The U.S. And Libya: Normalization Of A Stormy Relationship

By David Mack
This article was published in Foreign Service Journal on 04/01/2011

Relations between Libya and the U.S. have a turbulent history: War at the beginning of the 19th century; U.S. government support for Libyan independence after World War II; official and private-sector American engagement in the development of Libya’s oil wealth and human resources in the mid-20th century; Libyan terrorism and U.S. military retaliation in the 1980s; U.S.-engineered economic sanctions and isolation in the late 20th century; and restoration of diplomatic relations in 2006.  

Hopefully, the 21st century will continue to feature positive interaction between Libya and the United States.  But for that to happen, both sides must employ serious diplomacy and show mutual respect in order to build on shared interests.

Early History of Bilateral Relations

Our first policy toward Libya was appeasement.  The young United States established relations with the Bey of Tripoli in 1796 and signed a treaty of peace and friendship.  Behind the fancy diplomatic language, the reality was that in return for an annual U.S. government payment, the Tripoli-based corsairs, who had preyed on U.S. shipping, guaranteed its free passage.  Along with being a military hero, President George Washington was a foreign policy realist.  He correctly assessed that it was hard enough to maintain land forces and a modest navy to deal with the British, French, Spanish and other threats, and he warned against entangling alliances even with states that could have defended our commerce in the distant Mediterranean.

The second U.S. policy emerged in 1801.  Thomas Jefferson’s administration decided to establish a naval presence in the Mediterranean, it halted payments to the bey and spent the money on beefing up the U.S. Navy.  That led to our first foreign war, which started badly with the Libyan capture of the U.S. frigate Philadelphia and incarceration of its crew in 1803.  Two years later, William Eaton, the U.S. naval agent for the Barbary States, led a detachment of eight U.S. marines and a much larger foreign mercenary force overland from Alexandria to seize Derna, a port in eastern Libya.  Eventually, the Ottoman Empire reasserted direct rule in Tripoli and agreed with the United States and European nations that state-licensed piracy should no longer be an acceptable tool of national security. 

For the next century or so, the U.S. had minimal dealings with Libya.  We were of little significance in the Mediterranean, compared to the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France and Italy.  In 1911, Italy invaded Libya and established a colony.  Completely shut out of business, we closed the U.S. consulate in Tripoli in 1916.  Especially after the advent of fascism, Italian colonial rule proved brutal and racist.  The Arab population in Libya actually decreased between 1922 and 1943, and very few Libyans benefited in terms of modern agriculture, education or health care.    

U.S. forces landed in French North Africa in 1942, and U.S. diplomats gained a place at the table for postwar planning.  In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began a new policy toward Libya when he opposed plans for further European agricultural settlement.  At the 1945 Potsdam Conference, President Harry Truman declined to take a trusteeship for Libya, and in 1949 we supported a U.N. resolution for Libyan independence.

The Importance of Oil    

The new U.S. policy was cradled in the rhetoric of morality dear to Americans – self-determination and independence of colonial peoples.  It also reflected the power politics of the Cold War.  With its vast spaces and year-round flying weather, Libya was the perfect place for an air base.  Moreover, Libyans were among the poorest inhabitants of the world, with an annual per capita income of less than $50.  Their postwar economy was based on subsistence agriculture, the export of esparto grass for fine paper and scrap metal from the battlefields.  So rental paid by the U.S. and British governments for air bases looked like a good deal to a Libyan government with few options.

Even before Libya achieved independence in 1951, Washington started an aid program emphasizing badly needed secondary education, English-language and vocational training.  While foreign government aid was desperately needed during this period, by the 1960s it was dwarfed in economic importance by the investments and training programs of foreign oil companies, especially the American companies.  Libya’s first oil shipment was in 1961, and the country’s oil income expanded rapidly during the decade.

By 1969, the U.S. and British air bases in Libya were of declining strategic importance, but Tripoli had become a producer of energy vital to the economies of our West European allies and profitable for American companies.  While the U.S. still enjoyed a cozy relationship with an aging monarch and his sclerotic political system, Libyan popular attitudes were not isolated from the rest of the Arab world.  The war of June 1967 had left Arabs everywhere with a feeling of humiliation and a conviction that Washington had aided Israel’s victory, achieved in large part by its devastating surprise attack on the Egyptian Air Force.  This set the stage for the Libyan Revolution of Sept. 1, 1969.

