Arab Spring dons the Muslim Brotherhood robe

Mohamed Mursi's portrait in Tahrir Square yesterday (Photo by Mai Shaheen) 

Portraits of Mursi predecessors Naguib, Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak

 Following is my paraphrasing of a leader comment written in Arabic by Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat:

He was a toddler at the outbreak of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. No wonder he doesn’t recall Muhammad Naguib and military communiqué Number One.

He went to school during the years of Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the seventies under Anwar Sadat, he graduated with honors from university and enlisted in the Muslim Brotherhood.

Under Hosni Mubarak’s long term in office, he entered both the People’s Assembly and jail.

It is thus difficult to compare Egypt’s new president to any of his four predecessors. He didn’t read from the same book or drink from the same spring.

He received his PhD (in rocket science) from the University of Southern California and went on to serve as a professor (at California State University in North Ridge). This in no way means Mohamed Mursi is western-educated.

Unlike his forerunners, he did not spring from a military academy.  He sprang from the (Muslim Brotherhood) General Guide’s gown.

We saw yesterday what no one could have imagined a couple of years ago. Mursi himself wouldn’t have dared envisage a dream of such magnitude. No Muslim Brother could have visualized a colleague sitting in Nasser’s chair or Sadat’s rest house or Mubarak’s executive office in Uruba Palace. Mursi was an active and tenacious legislator who anticipated sitting behind bars, not in a palace.

You can safely say luck served him well.

Angry youths mobilized for change and the Muslim Brotherhood promptly seized the historic opportunity. It had deeper roots and greater means and was better organized than the youths. The revolution simply dropped into its lap.

Luck meantime knocked at Mursi’s door. As soon as Khairat el-Shater was disqualified, the Muslim Brotherhood rallied to resolutely back is standby candidate.

Good fortune remained on Mursi’s side when Ahmed Shafiq, a former air force commander and the Mubarak regime’s last prime minister, became his opponent in the presidential runoffs.

Many voters had to make a bitter choice. Mursi was not the safe bet for a civil state, but Shafiq evoked memories of a forlorn past. The ballot box chose Mursi, leader of the Freedom and Justice Party, as post-revolution president and Egypt donned the Muslim Brotherhood’s robe – but under the military’s watchful eyes.

Mursi’s victory is supposed to close the chapter of chicanery, rhetoric and ruthlessness. So exit the pipe dreams and enter the facts and figures.

The president-elect now has to think hard of how to revive the ailing economy. He has to reassure investors, tourists, allies and friends. He needs daring, robust and flexible policies coupled with a disposition to compromise.

He has to reassure Egypt, which is sharply divided. He has to reassure those in fear of uniform opinion, the uniform dress code and a possible obsolete approach to economic, political, minority and women issues.

He must tackle the problems of the constitution, the national assembly and the president’s prerogatives, especially that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) emasculated the president-elect before he was named.

He must ponder Egypt’s regional role, its ties with Israel, the United States and the European Union and mull over the issues of foreign aid, loans and grants and their attached strings.

Mursi’s journey won’t be easy. Freezing his Brotherhood membership and proposing to co-opt others won’t suffice. He has to quickly sponsor a serious and comprehensive nationwide reconciliation. The number of voters in his favor shows he won a narrow and conditional mandate. He has to realize his party is henceforth accountable for the people’s demands and aspirations.

Dreams are susceptible to cosmetics. Figures are harsh and bare. The days ahead might prove that the Muslim Brotherhood risked a lot when it insisted on winning the presidential palace.

On the whole, Egypt revolted, voted and held its breath waiting for the new president’s name. It was a tough exercise in democracy and its anxieties.

Egypt went to the polls and chose an Islamist for president, confirming thereby the Arab Spring’s identity as first transpired in Tunisia.

It’s not an overstatement to say a changed Egypt is before us. We can also say a changed region is dawning. The Spring that garbed Egypt in a Muslim Brotherhood robe is now drowning in Syria in a sea of funerals and regional and international prizefights.

