Sharia, a local terrorist organization, with the assistance of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate.  The elected Libyan government tipped us off to this finding itself.

The elected Libyan government: Less than a year after the Rebels killed the brutal Colonel Muammar el-Gaddafi, Libyans elected a National Assembly in July that has appointed a new President, Mohammed el-Megarif.  In spite of the still-tenuous security situation, Libyans are forging a legitimate government for themselves.  Now that elected government is voluntarily taking on the militias that haven’t agreed to incorporate into a national paramilitary force.  Mohammed el-Megarif, the President of the Libyan National Assembly, spoke at a memorial service for Ambassador Stevens on September 22nd, and Libyans themselves took to the streets in open opposition to the country’s teeming militias, regarding them as a foreign body in the new Libyan body politic.  Again, Libya remaining unlawful militias, grumbling Loyalists and large chemical weapons stockpiles all remain serious concerns, but the people seem to have their hearts in the right place, and both the interests and the sentiments of their elected politicians tend towards accountability and diplomacy.  Last but not least, the government is gradually establishing a monopoly over military force, finally initiating a you’re-with-us-or-against-us policy towards the country’s many militias.

Egypt seems to be in a scarier state of disorder, but the signs from its elected parliament and from Mohammad Morsi, its elected President, are similarly if not equally encouraging.  It’s certainly worth mentioning that Morsi was elected President on the Muslim Brotherhood’s party line; among his noteworthy political maneuvers were calling the Egyptian Parliament back into session after a questionable attempt by the country’s highest court to invalidate the recent parliamentary elections, the appointment of a generally-boring cabinet, a successful demand of some high-profile resignations from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the reversal of an earlier decision to loosen controls on the border with Gaza and the launching of a campaign against Islamist and separatist militants in the Sinai Peninsula region.  Far from the fanatical vanguard of some emerging pan-Islamic what-have-you, these measures suggest that President Morsi is a low-key nationalist and a democrat.  Islamic Conservative though he may be, the evidence suggests that he is trying to consolidate, not hijack, Egypt’s 2011 revolution.

While the Presidents of Egypt and Yemen called for restrictions on the freedom of expression that some publics find offensive, they nonetheless renounced violence in the name of their religion and implied that they were taking as liberal of a political stand on the issue as they could at the time. Governing nations trying to break free from quagmatic despotism, their renunciation of violence and expressions of even qualified sympathy for free expression on behalf of their people already give the lie to the most-pessimistic accounts of the political sentiments of their countries. Left, New York Times photo by Chang W. Lee; right, Associated Press photo by John Minchillo.

It’s true that Morsi and Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, the new President of Yemen, just called for curbs on free speech at the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.  This call is not likely to have much of an impact on the domestic policies of other nations, nor should it.  Salman Rushdie’s understandable concerns about a chilling effect aside, the recent and heavily-broadcast outrage of citizens of historically-unfree countries over the provocative private acts of citizens in free countries has not reduced the pace of such provocations; it seems to have increased it.  Modern technology has made the adjudication of what counts as impermissably-offensive speech and whom is answerable for it under which jurisdiction a problem of almost irreducible complexity.  But leaders like Morsi and Hadi are doing in this case is communicating the position of a broadly-held sentiment within their societies.  I am not saying this out of some cultural relativism but to excuse the leaders of those new governments–whatever their motives may be–the moment’s political caution.  Defense of free speech at home and abroad, oddly, may be both the more-principled stand to take and the only politically-practical position in the long run…but for now the only political tack towards this event that will build legitimacy for the new governments of Egypt and Yemen is to plead “cultural sensitivity” towards their own publics.

Even the reason why this is so indicates why democratic government should be strongly-preferable for their societies today.  With the anti-Muslim video recently produced by an Egyptian-American, as with offensive drawings of the Prophet Mohammed published by a private Danish newspaper, protesters in Muslim countries have interpreted images that offend their sensibilities as the policy of governments.  Their demand that the offending expression be outlawed reflects their experience with an oppression even deeper than outlawed forms of speech: Many of those in the Middle East who protested the offending art actually think that these provocations were the product of the governments in question themselves–or at least that they received government pre-approval.  This naive assumption is a vestige of the dictatorship which is the only form of government most of these societies have ever known.  While he railed against what he called “hateful speech,” President Morsi–the political leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s 1st truly elected President–denounced the violence committed in the name of his religion, and offered a qualified defense of “freedom of expression that is not used to incite hatred against anyone.”  While this position is too compromised in principle for those of full Liberal sentiment, it represents as great of an acknowledgment of our fuller freedom of expression as Morsi had the political space to give.  In context, it is unprecedented.

In Tunisia the elected moderate-Islamist government, through Foreign Affairs Minister Rafik Abdessalem, apologized for damage done to the US Embassy and the American Cooperative School in the capital Tunis.  He also apologized for threats made to the US Ambassador.  He said his government would pay for any damage incurred to US Government property in the country during the riots, and reaffirmed that it was the responsibility of the host country to protect the diplomatic assets of foreign governments.

Just 2 days ago, hundreds of people went on strike out in a province in central Tunisia–not to protest the anti-Muslim video but rather a lack of economic development in the region since last year’s democratic revolution.  The protesters spoke-out against the country’s Islamist government–over bread-and-butter issues.  While the ongoing protests and lack of economic progress may be frustrating or disconcerting, the very fact that protests continue under the new government is a compelling repudiation of the suspicion that these countries’ democratic transitions have somehow been coopted by Islamist dictatorship.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly 4 days ago, Moncef Marzouki, Tunisia’s President who himself hails from a moderate-Islamist party, warned that a small group of Salafists–he estimated a few thousand in a country of 10 million–wanted to enforce their mores through violence and were bad for business.  Salafist violence is bad for business: If this sort of Islamist becomes president of an Arab country through democratic means, we should not view this with suspicion but with relief–and encouragement.

It’s equally encouraging that, during his address at the United Nations General Assembly, President Marzouki said that “dictatorship is a disease.”

Who Is Responsible for Retaliatory Violence?

As protests roiled Benghazi, an eastern Libyan city that had served as the power base of the uprising that deposed Libyan dictator Colonel Moammar al-Gaddafi last year, gunmen launched an acute assault on the United States consulate there Tuesday night.  Successfully exploiting the protests as cover, they attacked the consulate with guns, hand-thrown bombs and rockets.  The United States Ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, was killed, along with 2 American security contractors who were formerly Navy SEALs and 1 other member of the Foreign Service.  The BBC reported that Ambassador Stevens apparently was only on the grounds of the consulate at the time because he was assisting with the evacuation.  The Libyan doctor who tried to revive the Ambassador after the attack said he died of smoke inhalation.

The 4 Americans who were killed in the line of duty were brought back stateside yesterday, and buried in a ceremony led by President Obama.

The principle reason I’m writing this is to wade into a controversy that developed almost immediately.  It is a political controversy, but because it involves a serious question of the priority with which government regards our rights I will try to deal with it in as minimally-political (but not apolitical) a fashion as possible.

The controversy started when Governor Romney predictably criticized President Obama’s response to the attacks.  I want to be very clear about this: I will spend most of this entry on the title question, not on the “apology” for the American value of freedom of speech which Romney accused the President of giving (and which anyone paying attention to the actual course of events knows he did not give).  Since I’ve cleared that up, Governor Romney’s charge was directed towards a tweet issued by a member of the Foreign Service at the US Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, without knowledge or authorization of the President:

“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

This statement was tweeted by a Foreign Service member before the attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi or the US Embassy in Cairo even occurred.  Governor Romney seized on it because they fit with his campaign’s foreign policy narrative of “no apology” for American values and the empowered role of the United States in the World.  He immediately caught a round of flak, including from some prominent Republicans, for seeking to politicize an unfolding crisis; the President responded with unusual harshness, saying Governor Romney has a “shoot first, aim later” approach to foreign policy problems.  But I want to look past Governor Romney’s objection to this comment from its political context, with the attendant charge against the President.  I even want to look past the focus of the statement itself, which “condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.”  So: When you remove the question of the appropriateness of Governor Romney’s comments, of President Obama’s moral tone in responding to the crisis, and of the notorious tweet’s call for respect for religion, what’s left of the controversy?  Well, none other than the most-fundamental political question of all is left.

