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Posts tagged ‘Syria’

May 21

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Did Charles Tilly Labor in Vain?

By Will H. Moore

Last week Jonathan Panikoff posted a stream of clap-trap and nonsense at Small Wars Journal to support his headline that, in Syria, “The True Chaos Will Begin After the Fall of the Regime.”

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Why do I sigh?  Mr. Panikoff is, of course, correct, if by “chaos” he means lots of people will be killed. I’m not certain that’s what he means, but I think it is at least part of it. Two things are troubling. First, the point has nothing to do with Syria: it is a general point that holds anywhere that an irregular transfer of power takes place a new state must assert its authority. Charles Tilly taught us this, first in his study of the French Revolution (The Vendee, 1964), and more generally in From Mobilization to Revolution(1978, see esp. pp. 191, 214-22). Yet Mr. Panikoff fails to mention this.

Instead, and this is the second part that wears on me, he trucks in what used to be Sovietology, which is a form of interpretation and prognostication akin to what one finds on ESPN: experts familiar with the names of various principals opine about the interests of each, intrigue among them, coalitions, etc. These folks are, as far as I can discern, blissfully unaware of the extent to which their ideas and interpretations are colored by standard narratives in their culture (ranging from children’s tales, fiction for adult consumption, and religious texts, to learned scholarship). In that sense it is rather unfair for me to pick on Mr. Panikoff, for he is but one of literally thousands of analysts who engage in this practice. Please take this critique, then, as targeting those analyses of which Mr. Panikoff’s is but one example.

Charles Tilly’s work (by which I am largely referring to his pre-1990 writing) was unusually informative. But perhaps the point most strongly branded onto my brain by Chuck are points three and four on pp. 218-29 of From Mobilization to Revolution. It illuminates beautifully (1) why you are an ignoramus if you wear a Che Guevara t-shirt (he directly oversaw the slaughter of thousands of Cubans denied due process, but if you like mass murders, by all means, celebrate Che) and (2) why so many of us were stunned beyond words when the Bush administration banned Ba’athists, who made up the overwhelmingly majority of Iraq’s military and police forces, from government service, thus creating a “monopoly of coercion” vacuum.

Third, the revolutionary coalition is likely to fragment once the initial seizure of control over the central government apparatus occurs, and that fragmentation itself tends to produce further struggles involving violence…. Fourth, the victorious polity still faces the problem of reimposing routine governmental control over the subject population… As the government returns to its work of extracting and redistributing resources, it finds  people reluctant to pay taxes, give up their land, send their sons to war…. And so a new round of violent imposition and violent resistance begins.

Tilly continues to make several interesting claims, and I leave it to those interested to pursue them. I wish to emphasize both the abstract concepts and his use of active voice. Tilly’s work provides us with neutral concepts such as challenger, contender, coalition, and bureaucratic apparatus. He speaks of mobilization processes, routine governance, and competition. He also recognizes that government impose control, extract taxes, and redistribute resources. These are activities pursued by a self interested state, challenged by groups of people who prefer not to cooperate, if they can. It is absolutely devoid of Manichean narrative: there are no “white hats” or “black hats” to be found. Yet Charles Tilly is dead, and as I search for evidence of the impact of his work, I fear it may be shrinking, not growing.

Returning to posts like that offered by Mr. Pannikoff’s, such analyses of  ”coming chaos in Syria” fail not only to add content to what we learned from Tilly, they actually subtract content by leading us to view what might happen next through the same lenses we might use as we consume Survivor, a soap opera, or The Walking Dead. And that, folks, is why I sigh.

Cross-posted at Will H. Moore’s personal blog.

May 6

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On the Perils of Red Lines

By Erica Chenoweth

Barack Obama meets with his national security team. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

Barack Obama meets with his national security team. Official White House photo by Pete Souza.

