Annan's Mission Impossible

Why is everyone pretending that the U.N. plan in Syria has a prayer of succeeding?

BY SALMAN SHAIKH

                                                                Kofi Annan

The world is learning hard lessons in Syria. The United States has already admitted that the mission of U.N. and Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan is likely to fail, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week that Washington is preparing to take other measures against Bashar al-Assad's regime. She pointed out what is clear to all: U.N. observers cannot operate effectively while Assad refuses to abide by a ceasefire.

Let's be clear about why Annan's mission has been unsuccessful. It is not failing because the U.N. observers have been slow to deploy, or even because Assad has yet to implement a single point from Annan's six-point plan. The fundamental reason for Annan's failure is more basic than that: His plan is flawed because it was formulated on the misguided belief that the Assad regime will ever stop using violence against domestic protesters and negotiate with them in good faith.

It is high time to debunk once and for all the popular myths about the Syrian regime. People have believed for too long -- whether out of naïveté or cynicism -- that Assad has been willing to initiate political reforms and will do so in due time. He has not and will not. Nor will the regime stop its violence. Doing so would hasten its demise, as Syrians took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands to protest freely and assume control of large parts of the country.

And yet, the world still clings to the hope that the Annan plan will somehow bring an end to the violence. It seems that we have lost our moral compass, unrealistically hoping that Annan will succeed -- and largely doing so because we are too timid to contemplate seriously other options to assist the Syrian people.

Assad's behavior during the 14-month long uprising shows that he has never seriously considered a "fundamental change of course," as Annan has demanded. Instead, Assad has sought to solve his problems through intimidation and brute force. The estimated death toll of more than 11,000 Syrians since the beginning of the uprising serves as a bloody testament to that fact.

Annan's plan relies on the hope that Assad will negotiate in good faith, perhaps under pressure from his Russian backers. He will not, and the regime will not accept any credible opposition to its rule -- regardless of Moscow's preferences. The regime's war crimes -- including the indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas, the forced displacement of civilians from cities, and the sanctioning of a mass campaign of rape against women by security forces, including paramilitary shabiha brigades -- speak for themselves. While the international community continues to focus on Annan's efforts, it is unbelievable that Assad and his regime are still not seen as international pariahs. The Syrian government has lied to the international community at every turn. When will the world realize that any attempt to negotiate with Assad is utterly futile?

The Assad regime has so far successfully employed a strategy of buying time, agreeing to the Annan plan while doing everything it can to undermine it. Meanwhile, the international community has played into Assad's hands by buying into the fanciful logic that the introduction of unarmed U.N. observers will establish calm inside Syria and moderate the regime's behavior. Indeed, it was only a few short weeks ago that French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé declared that the Annan mission was "our last chance to avoid civil war." In a rare moment of clarity, the head of the U.N. Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS), Maj. Gen. Robert Mood, admitted that not even 1,000 observers could end the bloodshed.

The only surprise here is that the U.N. Secretariat, which had grown increasingly risk-averse following the al Qaeda bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003 that killed 22 of my former U.N. colleagues, has now embarked on one of its most dangerous missions since then. Its brave blue berets have been thrust into a situation where they are simultaneously in grave danger and do not have the capability of fulfilling their mandate. This latest mission shows that the United Nations has not learned the lessons of its failures in Bosnia in the 1990s, when the initial peacekeeping mission did not have sufficient capabilities to stop the slaughter in Srebrenica.

Not even the Syrian regime's international protectors can convince it to abide by the terms of the Annan plan. Russia, and to a lesser degree China, have indeed leaned heavily on Assad in this regard, and there are signs from senior diplomats and those close to the foreign policy communities in both countries that Moscow and Beijing are getting fed up with Assad, and even consider his eventual demise to be inevitable. But these frustrations have amounted to naught. Neither country has convinced Assad to implement the Annan plan, and they have not placed greater pressure on him to remove his heavy armor from Syria's main cities. Instead, the Syrian army has resorted to placing sheets over some of its tanks in a transparent ploy to trick the world that it is abiding by the terms of the ceasefire.

Perhaps Russia and China, like the Syrian regime itself, know that Assad would quickly lose control of large parts of his country if he did so. Ironically, Moscow's fears -- of losing its closest strategic ally in the region, of what comes next, and of being frozen out of a new Syria, as was the case in Iraq and more recently in Libya -- are taking it further from its strategic objectives. Assad's game of buying time is losing Moscow valuable friends in the region. Working toward a post-Assad Syria remains the only way to strengthen these fragile ties.

Even as Syria's death toll has mounted and the Annan plan increasingly looks like a lost cause, decisive international action has been hard to come by. For all the anti-Assad rhetoric coming from Ankara, Turkey has been reluctant to act without U.S. and NATO backing to establish the much-hyped "safe zones" inside Syria. Ankara has its own problems to deal with: As Georgetown University professor Birol Baskan explains, Turkish reluctance is due largely to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's fraught ties with his nation's secularist military establishment, as well other domestic vulnerabilities. And despite all the talk of arming the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the Gulf states -- Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular -- have hesitated, too.

The United States also has little appetite for a more aggressive role in Syria. It is clear that President Barack Obama is running for re-election on the narrative that America's wars in the greater Middle East are coming to an end. "As we emerge from a decade of conflict abroad and economic crisis at home, it is time to renew America," he declared during a speech last week in Afghanistan. Washington has accordingly been willfully slow to take advantage of the strategic opportunity presented by regime change in Syria. Instead of pressing its advantage and further isolating the regime's backers -- in particular, Iran -- the United States has taken the seemingly safer course of increasing the economic pressure on Assad's regime.

In the absence of clear and determined U.S. leadership, trying to make the doomed Annan plan work will take the international community through the summer and the U.S. presidential election, making any decisive international action unlikely until the middle of next year at the earliest. This will be fatal for the future of Syria, leading to more bloodshed, more radicalization on both sides, and a heightened risk of ethnic and sectarian conflict.

The consequences for international security will be dire. Syria's descent into chaos is increasingly dividing the country and may even threaten its future as a unified nation-state. Iraq's Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), which is increasingly flexing its political and economic muscles, has demonstrated that borders cannot be taken for granted in this highly volatile region. Syria's crisis may do for the Levant what the Iraq war did for Mesopotamia, unraveling the post-World War I political fault lines of the Middle East. Worse, continued conflict in Syria will likely spill beyond its borders and could re-ignite smoldering sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon, threatening the stability of the entire region.