Who is responsible when offensive provocation leads to retaliatory violence?  The perpetrators of violence are responsible.  The perpetrators of violence are always responsible, and they are entirely responsible.

This is not to say that the creation of an artwork (however badly-made and contrived in its meaning) that one can reasonably expect to engender a violent response isn’t a morally-fraught question.  Moral considerations that don’t at least countenance the likely response of others to the act are really moral abdications.  But the difference between the provocateur and he who rises to the bait with a violent response is the difference between a person who may (or in some cases, does not) have bad motives but performs a nonviolent act versus a person who chooses to initiate violent force because of their subjective feelings.  The makers of the bad movie insulting Islam’s chief religious and historical figure may warrant our contempt for issuing an insult that was designed expressly to provoke a response…but that is the most sanction they deserve.  Their act of provocation does not warrant physical retaliation against anyone whatsoever–in any way.

When President Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin horrified many with its account of man’s inhumanity to man under American slavery, he is said to have greeted her with immortal irony: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”  Hyperbole, of course, but is it plausible through some stylized narrative to hold Stowe accountable for the bloodiest war in American history?  No, no, a thousand times no.  Neither Stowe’s obvious innocence in the course of the war nor the rightness of the Abolitionist cause have anything to do with it; the simple fact is a match of this sort is happenstance compared with the tinder it lights.

And the tinder itself is much smaller than people think for how brightly it burns.  CNN yesterday was in particularly-shameful form, playing a few minutes of violent Friday protests over and over and over again.  The Cairo area has about 20 million people; a few thousand participated in Friday’s protests.  Worldwide, most of the protests were not riotous.  The narrow subset of people who perpetrated acts of violence deserves more attention; the attack on the US consulate in Libya appears to have been planned by a Libyan radical Islamist group, Ansar al-Sharia, which blocked Libyan security forces from moving in to protect the consulate while it was being overrun.  While this comes up in an online CNN article explaining the riots, the news channel’s coverage yesterday nonetheless was full of headlines like “RAGE IN THE MUSLIM WORLD.”

But again, the small number (and telling geographic confinement) of Muslims actually involved in violent riots is not the issue in assigning blame between provocateur and rioter.  The principle at stake here is as basic as they come.  Our refusal to take punitive action against the makers of a message–however-offensive–isn’t simply about our fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression in this case.  It is even more-basic than that.  When we rebuff the demands of those who answer an insult with violence, we repudiate the uncivilized notion that the one whom is willing to use violence can dictate the actions of others.  Anyone has the right to take offense; expressed indignation can be quite virtuous and even have beneficial effects on individuals or on a culture.  Anyone has the right to put these provocateurs on the couch, so to speak, or to seek to ridicule or disqualify them in the public sphere.  But as the use of violence expands the public sphere contracts; it is never in its essence anything more than it is between 2 individuals–namely, an attempt by one to subordinate the other mechanically to his will.  Violence is simply about unadorned power.  The most-basic principle justifying government is that it may monopolize violence to prevent its subjective use by individuals against one another.  Thomas Hobbes goes so far as to say that there can be no talk of morality without what we call law and order; suffice to say that casting blame on a provocateur in a way that implies that violent men can blame others for their violent actions is nonsense.

While Neoconservatives and the emphatically religion-averse “New Atheists” have preached confrontation, in the face of this latest rash of violent riots much as they did with the 2006 “Cartoon Riots” following the publication of offensive drawings of Muhammad in a European newspaper, they have done so on freedom of speech grounds.  Offensive images, including those that bring the sacred down to the level of the profane, can always be sufficiently defended on the grounds of freedom of speech.  But I’ve noticed that those who congregate to defend these gestures on these grounds have an odd tendency in practice to share the sentiments expressed.  There is a right even more-basic than our freedom of speech that violent rioters calling for punishment for those who made the offending video are violating.  That right is the expectation that our government will protect us from violence.

On account of our First Amendment, Americans have the right to express themselves as they wish–provided that such expression will not create an immanent danger.  On this grounds one does not have a “right” to yell “Fire!” in a theater because it could cause a stampede; however, one does have a right to offensive gestures; others have the opportunity to consider and decide how to respond.  Those who have rioted, burned several American chain restaurant franchises in the Middle East, launched attacks on our and German embassies and even killed 4 staff members at our consulate in Benghazi, Libya were not automatons responding reflexively to a present stimulus; they were human beings who decided to riot, destroy property, threaten people and in some cases kill because of an idea.  This idea, in case this characterization invites confusion, had nothing to do with changing their own lives or other people’s lives for the better; given that, one might have said the same about the Arab Spring of late 2010 to the present, which has brought striking political change in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and may do the same in Syria once the Assad Regime finally succumbs to the rebellion it cannot contain.  The only idea the present rioters are fighting for is their capacity to use violence to dictate terms to others.  They say it is to defend the integrity of their religion, or the dignity of their religion’s founder; a Liberal Ironist maintains as always that these ideas and their need for defense are human in origin, as are both the standards by which the rioters judge them “defended” and the crude and hamfisted tactics they would use to achieve that aim.  This is and only ever has been about them, about the violent radicals themselves, and about their efforts to use force to control other people’s behavior.  To say that expressive provocateurs are responsible for the violence their work incites–even if they might have thought that their actions could provoke a reaction–is in its very nature to follow the script written by the violent extremists.  (It hardly seems to make sense to speak of them “writing” something, but there it is.)  The Liberal Ironist sees religion as a series of theoretically-inviolate symbols people use either to congregate and communicate difficult truths (at best) or simply to dominate each other (at worst); these symbols are always anthropomorphic, and never transcend human experience.  1 idea may prove more practically useful than another in one’s experience, but no idea is more “real” than any of the others, and no idea is going to “win the Contest.”  Ideas compete, but they are not involved in zero-sum games.  Animals–humans very-much included–play zero-sum games.  This is a zero-sum game: To blame anyone other than the actual initiator of violent force for actions consciously taken, is to submit to domination by anyone immoral-enough to assert it.  They may portray themselves as victims, but the ironist at his most-illiberal would say that this is an old trick of those who want power they cannot earn.  The impersonal use–or even the credible threat–of deadly violence to counter an insult isn’t like the problem of terrorism, it is the problem of terrorism.

I want to close with an attempt to address Governor Romney’s attack on the President’s leadership through this episode.  Aside from on the most-basic level (regarding government’s role in protecting the peace and our interest in conducting a sure-footed foreign policy), I want to do this without recourse to politics.  Governor Romney responded to an unofficial tweet issued by someone in the US Embassy in Cairo; Andrew Sullivan marvelously noted that this tweet was tweeted before the film riots and the assault on the US consulate in Libya–but that Governor Romney’s response blamed the President for issuing an apology in the face of violent attacks that had not yet occurred, by way of a statement that he hadn’t seen or authorized.  Romney admonished him thusly:

“I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

This crosses the line, as does Romney’s equally shrill later “clarifications”–and not principally because the Governor is blaming the President for something he didn’t do, or because he saw fit to wade into the issue without actually knowing what was happening.  Governor Romney tried to make the President look weak while a security crisis unfolded that involved multiple United States diplomatic missions in the Middle East, as well as possible risks to American citizens and American property abroad.