  • Our very own contributor Dan Byman has an op-ed in the Sunday New York Times arguing that Obama shouldn’t draw red lines. His article assumes that Obama meant to draw the red line at chemical weapons use, which seems dubious now that…
  • The selfsame edition of the Times has printed a front-page piece suggesting that Obama didn’t really mean to draw a red line at the use of chemical weapons. Instead, mentioning the red line was “unscripted” and “off the cuff.” I can sort of see how this could happen. At this point, the international illegality of the use of chemical weapons (especially against civilians) is fairly noncontroversial. Violation of a norm that the rest of the world has taken for granted since World War I would easily put Syria back into the “rogue state” category. My guess is that someone asked the president “What is the US’ red line on Syria?,” he simply retrieved the easiest “off the cuff” red line that sprung to mind, and choosing chemical weapons use because (a) everyone knows it’s abhorrent; and (b) he thought that Assad would never do it; so (c) the US would never be called to action. Others take issue with this standard, but the rest of the administration has since viewed it as a safe bet and has returned to this red line routinely. This may be complicated by the fact that…
  • A UN investigator reports that it may be rebel groups, rather than the Assad government, who have used chemical weapons. It’s important to emphasize that this report is based on somewhat inconclusive evidence. [Update: The Syrian rebels have vehemently denied this claim.] But if true, it highlights a moral hazard problem – the fact that opposition groups may deliberately provoke or even cross the red line in order to generate an international intervention that (they think) would tip the balance in the favor.
  • On the other hand, Israel has no problem drawing red lines. Benjamin Netanyahu notoriously drew a red line when it came to Iranian nuclear proliferation, and in recent days, Israel has launched several “defensive air strikes” against unnamed targets assumed to be sites of weapons transfers to Hizballah. The Israeli government has an explicitly low tolerance for Iranian missiles or chemical weapons falling into the hands of its more immediate enemies. But when the Israel Embassy’s spokesman was asked about the recent air strikes, he provided a definitively scripted response: No comment. But the message is clear to Iran: Israel responds with force when Iran shares weapons with Hizballah, and Israel will respond with force if Iran approaches the red line on nukes.

Regardless, it is clear that neither the enforcement nor the non-enforcement of red lines has halted the killing of civilians as the Syrian tragedy unfolds.

May 1

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Do Red Lines on WMD Use Matter?

Guest post by Lionel Beehner

USMC photo by Sgt. Andrew D. Pendracki.

USMC photo by Sgt. Andrew D. Pendracki.

Do red lines matter? The Obama administration has faced mounting criticism for setting a line in the sand on Syria — warning that the movement or use of chemical weapons would be punished — and then apparently failing to act on its promise. The criticism has come in two varieties: First, those like John McCain say the line was a dumb idea because it basically hands Assad a blank check to do anything else short of using chemical weapons, including mass indiscriminate attacks against civilians, targeting mosques and minarets, and displacing millions of Syrians. Along this line of criticism the red line feels arbitrary and strange, since the killing of over 70,000 Syrians by conventional means would seem a graver violation of international humanitarian norms than the use of chemical weapons. Moreover, the previous use of such weapons in the region, like Saddam’s 1988 gassing of Kurds in Halabja, barely warranted a peep out of Washington at the time (In fact we were complicit in giving Iraq relevant equipment, arms and intelligence support that abetted the attacks).

Chemical weapons, of course, have been around since the Peloponnesian War, when sulfur was used to burn down cities. The Brits proposed burning sulfur during the Crimean War in hopes the winds would help them gas Russian troops at Sebastopol. Both Germans and British famously employed chlorine and mustard gas during the First World War. Interestingly, during the Second World War, shortly after the Italians sprayed mustard gas against the Ethiopians in 1936 and the Japanese fired gas-filled shells to force a Chinese retreat in 1941, FDR issued a direct warning to the Japanese and Germans not to use chemical weapons. His threat worked (Obama should reread his World War II history).

A second line of criticism stems from international relations literature on reputation costs. If a leader draws a line in the sand and then fails to follow through on his threat, presumably others will think he is weak and thus be less likely to be deterred from making future provocations. In Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling argues that a state’s reputation for resolve “is one of the few things worth fighting over.” Broken commitments affect our future ability to credibly deter aggression and hurt our relationships with and promises made to allies. Not everyone agrees with this line of logic. Daryl Press, for instance, believes that power is what matters to make threats credible, not a state’s past actions. Jonathan Mercer also discounts the importance of reputation and resolve during foreign crises. In other words, threats are situational, and so Obama’s backing down on Syria would not signal to the Iranians that he is weak and unwilling to enforce red lines drawn.

I disagree with this logic. On Syria, if the United States does not either intervene or escalate its pressure on the regime, the message is clear: First, we are helpless to do anything, so dictators, go nuts. Second, if you have WMD you have a blanket of immunity from outside intervention, so be sure to rearm those chemical, biological, and nuclear stockpiles. Finally, to Iran – any red line we draw in the sand is basically just suggestive. Go on spinning those centrifuges because we really don’t mean what we say. Obama should either a) not draw red lines or make promises he has no intention of keeping; or b) follow through on his ultimatum by gradually tightening the noose around Assad, which could see fence-sitters among the Syrian population such as the Christians and Kurds switch sides, create dissension within Assad’s inner circle, and weaken the more extremist elements within the opposition. Presumably a more engaged US will strengthen secular groups within the opposition, by diverting funds and arms away from the Al-Nusra Front.

To be sure, a US or NATO-led intervention is not some panacea that will paper over all the sectarian grievances, personal feuds, or other triggers for postwar violence in Syria. It will hasten the fall of the regime, but not guarantee a smooth aftermath. In fact, it could easily portend a messier post-Assad Syria, simply because it will leave in placed several armed actors whose relative power will be left unclear, tipping the scales toward those who are best organized and most willing to use violence, which in this case are Islamist parties (There’s a reason why the Bolsheviks took power after Russia’s civil war).