Eventually, U.S. policy adapted to these new realities.  Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, claims in his memoirs that he favored a covert action program to overthrow the new Libyan leaders and keep the airbase, but yielded to the State Department view of the primacy of the oil interests and declining value of our military base.  Much later, during the Reagan administration, the U.S. supported and provided some military training to Libyan émigré opponents of the Qadhafi regime.  They proved unreliable. 

Ambassador Joseph Palmer left Tripoli in 1972, as U.S.-Libyan diplomatic relations were becoming more troubled.  Not until 2009 did a U.S. ambassador return to Tripoli.  Nonetheless, the volume of U.S.-Libyan trade grew until 1979, and large numbers of Libyan students received higher education in the United States.  But after a Libyan mob sacked the U.S. embassy in 1979, we withdrew our remaining official personnel from Tripoli.  A short time later, we gave Libyan diplomats in Washington their walking papers.  Libya was placed on the terrorism list, and the travel of business people and students between the two countries ground to a near halt

Between 1980 and 1992, several acts of terrorism dominated the U.S. image of Libya.  U.S. policy toward Libya featured military pressure, diplomatic isolation and unilateral sanctions.    By 1992, we were able to make our punitive policy more effective with the passage of U.N. sanctions.  Libyans began to feel the cumulative economic and political weight of being a pariah state.

Movement Toward Reconciliation

Starting in 1992, Libya took initiatives for secret talks to improve relations.  After years of U.S. rebuffs, the Clinton administration joined Great Britain in secret talks with Tripoli in 1998.  The George W. Bush administration continued the dialogue.  The combination of this diplomatic framework with well-crafted and nearly universally applied U.N. sanctions led to the Libyan decision to change course. 

The Libyan government took steps to end support for terrorism and cooperate with the Scottish court established to prosecute the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.  Nearly all of the families of the victims of Libyan-linked terrorism eventually accepted its offer of compensation.  By December 2003, Washington, London and Tripoli were ready to formalize changes in Libyan foreign policy that were already evident.  Libya’s full implementation of the agreement to rid itself of chemical and nuclear weapons programs accelerated the positive trends. 

Since then, the U.S. government has followed a gradual process of normalizing our relations.  For some, the process has been too fast.  This is true of many families of American victims of terrorist acts connected to the Libyan government, for instance.  Coverage of Libya in the U.S. mass media is sporadic and tends to focus on the personality of its leader, Muammar al-Qadhafi.  Human rights groups and some Libyan émigré personalities emphasize Libya’s lack of internal political reforms.   

Others believe normalization has been too slow.  Libyan government officials, business people and educators all make this complaint.  It is also the view of most American companies, who have been at a competitive disadvantage in Libya due to the years of sanctions.  They point to the speed with which European governments normalized relations with Tripoli starting as early as 1999 with the suspension of U.N. sanctions.

Within a short period, most of our close allies had opened full embassies in Libya, and many established direct airline links.  The process of normalization accelerated after December 2003, with visits to Tripoli by top leaders of countries like Britain, France, Italy and Germany, just to name a few, often with delegations of businessmen on their coattails.  There have also been return visits to West European capitals by Qadhafi, illustrating the reality that Libya was no longer isolated.  It was Washington that was out of step with the rest of the world, and we no longer had international leverage to influence Libyan behavior. 

In contrast to our allies and competitors, the highest-level U.S. official to visit Libya was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and that did not happen until the very end of the Bush administration, in December 2008.  (Her Libyan counterpart had visited Washington in January 2008.)  U.S. Ambassador Gene Cretz, whose nomination was held up by the Senate for more than a year, did not arrive in Tripoli until 2009.  After some months, full consular services returned to Libya’s capital, following pressure by impatient U.S. companies and U.S. universities.

In September 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with her Libyan counterpart, Foreign Minister Musa Kusa, in New York on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly session.  A State Department spokesperson indicated the conversation focused on regional issues such as the Palestinian-Israeli talks and the situation in Sudan, matters where the U.S. government seeks Libyan support.

Cautious Re-engagement with Tripoli

The Obama administration is in the process of broadening bilateral relations, especially in the areas of economic and scientific cooperation and expanded person-to- person contacts.  Despite the recent signature of a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement, the priorities of U.S. policy remain strategic, not commercial.  In this respect, the U.S. differs from nearly every country of the capitalist world, whose governments tend to make winning business contracts the principal measure of their relations.  However, growing numbers of Libyans and Americans are eager for expanded business and tourism and a resumption of the educational exchange that characterized U.S.-Libyan relations in the 1950s and 1960s.  Recent steps by both governments to normalize visa issuance and travel are overdue and popular.