I do not level this criticism lightly or opportunistically.  In 2007, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Syria to confer with President-for-Life Bashar al-Assad, who had not yet come fully into his own as a brazenly mass-murdering tyrant (merely a quiet, garden-variety tyrant).  Speaker Pelosi sought to show-up President George W. Bush for his strict policy of diplomatic silence towards the Assad Family Regime.  This was wrong–and not because “we shouldn’t have been talking to Syria.”  5 1/2 years ago, I agreed that our government should have been trying to establish better relations with the Assad Regime.  I cannot say for certain whether this would have benefited the pro-democracy movement in Syria in 2011 or would simply have made the United States look worse and the Assad Regime even more-confident; In any case, I was all for better communication with the Assad Regime at the time.  But I was not in favor of legislative leaders holding out the promise of alternate US foreign policies.  That is simply inappropriate behavior for an elected official of the same government.  In a CNN interview last night, former Utah Governor, US Ambassador to China and Republican Presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman said “politics stops at the water’s edge;” that’s a sentiment I like very much–whoever happens to be President.  In-house disagreements are fine, as are serious disagreements about foreign policy.  But you do not undermine the President while he is conducting US foreign policy.  This is not a game.  This kind of opportunistic effort at backseat driving leaves us all worse-off; in any case, a Presidential candidate shouldn’t be making comments that could be taken for more than they are while a foreign security situation is unfolding, or in ways that could be construed as an attempt to force the President to change his policy tack.

I didn’t want to link these 2 judgments together, but tactical concerns and concerns of tact must be allowed to take precedence over statements of principle where foreign policy are concerned.  Lives are at stake; if a government’s foremost responsibility of protecting the lives of its citizens dictates that we not comply with the demands of violent malefactors, it also requires that the President be permitted to formulate a response to an emerging situation when our foreign service personnel or other Americans abroad may be in danger.  The initial provocateur’s political right to get us into this mess may still be a moral wrong, and in any case a doubling-down by a political candidate looking for an angle cannot help.  Those who want a position of power in government have to think responsibly, even if the proper functioning of our political system sometimes defends citizens when they don’t.

The Liberal Ironist hopes that you think without fear, speak your mind–eloquently, I must ask–and ask yourself when considering political action, “Am I helping to make the World a more- or a less-threatening place?”

11 Years After an Act of Terrorism

This blog started 2 years ago today.  The principal purpose of the Liberal Ironist is to offer political and moral opinion aimed at the lessening of human cruelty and the harshness of life (the aim and tendency of political Liberalism), and to offer a warning that our understandings of the Universe and our grasp of the good at their best are never more than another way of being human (which is the starting insight of the ironist).  2 years after this blog’s founding, we mark 11 years since a brazen act of mass murder by a very different political species–reactionary fanatics.

The terrorism of September 11, 2001 was the work of those who believed they had divine license to kill 3,000 people–principally American civilians but also foreigners and (a simple matter of probability with such indiscriminate killing in an urban area) their at least nominally fellow-Muslims.  This act of terrorism was carried out principally because of xenophobia; at the time the United States had thousands of soldiers–withdrawn by the Bush Administration following the invasion and occupation of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq–stationed in Saudia Arabia, homeland to the 2 holiest cities in the Islamic tradition.  The other reason for that act of mass murder was the United States’ support for the State of Israel, which these terrorists believed to be a Crusader state.  While this blog on principal countenances criticism of particular Israeli policies as legitimate both as part of its aim to advance humane treatment of one another and as essential to the health of any democratic polity, it is noteworthy that the same terrorists who were so obtuse in including about 3,000 non-combatants at work in their home cities as legitimate targets of a war were also obtuse in seeing no difference between a political controversy between 2 nations seeking a homeland now and a murderous invasion fought on religious pretexts that essentially sought to plunder rich Arab cities about 900 years ago.  The vain masterminds of September 11th  (whom, whether they have died grisly deaths, been incarcerated by the United States, or remain at large in Pakistan are all greatly-diminished and far from home) seemed to enjoy admonishing us with references to history, but the crudeness of their obsession with fitting-in to that history (and their rage against their own inability to control events) is more-striking than their crude understanding of that history.

Both as a people and through the mustered force of their government, Americans have done both great and stupid things in response to the terrorist threat that reared its head on September 11, 2001.  Many Americans turned-out to clear the wreckage of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan; meanwhile, George W. Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency assured Lower Manhattan residents and relief workers that their air was safe to breathe.  This lie led to respiratory illnesses and cancers among 70% of the first-responders at Ground Zero by as early as 2006; cancers from respiratory exposure to extremely-toxic asbestos may take decades to develop.  Then-New York Governor George Pataki established a compensation fund that expanded State death benefits for first responders who died from cancer following relief work at Ground Zero, but Federal action had to wait for the 112th Congress and the Obama Administration, whose compromise with Senate Republicans on tax cuts for the rich ended a filibuster and finally allowed passage of the James Zadroga Health And Compensation Act of 2010.  While there were scattered reportings of violent and at times deadly hate crimes–not just against Muslims but also against Sikhs and Hindus, whose religion wasn’t even nominally associated with the September 11th attacks–America as a whole did not regress 100 years in its social relations with minority groups.  That said, there was regression, both in the broad discretionary police powers of the USA PATRIOT Act (some of which had originally been proposed nearly 20 years before as measures to fight drug smuggling) and in the seizure of large numbers of American Muslims and Muslim immigrants on suspicion of material support for terrorism.  First opened to receive inmates in January 2002, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp was originally created on the reasoning that, being located at the US Navy base in Cuba, it was outside the jurisdiction of our country’s legal system.  779 men have been in carcerated at Guantanamo Bay on terrorism charges since that time; 600 have been released and 8 have died at the camp, including 6 suicides.  169 prisoners remain at Guantanamo Bay, half of whom have been cleared for release but remain in detention.  Today the prison is well-below it largest extent, and so far from the initial confusion and at times clumsy reaction following September 11th, both the number of those detained at the facility and their treatment is probably more-commensurate with the inmates’ suspected crimes.  Still, an untold number were simply wrongfully-detained, and the legal and moral snarl created both by their wrongful imprisonment and the torture or abuse of innocent and guilty alike at Guantanamo Bay may never be resolved.  And the allegations of abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay occurred in the shadow of far more-widespread cruelties committed against suspected enemy combatants at Abu Ghraib, Saddam Hussein’s old torture prison, after the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

It warrants mention that President George W. Bush was good-enough to clarify that we were at war with a particular terrorist group and group of political ideologists, not with the religion of Islam and not with Muslims generally.  You may say it was a common-sense thing to say, but the truth is he didn’t have to say it, and doing so certainly had a positive effect in grounding our thoughts in the uncertain months ahead.  Let us not forget the times when evils were averted with the right words.

Our invasion of Afghanistan to root-out al-Qaeda and their protectors, the Taliban, was fought pretty cleanly as nationwide invasions go.  Owing to its poverty, long history of war, minimal infrastructure or commerce, and the ease with which these factors feed into political corruption, the chances of Afghanistan actually consolidating a democracy remain poor.  But we did try to develop a democracy in that country, and the arrival of US forces in Afghanistan brought the extreme oppression of the Taliban mostly to an end.  It is atypical in history for counterattacks to be waged so little in the spirit of revenge.  Of course, this war of such comparatively narrow scope and justification was followed by the Iraq War.

4,805 Allied soldiers and 1,554 security contractors (read: mercenaries) killed.  16,623 soldiers of the new Iraqi government we created killed by Iraqi insurgents to-date.  A projected total price tag to the United States of about $1.9 trillion.  Oh, and if anyone is keeping track, over 110,000 Iraqi civilians killed.  Note that these figures are just of US and allied military forces and civilian bystanders; I haven’t even listed the toll of enemy combatants killed.  This is harm we have visited upon ourselves and upon foreign innocents.  When the dust settled, we found Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.  I felt much ambivalence about mentioning some of these misadventures of ours–this one in particular–because I know people are hurting and that I risk provoking partisan dispute on a day our entire country was wounded; but it occurred to me that such an episode, combining a failure of the media to ask important questions, of a majority of the public to stay informed and ask follow-up questions, and of top State, intelligence and Defense officials to see past their own wishful suppositions, has to be seen for what it is.  The Iraq War was an ideological blunder of epic proportions that cannot be understood outside of the sense of insecurity we felt in the wake of September 11, 2001.  We have learned some valuable lessons from our mistakes of that time, but this mitigating fact still leaves me with a heavy heart, because we could have perceived in advance the lessons that we apparently had to learn from blunt experience, and those lessons cost us (and a country that had nothing to do with September 11th) dearly.