Even still, a democratic Syria run by Islamists is preferable to both the status quo of civil war or a return to a Baathist dictatorship at peace with its neighbors. The likelihood of a secular democrat coming to power are virtually nil. If that is the lofty expectation of US senators pushing Obama to intervene, then we should stay out. We should intervene because it will save lives, improve our standing in the region and our ability to project power and dictate events, and weaken Iran (Though a Sunni-led Syria does not necessarily guarantee it will join the Saudi-led bloc against Iran given how the region’s dynamics make for strange bedfellows, but presumably it will weaken ties with Tehran, which helps our leverage during nuclear negotiations).

Assad has already destroyed the minaret of a UNESCO-protected mosque in Aleppo (and one of the most gorgeous places of worship I’ve visited in the region) and allegedly used chemical weapons against his own people. The question then becomes: What more would he have to do to warrant an international response?

Lionel Beehner is a fellow with the Truman National Security Project, a doctoral student at Yale University, and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a former senior writer.

Mar 6

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Political Violence Thought of the Week

By Erica Chenoweth

UN Photo by Marie Frechon.

UN Photo by Marie Frechon.

Why would Syrian rebels abduct UN peacekeepers stationed in the Golan Heights? Here are two potential reasons:

  1. Provocation. The Syrian rebels — or at least this faction of the rebels — want to provoke more international involvement in Syria’s conflict. The rebel group responsible claims that it will continue to hold the 20 or so abducted UN peacekeepers until the Syrian army withdraws from the Golan Heights. This is a slightly strange demand and is a dubious strategy for several reasons. First, I highly doubt that protecting UN peacekeepers is high on Bashar al-Assad’s list of priorities. Assad is already no friend of the UN and probably feels that Russia and Iran’s stable backing keeps him relatively well-defended from international pressure. In other words, this provocation is not likely to move Assad at all. It is, however, more likely to provoke outrage on behalf of the international community, and fears that the conflict will spill over into Syria’s already fragile neighborhood. The Syrian rebels have long sought to influence international outrage and to push it to such a degree that major powers would intervene with more force. I think this is the most likely explanation for this incident, but contrary to rebels’ expectations, I doubt that it will work.
  2. Accident. We don’t always acknowledge the importance of accidents, coincidences, or incidental violence in the course of conflicts. Observers seem to think that major incidents like this are deliberate — designed with strategic intentions and meant to have some kind of strategic impact. But given the complexity, confusion, and “fog” of war, it may be just as likely that a group of rebels happened upon this outpost, and someone in the group thought it would be a good idea to occupy it and detain its inhabitants to use as leverage.

Incidental or not, this action is not likely to improve the strategic standing of the Syrian rebels. The prime narrative in the US, at least, is that “we still don’t know who these rebels are.” Engaging in actions like this do little to elicit further sympathy from the international community; instead, they just make the conflict look like more of a mess to avoid.

Feb 26

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Resolving the Syria Crisis: Conference Report

Syria Conferencer PosterBy Oliver Kaplan and Erica Chenoweth

On January 10-11, the University of Denver hosted “Resolving the Syria Crisis,” a conference featuring participation by academics, Syrian activists, journalists, and a plenary session with Michael Ignatieff, Richard Falk, and Kenneth Roth. The event was hosted by the Center for Middle East Studies, which is part of the Korbel School of International Studies. The Center hosts its official launch event today, Tuesday, February 25th.

Here are some of our key observations from the conference.

  1. The Syrian case is unique… Or is it? Scholars would often try to support their empirical claims (and policy recommendations) by invoking analogies or patterns observed across historical cases. However, the Syria specialists would routinely reject these claims on the basis that “Syria is different.” This was a common source of disagreement — just how “different” Syria is from many other civil wars from history. Whether Syria is comparable to other cases depended in part on the policy options the commentator supported. Proponents of foreign military intervention, for instance, proffered cases like Libya and Bosnia; precedents that support their pro-interventionist stance. Others felt the violence and severity of repression had no parallel. In our view, the validity of analogies comes down to the level at which one is conducting their analysis. Certainly if one gets specific enough differences can be found between cases, while at higher levels cases may have more in common. In sum, the policy debate could benefit from some Research Design 101.
  2. Unarmed civilians remain resilient. The English-speaking representative of the Local Coordination Councils (LCCs) mentioned that the LCCs continue to document several hundred demonstrations per day, indicating that the civilian population remains highly active in the struggle against Assad. This might come as a surprise to some readers, since most of the recent news coming out of Syria has centered on conflict incidents. Oliver Kaplan also highlighted an important sub-narrative about how, similar to other conflicts, some Syrian civilians that are caught in the crossfire are finding nonviolent ways to survive through social cohesion. He identified various instances of inter-sectarian harmony, ethnic and religious minority group cohesion, and conflict early warning systems. As one of the activists remarked, “civil resistance is alive and well in Syria.”