With the stakes so high, the international community cannot afford to pin its hopes on the Annan plan. Instead, it should accept the hard lessons of the past 14 months and redirect its efforts toward changing the balance of power on the ground.

Those countries with a stake in Syria's future should do their utmost to help Syrians organize a broad-based national movement that unites people on the basis of opposition to the regime and commitment to a democratic Syria. This will require undoing the Assads' 42-year old "divide and rule" strategy, bringing together key groups of Syrian society such as minorities and tribes. These groups now have a crucial role to play to hasten the regime's demise and place Syria on a path to a democratic future.

There are indications that such a strategy would meet with success. Over the past few months, I have conducted extensive roundtable discussions with many Syrian constituencies -- such as tribal figures, members of established families, religious leaders, and representatives of the Kurdish community -- whose interests are often poorly understood by the outside world. From these conversations, I have found that there is a growing desire among tribal groups from the strategically important eastern and northern areas of Syria to resist Assad, including through military means, and to unite with other groups, particularly the Kurds. In turn, some Kurdish leaders have indicated their willingness, in ongoing private conversations with the tribes, to engage with these groups. Although the Kurds are divided in their stance toward the revolution, all want their culture and rights recognized in a post-Assad Syria. Other communities, such as the Christians and Druze, have largely stayed on the sidelines in the absence of a Syrian national project in which they have confidence.

The Syrian National Council (SNC), an anti-Assad opposition body that operates largely outside the country, has assumed international importance as "a legitimate representative of the Syrian people," in the words of the "Friends of the Syrian People" group. However, my conversations with tribal and minority figures clearly reveal that they have little confidence in the SNC. Many point to the fact that it has no presence on the ground, and most are suspicious of the influence that the Muslim Brotherhood and its perceived patron, Turkey, wield within the organization.

These groups express greater support for the fragmented FSA, even if it has struggled to establish a clear command-and-control structure inside Syria from its Turkish base. Tribal figures have stated that they want the international community to support the FSA by providing expert assistance and help with communications and specific armaments. They worry that the uncoordinated, steady trickle of arms through private sources and the determined efforts of jihadists to enter Syria through Iraq will lead only to further chaos. They also point out that many FSA leaders and ordinary soldiers are "sons of the tribes," and that more would join its ranks if the FSA had greater external support. Notably, there is also increasing talk of a military alliance between the FSA -- in collaboration with the SNC -- and the tribes and Kurds.

The world should abandon the fiction that the Assad regime can be persuaded to reach a political accommodation with its adversaries. Rather, it is time for a renewed effort to forge a genuine united front, including all groups in Syria's social fabric, dedicated to Assad's downfall and the establishment of a pluralistic, democratic state in the aftermath. This effort needs stronger international backing today -- opposition leaders inside and outside the country do not have the resources to unite their ranks alone. If an endeavor to create a genuine grand opposition coalition were to succeed, the Assad regime would face a greater political and military challenge than ever before, stretching its forces to a breaking point. With Annan's peace plan in tatters, that's a goal the international community should embrace.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 08/05/2012
-Salman Shaikh is director of the Brookings Doha Center. He previously served as the special assistant to the U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and the U.N. under-secretary-general for political affairs

The Obama Doctrine And The Lessons Of Iraq

By Dominic Tierney

                                                        American President Barack Obama

The Obama Doctrine is like the Holy Grail. People have searched for it all over the world. The Internet is full of theories about what it looks like. Skeptics have doubted whether it even exists. The quest for the Obama Doctrine reveals a president with the wisdom to resist doctrinaire thinking. But at the same time, Obama’s focus on avoiding the mistakes of Iraq could itself prove dangerously rigid.

One of the reasons that the Obama Doctrine has seemed elusive is that the concept of a “presidential doctrine” is used to mean different things. In one sense, it refers to a tradition where each president gets to issue a single binding pronouncement—amounting to one of the Ten Commandments of American foreign policy. Back in the nineteenth century, the Monroe Doctrine proclaimed: thou shalt not colonize the Western Hemisphere. More recently, the Truman Doctrine held: thou shalt resist communist insurgency. And the Bush Doctrine declared: thou shalt be with us, not with the terrorists.

In this sense, there is no Obama Doctrine. The president has declined to issue such a commandment and isn’t in any hurry to do so. Back in 2008, Obama said he was “not going to be as doctrinaire as the Bush Doctrine, because the world is complicated.”[1]

Obama should be applauded for questioning the value of rigid doctrines. Simplistic proclamations can become a straightjacket that constrains a president’s options. This is especially true when we live in a complex world with diffuse threats, as we do today. The Arab Spring, for example, with its distinct local dynamics, requires flexibility, and even inconsistency. We don’t need the same strategy in Libya and in Syria.

Presidential doctrines have a poor record. The Truman Doctrine, for example, encouraged a universal definition of U.S. national interests during the Cold War that helped draw the United States into Vietnam. Other nations have copied many American innovations, but they haven’t copied the presidential doctrine. Bismarck didn’t have a doctrine. Neither did Churchill. As creative diplomats, these leaders wanted flexibility in their foreign policy.

The idea of a presidential doctrine can also be used in a looser way: to refer to a president’s core foreign policy beliefs. After 9/11, for example, the Bush Doctrine outlined a positive transformational agenda with four major elements. First, the world was gravely threatening because an alliance of terrorists and rogue states could inflict incalculable harm on the United States. Second, the spread of democracy—even at the point of a bayonet—would undermine terrorism and serve American interests. Third, the United States would act unilaterally when necessary. Fourth, the United States would protect its position of unchallenged primacy.

In this looser sense, the Obama Doctrine does exist. For sure, Obama has continued and even enhanced the use of several Bush-era tools such as drone strikes. But overall, the Obama Doctrine is designed less to revolutionize the international system than to correct past errors.

Obama is not, after all, a foreign policy president. His main goal upon election was to solve the financial crisis and pursue his domestic agenda. In their bestselling account of the 2008 election, Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin captured Obama’s thinking as he courted Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state: “the economy is a much bigger mess than we’d ever imagined it would be, and I’m gonna be focused on that for the next two years. So I need someone as big as you to do this job.”[2] It’s striking to compare the relative caution of Obama’s foreign policy agenda with the expansiveness of his domestic goals.