To our great credit, in the end we didn’t “learn” the worst possible lessons from this experience.  We didn’t “learn” that the entire Middle East is incorrigible, nor did we “learn” that foreign interventions were never worth the trouble or expense.  Our grim experience in Iraq probably retarded our response at the cost of Rebel lives, but the NATO intervention in Libya, jointly spearheaded by UK, French, and US forces, brought a murderous tyrant’s 42-year rule to an end and gave a home-grown movement for democracy an unprecedented chance there.  Rather than be overtaken by hysterical fear over Islamists, we have cautiously maintained relations with the strategically-significant governments of Egypt and Yemen as their people deposed long-running dictators, asking the old guard to stand aside in deference to popular sovereignty and offering assistance as transitional governments seek to consolidate democratic change.  We have done a lot of good–and where the good that needed to be done has been better-suited to those who live in the countries in question, our leadership and we ourselves seem to have grown in wisdom and perspective, letting oppressed peoples take the initiative in taking government into their own hands when they’re ready and offering assistance when needed.

We also continue to kill or imprison the masterminds and pawns of al-Qaeda.  A complicated–indeed, seemingly-contradictory–resolve seems to be needed to defend civlization against terror without submerging one’s awareness in messianic license. Americans often view themselves as standing outside of history.  This myth allows us to make mistakes (including serious mistakes) for want of perspective, but it also allows us to transcend those mistakes faster than the politics or shared perceptions of other societies might.  I won’t stoop to pretending we always do right or that the history of the World is our story alone.  But we have seen the precipice and pulled back before, and when errors or injustices come to light we make a change.  We owe this capacity to adaptation both to our political institutions and the respect for it that is a basic part of our culture.  I am proud of how far we have come, and of the common concern of Americans, in spite of the differences that motivate it, that we must remain vigilant.

May the day’s recollections be sober but not ache, may you demand justice without malice or prejudice, and may you find, as you celebrate what you love, that those you might not understand are nonetheless good–worthy not only of life, but of freedom also.

The Assad Regime’s Failing Counterattack in Aleppo

The Assad Family Regime’s brutal counterattack against rebel positions in Aleppo, Syria’s 2nd-largest city, was taken by many spectators to portend a significant setback to rebel progress in the country’s growing civil war.  A grim indicator of the Assad Family Regime’s use of helicopter gunships, tanks and even fighter jets to hammer rebel positions, both the Red Cross and the Red Crescent of Syria agree that over 200,000 residents of the city fled over the past weekend alone.

Though the rebel Free Syrian Army has shown many signs of growing strength in July, from a stunning assassination of high-level military officials in the capital Damascus to concurrent territorial gains in that city, the lack of material means to fight the Regime’s gunships and armor columns (let-alone the fast and crudely-destructive fighter jets the regime is now prepared to deploy in its own cities) has clearly hampered has for days been taken to imply a massive regime counterattack and inevitable rebel retreat.  The former has clearly happened; the latter has been more-measured than anticipated.

Even as they fall back in the face of the Regime counterattack, the Free Syrian Army continues to make progress on other fronts where the government has become vulnerable.  Following an overnight battle, the rebels captured a Regime military base manned by about 200 troops of the Syrian Army on Monday morning.  Somehow, casualties were light on both sides, and the rebels captured 4 tanks in fighting condition.

A dozen Syrian military and police officers, including the Deputy Police Chief of Latakia, defected to Turkey last night.  At the same time Khaled al-Ayoubi, the Syrian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, resigned his post, saying he would no longer “represent a regime that has committed such violent and oppressive acts against its own people.”  It is unclear whether Mr. Ayoubi now intends to represent the rebels in some capacity, but his resignation from the Assad Family Regime was favorably-received by the UK Foreign Office.

Even if rebel claims that they are repulsing the government’s counterattack in Aleppo prove to be exaggerated, the very fact that the rebellion has reached this point is devastating news for the Regime.  With a 2004 census count of just over 2.1 million people, Aleppo is home to about 10% of all Syrians; through most of the conflict the city has at least outwardly supported the Assad Regime.  The use of gunships, tanks, and artillery in the city’s streets–along with what amounts in effect to a military blockade of many neighborhoods that has cut off both food staples and electricity–will alienate many supporters of the regime, as will the Regime’s somewhat-lighter hand in Damascus.  The Liberal Ironist previously reasoned that Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s initial unprovoked heavy-handedness in dealing with protesters followed by abrupt offers of concessions, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s less-sincere offering of the same under similar conditions, presaged the collapse of those regimes under growing rebel confidence.  But in Libya Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi”s contrasting zero-tolerance policy towards any and all dissent simply inflamed existing popular mistrust and anger towards the stationary banditry that passed for a government there, converting protests into armed insurrection.  The same is coming to pass in Syria, where the Free Syrian Army can claim to have received no foreign direct assistance aside from Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.  At no time has the Assad Family Regime made an offer of concessions, or even really of peace.  The very fact of the massive reprisals the Regime is now taking on a city that had in relative terms sat-out this civil war is a sign that differences between the government and most of its people are now unbridgeable, and that the government is losing its grip on the material means it needs to support itself.  The Liberal Ironist no more has a crystal ball than anyone else, and so cannot predict when the Assad Family Regime will fall, but I am confident that fall will come more-suddenly and dramatically than many observers now expect–as it did in Libya.

Assad Regime Claims Chemical Weapons for Use Against Foreign Aggression Only…But Hasn’t He Labeled the Uprising the Work of Foreigners?

Earlier today Syria’s listing Assad Regime made an unprecedented public acknowledgement of its chemical weapons stockpiles, assuring its already-brutalized public that it would never use them against its own people but warning foreign powers that it was prepared to use them against any foreign aggressor.

That is a nice assurance for the son and nephew of those responsible for 1982’s Hama Massacre to make.  Surely it is an especially comforting guarantee, coming as it does after Syrian President-for-Life Bashar al-Assad missed an opportunity by responding to the peaceful protests of early 2011 with naked violence matched only by the avowedly-monstrous Colonel Moammar Gaddafi of Libya.  In 17 months 18,000 Syrians–including a growing proportion of the Assad Regime’s contracting force of loyal troops–have died in a civil war that only had to happen because Assad refused to allow any peaceful protests.  He seemed to have drawn the lesson from the collapse of the seemingly-safe Ben Ali Regime in Tunisia in just 4 weeks and the seemingly-safe Mubarak Regime in Egypt in about 3 weeks that a zero-tolerance policy toward protest, including peaceful protest, was the only way to cow the Assad Family’s opponents.  Actually, a reasonably-informed outside observer could see that in both of those contexts it was the combination of unabashed corruption of the regime in the face of high unemployment and inflation, coupled with violent repression of initial protests followed by the abrupt prospect of concessions, and finally capped off by the unwillingness of both country’s militaries to crush the protesters, that brought both of those previously-quiet single-party states down so quickly.

Assad’s obtuse grasp of politics is a fitting complement to his brutality.  His “zero tolerance” approach to dissent was intended to demonstrate his resolve, but instead it has simultaneously militarized his opposition and greatly increased the plausibility of their appeal, leading to its rapid expansion.  At first the Assad Family Regime seemed to think it would have a simple time of it, simply besieging the southern town of Daraa where the protests began and fighting the protesters into acquiescence.  But in keeping with a classic blind spot of dictators, the full extent of economic discontent, the speed with which news of the Assad Family Regime’s cruelty spread and even the light in which it was seen all seems to have eluded Assad.  He has started a civil war he cannot finish.  And in the middle of last week, 3 (later, as it turned out, 4) members of Bashar’s inner circle were killed in an astonishing bombing in Damascus.