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  3. Civil war or one-sided violence? Activists and opposition groups take issue with calling the fighting in Syria a civil war, viewing it more as one-sided brutality by the Assad regime or sometimes even calling it “genocide.” A more appropriate term might be politicide, where violence is directed against political opponents. But these days, it is also clear that the Free Syrian Army and its militia affiliates are themselves responsible for plenty of deaths as well, meaning that it is a civil war (albeit a lopsided/asymmetric one) by any conventional standard.
  4. Some activists blame the “Islamization” of the war on the lack of Western aid. One activist was disgusted by US State Department envoy Victoria Nuland’s statements that “our hearts are in Aleppo” (“We don’t need your hearts!”) and that “we don’t need more militarization” (“Then how are we to prevent more Aleppos and keep the movement secular?”). Syrian opposition groups are confused by the US stance. They see contradictions between America’s initial reluctance to take action (i.e., intervene military or send heavy weapons) to stop the conflict’s Islamization and later decision to blacklist the Islamist militia Jabhat al Nusra as a terrorist organization.
  5. Syrian opposition groups want foreign powers to impose a no-fly zone and humanitarian corridor. So did some of the other observers. However, their arguments rested on five assertions that deserve careful consideration: (1) that rights-respecting rebel groups would then gain the upper hand in the war and usher in a swift victory; (2) that Western powers would then gain more political influence over the longer-term outcome of the conflict; (3) that the West has a moral imperative to act now; (4) that such actions would not give Assad useful propaganda about foreign invasion or  carte blanche to increase repression; (5) and that the West would now change its position and pursue these policies when there has been foot-dragging for almost two years. When confronted with evidence, however, that an international military intervention could result in more civilian deaths and lengthen the conflict, advocates of this stance fell back on the claim that Syria was different from previous historical cases, or that the moral imperative justified such action regardless of the consequences.

The Center for Middle East Studies is planning to eventually publish the papers from the conference in a collected volume. We look forward to this scholarly contribution on such a timely and important topic.

Feb 25

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Ongoing R2P Violations in Syria Highlight the Urgency of Global Governance Reform

Guest post by Eamon Aloyo

UNAMID peacekeepers in Dafur, Sudan. UN Photo by Albert Gonzalez Farran.

UNAMID peacekeepers in Dafur, Sudan. UN Photo by Albert Gonzalez Farran.

Bashar al-Assad’s military and some opposition rebels have committed, and will likely continue committing, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria. Over the course of the crisis at least 60,000 people have been killed – many innocent civilians – 2.5 million displaced, untold amounts of property destroyed, and, as reported by the International Rescue Committee, cases of war-related rape have occurred  Assad is responsible for most of this destruction, and the situation is deteriorating. The rate of killing has increased from 1,000 per month in the summer of 2011 to 5,000 per month since July 2012, and a UN official estimates that 100,000 could die in 2013.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine provides a framework through which to respond to mass atrocities, but the failure of the international community in Syria highlights the need for institutional reform if R2P is to be consistently implemented. In 2001, a nongovernmental, multinational team of high-profile individuals released a report called the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which developed R2P in response to the mass atrocities in the 1990s such as those in the Balkans and Rwanda. Their central point was that states have the primary responsibility to protect their citizens from mass atrocities, and the international community has secondary responsibilities to do so whenever states are unable or unwilling to protect their own people. Surprisingly, just four years after the release of the report, heads of government agreed to R2P’s central principles in the World Outcome Summit Document.

Since then, the international community’s failure to adequately respond to the atrocities in Syria, Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and elsewhere have illustrated the inadequacy of the R2P norm alone. Institutions that can respond quickly and with adequate resources to R2P violations are necessary if innocents are to be routinely protected.

Rather than proposing specific reforms here, I suggest that a group of prestigious individuals comparable to the authors of the ICISS from governments, NGOs, businesses, and IGOs should form a commission to propose feasible ideas for integrating R2P’s laudable goals into global governance institutions. Only such a group could garner the political capital to achieve such reforms.

The political climate to achieve global governance reforms may now be available due to a unique moment in history. President Obama, who has embraced R2P ideas through his participation in the Libyan intervention, cannot run for reelection and may thus be willing to press for unpopular reforms of global institutions. France’s ongoing intervention in Mali exhibits Francois Hollande’s willingness to support foreign military action, and he could ride the wave of support the intervention has brought him to advocate for such reforms. Developing countries such as Brazil — which has offered an innovation to R2P known as “responsibility while protecting” — and India, are eager to exercise their powers on a global stage, and this opportunity for institutional reform may be in their interests. China and Russia might be persuaded to authorize such a commission to show that although they do not support intervention in Syria, they are not the callous actors their critics make them out to be. NGOs have honed their skills at developing new institutions in recent decades by contributing to the development of the ICC and the Landmine Treaty Ban. IGO leaders have themselves proposed reforms to their own institutions. Many businesses should support such reforms because instability and destruction of their infrastructure is bad for their bottom lines.