The region is into a season of tremors, surprises and breakdowns. So please fasten your seat belts.

Expect “a lot of bark but little bite” from Turkey

Turkey today called a meeting of NATO member states to discuss its response to the shooting down of one of its fighter jets by Syria on Friday.

Djemal Pasha (from Wikipedia)

Ankara invoked Article 4 of NATO's charter, under which consultations can be requested when an ally feels their security is threatened. But the move also signals that, for now, Ankara is looking for a concerted diplomatic response rather than taking military action of its own.

Earlier, Turkey's foreign minister said the F-4 Phantom was in international airspace when it was hit.

Ahmet Davutoglu said the unarmed plane was not on a reconnaissance or secret mission related to Syria, but had mistakenly breezed in and out of Syrian airspace a quarter of an hour before the incident.

In an interview with TRT television, Davutoglu stressed the unarmed jet had briefly entered Syrian airspace by mistake on Friday but had left by the time it was shot down several minutes later.

“Our plane shortly violated Syrian airspace, but not at the time it was shot down,” he said.

"According to our conclusions, our plane was shot down in international airspace, 13 nautical miles (24km) from Syria," he said.

Davutoglu also insisted the jet had not been on a "covert mission related to Syria" but had instead been carrying out a training flight to test Turkey's radar capabilities.

The unarmed F-4 Phantom was not sending hostile signals, and identifiable as Turkish, he said.

"You have to first send a caution, a warning," he said in the first detailed Turkish statement on the international incident. "If the warning doesn't work, you scramble your planes, you send a stronger signal, you force the plane to land. There wasn't enough time to do any of that in the time our plane was in Syrian airspace."

"We have to question how it is that an unarmed, solo flight got this response from the Syrians," he said.

He also said Turkish intelligence intercepted radio communications from the Syrian side suggesting that they knew it was a Turkish plane.

Davutoglu said Turkey's response will be clear after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's scheduled meeting with opposition leaders later today. “We will, without any hesitation, decisively take the necessary steps regarding the Turkish plane downed by Syria,” he added.

This is an unusual move that raised speculation about a possible parliamentary decision, which is a requirement for any military action out of the country according to the Turkish Constitution. “We are not considering military action now,” a source told Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News. “But we want to inform the opposition and we want to keep all options open.”

In his daily column for Saudi Asharq Alawsat, Egyptian political analyst and talk show host Imad Adeeb quotes an unnamed Turkey expert as giving four reasons why Ankara’s response to Friday’s plane incident will be all bark but no bite.

The four reasons are:

(1) Relations between the Turkish military and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) of President Abdullah Gul and Erdogan are stretched and the military are opposed to any impetuous escalation.

(2) Military escalation against Syria would help the regime’s political floatation. Fact is that an external military threat usually shores up a regime swimming in troubled waters by rallying citizens around it.

(3) A Turkish military blitz would destroy Turkey’s so-called “zero problem” foreign policy and evoke memories of the Ottoman Empire and of Djemal Pasha, who was appointed with full powers in military and civilian affairs in Syria in 1915.

(4) The regional reactions of Iran and Hezbollah and trade relations with Russia and China give Ankara cause for concern.

Accordingly, “You can expect Ankara to talk tough politically and take retaliatory political measures. But it will choose to pass up a military riposte as it did in the case of the Israeli naval commando raid” on a Turkish boat in the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla.

“Turkey will be making a lost of noise, but the maximum it will do is increase its military assistance to the Syrian opposition.”

Syria fires four messages by downing Turkish jet

Photo from the Turkish daily Hurriyet

“Suspense” is the predominant impression you get from reading regional news and views the morning after Syria shot down a Turkish F-4 Phantom jet over its airspace.

The buzzword is “suspense” because political analysts and opinion-shapers are hazarding conflicting guesses on the likely response of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad poked him in the eye with a blunt stick.