The strategic benefits to the United States of Tripoli’s current posture are immense.  Libya is no longer an adversary state located on the Mediterranean Basin.  Instead, it can be a positive example to the North Koreas and Irans of the world of how to come in from the cold and become a respectable member of the global community.  To be blunt, there are too many bad governments seeking bad weapons for the United States to bomb them all into submission. 

The Bush administration needed an alternative paradigm for international cooperation, and diplomatic engagement with Tripoli also fits well with the overall foreign policy of the Obama administration.  Normalization on a basis of mutual respect, including intelligence exchanges on terrorist threats, serves the security needs of both states.  Economically, Libyan oil and gas reserves offer diversification of supply in a world of tight energy resources.

A major incentive for the Libyans has been full international acceptance.    Restoration of diplomatic relations with the U.S. made it possible for Libya to be elected to the U.N. Security Council.  Its record over the course of two years was generally responsible.  Despite its own bad memories of U.N. sanctions, Libya voted for enhanced measures against Iran, and hosted the recent Arab League summit meeting that supported a resumption of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

Qadhafi, who recently concluded a year as chairman of the African Union, has cooperated with other African states and with the United States to ameliorate the Darfur problem and to prevent the growth of ungoverned spaces in the Sahara and Sahel regions, which could harbor terrorist organizations.  Tripoli has also made useful contributions to the development of African economies. 

Internally, Libya is introducing cautious economic reforms, but thus far it has not initiated a process of political or constitutional change.  The country has an elaborate formal structure of direct democracy, but non-Libyan observers view the current political system as authoritarian.  The most meaningful civil society institution in Libya is the weak but ambitious private sector.  Over the long term, interaction between Libyan and U.S. companies, and the reopening of American universities to Libyan students, can do far more to encourage reforms than lectures by human rights organizations. 

Libya’s leaders sometimes make unpredictable, even disturbing, statements.  (For their part, Libyans often regard Washington’s public statements as arbitrary and unfair.)  Tripoli’s actions, however, have followed a generally prudent road in recent years, so three successive U.S. administrations have tried to maintain a steady course in pursuing closer ties, recognizing that it was a good idea to bring Libya in from the cold.  Without false optimism or illusions, we should try to maintain the relationship and expand it where we can. 

After all, the principal rationale for U.S. diplomatic relations is not to celebrate friendships with ideal democracies blessed with free-market economies.   The real diplomatic challenge, and the one that offers the most benefit, is moving countries from the status of adversaries to former adversaries to partners, to deal with a world of global threats and cultivate common interests.  Washington and Tripoli can take pride in having moved this process forward. 

The history of Libyan-American relations invites attention to a larger foreign policy lesson, as well.  Neither government advanced its interests greatly by the use of military power in isolation from other forms of persuasion.  Indeed, overt or covert violence was often the prelude to setbacks for both sides.  This was true from the early 19th century through the 1980s. 

Beginning in the 1990s, both governments employed a wider range of the tools of statecraft.  Latent military force for purposes of deterrence played a role, as did international sanctions.  But it was essential to construct a diplomatic framework to make such measures effective.  Diplomacy allowed policymakers in both Washington and Tripoli to reconsider their respective interests and seek to advance them in a coolheaded way.   Such an approach has applications in the resolution of other international conflicts. 

Is Algeria Next?

By David Kenner

This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 24/01/2011

 

While the community of Middle East leak-watchers is focused on Al Jazeera's release of 1,600 documents from the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, WikiLeaks has released a number of U.S. diplomatic cables that call into question the long-term viability of Algerian strongman Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Particularly in the wake of Tunisia's revolt -- and the U.S. Embassy's success at identifying the seeds of unrest there -- these cables deserve a close read.

The most engaging report is a 2008 cable on disaffected Algerian youth known as "the harraga," or literally "one who burns." Unlike Mohamed Bouazizi, who lit himself on fire in Tunisia two years later, these men aren't burning themselves -- they're burning their identification papers before setting out on makeshift boats in an attempt to reach the shores of Spain or Italy. It's an unbelievably dangerous journey: The embassy estimates that over 90 percent of the harraga die at sea, are detained indefinitely by North African authorities, or are returned to their host country. According to one article cited in the cable, up to 50,000 Algerians and Libyans attempted to reach European shores in search of economic opportunities in 2007.

From the Algerian regime's perspective, perhaps the most troubling aspect of this story is that the harraga hail -- like Bouazizi -- from the society's educated classes. One boat, the embassy reported "includ[ed] five university graduates and two doctors." The grandson of a former Algerian president also departed the country in this way and "has not been heard from since."