International actors should use the inadequate responses to the ongoing Syrian crisis as an opportunity to ensure that R2P will be institutionalized rather than an afterthought. Ad hoc international criminal tribunals, as some suggested Western leaders did to mollify their consciences after their failures to protect innocents in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, or just pressing for holding Assad and other responsible for their violations of international criminal law at the ICC is inadequate. Although such criminal accountability is important, it does not address the structural, and more pressing, issue of how to actually protect innocents. We should use the international community’s failure in Syria as a springboard for institutionalizing R2P. Potential victims deserve it.

Eamon Aloyo is a Research Associate at the One Earth Future Foundation.

Feb 19

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Can We Please Have Useful Reporting?

npr_logoBy Will H. Moore

Over the weekend National Public Radio broadcast a story about rebel gains in Syria. During the segment host Rachel Martin and reporter Deborah Amos discussed the fact that the Syrian government was permitting aid to travel via truck from Damascus to the rebel-held north portions of the country. Martin asked Amos why the UN couldn’t just deliver the aid through Turkey, which is closer to the areas where the aid is needed.

This sort of morality play disguised as journalism drives me to distraction: not only ubiquitous, it also obscures analysis and understanding. The question should never have been asked, but questions like it always are because they cater to a Manichaean narrative – bad, evil people are preventing UN aid workers from assisting innocent victims. This narrative infantalizes the forced migrants who have fled, and at the same time obscures understanding about why the situation occurs.

Image by The Guardian.

Image by The Guardian.

Why must aid be channeled through Damascus? First, like anyone else seeking to cross an international boundary, aid agencies (UN, other IGO or NGO) must gain permission from a country to operate. Second, aid implies shipping, and shipping raises the spectre of smuggling. A reporter like Amos is well aware that intelligence agencies sometimes operate under the cover of aid work, so while it is certainly defensible to judge Assad’s decision to restrict aid to the rebel-held areas to routes beginning in Damascus as reprehensible, we must also recognize that it is both prudent and sane. Martin and Amos’ exchange obscures the latter to implicitly highlight the former.

Third, and likely most importantly, one might wonder why Assad would permit humanitarian aid to flow to the north at all. He certainly wasn’t concerned about the death and misery of those people when he authorized the military missions from which they fled. Alas, the five minutes of reporting by Amos offers nary a hint. Yet the answer is plain: by running aid through Damascus Assad’s regime can skim, and perhaps even gouge, the shipments. In addition, forcing aid through Damascus also permits a channel via which to circumvent sanctions. During the 20th century the renegade Rhodesian regime weathered international sanctions in no small part because there was no feasible way to trade with neighboring Malawi or Zambia other than via rail lines running through Rhodesia. It was a widely known “secret” that the Rhodesians not only skimmed shipments, but also smuggled via cargo marked for delivery elsewhere. 

Whether Martin and/or Amos are incompetent or shills catering to ratings I have not an inkling. But it is important to underscore that their exchange is so common to be banal: I pick on Amos only because I caught the report and cobbled together a few minutes to write this. I could literally write this post about half a dozen different reporters per day. That fact makes each instance no less frustrating.

Jan 14

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Why Syria’s 60,000 Deaths Should Not Shock Us

Screencap from YouTube video reportedly showing anti-regime fighters in Aleppo.

Screencap from YouTube video reportedly showing anti-regime fighters in Aleppo.

Guest post by Lionel Beehner

The United Nations has reported that the conflict in Syria has exceeded 60,000 fatalities, with UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay describing the figure as “truly shocking.” The number is indeed harrowing but is not out of line with past civil wars, even those of the post-Cold War era. On average, most civil wars kill about 3,000 people per month, which means the nearly two-year conflict in Syria is about par for the course. The international community has tended to view the Syrian conflict as an outlier, when in fact the war has pretty much followed the pattern familiar of other internal conflicts.

The war started out as a nonviolent uprising demanding greater rights that triggered a bloody regime crackdown. Violence begot more violence, and the peaceful demonstrations quickly morphed into open rebellion, though one limited mostly to Syria’s periphery. Arms and outside assistance were slow to trickle in as the opposition found itself overmatched and fractured. (The first phase of an insurgency, according to Mao, is the organizational stage, which requires enlisting support among the population.) The attacks that followed against government forces and facilities were mostly of the guerrilla-style hit-and-run variety, especially in rural areas where government control is weaker and where the rebels can hide out in the population (the second phase of an insurgency is armed rebellion). The opposition drew greater support during this stage, and there were even a few high-profile defections among Syria’s political and military elite, albeit none among Assad’s prominent inner circle of Alawites.