Obama has dialed down all aspects of the Bush Doctrine. Obama’s rhetoric is less militant and crusading on the importance of democratization, less apocalyptic on the potential threats that exist, less enamored by the allure of unilateralism, and less aggressive in asserting primacy through military spending.

Look closer, and a central dynamic animating the Obama Doctrine is negative: rejecting the Iraq War. Here it’s useful to take a step back and think about how leaders learn from history. It’s commonplace for presidents to draw analogies with the past, for example, referring to appeasement in the 1930s, the Vietnam War, or U.S. intervention in Somalia in the 1990s. Sometimes these historical allusions are just rhetoric, designed to decorate a speech. But they can also powerfully shape how presidents think.

Interestingly, leaders don’t learn from all of history. Instead, they make analogies with past failures more than successes and they usually focus on recent events. This means that the key source of learning is the last big failure. For the post-World War II generation, the major lesson of history was “don’t appease.” Then, after the 1960s, a new and powerful historical lesson emerged, “no more Vietnams.” In the wake of 18 American combat deaths in the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993—immortalized by the movie Black Hawk Down—the lesson was “no more Somalias.”

For Obama, the most powerful lesson of history seems to be “no more Iraqs.” It’s hard to find any aspect of the Obama Doctrine that is not directly influenced by the Iraq War. First, Obama has highlighted what Michael Doran calls an “extrication narrative” based on a responsible withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East—especially Iraq. Second, compared to Bush, Obama is more restrained about using force, and more concerned by the potential for unintended consequences. Third, when force is employed, Obama favors precise and surgical operations, including Special Forces raids and drone strikes. Fourth, Obama supports multilateral military operations, especially if there is a large-scale commitment. Fifth, Obama is averse to Iraq-style nation-building. The Pentagon’s 2012 strategic guidance document, “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership” stated bluntly that: “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.”[3]

The 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya exemplified these five aspects of the Obama Doctrine and represented in many ways the “anti-Iraq War.” Unlike with Iraq, the Arab League and the UN Security Council supported the Libyan mission. The United States played a relatively secondary role. Nation-building by American forces was rejected out of hand.

In addition, as a sixth point, the president has sought to shift America’s diplomatic and military attention away from the Middle East toward a rising China. The Pentagon’s strategic guidance declared: “We will of necessity rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific region.” This represents not just a change in regional focus but also in adversary: from asymmetric insurgents toward traditional great power rivals. In November 2011, Obama announced that 2,500 U.S. Marines would be deployed to Australia. Symbolically, they’ll be about as far away from Iraq as possible.

There are exceptions where Obama acted in ways that echoed the Iraq War. Most importantly, the president escalated U.S. forces in Afghanistan and adopted a counter-insurgency strategy that is similar in some respects to the “surge” of American troops in Iraq. But the president is now looking to wind down the Afghanistan War and add a new chapter to the extrication narrative.

In part, the centrality of “no more Iraqs” to the Obama Doctrine reflects broader strategic and cultural forces. The cost of the Iraq War in blood and treasure (5,000 dead and $700 billion expended), as well as pressures from the financial crisis and the rise of China, would have forced any president to absorb the lessons of Iraq. Indeed, Obama’s thinking is part of a wider backlash against the Iraq War in American society, which political scientist John Mueller called the “Iraq Syndrome.”[4] In November 2011, for example, approval for the war in Iraq hit an all-time low of 29 percent.[5]

At the same time, however, Obama may be particularly attuned to the lessons of Iraq. After all, the Iraq War was central to his political rise. Obama’s opposition to the conflict was a major reason why he defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. (Hillary voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, and she refused to apologize for this vote even when she became a critic of the war.) Obama once said that he was not against all wars—just a “dumb war” like Iraq.

Is it helpful to focus so heavily on the lessons of Iraq? There is, of course, much we can learn from the Iraq War. For one thing, regime change can unleash unpredictable forces. This is a critical lesson because Americans often see war in its purest form as a moralistic crusade to topple tyrants. Another related lesson is the risk of overconfidence. The champions of the invasion promised that stabilizing Iraq would be straightforward but these hopes proved to be wide of the mark. Indeed, the failure to plan effectively for the post-war occupation was one of the avoidable catastrophes of recent U.S. foreign policy.

Iraq also reveals that when an administration is set on war, and controls the intelligence data, there can be a lack of scrutiny from the media and Congress about the strategic consequences of using force. The true debate only came later—when the American boots were already on the ground.

But the danger of the “no more Iraqs” syndrome is that it promotes exactly the kind of doctrinaire thinking that the president has promised to resist.

Someone attacked by a dog when he is young may develop a healthy wariness of dogs: once bitten, twice shy. Or he may exhibit an incapacitating life-long phobia. And the same is true with Iraq. We can either become suitably wary of the perils of regime change, or we can develop a harmful phobia against anything resembling the Iraq War.

As the saying goes, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. But political scientist Robert Jervis once noted that those who remember the past and learn from it sometimes make the opposite mistakes.[6] No one should forget the lessons of appeasement from the 1930s. But after World War II, American presidents overlearned these lessons and saw every threat as the second incarnation of Hitler—which must never be appeased. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he was sending U.S. ground troops to Vietnam because “we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression.”[7]

Today, we’re in danger of overlearning the lessons of Iraq. First, the grave costs in trying to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan have produced a powerful backlash in the United States against the whole idea of nation-building. A tempting lesson from Iraq is: let’s never nation-build again. Some go even further and believe that the U.S. military shouldn’t prepare for stabilization missions. If the military can’t do it, the military won’t be asked to do it.

One problem is that Iraq is an exceptional case. If we put the Vietnam War to the side because the United States was simultaneously fighting both an insurgency (the Vietcong) and a state (North Vietnam), Iraq is the single most costly counter-insurgency or nation-building mission in American history. Most nation-building missions incur far fewer casualties. When the United States helped to stabilize Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, for example, there were zero U.S. deaths. We therefore need to consider the experience of nation-building in Iraq as part of a broader sample of cases.

The truth is that the United States is almost certain to carry out stabilization missions in the future. For all roads, it seems, lead to nation-building, from wars for regime change like World War II, Afghanistan, or Iraq, to humanitarian interventions like Somalia, to peacekeeping missions like Bosnia and Kosovo. The answer is to make sure that the U.S. military is highly trained at nation-building—and then employ this tool with great discretion.