A 2007 cable signed by U.S. Amb. Robert Ford -- now the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Damascus -- lays out the consequences of this disaffection more explicitly. The Algerian regime, he writes, is "plagued by a lack of vision, unprecedented levels of corruption and rumblings of division within the military rank and file."

The most explosive comments in the cable are relayed to the embassy by Said Sadi, an opposition leader. Sadi described a conversation that he had with Gen. Toufik Mediene, Algeria's head of military intelligence, who "acknowledged that all was not well with the health of Bouteflika and Algeria writ large." When the conversation turned to Algeria's endemic corruption, Sadi reports that the general "motion[ed] silently to the portrait of Bouteflika that hung over their heads" to indicate where the problem lay.

Ford hedged his bets in late 2007, writing that the embassy does not expect an imminent revolt in Algeria. But in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolt -- and with Algerian protests and self-immolations mounting -- the moment may just be now.

A Tunisian Revolution That's Bloody Than Jasmine

By Eric Goldstein from Qasserine in Tunisia
This commentary was published in The Washington Post on 24/01/2011

In this hardscrabble corner of southern Tunisia, near the Algerian border, "Jasmine Revolution" seems a misnomer for the popular uprising that ousted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Jasmine suggests the middle-class villas in greater Tunis, their outer walls covered with sweet-scented vines. "Jasmine Revolution" suggests intellectuals, artists and professionals bringing a police state to its knees by marching arm-in-arm.

Tunisia indeed has a large middle class, and educated, relatively well-off Tunisians played a key role in toppling the regime. But in Qasserine and several surrounding cities that consider themselves the cradle of the revolution, the story has been more about blood than jasmine.

Human Rights Watch collected the names of 17 residents of Qasserine whom police gunned down during street protests Jan. 8-10. Six died around the same period in the smaller city of Tala, about 25 miles north. These two cities lost more than the official number of 21 dead nationwide that the Ben Ali government gave shortly before collapsing; the exact toll is not yet known. But to the west, five more died in Regueb and two in Menzel Bouzaiane. In the center of this region lies Sidi Bouzid, the city where the peddler Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on Dec. 17, triggering the revolt. Police also shot protesters in the capital, but this southern region bore the brunt of the casualties.

The provisional government says 78 died nationwide and has declared three days of mourning.

Qasserine is the other Tunisia, where most people say their main demand is jobs, and the most-chanted slogan was "Khoubz wa ma', Ben Ali la!" ("Bread and water, Ben Ali no!").

The frustration here was not well known because until Ben Ali fell, virtually no foreign journalist or human rights researcher could usefully visit this inland region. If the secret police did not spot and turn you back, you would have found almost no resident willing to speak honestly, for fear of a harsh interrogation or worse. This was confirmed to me by several residents, now basking in the sudden profusion of television crews profiling their revolt and poverty - including reporters from Tunisia's reborn state television, who during Ben-Ali's 23-year authoritarian rule came here only to film ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

Qasserinites earned this attention the hard way. My colleagues and I spoke with families, eyewitnesses, medical officials and others here and in Tala last week who told us how riot police units brought in from elsewhere fired live ammunition at protesters, hitting them fatally in the groin, abdomen or head, and striking several in the back. Most protests were peaceful; in others, youths burned tires and threw rocks and in some instances Molotov cocktails. But the accounts we heard suggest that security forces routinely shot to kill, including in situations that could not be considered life-threatening, such as when youths hurled stones and set tires aflame after police used tear gas to disperse residents marching in a youth's funeral procession Jan. 10.

The fatal shootings enraged Tunisians nationwide. It is one thing to know that you live in a police state, another to see the police mow down your countrymen. In the bread riots of 1984, Qasserine residents - now the parents of the youths who revolted this month - took to the streets and paid a heavy price. Since Ben Ali became president in 1987, Tunisians have had no experience of the police killing demonstrators on this scale - for the simple reason that the police rarely allowed demonstrations to get off the ground.

When police repression did not end the recent unrest, Gen. Rachid Ammar, commander of the army, reportedly refused to order his troops to fire on protesters. Qasserine residents say that on the afternoon of Jan. 10, the army suddenly replaced the anti-riot police in the city. Soldiers have since handled the continuing demonstrations without major incident. 

In Qasserine, a well-informed medical source laid out the forensic evidence that the police had shot to kill, then asked me not to cite him by name. "We don't know where this [revolution] is going," he said. "The agents who killed all these people are still out there, with their guns."

The residents of this region are breathing easier, but many voice a second demand alongside their continuing call for more jobs: punish those who killed their sons and brothers.