As the use of force by the rebels became more brazen – evidenced by attacks against military installations in and around Damascus – the rebellion entered the third (and presumably final) phase: open civil war. The Assad regime responded by employing indiscriminate attacks against urban areas heavily populated with civilians aligned with the opposition as a kind of collective punishment, as well as by escalating the violence beyond its borders and into Turkey. This new phase of the war accelerated the refugee crisis that was already underway, a development expected in conflicts where fighting is most intensive in border areas. Soon the number of internally displaced Syrians soared into the millions, with hundreds of thousands seeking safety in Jordan, Turkey and Iraq. Finally, as the opposition made impressive gains, it found itself increasingly hijacked by a more virulent strand of insurgency that embraces Islamist fundamentalism (as evidenced by its use of beheadings and suicide bombings), a movie we saw before in Iraq.

Even the international community has responded in an almost predictable fashion – call it the inside-out version of the Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief: Because of the initial lopsided use of violence, the first outside reaction is almost always one of anger or shock, followed by behind-the-scenes bargaining, then depression of sorts sets in at the lack of tangible results, as well as denial of the continuous bloodletting (which is where we appear to be at the moment), followed by either intervention (Kosovo, Libya) or acceptance (Rwanda).

Perhaps the best way to observe the Syrian conflict is as a course correction to the wider Arab Spring. If anything, the (comparatively) bloodless revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were outliers, and the violent civil war in Syria adheres to what scholars might regard as the “norm” of how states cope with low-intensity revolts and insurgencies. Two years ago, the perceived costs of overturning one’s government in the Arab world appeared very low, and so we saw a cascade-like wave of popular uprisings across the region, many of which unfolded with comparatively limited violence — similarly to the cascade of revolution that swept the former USSR in 1989. The violence meted out to these revolutionaries escalated as regimes in Libya and Bahrain, being good Bayesians, updated their odds of staying in power after the fall of longstanding rulers in Tunis and Cairo, and decided that violence made more sense than compromise. Obviously, if it were painless to overthrow one’s government, there would be a wave of popular revolutions all across the developing world (a puzzle to some Africa scholars is why the continent has seen so few secessionist wars and redrawing of colonial-era boundaries).

Consider the wave of color revolutions that swept through Eastern Europe a decade back, which mirrored a similar trend. There were notable first movers after successes in Georgia and Ukraine, followed by imitators in Azerbaijan, Andijan (a city in Uzbekistan), and Belarus that were met with violent crackdowns rather than political concessions, which effectively put the kibosh on the wave of “color revolutions.” Protesters have updated their “revolutionary thresholds,” to borrow a term famously used by Duke University’s Timur Kuran. Civil wars such as Syria’s, in this sense, serve as a stark reminder that wresting control from entrenched regimes comes at high stakes. The idea that Assad would fall without outside assistance was always a pipe dream.

That is because Assad has learned what repression techniques worked in the former Warsaw Pact, but failed in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. His playbook has rested on using massive and indiscriminate force, but not to the degree that would trigger a military intervention from outside powers – there have been no reported Srebrenica-style massacres, nor has Assad given any fiery Qaddafi-like speeches in which he has promised to go door-to-door and wipe out the insurgents. He has kept the killings to a relatively slow yet steady drumbeat of violence, while shrewdly backing away from moving around his chemical weapons, a red line for outside intervention. Further, Assad has kept his benefactors abroad – namely the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians – as obstructionists to any meaningful UN-sanctioned intervention or peace deal that would have him cede authority or escape to some desert island or Siberian dacha.

Interestingly, the regime’s counterinsurgency tactics have shunned those championed by the US military under David Petraeus. Assad has not focused on winning Kurdish or Christian “hearts and minds” or on separating the “fish” (Free Syrian Army) from the “sea” (Syrian civilians), instead treating them all as a  target. His military does not “clear, hold and build” cities or spread security like an oil spot; instead it reduces entire neighborhoods to rubble, which serve as reminders to fence-sitting Syrians what the costs are for joining the opposition. His father’s “Hama Rules” back in the early 1980s provided a blueprint for such tactics. The use of selective violence is obviously more costly as it requires intelligence from non-combatants on whom to target. Without territorial control, the ability to use such discriminate violence is difficult, which may explain why the Assad regime has relied mostly on indiscriminate attacks, or “counterinsurgency on the cheap.”

To be sure, not everything in Syria has gone according to what scholars might predict. Civil wars emerging from revolutions tend to be short-lived affairs, according to Stanford’s James Fearon. The longest wars, we know, tend to be those fought between minorities along the periphery and a deeply entrenched majority population and regime. Such “sons of the soil” campaigns often involve funding from contraband such as drugs or diamonds (Colombia’s ongoing battle with the FARC provides a case in point). Although there has been no direct military foreign intervention, Syria’s conflict has been sustained by support from outside powers: the rebels have been aided by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, while the regime enjoys the financial backing of Iran and Russia. Some scholars posit that meddling by foreign powers can drag out civil wars that otherwise would have burned out (see the Democratic Republic of the Congo), which also would predict Syrian atrocities to continue for the foreseeable future.