In response a friend found a level-headed entry on a blog specializing in political violence, calling on onlookers not to uncork the champaigne just yet.  Well, if the point is that the rebels will have trouble consolidating their gains in the face of the Regime counterattack, and that Bashar will now feel he has to double-down to save himself, yes, that all seems logical and borne-out.  But the Liberal Ironist is leaning heavily on the “For Now.”  About 1/2 of Assad’s inner circle was killed in 1 bombing.  This could only happen because the capabilities, resolve, and connections of the rebels to disaffected members of the Regime have grown.  They may have made bids for territory they cannot hold, but early last year the protesters in Syria were peaceful and were not armed; the Assad Regime is clearly on a long-term trajectory towards failure.  Between its isolation, defections, rebel expansion, Turkey’s hostility and growing Russian embarrassment, I really don’t think the Assad Regime has the resources it would need to successfully gamble for resurrection.  Just because it isn’t dead doesn’t mean it isn’t dying.  Barring far more assistance from Russia than just diplomatic cover–which Russia’s current prevarications suggest is unlikely–I don’t think the Regime can survive this.  There’s really no good explanation for how it can considering the rebellion has reached this extent already.

But now, the Assad Family Regime has the Obama Administration to deal with.  “We’re looking at the controlled demolition of the Assad regime,” said a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in response to Administration officials’ weekend announcement that the United States will now accelerate its efforts to provide aid to Syria’s rebel groups–though it will not directly arm them or advise Israeli tactical action at this time.  Since, as the New York Times article linked above indicates, Turkey, Qat

In the face of such a prospect, all the Liberal Ironist can say is that it is reason-enough to intervene on the side of the rebels in the 1st place, and that part of the assistance the United States should offer the rebels is clear: They need whatever training and equiptment we could hope to provide them to minimize the losses that would attend such indiscriminate killing by this dying Leviathan.

Chinatown in the Middle East: Cairo, Corruption, and the Myth of Urban Apocalypse

A friend of mine is studying urban development in Cairo for his dissertation.  Almost exactly 2 years ago he explained his assumption that “in the contestation over what a city looks like, you can get an unusual and rich perspective on collective identity.”  It sounded like some kind of strange holistic remark at the time, but I think I understand now, and I see what he means.  He is in Cairo–a nice representation of the problem with Egypt.  I owe my view of Egypt’s problems (and my sense of brooding over current portents) to the observations of my friend, heretofore and eternally known as Jon.

The Arab Republic of Egypt currently has about 90 million citizens, about 8 million of whom live abroad.  35-40% of Egyptians live in poverty, on less than $2 a day.  The economy is still very agriculturally-focused, though petroleum exports (particularly in transit through the Suez Canal) and tourism are both very important.  Egypt’s population has expanded rapidly over the past 40 years due to the introduction of industrial agriculture techniques which have made the country far less-dependent on the flood-rhythms of the Nile River (which rhythms have ceased anyway with the construction of the Aswan High Dam).  The City of Cairo had a 2006 census count of 6,758,581 people; combined with its satellite cities and suburbs the Cairo Metropolitan Area counted 19,439,541 people–nearly 1/4 of all Egyptians.  As Egypt is by far the most-populous Arab country and so the cultural center of gravity in the Arab World, so is metropolitan Cairo as the most-populous urban center in Egypt the stage where the various twists in Egypt’s modern political drama unfolds in earnest.

Ugh, I’ll try to keep a lid on such talk, honest.

A year ago Jon characterized Cairo as a chaotic jumble that works (though he never seemed inclined to describe the Egyptian state that way).  But in spite of the millions of families, the neighborhoods and informal associations that traverse winding and narrow streets and often equally informal living accommodations–including people living in the mausoleums of the Necropolis–many Egyptians apparently fear an unspecified coming explosion of their city.

When Jon originally told me this, I was almost indignant at the mere mention of the myth.  The idea that cities foster violence and social collapse is now old–and way off the mark: “Cities don’t explode.  They implode when too many of their people fear a coming explosion and flee to the suburbs, which hollows-out the tax and consumer base necessary for the city to support itself.”

“Well, I know, but this mythology of Cairo’s coming explosion has a lot of power over people there.  And it is encouraging people to move out of the city.”

I hadn’t known of the plans to build satellite cities on Cairo’s outskirts.  About 1/2 a dozen such cities are now in varying states of development, within commuting distance of Cairo, with populations of hundreds of thousands to several millions planned for the end of the decade.  This population shift will be expensive, and heavily-subsidized: Public water from the Nile–quite accessible to Cairo which flanks the legendary and still-essential river–will have to be piped upland miles into the desert to irrigate parks and shade trees, and to provide clean drinking water and sewerage for major cities that in some cases only recently broke ground.  Maybe these new towns will be paradise on Earth, but with Egypt’s comparative poverty and aridity, and the intensity of infrastructure and services that would be needed to plan several new cities outside of Cairo at locations that have no economic value aside from being outside of Cairo?  Wouldn’t diverting all that water so far afield be wasteful?

“Wouldn’t diverting all that water so far afield be wasteful?”

“Well, sure,” Jon granted.

“…Well?  Why are they doing this?!” I asked.  “Can this whole process really be driven by some mythological fear of urban collapse in Cairo?  What, the government is marshaling the whole country’s resources to help the rich escape?”  Then: “Wait…Who owns the land?”

“Well, this is where it gets sensitive: Many people with connections to Egypt’s military own land outside of Cairo that’s worthless desert right now, but once the water is brought there and those cities are planned-out it’ll be worth a fortune.  And the development firms that will lead those building projects are owned by relatives of leading military figures, or else military leaders otherwise have a stake in them.”  It was then that a thought occurred to me about Jon.  He might work-out all the angles in a complex political architecture, then in subsequent conversation might leave it to you to work them out yourself in asking him the right questions, which he answers discretely if not discreetly.  It might be he wants to see if the next question that comes logically to you corresponds with the one he had, thus affirming his conclusions; or maybe he is simply curious to see which parts of a potentially-political subject you find interesting without direction.

The Liberal Ironist is a student of political science in general.  As such I want to know more about power.

A 2nd thought occurred to me promptly after the 1st: If Egypt’s collective identity is supposed to emerge in Cairo’s “urban renewal,” that collective identity is the plot of Chinatown: A vested oligarchy appropriates a vast hinterland of little natural value but near to a growing city, and conveys a regular supply of fresh water to that land at great expense, literally granting ownership of the future to itself through what on the face of it is a wasteful investment of infrastructure.  The political discourse calling for the expansion of Cairo does go back decades; in its latest iteration, here is a poorly-translated but still-illuminating 1993 op-ed from al-Ahram Weekly.  I’ll be curious to see whether elite abandonment of Cairo for these satellite cities leads to the impoverishment and decline of this cultural and media center of the Arab World.  In a brief but revealing 2010 report, the New York Times suggested that this process is already underway:

“The Egyptian government has spent untallied millions of dollars building new roads and power and water lines to the desert areas it designated for future development. It has sold huge parcels of land to developers in opaque deals, and built some low-income housing. But it has relied primarily on private developers to put up the cities’ more expensive villas and condos, as well as the malls and offices.”

The article noted that some public housing has been built–in theory for the working class–but that poor squatters have often been relocated there, too remote from jobs in Cairo to support themselves there.  The Liberal Ironist cannot decide if this is part of a callous plan to compel poor squatters to abandon the Cairo area altogether, or simply the result of incompetence.

Why bring this up?  This is what puts Egypt’s recent military coup into context.  This offers you, dear reader, an idea of the immobile assets Mubarak’s old coalition of military officers and commercial beneficiaries of state largess want to protect.

Will satellite cities built on the outskirts of Cairo create the living and working spaces for a growing new middle class, or simply a means for the insular rich and the protected to get away from the toiling millions?  If it’s the former, a few more years of tyrannical peace could come to appear providential looking back, leading Egypt into the global economy–and delivering Egypt’s expanded middle class to an easier democratic transition later on.  This would be similar to the East Asian development model–though in those cases the development of human resources and promotion of a high personal savings rate were as important as the development of infrastructure.  In a worst-case scenario the rich and regime-connected simply move out of Cairo into its newest suburbs, leaving behind them a capital city in which they are now not personally invested.  Failing political institutions in Cairo and declining job prospects for the young people left behind could lead to a 2nd, more-radical revolution, one that would actually embody the anarchic sentiment and embrace of violence that die-hard regime supporters allege about the current Muslim Brotherhood.  This would have been caused not so much because of Islamist sentiments among the masses–which are present but seem more-conservative than radical–but because the last existing state institutions which are viewed as offering an independent and patriotic voice (namely, the courts and the military) would have bared their fangs, for the deplorable end of protecting their large shares of the pie.