Second, memories of the flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may be powerfully shaping how the United States assesses the state of Iran’s nuclear program today. Afraid of repeating the error of threat inflation, the U.S. intelligence community has become far more skeptical about reaching conclusions about Iran’s capabilities. The upside is that improved safeguards and a heavy dose of caution may produce a more accurate viewpoint. Paul Pillar, a former C.I.A. analyst, believes that current intelligence reports are based on the facts. But he added: “Because intelligence officials are human beings, one cannot rule out the possibility of the tendency to overcompensate for past errors.”[8] Correcting for previous threat inflation, without overcorrecting and downplaying menacing data, is a very delicate task.

A third prominent lesson of Iraq is to use force multilaterally, in order to share the burdens of war and gain legitimacy. But the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 revealed the challenges of multilateral warfare, with too many cooks threatening to spoil the broth.

Napoleon once said, “If I must make war, I prefer it to be against a coalition.” The reason is that multilateral military campaigns can be cumbersome and ineffective, and may suffer from a lack of leadership. In Libya, many NATO allies had tight restrictions over what their militaries would do. The UK, France, the United States and Canada, carried out most of the airstrikes. Meanwhile, Spain, the Netherlands, and Turkey wouldn’t allow their aircraft to engage in ground attacks.

According to the New York Times, a NATO report “concluded that the allies struggled to share crucial target information, lacked specialized planners and analysts, and overly relied on the United States for reconnaissance and refueling aircraft.”[9] Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates described NATO’s incapacity in Libya (and Afghanistan) as a wake-up call, fearing “the real possibility for a dim, if not dismal future for the trans-Atlantic alliance.”[10]

Of course, Qaddafi was eventually overthrown. But these alliance problems could be dangerous in a more difficult or prolonged operation.

In summary, Obama should be credited for rejecting doctrinaire diplomacy. But the Iraq War was such a negative experience for the United States that the idea of “no more Iraqs” could become an idée fixe or a dangerously dogmatic position. We must learn from Iraq but we can’t let a single case blot out the sun.

Notes & References

-This essay was published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute in May 2012
- Dominic Tierney is associate professor of political science, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and a correspondent at The Atlantic. He completed his Ph.D. in international politics at Oxford University in 2003.  His most recent book is How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (Little, Brown, & Co., 2010). This essay is based on his remarks at FPRI’s Manhattan Salon.

1^ http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/03/23/134781423/complex-libya-offers-no-simple-answers-so-obama-has-none
2^ John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clinton, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), p. 435.
3^ http://www.defense.gov/news/Defense_Strategic_Guidance.pdf
4^ http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61196/john-mueller/the-iraq-syndrome
5^ See www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm and www.pollingreport.com/afghan.htm.
6^ Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).
7^ Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 179.
8^ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/world/middleeast/assessing-iran-but-thinking-about-iraq.html?_r=1
9^ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/world/africa/nato-sees-flaws-in-air-campaign-against-qaddafi.html
10^ http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-202_162-20070467.html

Jordan, Forever On The Brink

By Marc Lynch

The sudden, unprecedented resignation by Jordan's Prime Minister Awn Khasawnah last week threw a sudden spotlight on the ongoing shortcomings of political reform in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The deficient new election law rolled out last month, like every step the King has taken over the last year and a half, did too little, too late to respond to the concerns of Jordanian citizens. Limited reforms have done little to stem a rising tide of protest across the towns of the south, a deeply struggling economy, loud complaints of corruption, and an intensifying edge of political anger. Add in the potential impact of the ongoing crisis in Syria or of a new escalation in the West Bank, and concerns for Jordan's political future seem merited.

Veteran observers of the region can be excused for rolling their eyes ever so slightly at reports of instability in Jordan, of course. The Kingdom has seemed on the political brink virtually constantly for many decades, its stability always questioned and the monarchy's command doubted (often, admittedly, by me). And yet the Hashemite monarchy has survived.  Warnings about political crisis in Jordan therefore sound just enough like boys crying wolf or Chicken Littles shouting about falling skies. That long history of frustrated protest and successfully navigated challenges should caution anyone predicting a real explosion.  But it would be equally wrong to dismiss the signs of a rapidly escalating political crisis to which the Palace seems unable or unwilling to respond.

This post previews a new POMEPS Briefing, "Jordan, Forever on the Brink," which collects twenty articles from the last three years explaining the nature of the Kingdom's political crisis, the shortcomings of its attempted reforms, and the current political state of play. (Link to free download to come soon.)

The context of last year's Arab uprisings adds urgency to Jordan's problems, but its political stalemate has been developing for many years. The democratic opening, which followed an outbreak of social protests in 1989, including press liberalization, freely contested elections, and the crafting of a "National Pact" for a democratic monarchical system, now seems a distant memory. Then-King Hussein began rolling back the new freedoms in the middle of the 1990s, as he moved to conclude an unpopular peace with Israel. A new election law designed to curb the power of the Muslim Brotherhood's Islamic Action Front Party produced a series of weak, ineffectual Parliaments too often dissolved early at the whim of the Palace. 

Since replacing his father, the current King Abdullah has not behaved like a leader deeply committed to democratic procedures or credible about reform. Palace officials often argue that he is a true reformer frustrated by the slow pace of change, but if so then he has remarkably little to show for more than a decade's effort. He suspended Parliament soon after taking the throne and ruled by emergency law for several years. Reform initiatives such as the National Agenda disappeared without a trace. The political history of the last decade has been a depressing litany of failed governments, incompetent Parliaments, and frustrated civil society. The last elections, in November 2010, ranked among the worst in the Kingdom's history.

That frustration has been exacerbated by grinding economic problems, which have largely wiped out the middle class and badly hurt the poor. Cuts to government spending or the state bureaucracy, meanwhile, tend to disproportionately hurt the East Bankers who have generally been favored by the state for political reasons. The ostentatious new wealth on display in parts of Amman only fueled the simmering resentment, as ever more open talk of corruption at the top permeated political society... and circulated freely through new social media and in every day conversation. I still remember being shocked a few years back at being regaled in public by near strangers with stories of Queen Rania's new private jet and the backers of a new big dig in central Amman. Official efforts to censor and control such information are long since hopeless.