The high number of fatalities in Syria should not come as a shock to the international community. Syria has evolved into a classic civil war, emerging out of the embers of a failed nonviolent revolution. It is not some outlier that needs to be explained away. With some reasonable certainty, most scholars in the field would predict that war will persist for at least a few more years and kill several more tens of thousands, barring some massacre that prompts outside intervention, which is unlikely. Like America’s response to gun violence at home, we go berserk after massacres (and rightfully so), but have a strangely high tolerance for day-to-day killings from firearms, whether on our own city streets or in civil war settings abroad. (Remember it was the prospect of a massacre in Benghazi that prompted NATO’s no-fly zone in Libya and Qaddafi’s eventual overthrow.) Massacres “shock the conscience of mankind,” it would seem, and so require forceful action, yet slow trickles of violence do not make news, whether on the streets of Chicago or Aleppo. High body counts only shock us after they reach alarming thresholds. (Consider, for instance, the storm caused in 2006 when The Lancet reported that 600,000 Iraqis had been killed in the war). A question for social scientists and psychologists is why massacres tend to prompt action, but civil wars and insurgencies, which are often characterized by a steady drip-drip-drip of violence, do not.

The violence in Syria has effectively ended the so-called “Arab Spring,” much as the authoritarian crackdowns in Eastern Europe a decade back did to the color revolutions. Expect the violence to continue unabated, since assuming there are no Srebrenica-style massacres in Syria, there will be no outside military intervention by the West. Hence, expect the war’s fatality figure to easily climb above the 100,000 threshold in a year’s time, prompting yet another round of “shock” and soul-searching from abroad.

Lionel Beehner is a fellow with the Truman National Security Project, a doctoral student at Yale University, and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a former senior writer.

Jan 9

4 Comments

PV Thought of the Week: Can Apps “Inform” the Public?

By Erica Chenoweth

Screencap from "Endgame: Syria".

Screencap from “Endgame: Syria”.

I was struck by this recent story about Apple rejecting a proposed iOS game called Syria: Endgame. From the game’s description on GameTheNews:

“Developed in around two weeks, the game allows users to explore the options open to the Syrian rebels as they push the conflict to its endgame. Each choice the user makes has consequences – the types of military units you may deploy, the political paths you choose to tread. Not only does each choice impact the current situation but your choices may also impact the final outcome. Users can play and replay events to see how different choices on the ground might lead to different outcomes.”

There is also a chance to sample the game.

This brings up a couple of thoughts and questions:

  1. The game is meant to approximate “real life.” Why would this approximation yield satisfaction to players? Is it because they want to learn how to be better rebels?
  2. The game was developed in two weeks! If this kind of technology — where news aggregation can be translated into artificial intelligence and then repackaged into a real-time civil war simulation — proves valuable, it opens a host of new opportunities for rebel groups and opposition movements in general. I’ve discussed before the inherent difficulties of strategic planning facing non-state actors: they rarely have the time, resources, manpower, or space available for realistic simulations. But if games like Endgame:Syria become more ubiquitous and speak to ongoing civil conflicts, simulations may eventually prove to be ample substitutes for real war games.
  3. If the latter hypothetical were to come true, then here’s an interesting research question: does war-gaming improve rebel performance in civil war? Governments certainly seem to think that war games help their own forces’ military performance. But it remains to be seen whether this perception would extend to rebel military performance. My hunch is that this would be largely contingent on the level of coordination and organizational discipline within the rebel group — which is noticeably lacking in Syria. But where rebel groups are well-organized, easily accessible tools like this may provide opportunities for more strategic (rather than just tactical) approaches to fighting. I can see why Apple would be dubious of approving the game.
  4. Apple rejected Endgame: Syria. Is this because of technical specification problems, or because they do not want to put their brand behind something that trains people to be better rebels? If the former, then the rejection’s not a very interesting story. But if it’s the latter, here is an interesting example of a powerful corporation anticipating a moral hazard down the line.

Dec 13

3 Comments

Evading Invasion: Syria’s Chemical Weapons and Obama’s Audience Costs

By Erica D. Borghard and Jack Snyder

President Obama in a November briefing. White House photo by Pete Souza.

President Obama in a November briefing. White House photo by Pete Souza.

Syria’s recent chemical weapons activity has raised the specter of audience costs for President Obama. Audience costs — the domestic price political leaders pay for failing to follow through on their threats — are said to be the key mechanism explaining why democracies prevail in international crisis bargaining. Because democratic leaders can go public with threats that effectively tie their hands, they can more credibly communicate their resolve and force target states to back down. But some (including yours truly) have questioned whether audience costs exist at all and, if so, how much they actually matter.