A Syrian military spokesman said an unidentified aerial object violated the country’s airspace and was shot down by anti-aircraft artillery, hitting it one kilometer off the country’s Mediterranean coastline, Syria’s state-run news agency SANA reported.

The plane turned out to be a Turkish fighter jet, and was dealt with in keeping with Syrian law, a Syrian military spokesman explained.

He also stated that Syrian forces are helping the Turks search for the two missing Turkish pilots.

Erdogan issued a statement, after an emergency security meeting in Ankara, saying a decisive response will be taken once all the facts about the incident are known.

Abdelbari Atwan, publisher and editor-in-chief of the London-based pan-Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi, believes Erdogan’s talk of a “decisive response” after the emergency security meeting in Ankara “implies that the matter is extremely serious and warrants some kind of retaliation (by Turkey)… We could be on the brink of a regional war.”

By downing the jet, says Atwan, “the Syrian leadership meant to send four strong messages”:

• The first message “warns Turkey not to overreach itself in its support of the Syrian opposition by supplying it with advanced weapons and by providing safe passage to Muslim extremists seeking to bring down the Syrian regime.”
• The second tells NATO “and the United States in particular that Syria is not Libya and that any recourse to the use of force against it -- including aerial ‘carpet bombing’ -- won’t be consequence-free.”
• The third message is addressed to “some Arab countries, chiefly in the Gulf, that are arming the opposition via Turkey.”
• The fourth and last is for the public at home and is meant “to make up for the defection of a Syrian pilot with his MIG-21 to Jordan and show that cohesion of the regime is inviolate and ready to foil the ‘external plot’ to bring it down.”

To Atwan’s mind, the Syrian leadership could not have gone this far in the escalation “without getting a green light from its Russian counterpart.” He says the fighter jet went down near the Russian naval base in Tartus, “and might have been brought down by Russian air defense systems there.”  

Accordingly, “will the Syrian leadership succeed in dragging Turkey, and thus the United States, into a mistimed pre-emptive war they want to avoid at all costs pending the U.S. presidential elections and preparations for taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities?”

“It is noteworthy,” Atwan writes, “that Turkey’s response to the downing of its fighter jet was muddled, much as its reaction to stepped up Syrian support for Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)” terrorist attacks on Turkish targets. 

What is certain is that “Syria is not Libya and Assad is not Gaddafi. The former has an impressive arsenal comprising S-300 (Russian surface-to-air) missiles while the latter could not intercept s single Western plane except the one over Lockerbie -- that’s if he were the one who brought it down after all.” 

“Only in Egypt” – some nonpareil happenings

From The World

This is my edited translation of Egyptian political analyst and talk show host Imad Adeeb’s column today for the Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat:

Only in Egypt do politicians dispute final results of the presidential elections.

Only in Egypt are some elections results forged by bribing staff at the print house officially designated to produce the ballot papers. Sounds like the script for an American detective suspense movie.

Only in Egypt would you find in ballot boxes more ballot papers than the number of registered voters at the polling station.

Only in Egypt would one of the two candidates in the presidential race announce the election’s final results one-third of the way into the vote count and before the Supreme Presidential Elections Committee (SPEC) had the chance to examine appeals filed by the two campaigns and to officially declare the winner.

Only in Egypt would the vote-buying rate reach $250 per gullible would-be voter.

Only in Egypt would an elected president assume office without knowing his presidential prerogatives in a country lacking a constitution and a parliament.

Only in Egypt would state institutions change weekly and dramatically from one Thursday to the next. On the previous Thursday, the country lacked a president but had a parliament. This Thursday, it has no parliament and no president. Next week, it will have a president but no parliament.

Only in Egypt would the regular army, which proved professional in managing state affairs over the past 20 months, assume the state’s legislative and executive powers. It then handed legislative powers to an elected parliament before retaking the legislative powers after disbanding parliament. Later this month, the army would hand over executive powers to the president-elect but keep hold of the legislative powers pending the election of a new parliament.