The villain in Chinatown didn’t have to worry about a revolution in the future because the people of Los Angeles were always free to choose their political leaders, and even he with all his power just has to accept the result of any election.  But if a military oligarchy sacrifices the health of its largest city to a massive contrived real estate bonanza, they could separate hundreds of thousands of Cairenes from convenient access to their jobs, and leave Cairo proper without effective public goods provision.  Cairo is too big to ignore, yet the Generals have just indicated they won’t give people a peaceful means to hold their leaders accountable once these plans come off the rails.

Egypt’s Preventable Political Catastrophe

On Friday Eygpt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces assumed law-making (and constitution-writing) powers when the Supreme Constitutional Court disbanded the Egyptian Parliament.  The Court’s pretext was the invalidation of the parliamentary elections of late-November-late December 2011, which resulted in about 356 seats in the 508-member People’s Assembly (70%) going to 3 alliances of moderate-to-Salafist Islamist parties.  Some of the cruder observers in the West quickly predicted doom, but the ensuing months brought the troubling noises familiar to us from mature democracies, rather than the alarming foreign sounds characteristic of a hijacked revolution.

Lingering concerns over their sentiments on the status of women and religious minority groups (and on a more-Machiavellian note, their commitment to intelligence-sharing with the US and the peace treaty with Israel) aside, Egypt’s Islamist parliament seemed to have a pragmatic center interested in actual governing.  To be sure, it wasn’t going to be a liberal parliament, but it was going to be the most-representative lawmaking body Egyptians had ever had.  The Brotherhood’s political leadership seemed quite serious about establishing accountability and seeking consensus–on its own terms of course, but far more-seriously than the sclerotic and brutish (but admittedly Anglophile) Mubarak regime ever had.  It would displease the United States with some of its foreign and domestic policy choices and perhaps even offend our sensibilities, but it falls short of relativism to say that an elected Egyptian parliament would have been a good thing anyway.  Egypt’s religious conservatism isn’t the foremost issue here; consolidating the gains of Egypt’s democratic revolution is (or was).  As the most-populous Arab country, with the region’s cultural hub in Cairo, Egypt has (or had) the potential to demonstrate democratic best practice–and worst practice–to Arab countries currently in varying stages of the Arab Spring from democratic transition to civil war to icy regime retrenchment.  Outside of Islamist terrorists, every domestic political actor–the statist old guard, the young revolutionaries, the poor farmers, the moderate Islamist, the Palestinians, the Israelis, and us Americans–could have benefited in a non-trivial way from Egypt’s demonstration of true democratic give-and-take.  Submitting one’s political message to the people, as morally-specious and inconsistent in narrative as it may be, requires one to make an argumentative appeal, and to have enough trust in one’s countrymen to respect the result, including what one might find to be a deplorable result–at least temporarily.  The alternatives are personal exile or resort to political violence–terrorism if one doesn’t control the military and has few supporters, revolution if one’s supporters are numerous but civilian, and finally retrenchment and perhaps a politicide of dissidents if one is in power and unwilling to commit to concessions.

Democracy doesn’t guarantee total accountability of the government to the people–indeed, democracy sometimes reveals the perversity of too much democracy or even too much accountability–but good-enough looks wonderful compared to the caprice, corruption and violence of which so many of the World’s autocracies are capable, or arguably cannot hope to transcend.

The official story is simply that the interim constitution–which of course was submitted to Egyptians for referendum last year by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces–required that 1/3 of the MPs elected to the People’s Assembly be independents unaffiliated with a party.  For what it’s worth, that’s a stupid rule.  The Liberal Ironist mistrusts independents more than partisans–even if the latter can clearly be faulted for being ideological or unwilling to listen.  Partisans are highly-accountable.  With some general political knowledge and experience you typically know what they are going to say and do, and their rationales for either.  Hell, they want you to know what they are going to say and do.  Partisans are also inclined to hold each other accountable.  If a person goes into politics but has no use for parties at all, he is either not serious about the issues (What, he can’t choose between 2 or more parties with programmatic platforms?), a mercenary (If he’s such a freethinker, is he willing to trade the vote for transitory access to material benefits in legislation?), or vain (We should already know to watch-out for those ones).

Perverse as such a constitutional provision may be in theory, consider it in practice: The Supreme Constitutional Court found that many of the nominally-independent MPs had unofficial but clear ties to 1 party or another–a situation the Liberal Ironist very-ironically likes to call “reality.”  This led to the invalidation of last year’s entire vote–1/2 a year after the fact–and the disbanding of the Egyptian Parliament.

The Constitutional Court’s story is about legality.  There is another story, a widely-believed story about ideological suspicion between the pro-Mubarak “deep state” in the military and the courts, and a story that resonates far less abroad, about property and money.  This story happens to be the one driving this coup.

The ideological frame, promoted by the old-guard in the Supreme Armed Forces Council and most-explicitly expressed by Ahmed Shafiq (Shafik?), the incumbency candidate for President of Egypt and President-for-Life Mubarak’s last Prime Minister, is that the Muslim Brotherhood is unreconstructed from 30 years ago, when it killed then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel and attempted a violent revolution in Syria.  Shafiq implies that liberals’ worst fears about the Brotherhood are true, that it has stuffed the ballot boxes (almost a provocation for a Mubarak crony to allege) and that as we speak it is scheming with foreign powers (the US? Israel?!) to consolidate its monopoly over political life in Egypt.

I still think this is just propaganda, and I say that while acknowledging that in a mature democracy I wouldn’t support the Muslim Brotherhood based on its social policy.  But Egypt needs accountability–not just through elections but by derivation through some kind of change in Edypt’s reigning business-government tryst.  For Mubarak’s last appointed Prime Minister to lead the next Egyptian government, freshly following the disbanding of Egypt’s 1st freely-elected parliament by Mubarak-appointed judges and the military’s appropriation of the power to rewrite the constitution, and after apparently losing the popular vote to the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate…To accept this result is either to accept that Egyptians cannot be trusted with democracy, or that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces cannot be trusted not to answer further challenges to its political authority without violence.

Such results are not inevitable.  Actually, there are a variety of ways this could still play-out, starting with Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammad Morsi’s (Mursi’s?) apparent election to Egypt’s Presidency.  Ahmed Shafiq, sowing confusion and perhaps thereby hoping to have some votes thrown out to have the courts appoint him Egypt’s next President, has made parallel claims to have won the election.  These claims appear to be assumed solely by virtue of Shafiq’s role as a connected and vested member of the old military-backed regime, and by an unhelpful fear of the Muslim Brotherhood.

If the SAFC does accept Mr. Morsi’s election as Egypt’s next President, it still retains the power to rewrite the constitution.  We can expect the SAFC to protect many economic and property interests–and that is the 3rd explanatory frame for the current military government: Beneath the pretexts of constitutional enforcement or a struggle by the forces of order against Islamist ideology, there are the commercial interests of those connected to the military regime.  This is what the power base of the Mubarak regime wants to protect, because Egypt is a poor country and the Muslim Brotherhood has promised reforms to address corruption and inequities of wealth.

Carles Boix theorizes in his influential work of political theory Democracy and Redistribution that the most-favorable political conditions for a democratic transition are either those with a large middle class (or at least a narrow financial range between the rich and the poor) or those in which the rich can easily reinvest their wealth outside of their home country.  Both propensities for a democratic transition come back to the security of the rich from policies of extreme wealth redistribution: If the gap between the rich and the poor is relatively-narrow within a polity, the rich aren’t so worried that an elected government will attempt to appropriate their wealth, even in a protectionist financial system.  Alternately, if the rich can move their capital into foreign markets, they are less-vulnerable to wealth-redistribution policies.  (As an inverse consideration, government policies that tax wealth too heavily can scare foreign investment from a financially-globalized country.)  The upshot is that Egypt has both the structural conditions (a large underclass and a lot of captive assets such as stakes in state contractors or land), and political actors making the reformist pledges (such as the Muslim Brotherhood) to provoke retrenchment by authoritarian political forces.  Those authoritarian political forces are coherent, highly-centralized and empowered.