The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings inspired as much enthusiasm and popular protest energy in Jordan as they did elsewhere in the region. Jordanian youth mobilized large protests, while traditional opposition movements also gathered strength. Jordan's impressive community of online activists pushed the boundaries of public debate, with unusual criticism of corruption at the highest levels -- even (or especially) Queen Rania. Perhaps more troubling to the regime, discontent spread relentlessly into the south as a protest culture took hold. Military veterans spoke out in unprecedented ways, signaling potential problems at the very heart of the regime.   And Jordanian-Palestinian identity politics, always at the center of Jordanian politics and society, played out in ever more intense forms.  

The King's responses have been consistently behind the curve, suggesting a failure to appreciate the full extent of the regime's problems. The dismissal of several Prime Ministers in succession were dismissed as the mere shuffling of deck chairs with little practical significance. The King's speech in June disappointed activists hoping for more concrete and far reaching promises of political change. Promised constitutional reforms compared poorly to even those limited changes offered in Morocco. By November, oft-promised reforms remained largely "fictional," in Sean Yom's incisive verdict. More effective has been the traditional moves to polarize society around Jordanian-Palestinian conflict to divide and distract opposition -- but even that strategy holds risks for the monarchy under current conditions. As Laurie Brand and Fayez Hammad recently asked, "what exactly does the King understand?" 

Some hopes had been placed in the appointment of the respected liberal jurist Khaswaneh as Prime Minister. With his departure, that hope too has been frustrated. The long history of the regime's surviving such frustrated hopes and failed reforms would suggest that this too shall pass. But Jordan's Palace should not be so confident. The spread of protest into new constituencies, the rising grievances of the south, the intensifying identity politics, the struggling economy, and the pervasive fury at perceived official corruption create a potent brew. The violent dispersal of an attempted Amman sit-in last March shocked activists and broke their momentum, but the protest movement has proven resilient and creative. I would rank Jordan today only below Bahrain as at risk of a sudden escalation of political crisis -- at which point the impossible would in retrospect look inevitable indeed.

Keep an eye out for the new POMEPS Briefing on Jordan, which will be posted in the next day or two.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 07/05/2012
-Marc Lynch is associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University

Turkey Is Drawn Into Iraqi Affairs

By Saban Kardas

                           Tariq al-Hashimi and Recep Tayip Erdogan (Source: AA)

The developments in Iraqi domestic politics, coupled with their regional implications, continue to drag Turkey deeper into Middle Eastern affairs, while its involvement in the Syrian conflict already occupies a large part of Ankara’s foreign policy agenda. The ongoing power struggle between Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his opponents on the one hand, and the complicated relationship between the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Northern Iraq on the other have taken an interesting turn, creating reverberations for Turkey’s regional policies.

In the wake of the withdrawal of US forces, Maliki has moved to consolidate his power, threatening to undermine the delicate balance between various sectarian and ethnic groups. Maliki, who assumed his current post following a 2010 power sharing agreement, has failed to work toward national reconciliation. On the contrary, in this already fractured country, he has even undermined the governing coalition and also put Iraq on a collision course. His campaign against Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, who took refuge in Northern Iraq fearing for his life, crystallized the power struggle. The dispute grew into an impasse, with the increasingly harsher tone of the parties, engulfing Turkey (EDM, January 18). After spending some time in Kurdistan, Hashemi visited Saudi Arabia and Doha and later came to Turkey, effectively beginning his days in “exile.” Calling openly for Ankara’s support, Hashimi also furthered its involvement in his country’s affairs (Anadolu Ajansi, April 10).

A parallel process concerned Iraqi Kurds. The KRG’s relationship to Baghdad is complicated over the status of the disputed city of Kirkuk and the conflict over revenues from the exploration of natural resources in the North. In the ongoing standoff, the leader of KRG, Masoud Barzani, supports Hashimi and has used the leverage he gained to further bolster his position in Iraqi domestic politics. Last month, Barzani suggested he could hold a referendum to redefine ties to Baghdad. In a move that further accentuated this trend, during his trip to the US earlier this month, Barzani urged Washington to reconsider its backing of Maliki. Then, Barzani visited Turkey to meet with Hashimi and Turkish leaders (Anadolu Ajansi, April 20).

Barzani’s visit also underscored the degree to which Turkey has readjusted its regional policies. After years of confrontation with the KRG, Turkey already moved to normalize its relations with the Northern Iraqi Kurdish leadership to solicit their backing for Ankara’s fight against the PKK. In the wake of the latest developments, Ankara has further moved toward Iraqi Kurds to cope with the challenges in Iraqi domestic politics.

In the region, too, Turkey faces a similar fluid environment. With the unfolding of the Syrian uprising, Ankara’s partnerships in the region have gone through a new reshuffling. Faced with Tehran’s support for the Syrian regime and its backing of Iraq’s Maliki, Turkey’s coordination of its policies with the Syrian opposition, Iraqi opposition and the Gulf countries raise interesting questions about the patterns of Ankara’s alignment.

These realignments lead some to suggest that Turkey has been drawn into sectarian groupings but the Turkish government rejects those claims. Ankara justified its support for the Syrian opposition on the principles of human rights and democracy, rather than any sectarian affiliation. In Iraq, Turkey again refrained from framing its support for the Sunni leader Hashimi in sectarian terms and instead underlined the divisive nature of Maliki’s policies.

However, such statements from Turkish officials have far from convinced the Iraqi leadership. Maliki, already critical of Turkey’s policy on Syria, reacted harshly to recent developments and, in a press release, accused Turkey of interfering in Iraqi internal affairs and acting in a hostile manner (Milliyet, April 21). Reflecting the new regional realignment, Maliki then paid a two-day visit to Tehran on April 22-23, where he met with key Iranian leaders. In his first visit after his reelection, Maliki expressed solidarity with the Iranian leadership and vowed to work in tandem on regional issues (www.presstv.ir, April 23).

Both Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan and Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs gave a very strong reaction to Maliki’s remarks. On his way back from Doha, where he discussed Middle East issues with his regional counterparts, Erdogan called Maliki insincere and maintained that his oppressive policies threatened to divide Iraq. Suggesting that Maliki himself might have a sectarian agenda, Erdogan insisted that Ankara was in communication with all Iraqi groups including Shiite leaders (Sabah, April 22). The MFA’s statement also referred to Maliki’s attempts to monopolize power and exclude others as the basis of the current crisis in Iraq (www.mfa.gov.tr, April 21). Both countries summoned each other’s diplomats posted to the respective capitals over the developments.