Only in Egypt would you find one thing and its opposite. You would find a revolution and a coup d’état, the supremacy of the law and attempts to flout it, the rule of justice and its travesty, the Arab world’s most transparent elections and a struggle over its final results.

That’s fascinating and unparalleled, indeed.

Syrian activist Michel Kilo: “We’re getting there”

By Michel Kilo

 This is my translation of renowned Syrian activist Michel Kilo’s think piece appearing today in Arabic in the Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat:

Michel Kilo

The Syrian regime used to think that keeping the major Syrian cities in check should precede reining in the country’s rural areas; that getting people off city streets would surely keep the lid on protests in medium-sized and small townships; and that stifling the uprising was only a matter of time.

The regime thought it devised the correct plan and had the manpower to see it through since people are scattered, fearful and leaderless while the opposition is divided and impotent.

The regime did not foresee surprises. It thought everything would turn out to be “hanky-dory” within days or weeks.

Indeed, the regime focused on the major cities. It started bragging that Damascus and Aleppo were free of protests and were made safe of wide-ranging popular unrest.

In this context, it is worth recounting Damascus’ true story.

Damascus’ revolt started in its eastern suburbs before spreading to its southern, then south-western and lastly west-northern districts – so much so that the city was surrounded by a ring of protests, setting it in the jaws of giant human and geographic pincers.

That’s when the regime hit back in the east first, starting with Douma. It then proceeded to deploy the army everywhere around Damascus, subduing small villages and overrunning eastern and western Ghota.

As soon as the regime boasted that it got rid of the restive ring around the capital, the inner suburbs of Damascus -- namely, Muhajereen, Ruknuddin, Barza, Qaboun, Jobar, Midan, Kfar Sousa and Mezze – flared up. The insurgents responded by creating an inner ring around Damascus to replace the outlying one.

To date, the regime has been unable to overpower the new inner ring, and the revolution has resumed in eastern and western Ghota as well as in the capital’s outlying suburbia.

Aleppo too has a story to tell.

Aleppo’s Douma was considered a loyal and peaceful city. Together with Damascus, it was used by the regime to make the false claim that half Syria’s population is loyal to the regime.

The claim was being made when hundreds of thousands of people were participating in an average of 14 demonstrations daily in Aleppo proper and 50 in Aleppo governorate’s rural areas and when security forces were hurling Aleppo University students to death from their campus dormitories.

The situation in Aleppo today leaves no room for talk of a loyal and peaceful city. Had this been the case, the regime wouldn’t have deployed huge armored contingents in Aleppo to join the 100,000-plus security personnel who have been positioned there since the outbreak of the uprising.

In the past few months, the (pro-democracy) campaign entered another phase. It succeeded in frustrating the resolute offensive mounted across the country by the regime’s most violent and best-equipped forces. It then liberated vast swaths of territory from all manner of oppression.

Even Homs, which the regime sought to vanquish in the hope of breaking the opposition’s back, stood its ground. At the same time, the resoluteness of Harasta, a small city sitting on a highway hardly 10 kilometers from Damascus city center, is ample proof that the regime failed to tip the scale of the confrontation in its favor, albeit partially.

Failure of the regime’s all-out offensive allowed the revolution to go back to the cities and sink roots in the rural areas, which have gradually become out of bounds for the regime’s military and security forces.

The army has effectively transmuted into taskforces roving around the country, with protesters taking back to the streets as soon as the taskforces roll out their tanks.

More recently, though perhaps belatedly, the so-called “Syrian bourgeoisie,” better known as “the merchants” in common parlance, staged general strikes in both Aleppo and Damascus to express, in practical terms, their decision to break away from the regime.

The regime’s current response to the second wave of the nationwide insurgency is a string of systematic and genocidal operations against civilians all over.