It is not only grieving families who have an interest in accountability. If Tunisia is to erect a rights-respecting security apparatus to replace one based on torture and intimidation, it needs to bring perpetrators to justice and establish a full, public record of the price paid in blood for the "Jasmine Revolution."

The writer is deputy Middle East and North Africa director for Human Rights Watch.

It Is Not Too Late

By Ghassan Charbel

This commentary was published in al-Hayat on 24/01/2011

The Arab region is troubled and exposed. Its various sides experience in common fear and a deterioration of the situation. Anyone traveling among its capitals gets a whiff of the prevailing concern. The apparent calm is not enough to enshrine peace of mind. There is something boiling beneath the surface here, there, and everywhere. I do not want to fall prey to exaggerations. I do not mean at all that we are at the eve of consecutive collapses. I do not believe astrologers, and I do not trust the hasty conclusions of fervent analysts. But what is certain is that the fortress of quietude has been punctured with holes that cannot be healed the old way. We have reached a phase that is harder than the one Europe went through the day it woke up and discovered that the Berlin wall had resigned from the function of its existence. Europe used to have in its Western side mechanisms of stability, regimes with unshakeable legitimacy, and institutions able to absorb seisms and set up plans for protecting stability and prosperity opportunities. The Arab scene is different.

The Lebanese politician for instance has no right to talk about a “bone-breaking” battle in Lebanon without taking into account the regional situation. Lebanon is not an isolated island. It is part of the region, with its balances, diseases, conflicts, and bouleversements. Traditionally, it is a fragile stage. The absence of national immunity in it makes it prone to import fire and get burnt by it. It also makes it prone to pay high prices in wars that are greater than its local players, who have nothing but the right to fire the first shot. Following this, contacts take place in their absence, and they are considered to be adventurers who entered into a game which they lost the right to manage or specify its direction.

Lebanese politicians play with their country’s stability pillars amidst a burning region. The consecutive terrorist attacks in Iraq aim at igniting a sectarian conflict and threatening the opportunities of holding a quasi-normal Arab summit in Mesopotamia. There is no ambiguity about the decision of the Southerners in Sudan to resign from the Sudan with which we were acquainted. It is the failure of a coexistence experience that could’ve been saved with the culture of respecting the rights of the other, as well as their right to be different. There is also the Tunisian surprise, with its meanings and indications. We cannot use the pretext of the Tunisian situation in order to conclude that it is an event limited by its direct arena. There is also Iran with its files and ambitions; the Yemeni turmoil which is open to multiple dangers; the blocked horizon of peace and the shameful Palestinian scene; Egypt’s accusation of the “Palestinian Army of Islam” in Gaza of being involved in the explosion that targeted the Copt worshippers in Alexandria; and al-Qaeda’s program in the region, which has adopted the operation of targeting Christians after it had wagered in the past on sectarian confrontations.

In the middle of this dark picture, Lebanon seems to be heading towards an extremely dangerous venture. It is obvious that the Lebanese will is shattered and suffers from a blatant deficiency in immunity; that most of the Lebanese players get weaker in front of the outside or by following it; that the laboratory of Lebanese coexistence was struck by lethal damages; that the Lebanese practically live in scared “regions” that are in suspense, and suffer from a lack of geographic connection or a difficulty in drawing their boundaries and officially announcing their establishment, or imposing their right to resign from the fate of their neighbors.

It is not true that Lebanon has no choice but the abyss if the indictment regarding Rafic al-Hariri’s assassination is issued; that the indictment’s issuing will inevitably lead to a Sunni-Shiite conflict; that the confrontation in Lebanon will take back the relations of Syria with the Arab moderation camp to the pre-Kuwait summit status. All this is not unavoidable.

No one will end up being a winner from igniting the fire in the streets of Lebanon. Neither the truth will win, nor the resistance, the West, or Syria. The dirty laundry of the conflict will be daily hung on TV. The fire of the local-regional confrontation will be mingled with the attempts to use the indictment separately from the wishes of those striving to reach the truth. There is no exaggeration in saying that the truth will come out weighed down from such a confrontation, even if it keeps its weapons. Clashing with half the citizens does not offer victory, regardless of the clasher’s identity.

It is not late yet. Those who are capable must take a rapid decision to stop the slipping toward the breaking of balances in Beirut. The Arab region hasn’t digested yet the breaking of balances in Baghdad. It is not true that reaching a solution is impossible. A formula can be found for distributing the damages; a creative formula for distributing the poison.