To Turkey’s credit, concerns over Maliki’s course are indeed shared by a larger number of Iraqi actors, including Shiite groups. Increasingly, the inability of Maliki to build up coalitions with other groups and the weakening of the ties between Baghdad and the provinces, most notably Northern Iraq, are criticized by major Iraqi actors. Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr also visited Northern Iraq for the first time, in an effort to establish bridges between the parties (Anadolu Ajansi, April 26).

For years, Turkey has worked to ensure a smooth political transition in Iraq. Ankara’s policy was based on the understanding that if national reconciliation cannot be achieved, it could deepen the fragmentation and pave the way for an independent Kurdish state, not to mention other damaging repercussions for regional peace. It was for this reason that Ankara supported the Maliki-led government, although its initial preferences after the Iraqi elections had been different. With the ongoing political crisis and tensions in the region, Turkey has increasingly found itself on the same page as the KRG.

For his part, Barzani apparently hopes to deepen his cooperation with Turkey to further consolidate his position in Iraq. This development inevitably raises speculations as to whether the Iraqi Kurds might press for independence or a greater degree of autonomy from Baghdad, which, ironically, will put Turkey in a difficult position. Given Ankara’s own concerns about an independent Kurdish state and the Kurds’ claims over Kirkuk, Turkey’s support for Barzani will be conditional and it will hardly be the midwife to an independent Kurdistan.

-This commentary was published in  Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 9 Issue: 84, on 03/05/2012

The Dumb Idea Hall Of Fame

There's much more where this came from, but here are five terrible ideas to get us started.

BY AARON DAVID MILLER

                                          
                                     U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

In my 25 years of government service, I came up with more than my fair share of bad or just plain dumb ideas (see Arafat, Yasir, invitation to the Holocaust museum). In fact, I consider myself something of an expert on the subject.

But life's about learning, right? And like Justice Potter Stewart's famous 1964 opinion on pornography, these days I've come to know a bad idea when I see one.

The Middle East provides a particularly fertile ground for both the birth and demise of dumb ideas. And they come in varying shapes and sizes. Here are five candidates for some of the most inconsequential, ill-advised, or potentially dangerous dumb ideas proposed during the past year or so.

I'm grandfathering them in as potential nominees for the Dumb Idea Hall of Fame, a new feature to which I intend to devote at least one column a month.

Dumb Idea No. 1: Palestinian statehood at the U.N.

The most woolly-headed and inconsequential idea goes to the Palestinians for pretending (they actually may not really believe it themselves) that action at the United Nations might help their cause for statehood. Having tried this idea once last September with predictable results -- a big, fat nothingburger -- the PLO may be gearing up again for another run.

One can only wonder why. The Palestinians are desperate, to be sure, and the U.N. statehood gambit (like faux unity talks with Hamas) plays well on the street. But their lack of strategy and penchant for bad timing are breathtaking. So far, the U.N. initiative has produced implacable American opposition, U.S. congressional constraints on funding for the Palestinians, and America's withdrawal from UNESCO.

The last thing a U.S. president is going to do in an election year is support such an initiative. And it gives the Israeli government, already uninterested in real negotiations, just another reason to blame the impasse on the Palestinians. But hey, the Palestinians are going to do what they're going to do whether it makes sense or not. The best thing that can be said about the U.N. gambit is that it really doesn't matter.

Dumb Idea No. 2: Safe zones in Syria

Dumb ideas are one thing; potentially dangerous ideas are quite another. And that distinction goes to the idea of creating safe zones in Syria in an effort to pressure, if not topple, the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The proponents of this idea are either interminably obtuse or quite calculating and see the creation of such zones as a way to sucker the United States or other external powers into military action against the Assads. Either way, this approach has every sign of being half-baked, ill-advised, and open-ended. Indeed, it's driven by the most dangerous idea of all: that America needs to act and do something, regardless of the consequences.

Safe zones or humanitarian corridors have at least three purposes. The most obvious is to offer sanctuary to Syrians fleeing the fighting and the regime. The Turks would have the most incentive here, if cross-border refugee flows get out of control.

The other objectives -- providing a safe haven to train and organize rebels who oppose the regime, and hoping to further cause splits in the regime by occupying Syrian territory -- are far more dubious. These areas would have to be defended, which would mean more boots on the ground over time (remember: it took eight months to bring down Muammar al-Qaddafi's rinky-dink army). Syrian air defenses would need to be suppressed to avoid regime attacks. And poof -- before you know it, we have an open-ended escalation. This kind of piecemeal intervention is the worst outcome of all -- getting involved militarily without getting results. Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security has it right on this one: When it comes to military options, either the United States intervenes decisively -- as a matter of vital national interest -- or it stays out. Half-measures and incremental efforts to increase the pressure will likely result in additional costs without real results.

Dumb Idea No. 3: Bombing Iran Now

Nobody can or should blame a tiny country living on the knife's edge with a dark past -- even one with an estimated 200-plus nuclear weapons -- for worrying deeply about a mullah-controlled Iran with the bomb.

What Israel does about the prospects of a nuclear Iran and when is a more complex matter. Striking Iran anytime soon -- even if the nuclear talks don't produce a deal quickly -- would be dumb. It's a different thing to assume grave risks if success is likely and you have broad support even if you fail.

An attack now will not prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear capacity. It would be tantamount to mowing the grass; Iran would accelerate its nuclear program, most likely with greater international support. The world would be furious with the Israelis (see: higher oil prices, financial markets tanking, regional tensions), and nobody -- not even the United States -- would really understand why Israel struck when Iran didn't have enough fissile material to make a bomb and hadn't mastered the assembly of components, let alone tested a nuclear weapon. The Israelis' claim that they needed to strike because Iran's nuclear sites were now immune from attack would not be judged compelling by anyone.

It's much smarter -- though hardly easy -- for the Israelis to allow more time for sanctions to take their toll, see whether some deal on enrichment is possible, and if not, press the Americans to do what the president in March publicly articulated he would: not just contain Iran but prevent it from acquiring a weapon.