Today, Syria stands at a crossroads. The regime is hankering for a civil war, which the population is rejecting and resisting.

The clash is between two policies. One would destroy the country, the other would usher it to the world of freedom and democracy.

The outcome of the clash is beyond doubt. The Syrian people are throwing out the regime by their own brawn and means. In so doing, and by virtue of their legendary steadfastness, they are forging the elements of their victory.

McCain pushes for U.S. military leadership on Syria

U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) Tuesday delivered the following remarks on Syria at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C.:

Sen. John McCain

“Thank you, Michael [Rubin], for that kind introduction.

“It is a pleasure to be back at AEI. This institute has been leading our debates on public policy, especially on foreign and defense policy, for decades, and you continue that leadership today. It is great to be back among so many friends.

“I usually try to begin my speeches on a lighter note. But when it comes to the situation in Syria, I could not summon a joke or a laugh if I tried. It is too horrifying, too heartbreaking, too exasperating.

“For 15 months now, the Syrian people have faced an onslaught of violence from Bashar al-Assad and his forces. It is now estimated that as many as 12,000 lives have been lost. Some suspect the figure is even higher. And there is no end in sight. To the contrary, Assad appears to be accelerating his fight to the finish.

“Amid all of this violence, it is important to recognize that the clear trend is toward escalation, both in the nature and the quantity of the killing. Assad has gone from using infantry and snipers, to tanks and artillery, to turning loose special units and plain-clothed militias to massacre men, women, and children, as happened last month in the town of Houla. We are now seeing a rapid increase in Assad’s use of helicopter gunships. Whereas his forces once sought to clear and hold ground, they now appear to be under orders just to kill anyone and everyone they deem a threat. There is every reason to believe that Assad will continue to escalate the violence – more massacres, more use of helicopters, and perhaps worse weapons after that.

“Meanwhile, Assad and his forces continue to be rearmed by Russia and Iran. There are reports of Iranian operatives on the ground in Syria to help Assad with the killing, while Russia apparently continues to ship heavy weapons – including, as Secretary Clinton has stated, the very helicopter gunships that Assad is currently using to strafe and bomb civilians. Whether these are new helicopters or old ones that Assad sent to Russia to be refurbished and have the blood washed off of them is a distinction without a difference. There are now reports that Russia has dispatched two ships and a unit of Russian marines to reinforce their naval base at Tartus – and that they are also delivering additional anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to help defend the Assad regime. Clearly, this is not a fair fight.

“Amid all of the violence in Syria, we cannot go numb to the human tragedy there. In April, thanks to the special efforts of the Turkish government, Senator Joe Lieberman and I visited a Syrian refugee camp in southern Turkey. I have seen my share of suffering and death, but the stories that those Syrians told still haunt me – men who had lost all of their children, women and girls who had been gang raped, children who had been tortured. And none of this, mind you, was the random acts of cruelty that sadly occur in war. Syrian army defectors told us that killing, and rape, and torture was what they were instructed to do as a tactic of terror and intimidation. So if I get a little emotional when I talk about Syria, this is why.FHezb

“When it comes to the Administration’s policy toward Syria, to say they are ‘leading from behind’ is too generous. That suggests they are leading. They are just behind. In its desperation, the Administration now appears to be placing its hopes in the Russian government to push Assad from power in a Yemen-like transition. This is the same Russian government that continues to provide heavy weapons and moral support to Assad, that refuses to authorize U.N. sanctions on the regime, and that even blamed Assad’s recent slaughter of civilians in Houla on the opposition and foreign powers. The more basic problem with this approach is that the Administration has already tried it, and Moscow rejected it and shut down the U.N. Security Council. What has changed to make things different now?