The Syrian Position

By Tariq Alhomayed
This commentary was published in Asharq al-Awsat on 24/01/2011
 
It is generally assumed that states, like individuals, benefit from their mistakes, and evaluate their experiences, especially when dealing with particular issues. However, this is not the case with the Syrian position, in terms of dealing with Lebanon, specifically the International Tribunal, and nominations for the next Prime Minister.
 
Regarding the parliamentary ruling [in 2004] to extend former Lebanese President Emile Lahoud’s term in office, Damascus insisted on him staying in power at any price, knowing that it would then be easier to bring in another pro-Syrian President afterwards. At the time, Damascus seemed as if it was playing in accordance with the rules of the game in Lebanon. Syria ignored all warnings and extended Lahoud’s term in office, in what was considered to be a landslide Syrian victory. However, what actually happened was to the contrary. The move was costly for Damascus and brought serious consequences, consequences which ultimately came to a head when the Syrian President announced, in front of his parliament, that his country had made mistakes in Lebanon. On that same day, he even announced his intention to withdraw the Syrian army from there!

Today, Lebanese affairs are following the same pattern, whereby Damascus is repeating its mistakes. In the event that Hezbollah’s project is victorious, in its attempt to seize the whole of Lebanon, Syria will be the loser. If the situation erupted – and this is both likely and expected – then the Syrians will pay the price and take the blame. If Hezbollah’s project is victorious, Tehran will be in control, and Iran will reap the fruits of this success, not Damascus. In such a case no one would go to Syria to negotiate, but instead everyone – yes everyone – would negotiate with Iran, instead of Syria. Why would there be a mediator so long as Iran is the dominant force? This is what Iran is explicitly seeking, and has told the West very clearly, amidst the backdrop of negotiations surrounding its nuclear program. Tehran’s search for a regional role must be recognized by the West, because it holds the keys to the troubled areas of the region, and this is no secret!
 
If the Iranian project was to fail in Lebanon, the situation may still erupt, and this [eruption] is expected as I said previously. Damascus would bear the consequences of this, faced by the Lebanese first and foremost. This would deepen the gap between the two neighbors, and it would subsequently be difficult to build any wall of confidence between the Syrians and the Arabs, and matters would worsen. Arabs will deal with Damascus in accordance with past experiences, rather than listening to its promises and the same can be said of the West. Furthermore, such a scenario would also create tensions within Syria itself, and this is an obvious matter which does not require further analysis.
 
Hezbollah’s control over Lebanon would inevitably fuel sectarian sentiments, and awaken the Sunni fundamentalist giant, which is currently stirring and has a genuine presence. Then it would not matter whether Hezbollah had light or heavy arms with which to intimidate its opponents, for it only takes one extremist to have the same impact as an artillery assault. This is something we have seen in sectarian conflicts throughout the Arab and Islamic world, and we have witnessed the extent of its damage.
 
Syria’s interpretation of the current situation is a dangerous one, because it is an old interpretation of a new case; or rather it has not developed over time. The current situation comes in light of changing global conditions, and dramatic changes in the rules of the game, while following up on the daily occurrences will stop many from asking the question; when will they learn?

When Hillary Clinton Channels George W. Bush

By Fouad Ajami
This commentary was published in The Daily Star on 24/01/2011

“In too many places, in too many ways, the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Arab autocrats in a remarkable speech in Qatar recently. 

The Arab landscape all around her provided ample confirmation. In Tunisia, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, a despot who has been in power for nearly a quarter-century, was reeling. His people had conquered their fear and had taken to the streets. In Cairo, the Pharaoh the Pax Americana has indulged through five American presidencies appeared to be losing his touch, his once-tolerant country engulfed by sectarian troubles between Muslims and Copts. Lebanon, which had once been a showcase of American success in the region, was once again in the throes of a political crisis. 

But there was a truth that the secretary of state glided over. Sinking into the sand, too, is the worldview that informed President Barack Obama’s approach to the Middle East. 
 
Obama had come into office with a belief that he knew and understood the Islamic world. He was proud that Islam was a strand in his identity. He was sure that the policy of his predecessor had antagonized Islam. President George W. Bush’s “diplomacy of freedom” was not given the grace of a decent burial. “Ideology is so yesterday,” Clinton proudly proclaimed in early 2009. Realpolitik was to be the order of the day.

The Bush diplomacy had declared an open ideological assault against the Iranian theocracy. Obama would offer that regime an olive branch and a promise of engagement. Syria had been pushed out of Lebanon and viewed as a renegade regime that had done its best to frustrate the American war in Iraq. The Obama diplomacy would offer the rulers in Damascus diplomatic rehabilitation.