Knowing the Israelis, they've likely built extra time into their assessment regarding when and how Iran's nuclear sites will be immune from attack. If sanctions and diplomacy can't stop Iran from acquiring a weapon, a military option can't and shouldn't be ruled out. The dumb idea is exercising it now.

Dumb Idea No. 4: Obama's push for a settlement freeze

Rarely has any U.S. president committed more of a stumble during his first year than when Barack Obama decided to make Israeli settlements the focus of his approach to Arab-Israeli peacemaking.

In one fell swoop, the president set himself up for failure, turned his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a macho contest of who had bigger cojones (Obama lost), and alienated the Palestinians and the Arabs because he backed down. And for all this, the United States succeeded in getting no real freeze, no deal, and no negotiations. The president's tough rhetoric on settlements only made the problem worse as the gap between words and deeds swallowed his credibility whole.

Fighting with the Israelis is an occupational reality for any president or secretary of state who wants to do serious peacemaking. The fight, however, needs to be at the right time and on the right issue. If done correctly (i.e., with a strategy), it can actually be productive and benefit not only the United States, but the Israelis and Palestinians too.

The fight worth having, with both sides, is over the actual substance of an agreement. But given the gaps that separate the two sides and Obama's own indecision about what he wants, that fight isn't worth having. Yet.

Dumb Idea No. 5: A bad idea is better than no idea

Dumb ideas come along for many reasons. Sometimes they result from bad analysis, imperfect policy options, or desperation. They can also arise from wishful thinking or from an obsession with fixing things.

It's a variation of that last notion that represents the dumbest idea of all: that action -- any action, no matter how harebrained and ill-advised -- is better than no action. This idea is quintessentially American and results from the unique blend of idealism and pragmatism that cuts to the core of who Americans are as a people and how they see the world.

The fact is, Americans can't help themselves. America isn't a potted plant. Americans believe they can always make a bad situation better. This fix-it mentality is in our DNA. If it's harnessed and rigorously controlled, the United States can actually accomplish some things, particularly if it actually thinks through a strategy. But if not, it leads to what my friend Gamal Helal, an Arabic-language interpreter and confidant of presidents and secretaries of state, calls the United States' rush toward disaster. America is headed that way on Syria, I'm afraid.

My fondest hope would be to avoid dumb ideas altogether. This may not be possible. The need to act is just too strong. Perhaps we can at least limit the damage. But based on a couple of decades or so of government experience, I'm not holding my breath.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 02/05/2012
-Aaron David Miller is a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His new book, Can America Have Another Great President?, will be published this year

The Qatar Bubble

Can this tiny, rich emirate really solve the Middle East's thorniest political conflicts?

BY BLAKE HOUNSHELL

Sultan Al Qassemi, the Emirati commentator and prolific tweeter, jokes that he tries to post one article every day on the rise of Qatar, the tiny Gulf sheikhdom at the heart of the Arab Spring. There's a formula, he says. Nearly all articles express the same points: Qatar is rich, small, hosting the 2022 soccer World Cup, underwriting the pan-Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera, and cheering on protesters across the Arab world -- yet it's hardly democratic at home.

Often the headlines venture into rank hyperbole: The Economist called Qatar a "Pygmy with the punch of a giant," while the New York Review of Books hailed its "strange power." Various outlets have dubbed the country's ambitious emir, 60-year-old Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the "Arab Henry Kissinger." Last year, in an off-mic moment with political donors, U.S. President Barack Obama called him a "pretty influential guy."

There's no question the Qatari royals have parlayed their small country's extraordinary wealth into outsized if utterly unlikely clout, whizzing from one conflict zone to another and inviting dissidents and diplomats to the capital, Doha, to kibitz, negotiate, and plot against one another -- usually at the Sheraton, the pyramid-shaped, 1980s-era hotel overlooking the city's palm-lined corniche. (Think Star Wars bar scene for the Persian Gulf crowd, with French paratroopers strolling by as djellaba-clad Darfuri rebels and Western oil executives sip tea in the hotel's towering lobby.) Over the past decade, secured by one of the most massive U.S. air bases in the world, Qatar has inserted itself into conflicts in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, positioning the emirate as a disinterested mediator, trusted -- or at least tolerated -- by all parties.

It helps that there's little to worry about at home. Qatar is the richest country on the planet, with its 250,000 or so native citizens floating comfortably on a per capita income estimated at well over $400,000 a year. Another million and a half guest workers from all over the world toil at its mammoth construction projects and copious megamalls, while a smaller cadre of Arab and Western expats files the paperwork and keeps the trains running on time. Opinion polls find that Qataris evince little interest in political reform, and no wonder: Aside from having to live in dowdy Doha -- a dusty, sweltering inferno half the year -- they've got it pretty good.

Until 2011, the emir seemed largely content with his role as a mediator, though Al Jazeera's critical coverage of politics (everywhere outside Qatar and the Gulf, of course) sometimes riled his fellow Arab autocrats. And his influence had certainly grown as leaders of the region's traditional powers, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, slipped into their dotage. But Sheikh Hamad's ambitions ballooned even more last year as his popular satellite channel became an unabashed cheerleader for the uprisings in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen (though not neighboring Bahrain), while the minuscule Qatari military joined the fight against Libyan tyrant Muammar al-Qaddafi. Even the mighty United States started looking to Qatar for help in bringing the Arab League along with its transformational agenda -- quite the turn of events given that Washington had long seen Qatar primarily as the backer of Al Jazeera, with its anti-American vitriol and al Qaeda snuff films.

This was heady stuff for a tiny "thumb" sticking out from the Arabian Peninsula, as Qaddafi once described Qatar. The country is, after all, not much more than a city-state the size of Connecticut, surrounded by some very heavily armed neighbors. In seeking to fill a vacuum -- and ignoring his own vulnerabilities -- had the emir finally gone too far?

FOR MOST OF its short history, Qatar has been an afterthought of an afterthought in global politics, an impoverished backwater that had often fallen prey to the schemes of stronger powers, from the British struggle with the Ottoman Turks for control of the Persian Gulf in the 19th century to the rise of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia next door in the early 20th. Like many leaders of small states, the Al Thani ruling family possesses a certain knack for survival, sometimes appeasing Qatar's larger neighbors, at other times irritating them and inviting outside protection, as Qatar did when it built the gigantic, billion-dollar al-Udeid air base in 1996, anticipating the closure of U.S. facilities in Saudi Arabia -- before the emirate even had an air force of its own.