“What the President does not seem to realize is what President Bill Clinton came to understand in Bosnia – that a diplomatic resolution in conflicts like these is not possible until the military balance of power changes on the ground. As long as a murderous dictator, be it Slobodan Milosevic or Bashar al-Assad, believes he is winning on the battlefield, he has no incentive to stop fighting and negotiate. The same is true for the regime’s foreign supporters. For whatever the reasons, and despite destroying Russia’s reputation in the Arab world, the Russian government has stuck with Assad for 15 months. What makes us think that President Putin will change course now, when Assad is still the dominant power on the ground?

“We are now approaching a major point of decision. Kofi Annan’s plan, which does not even call for Assad to go, has been a failure for months. The head of the U.N. monitoring mission in Syria has suspended its operations for security reasons. Assad’s increasing reliance on helicopter gunships is giving new impetus to calls for a no-fly zone. And Russia is unlikely to ever support a policy of regime change in Syria. The Administration’s approach is being overtaken by events.

“Furthermore, the opposition inside Syria is increasingly forcing the hand of the civilized world to intervene on their behalf, because they are growing more effective militarily. This is no thanks to us. Public reports suggest that some of our friends in the Middle East are now arming rebel groups in Syria. This may explain some of the recent reports that opposition forces have been able to destroy some of Assad’s tanks and prevent his forces from retaking and holding some key terrain.

“Some will try to interpret these developments as evidence that the United States should maintain a hands-off approach to Syria. This is wrong.

“First, the fact that the opposition in Syria is doing better militarily thanks to external support seems to validate what many of us have been arguing for months – that opposition forces have enough organization to be supportable, and that our support can help them to further improve their organization and command and control. This is an argument for doing more, not less, to aid rebel fighters in Syria.

“Second, while it is good that some foreign military assistance now seems to be reaching the opposition in Syria, this alone will not be decisive. It will not be sufficient to end the conflict faster. It may even just prolong it. Nearly every Syrian I speak with tells me the same thing: The longer this conflict drags on, the more radicalized it becomes, and the more it turns into a sectarian civil war with an escalating spiral of violence that Syrians alone cannot stop.

“Finally, the Syrian opposition needs to know that the United States stands with them, and that we are willing to take risks to support them when they need it most. Our current inaction only denies us the opportunity to have influence with the forces in Syria who will one day inherit the country. And we are ceding that influence to foreign states that may not always share our interests and our values – or worse, to extremist groups that are hostile to us. Our lack of involvement in Syria is not preventing the militarization of the conflict, or lessening the risk of sectarian violence, or countering the appeal of extremist groups. All of these events are just happening without us – and without our ability to influence them.

“In short, the main reason the United States needs to get more involved in Syria is to help the opposition end the conflict sooner, while they can still secure an outcome that is consistent with their goals – and ours. We should do so not simply for humanitarian reasons, but because it is in our national security interest. In the words of General James Mattis, the Commander of U.S. Central Command, the fall of Assad would be the biggest blow to Iran in 25 years.

“Yes, there are risks to greater involvement in Syria. The opposition is still struggling to get organized. Al-Qaeda and other extremists are working to hijack the revolution. And there are already reports of reprisal killings of Alawites. These risks are real and serious, but the risks of continuing to do nothing are worse.

“If we fail to act, the consequences are clear. Syria will become a failed state in the heart of the Middle East, threatening both our ally Israel and our NATO ally Turkey. With or without Assad, the country will devolve into a full-scale civil war with areas of ungoverned space that Al-Qaeda and its allies will occupy. Violence and radicalism will spill even more into Lebanon and Iraq, fueling sectarian conflicts that are still burning in both countries. Syria will turn into a battlefield between Sunni and Shia extremists, each backed by foreign powers, which will ignite sectarian tensions from North Africa to the Gulf and risk a wider regional conflict. This is the course we are on in Syria, and we must act now to avoid it.