Thus the word went forth to the despots in the region that the American campaign on behalf of liberty that Bush had launched in 2003 had been called off. A new Iraqi democracy, midwifed by American power, was fighting for its life. The Obama administration would keep Iraq at arm’s length.

This break of faith with democracy was put on cruel display in the summer of 2009, when the Iranians rose in revolt against their rulers.

True, American diplomacy was not likely to alter the raw balance of power between the regime and its democratic oppositionists. But the timidity of American power, and the refusal of the Obama administration to embrace the cause of the opposition, must be reckoned one of American foreign policy’s great moral embarrassments.

No one called on the president to dispatch the Marines to Tehran, but the deference of the pre-eminent liberal power to men who had unleashed the vigilantes on their own people was at once a moral and a strategic failure. An American president who prided himself on his oratory could not find the language that would express the age-old American belief that our country is invested, morally and strategically, in the spread and triumph of liberty.

Obama had said he was willing to deal with the theocracy and regimes like it so long as they were willing to “unclench their fist.” Instead, a more heartless dictatorship had taken hold. The theocrats had no interest in granting Obama concessions. They were sure that they could hold their ground, and that America was bound to capitulate. Iran’s rulers took Obama’s measure: The opposition at home could be broken, and the drive for hegemony in the region, and for nuclear weapons, could be pursued without running appreciable risks.

No wonder the Hezbollah movement has shown such defiance in recent days. Iran’s proxies in Lebanon brought down that country’s coalition government as Prime Minister Saad Hariri sat down for a meeting with Obama.

 

Now that sort of gamesmanship is, by Hezbollah’s standards, a sin of minor proportions. Hezbollah’s leaders had struck in anticipation of an indictment of its members by an international tribunal investigating the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

But an undeniable truth hovers over Lebanon: the ebb of American power. Five or six years ago, the Lebanese rebellion against Damascus had been emboldened by American power and protection. The “Cedar Revolution” that brought about the withdrawal of Syrian troops was both Lebanese and a child of the American presence and prestige in that country.

But the Syrians had been eager to retrieve what they had given up under duress. The solicitude shown Damascus by the Obama administration convinced the Lebanese that a different wind now blew in Washington, and that they and their country were being given up in a Syrian-American accommodation. In the best of worlds, it is difficult for the Lebanese, divided among themselves as they have been throughout their modern history, to hold their own against Syria. But their abandonment by the United States was a devastating blow to those among them who wished for their country a political order of peace and normalcy.

The power of the region’s autocracies has given rise to a belief that there is an “Arab-Islamic exceptionalism” to the appeal of liberty. In its years of ascendancy, the Bush diplomacy had battled against the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It was a supreme irony that Obama, who had spoken of a great opening onto the Islamic world, had returned American policy to its older acceptance of the “differentness” of the Arabs, to the inevitability of tyranny in their midst.

It  took the embattled Muslim liberals a while to catch on to the moral indifference of the Obama administration. But catch on they did, and in their unequal struggle with the tyrannies in their midst they have operated on the reasonable assumption that the leading liberal power in the world order had no interest in the promotion of their liberty.

Tunisia came as a bolt out of the blue, and Arab rulers and oppositionists alike now watch and wonder whether this is the first domino to fall, or a case apart. In Tunisia, the proposition will be tested as to whether the Arabs can break out of that dreadful choice between the autocrats in the saddle and the radical Islamists in the shadows.

“Our president and king must be go,” read a Tunisian posting on an electronic daily. The grammar was flawed, the sentiment easy to make out.

For a fleeting moment in Qatar, George W. Bush seemed to make a furtive return to the diplomatic arena. He was there, reincarnated in the person of Hillary Clinton, bearing that quintessential American message that our country cannot be indifferent to the internal arrangements of foreign lands. The Arab world presents a great strategic and moral challenge. These are states with a broken compact between rulers and ruled. The rulers produce the very terror and rage they propose to hold back. The oppositionists, meanwhile, are a great, troubling unknown.

Fouad Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. This commentary, which first appeared in The Wall Street Journal, is published by permission from the author.

Free Now To Make A Nuclear Deal?

By Volker Perthes

This commentary was published in The Jordan Times on 24/01/2011

 

In Istanbul this week, representatives of Iran and the “5+1” group (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany), led by European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton, will resume talks about Iran’s nuclear programme. No breakthrough is likely, but the outcome could be more favourable than many expect.