On August 20 of this year, Obama held a press conference during which he issued the following threat to Bashar al-Assad’s regime:

“We cannot have a situation in which chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people. We have been very clear to the Assad regime but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation… We are monitoring that situation very carefully, we have put together a range of contingency plans, we have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that’s a red line for us, and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front, or the use of chemical weapons. That would change my calculations significantly” [emphasis added].

Yet on December 3, when the media began to report troubling movement of Syria’s chemical weapons and the preparation of some of those stockpiles for battlefield deployment — both of which would activate Obama’s August threat — the President responded by issuing a new threat that sidestepped his previous commitment to respond with “enormous consequences”. The movement of chemical weapons and talk of “red lines” were mysteriously absent from Obama’s new threat:

“And today, I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad and those under his command: The world is watching. The use of chemical weapons is and would be totally unacceptable. And if you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons, there will be consequences, and you will be held accountable” [emphasis added].

What does this shift suggest about the role of audience costs in international crisis bargaining? Following audience costs theory, we should expect to observe the following. First, Obama’s initial threat should have successfully deterred Assad from moving and prepping his chemical weapons. Second, pending the failure of Obama’s deterrent threat, the President should have followed through on his commitment to respond with “enormous consequences”. Third, given his failure to respond, Obama should be punished by the domestic public for inconsistency between his words and deeds. So, what do we actually see?

Events have played out off the equilibrium path predicted by audience costs theory. Obama’s initial threat did not deter Assad from moving and assembling his chemical weapons. This suggests a number of possibilities, all of which raise doubts about the role of audience costs: Assad didn’t get Obama’s message clearly; Assad received the message loud and clear, but doubted Obama’s resolve to follow through; or Assad received the message, but believed the domestic costs to his regime of backing down outweighed the costs of ignoring Obama’s threat.

Furthermore, rather than follow through on his threat to impose “enormous consequences” on the Assad regime for the movement and preparation of chemical weapons, Obama circumvented the terms of his first threat by issuing a second one that committed the President to respond to the use, rather than the movement, of chemical weapons. This second threat was buttressed by comments made by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stressing that Obama was indeed committed to some type of action against Syria if it were to use chemical weapons.

But how did Obama so easily slip out of his initial commitment? By playing a game of semantics. According to the New York Times, “the White House says the president has not changed his position at all — it is all in the definition of the word ‘moving’.” Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Thursday that ‘‘’moving around’ means proliferation,’ as in allowing extremist groups like Hezbollah, which has training camps near the weapons sites, to obtain the material.” This implies that, even if audience costs exist and leaders do in fact worry about them, their impact on international crisis bargaining is minimal because leaders can easily extricate themselves from commitments with some hand waving and word games.

Notably, both versions of the Obama threat failed to precisely stipulate what specific behaviors would trigger a US response, and what the contours of that response would look like. Secretary Clinton was even more adamant in stressing the fact that the US would not specify how it would respond to Assad’s use of chemical weapons: “I am not going to telegraph in any specifics what we would do in the event of credible evidence that the Assad regime has resorted to using chemical weapons against their own people. But suffice it to say, we are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur.”

Leaders’ threats typically build in wiggle room in this way. Their ambiguous threats put the opponent on notice, but they leave themselves an escape hatch. Leaders avoid rigidly locking in their future actions because such tight constraints are bad policy. As the New York Times reported last week, US officials are aware of these constraints: “‘We’re kind of boxed in,’ an administration official acknowledged… ‘There’s an issue of presidential credibility here,’ the official said. ‘But our options are quite limited.’” The administration recognizes that verbal inconsistency is awkward, but these costs pale in comparison to the risks of prematurely committing to fight yet another war in the Middle East. Recent reports have suggested that the US would need to deploy 75,000 ground troops to adequately secure Syria’s chemical weapons at a time when neither the President nor the domestic public finds the prospect of another ground operation in the Middle East palatable.

Some in the President’s domestic audience (notably, the New York Times) did indeed notice Obama’s inconsistency; an awareness which counts in favor of audience costs. However, the Times has been consistently hawkish on the Syria issue, generally adhering to an editorial policy that favors more pressure and leans toward military measures to resolve the Syria crisis. Would the newspaper have been so alert to audience costs if it did not have an already interventionist attitude?

Regardless, the American public has displayed a steady aversion to military involvement in Syria. Audience costs theory would predict that dovish publics would punish leaders for failing to follow through on their threats, even though they might agree with their leaders’ policy. While it is too early to infer whether Obama has paid significant domestic political costs for inconsistency, we anticipate that he won’t because history shows that policy substance is more important to the public than consistency.

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