The discovery of oil in 1940 allowed the Al Thani family to forge a collection of squabbling tribes and pearl fishermen into a small -- and wildly rich -- state. But it wasn't until 1995, when Sheikh Hamad ousted his father in a bloodless coup, that Qatar began building its little patch of desert into a force in the region and beyond. Under him, Qatar has become an expansionary power, a sort of latter-day Venice -- only its strength lies not in trade or maritime prowess but in the flow of natural gas. In this, Qatar has been more than merely lucky, making big, bold bets on the rise of liquefied natural gas and reinvesting profits in massive infrastructure projects at home and high-profile assets abroad like Harrods in London and the French soccer club Paris Saint-Germain. Eventually, the government hopes the interest on Qatar's $85 billion sovereign wealth fund alone will be able to fund its operations in perpetuity.

All that gas money has turned Doha into an unlikely entrepôt of political intrigue, a sort of Turtle Bay on the Persian Gulf. I lived in Qatar for a little more than a year, until last December, and the city offered a front-row seat as the Arab Spring unfolded -- masterminded, it sometimes seemed, from Doha. In October, I went to Souq Waqif, the Disneyfied market along the city's corniche, to attend a victory party Qatar was throwing for Libyan expats. The souq was festooned with banners celebrating the recent rebel triumph over Qaddafi, who had just been summarily executed and then grotesquely displayed in a strip-mall meat locker. The highlight of the party -- a sort of mosh pit filled with Libyans dancing to the revolutionary anthem "Raise Your Head High, You're a Free Libyan" -- proved too much for the authorities, and it was broken up in favor of a traditional Qatari sword dance.

For months, Doha had teemed with Libyan exiles, not so secretly funded by Qatar, which put up the rebel leaders at expensive hotels and bankrolled their satellite channel. Qatari cargo jets ferried tens of millions of dollars' worth of humanitarian supplies, weapons, and special-operations troops to rebel headquarters in Benghazi on regular flights; nearly the entire Qatari air force helped enforce NATO's no-fly zone. In August, when Libyan rebel fighters stormed Qaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya complex, they raised a Qatari flag in appreciation. Asked in an Al Jazeera interview just how much Qatar spent on the Libyan revolution, the prime minister simply said, "It's a lot. It cost us a lot."

Qatar insisted its only interest in Libya was freedom for the Libyan people. But a nationalist backlash over perceived Qatari meddling in Libyan affairs soon ensued. Abdel Rahman Shalgham, Qaddafi's former U.N. ambassador whose dramatic defection helped seal the dictator's fate, appeared on television to denounce Qatar as an alien, malign force. "Qatar might have delusions of leading the region," he said. "I absolutely do not accept their presence at all." Qatar's secular allies were soon forced out of the interim government, while its main Islamist proxy in Libya, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, was detained and humiliated at Tripoli's airport by rival militiamen. One year on, it's hard to see what Qatar gained from its North African adventure.

If Libya represented the apotheosis of Qatari power, Syria represents its limits. More than a year since their revolution began, Syrians are still braving bullets to protest the rule of President Bashar al-Assad -- and firing back with a few of their own. So far, all outside attempts to end the conflict peacefully have failed, including repeated Qatari-led efforts to come up with a diplomatic solution. If Assad survives, Doha will have aggravated the Syrian regime's biggest supporter -- Iran -- with which Qatar shares the world's largest gas field and maintains officially friendly ties, to little end.

Meanwhile, even opposition Syrians complain that Al Jazeera's coverage of the conflict has become unprofessional -- maudlin, biased, and often untrustworthy. Ali Hashem, a highly regarded Al Jazeera reporter, resigned in March, alleging that his reporting on armed fighters had been squelched in favor of the official narrative of a peaceful uprising. And with a member of the Qatari royal family now directly in charge after the ouster of longtime head Wadah Khanfar, the satellite network's credibility and independence are now widely questioned.

SYRIA IS NO exception. For all the media attention, few of Qatar's diplomatic initiatives have actually borne fruit. Lebanon's 2008 political settlement, brokered in Qatar, looks like a rare success story, but the others remain question marks. In May 2011, Qatar walked away from its peacemaking efforts in Yemen, while Bahrain that same month brushed aside a Qatari offer to mediate its internal conflict. Doha has volunteered to house the Taliban-U.S. peace talks aimed at resolving the decade-long war in Afghanistan, but the Taliban have yet to open their office there and the U.S. Congress spiked a prisoner-swap deal that might have built confidence for further negotiations. The Darfur agreement, negotiated at the Sheraton over the course of more than a year, didn't even include all the warring parties. Qatar's promising efforts to wean Hamas away from Iran haven't earned it any goodwill from its neighbors, either: A recent meeting of Arab leaders in Riyadh, focused on Iran, pointedly excluded Sheikh Hamad, distrusted for his warm(ish) ties to Tehran.

Nor is Qatar's cash cow -- natural gas -- by any means secure. A global supply glut has sent prices plunging. Australia is projected to surpass Qatar in the production of liquefied natural gas by 2020, and the shale-gas revolution in the United States and Eastern Europe (not to mention out-of-the-way places like Mozambique and potential new players like Libya) threatens to extend the bear market far into the future.

As for the World Cup, perhaps the crown jewel in Qatar's ascension to the global big-boy party, it is far from clear that Doha will be basking in soccer glory a decade from now. Not only are questions being raised about the viability of hosting a tournament in temperatures that reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, the limited availability of alcohol, and Qatar's risky, heat-busting stadium designs, but FIFA, soccer's international governing body, may soon launch an investigation into allegations that Qatari officials bribed their way to victory in the selection process. In any case, Qatar needs to import millions of tons of raw building materials -- including, of all things, sand from Saudi Arabia -- to make the World Cup a success. That will give the Saudis, with their retrograde foreign policy and their long history of meddling in Qatari politics, leverage for years to come.

So let's hold the accolades for Qatar. There's a reason most city-states throughout history have avoided provoking their larger neighbors -- sooner or later, they strike back. And isn't being incredibly rich good enough?

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy for its issue for May/June 2012
-Blake Hounshell is managing editor of Foreign Policy