In October 2009, an initial understanding was reached, according to which Iranian low-enriched uranium (LEU) would be delivered to Russia for further enrichment and conversion into fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR). But this accord faltered on Iran’s domestic politics: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s political adversaries effectively blocked it. Might the same thing happen again?

Ahmadinejad, who was severely weakened after his disputed reelection in 2009, has now consolidated his position. Representatives of his regime are still concerned about what they see as externally backed attempts to stage a “velvet revolution” in the country, but there is little fear of new challenges from within.

One conservative intellectual put it in almost Nietzschean terms: “Yes, two million people took to the street after the elections. But they were voters, not fighters. They criticised the situation. But no one wants to change the system by force.”

In other words, there is no will to power on the part of civil society and the opposition.

Many who protested against the regime in 2009 are disillusioned. Ordinary people do not hide their contempt for the regime, but they also see that last year’s mass protests have failed. Many have withdrawn into the private sphere - education and culture for some, business for others. Visa applications are increasing, indicating preparations for limited or prolonged sojourns abroad.

While Iran’s leadership continues to repress liberal dissenters, it feels secure enough to talk of “reconciliation” with parts of the “loyal” opposition - Ahmadinejad’s conservative and reform-oriented adversaries who want to preserve the Islamic system as such. Within the president’s camp as well, there are discussions about the post-Ahmadinejad era and possible successors to him - all, however, assuming regular presidential elections in 2013. Until then, despite frequently harsh criticism of his performance, the president is seen to have a mandate to govern.

The effects of the latest round of international sanctions on Iran are somewhat ambiguous: they have weakened the country, but they do not seem to have weakened Ahmadinejad. Withdrawal of European companies is delaying necessary investments and forcing Iranian firms to seek less-favoured alternatives, mainly in China and Russia. Prices are increasing, more transactions are being conducted in cash, and more dubious business figures are arriving from around the world.

But, while government officials do not deny that sanctions worry them, they point to Iran’s high foreign-currency reserves and the Iranians’ creativity in coping with the effects. Moreover, Ahmadinejad uses the sanctions as political cover to pursue his economically sound - but deeply unpopular - policy of slashing subsidies on electricity, petrol, and bread.

Though economic pressure is unlikely to force the regime to abandon uranium enrichment, unity on sanctions among the five permanent Security Council members, and moves by the EU, Japan, and South Korea to sharpen them further has had an impact.

Most importantly, sanctions have strengthened those within the elite who favour negotiations, and weakened those who are deeply critical of Ahmadinejad’s unhidden interest in doing business with the West, particularly the United States.

For Ahmadinejad and his supporters, there are two main reasons for engagement with the US. First, they know that an understanding with the US would be popular, particularly among educated youth and the business community. Second, Ahmadinejad and the political leadership believe that the regime is under serious threat from the US - and only from the US.

American officials often underestimate this threat perception and deep suspicion of US intentions, but they are powerful factors in Iranian politics. While Iran’s ruling elite appears to be divided over the prospect of a full-scale rapprochement with the US, they share this underlying fear of America and do not want their country to be isolated further.

Given this background, it is quite possible that this time Iranian domestic politics will not undermine a new agreement to swap Iranian LEU for fuel rods for the TRR. The 5+1 group has an interest in reducing Iran’s stockpile of LEU and the risk of its use at some point for military purposes. Iran, for its part, has an interest in securing both the supply of fuel rods for the TRR and the international community’s implicit acceptance of its uranium-enrichment efforts, as well as in engaging with the US.

Any such deal will be possible only if it responds to both sides’ interests. It would certainly help if Iran began the talks with a commitment to end its enrichment of uranium to the level of 20 per cent. Even Iranian officials admit that there is no (civilian) purpose for such a programme if the 20 per cent enriched fuel rods for the TRR are actually produced in Russia.

Another clear signal of Iran’s intention to settle the dispute would be progress towards ratification by Iran’s parliament of the Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The 5+1, for their part, should indicate that an eventual agreement on the basis of “minimum enrichment and maximum controls” is possible.

Agreement on a LEU fuel swap would not resolve the nuclear dispute between Iran and the West, but it would open the door for a diplomatic process that could eventually reach the core of the problem - Iran’s uranium enrichment and the risks of diversion for military purposes. If the Istanbul talks go well, they could provide a roadmap for further negotiations, not only on the nuclear issue, but also on Afghanistan, the Middle East, and terrorism. Even if they only provide an avenue for bilateral engagement between the US and Iran, they will still prove to be worth the effort.

The writer is director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP). ©Project Syndicate, 2011. www.project-syndicate.org