The proverbial pie has shrunk–slightly, but perceptibly.  On May 21, Egypt’s Minister of Planning announced that the country’s annualized GDP grew by 5.2 percent in the 1st quarter of 2012.  But her figures represented superficial statistics; GDP growth was 5.2 percent over that of the 1st quarter of 2011, at which time the economy contracted because the revolution against Mubarak was in progress.  The truth is that in the 1st quarter of this year Egypt slid into recession.  The Tahrir Square protests that brought Hosni Mubarak’s near-30-year reign in Egypt to an end were a young persons’ revolt, brought on by rising costs of staples and a lack of employment opportunities in a polity that was rigged in favor of corrupt ruling elites–and which treated dissenters cruelly.  If the military SAFC is smart, they will recognize Mohammad Morsi as the winner of Egypt’s presidential election to appease the justifiably-suspicious revolutionaries.  They could choose to secure their commercial advantage in the new political system discreetly, and allow the appointment of new judges and for free and fair parliamentary elections that will be binding.  Having taken this agressive step to protect their privileges, they could certainly choose to go no further.

The Liberal Ironist doubts they are that smart.  But even a “final” outcome of military retrenchment depends on the way an unrepentant dictatorship tries to develop the economy.

As it happens, Egypt’s plans for the future of “Cairo” are grandiose.  And they are set-up to profit the powers that be, and they might make things worse to boot.  If you have some time, the Liberal Ironist would like to move away from the news and discuss a development–pun intended.

Enough Dithering–Syrians Need to be Saved from Their Own Government

On Friday, the New York Times reported, Russian President and sometimes Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin expressed fears of a civil war in Syria, claimed to be neutral between its ally the habitually-murderous Assad Family Regime and Syria’s minimally-armed and disarrayed opposition, and deputized his Foreign Ministry to allege that unnamed foreign powers slipped through a Syrian military cordon in order to massacre 108 civilians in the Houla area.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is nothing if not a political coward, averred that her and government and President Putin’s “have the same interests regarding stability in the whole region, even if there is the one or the other odd difference in the path to get there,” such as whether or not shipping weapons to the Assad Family Regime is deleterious to peace or whether taking any kind of action whatever might be more effective in ending the bloodshed than taking no action at all.  In other news, the Earth continued to revolve around the Sun, maintaining a trend of about 4.54 billion years.

The Liberal Ironist understands that there are reasons why action hasn’t been taken in Syria to halt the bloodshed of what is clearly a nihilistic government; it’s just that none of these reasons for hesitation were very good ones, and they have become poorer, irrelevant or untrue with time.  In the 1st place, Syria’s opposition, unlike Libya’s, didn’t coalesce and see the writing on the wall sufficiently to request foreign institution of a no-fly zone quickly.  This, plus the lack of an obvious threatened rebel stronghold such as Libya’s Benghazi (which is larger than Washington, DC) may have led to an unfortunate ambiguity about the situation.  Syria’s population is more than 3 times Libya’s and in stark contrast to Libya Syria has a serious air force, meaning that the imposition of a no-fly zone over the country would be a war in itself; relatedly, with Syria’s rebels arguably weaker and less liable to receive defections from the government and military, and with that military being more-formidable, the prospects for as easy of a success as we had in Libya with such a cursory military engagement are dimmer.  Furthermore, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev early-on expressed relative sympathy for the rebellion against Libya’s brutal Colonel Moammar Gaddafi, and consented to a mid-March UN Security Council resolution intended to prevent war crimes, which was ultimately loosely-interpreted to justify 1-sided intervention to help the rebel Reds beat the loyalist Greens in that rapidly-emerging civil war.  Being “once-bitten, twice shy” as the expression of the specious goes, then-Prime Minister Putin apparently felt confirmed in his long-standing suspicion that if you give the United States any slack, it will use it to stop your allies from ruthlessly slaughtering hundreds of thousands.  Now, the prospects for a similar resolution getting through the Security Council to intervene in any way to stop the killing hover just above nonexistent.  As in the Security Council resolution that authorized the Korean War, it may require the Russian ambassador to the UN getting locked-out of discussion during a bathroom break for any resolution to pass.

Then there’s former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s mission to Syria to institute a peace plan designed to be accepted by both sides.  The Liberal Ironist gives Annan credit for trying the legal route (which, like eating chicken soup when you have a cold, at least can’t hurt).  Annan’s mission to Syria has also been beneficial in that he has wisely used the very lack of compliance from the Assad Regime with the terms of the agreement as a means to refrain on that government’s atrocities and basic illegitimacy.  In short, the essential failure of his mission–which yours truly considered inevitable–has still had a positive effect in that it helps keep the Assad Family Regime’s crimes in the news.

That said, consider the manner in which the Assad Family Regime ran-out the clock on Annan’s peace plan: Having called for a full, 2-way cease-fire by government and opposition forces on Monday, April 9th, to go into effect on Thursday, April 12th, the Assad Family Regime soon after demanded that the rather ill-equipped rebels disarm 1st, completely.  (The agreement was specifically supposed to provide for the Regime to withdraw its military forces from contested cities, so that international aid groups and observers could enter those cities and provide relief services.)  Then it let the deadline for the cease-fire run out and, having not observed compliance on the part of the understandably-skeptical rebels, simple kept up its campaign of suppression, entirely unabated.  The Assad Regime has made no effort to observe such a cease-fire since that time.  The government had indicated its support for Annan’s proposal early-on, thereafter leveling its special conditions on the rebels only as the deadline approached.  This indicates the Assad Regime only intended to benefit from an unconditional surrender of rebels who had become a real threat, or to stall-out any kind of foreign intervention for as long as possible.

Rami G. Khouri, writing for the Daily Star, a Lebanese newspaper, had an interesting intricate analysis of the moving parts Kofi Annan likely sees in trying to engineer a peace in Syria that has both internal and external institutional supports.  It is eye-opening to hear-out an explanation of how many political interests and benefactors would have to commit to a solution for it to be sustainable.  For example, agreement on certain political principles between the mutually-mistrusting United States and Russia is necessary for them to act as guarantors for a Syrian peace agreement, but other parties such as the People’s Republic of China, the European Union, Turkey and Qatar must probably be involved–but Saudi Arabia and Iran may be too politically-provocative to achieve much there.

The analysis leads me to the confirmation (aided, no doubt, by the fact that time is clearly running out for any agreement between the Regime and the rebels before a shooting war for territory really begins) of my doubts that anythin positive in Syria will happen without foreign intervention there.  As both the misgivings and the plausible-alternative policies begin to recede from view, we are left with a civilian death toll of over 9,000 and rapidly climbing since last-March.  Indeed, almost 2 weeks ago now, mercenary thugs hired by the Assad Family Regime apparently murdered 108 civilians in Houla, a town northwest of the northern city of Homs, most of them women and children, mostly execution-style.  As is characteristic of civil wars, exactly who performed the killings and why remains ambiguous.  But exactly what happens in these episodes is ambiguous for the same reason it can happen in the 1st place: The government either no longer retains the capacity to police the population, or else it lacks the legitimacy to police the population.  As we learned (or at least were reminded) in 2011, political illegitimacy can be as profound of a problem for government as material incapacity.  The Liberal Ironist can hardly think of a better idiomatic statement of the Assad Family Regime’s incapacity to govern Syria than its excreble investigation into the massacre in Houla.  The Syrian government “found” that rebel militia fighters inexplicably slipped past a Syrian military cordon around the area, shelled Houla with heavy weapons they haven’t ever used in a battle with the Syrian Army, and executed scores of women and children along with the men in order to  drum-up a pretext for the United Nations to invade Syria and violate its sovereignty!  In fairness, this is no worse an insult to our intelligence than Assad’s–or Gaddafi’s–grim prognostications of a civil war which they could end within hours simply by relinquishing a despotic grip on their countries.

Maybe no new UN Security Council resolution at all shall be forthcoming.  So be it, I say; the UN is good for a lot of things, just not supporting an urgently-needed humanitarian intervention at the moment.  But if the last lesson Russia’s past-and-present President learned is that giving in on a humanitarian intervention earns you accolades but loses you a minor ally, why not give him an object-lesson that holding-out on a brokered cease-fire between government and opposition earns you contempt and loses you a major ally?  There are ways to do this; a toolkit approach could work.  The Turkish government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has proposed a ground invasion into northern Syria to create a safe zone for the rebels; a no-fly zone could be established over this area, at least, with US, European, and some Arab air support as during the Libyan intervention.  We could arm the rebels; what point is there in declining to do this when Assad and Russia’s Foreign Ministry accuse us of doing this already?  Paranoid and isolationist states invite indifference into interventions if they issue charges that they’re already happening at all times.

President Obama was able to wait for the pieces to fall into place–just barely–in Libya.  With Syria the legitimate investigative and peacekeeping functions of the UN have failed because some of the veto-players in that organization are nakedly ill-intentioned.  It’s simple; let’s ignore them.  As Russia demonstrated the last time Vladimir Putin was its President–during the South Ossetian War in Georgia in 2008–a world power can frustrate the objectives of a weak state rather easily, particularly if the latter rules over people who want nothing to do with it.  If due process at the UN episodically serves the interests of the defenders of politicide, then we should learn to do end-runs around it until it removes the incentive to use the organization that way.  Let Turkey invade the north; let us give food, medicine, and more-dangerous things to the rebels.  If it comes to that, I’m pretty confident our current-generation fighters can handle dogfights with the Cold War relics Syria flies.  Our cognitive biases, not our judgment, lead us to focus on the (admittedly considerable) costs associated with such an intervention; if the good fight didn’t require an investment, no one would have to call it that.  We recognize the moral urgency of the situation in Syria; the only question the Liberal Ironist has is if any of the principal heads of state can recognize, as David Cameron, Nicholas Sarkozy, Barack Obama did in Libya last year, that we can create a strategic opportunity there as well.

What’s That? Political Mass Murderers Don’t Really Care About Sovereignty?!

You’ve got to hand it to Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad: He’s a lot dumber than he looks.  He was given an undeserved reprieve a week ago when former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, at the behest of the United Nations, brokered a cease-fire agreement between the Assad Family Regime and Syria’s rebel movement, which has been active for a year and seems to be living through a slower-motion version of the way a massacre could have unfolded in Libya last year.  In short order, President Assad topped what was clearly intended to be his great diplomatic salvation with a further, unreasonable demand: Syrian government troops wouldn’t withdraw from the country’s multiple besieged cities until after rebels agreed to lay down their arms.

He must be joking–rather, he must be bluffing.  It’s worth mentioning that Syrian government forces had stepped-up their campaign of violence against the rebels while making this demand.  In fairness (though I’ll not invoke the maxim here) it’s hardly historically-anomic for 1 side in a shooting war to press its attack in the days or even the hours leading up to an armistice; if peace negotiations will occur with territory held or relative capabilities of the military factions counting towards one’s bargaining position, trying to gain a strategic advantage over enemy forces in the last moments before a cease-fire may seem outrageous in terms of surplus loss of life–but it’s certainly a rational strategy.  But this being understood, to claim that the UN-brokered cease-fire agreement is off unless Syria’s rebels put themselves at Assad’s mercy–when this is neither generally-accepted terms for a cease-fire nor in keeping with the UN-brokered cease-fire plan actually struck–is an insult to the intelligence of the mediators of this cease-fire at a minimum.  To Syria’s incredulous rebels, it is a sign they should be fighting harder.

If you can actually believe it, this wasn’t Bashar’s biggest diplomatic provocation this week.  That would have to be Monday’s cross-border incursion into Turkey–in order to kill fleeing refugees.  Yes, you heard that correctly: Syria’s military forces will not respect the sovereign territory of its neighbors if they have a chance to shoot those civilians fleeing the violence of its restive cities in the back.  As REUTERS reported yesterday, the Syrian Army responded to the rebel Free Syrian Army’s escort of a party of refugees into the Kilis Refugee Camp in Kilis Province, Turkey by firing directly into the refugee camp on Turkey’s side of the border.  This led to the Turkish government’s closing of the border later in the day for security purposes, which in the short term probably plays into the Assad regime’s plans to…well, kill a lot of people.

This escalation of hostilities seems to have been met with shock; maybe we have become desensitized to the irony of governments that murder thousands of their own civilians out of convenience making a plea for the inviolability of their own sovereign territory as a matter of principle.  If the concept of a government’s sovereign territory isn’t an extension of the concept of the personal integrity of its citizens or subjects, what is the point of having such a concept?  Rather than being a sacred trust, such sovereignty would be little-better (and in some cases, just as contingent) as gang territory.  If a government is so operationally-unconstrained that it will murder the people it is responsible for wholesale, what cause other than fear of the immediate consequences could possibly restrain it from violating its neighbors’ territory out of the same brute calculation?

Russia and China, both seemingly congenital human rights violators among nations but also  by history and strategic necessity among the 5 Permanent Members of the UN Security Council, have previously used their veto power to prevent any UN Resolutions of substance being issued on the Syria question.  Both Russia and China pressed for mediated talks between Assad and the rebels, but have interpreted such mediation in ways that were at least plausibly aimed at rapproachment between both sides.  Russia hasn’t publicly taken a position on Assad’s last-minute demands towards the rebels, and China so far has done little more than issue a plea yesterday for both the Assad Regime and the rebel uprising to honor the cease-fire which was set to start then.

Since the Assad Regime has continued its attacks on the rebels in northern cities today, and Annan’s cease-fire was intended to go into effect yesterday, the cease-fire appears to be off.

Where do we go from here?  It would be folly to think the governments of Russia and China will suddenly want to make penance for their support for Assad when this has never prevented them from pursuing their interests with murder-prone governments such as Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia or Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s Sudan.  What we’ve seen in recent weeks is just how little the President’s “reset” of relations with Russia and China has profited us.  The current Assad patriarch has revealed himself to be no less-abashed a mass murderer than his father, and Russia and China choose to define the festering civil war in Syria entirely as a zero-sum game between them and us for influence in the Middle East.  That is an interpretation, not an insight.

Turkey’s Erdogan government, through its diplomatic corps, has chosen to darkly imply that it is once again considering military action against Syria to push its armed forces back from its border.  We’ve allowed Syria’s rebels to hang by a thread for months without issuing anything so much as the term “unacceptable” that foreshadowed last year’s intervention in Libya.  Turkey is a longtime ally in good standing; it has accepted tens of thousands of refugees from collective punishment in Syria and for its humanitarianism it now finds itself vulnerable to cross-border incursions like those Sudanese militia made into Chad to hunt-down refugees fleeing the violence in Darfur.  Why let perpetrators of genocides and politicides hide behind the pretenses of sovereignty when they regularly create–and pursue–streams of humanity issuing from their own killing fields?  I say we should shore-up our commitments to our allies (such as Turkey) and to our values (such as the protection of civilians) rather than repeat a deference to nonplussed and unscrupulous world powers.

The Erdogan government has also previously entertained the idea of occupying a small area of northern Syria as a rebel safe zone.  I think that would be a good start.  If Syria regards that as an offensive action now, it should have accepted the cease-fire proposal after it became clear its violence was driving tens of thousands of refugees over its borders.  If Russia and China find a resultant hastening collapse of the Assad Regime objectionable, they should have put this morally-vacant dictatorial protege on a shorter diplomatic leash. A strong intervention now on the side of the rebels would send a message that we can play their Realpolitik game, too.