“The U.S. action I envision would not be unilateral. It would be multilateral. We would work closely with Arab and European allies, especially Turkey and our partners in the Gulf. As in Libya, there would be no boots on the ground. And we would only intervene at the request of legitimate representatives of the Syrian people. Our goal would be to help the opposition change the military balance of power on the ground, thereby creating conditions for an end to the violence, the departure of Assad and his cronies, and a negotiated transition as soon as possible.

“To achieve this goal, we first need to help the Syrian opposition to establish safe havens inside the country. This is essential for a number of reasons. It is constantly said that the Syrian opposition is disorganized. That may be true at the national and international levels. But it is much less true at the local level. To the contrary, the Revolutionary Councils, Military Councils, and Local Coordination Committees that have emerged in cities across Syria are increasingly sophisticated and effective. I have met some of their members and representatives, and they are among the most impressive figures I have encountered in the Syrian opposition.

“Nonetheless, if the Syrian opposition is to succeed, it needs an effective unifying structure of some kind. It is unlikely that such a structure could be formed in Syria until the opposition has a safe haven – a place where they can emerge from hiding, gather together in safety, select national political and military leaders, and organize themselves better as an alternative governing structure, not just for the purpose of pushing Assad from power today, but to prepare for the huge challenge of administering and securing the country once Assad is gone. This is what the National Transitional Council was able to do in Benghazi, and it is why, despite major challenges, the transition in Libya is largely succeeding.

“It is less difficult to imagine today, as opposed to several months ago, how safe havens could be established in Syria. Indeed, some analysts suggest that the opposition may already be creating some areas of de facto control in the country – for example, in parts of Idlib province and areas north of Aleppo along the Turkish border, and in eastern Syria around Deir ez-Zor. It is quite possible that the opposition could soon declare parts of Syria to be liberated, as the Libyan rebels did in Benghazi, and then ask for external support in defending that territory.

“This is exactly what we should be helping the opposition to do. Rather than insisting that we cannot act militarily without a U.N. Security Council resolution, as the Secretary of Defense recently asserted, we should follow President Clinton’s example from Kosovo: We should refuse to give Russia and China a veto over our actions, and instead work outside of the Security Council to shape a coalition of willing states with a legitimate mandate to intervene militarily in Syria. Many of our allies are willing to do much more, but only if the United States is with them. As one regional official told the Wall Street Journal last weekend, the Turks in particular are looking for, quote, ‘the ironclad backing of the U.S. and others.’

“We should provide it to them. We should make U.S. airpower available, along with that of our allies, as part of an international effort to defend safe areas in Syria and to prevent Assad’s forces from harassing them, as they will inevitably try to do. Once Assad’s forces see that they, their tanks, their artillery, their helicopters, and their other aircraft will pay an awful price if they try to threaten these opposition safe havens, I suspect they will quickly lose their appetite for it.

“Once defended, these safe havens could become platforms for increased deliveries of food and medicine, communications equipment, doctors to treat the wounded, and other non-lethal assistance. They could also serve as staging areas for armed opposition groups to receive battlefield intelligence, body armor, and weapons – from small arms and ammunition, to anti-tank rockets – and to train and organize themselves more effectively, perhaps with foreign assistance. The goal would be to expand the reach of these safe havens across more of the country.

“As a final part of this strategy, we must think about the situation in Syria in a broader strategic context. The events unfolding from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq are all part of one connected story. We must be thinking about how we could capitalize on the fall of the Assad regime in Syria to weaken and marginalize Hezbollah… to strengthen Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence… to support the reconciliation of sectarian conflicts through politics not violence...  to increase the pressure on the Maliki government in Iraq to roll back its authoritarian tendencies and share power more democratically… and to counter Iran’s subversive hegemonic ambitions in the region. In all of these efforts, the United States and Turkey share common interests and values, and we need to be working more closely together than ever.        

“But most of all, what is needed is American leadership. If there were ever a case that should remind us that our interests are indivisible from our values, it is Syria. A few days after the massacre in Houla, the Washington Post interviewed a young Bosnian man who survived the genocide at Srebrenica in 1995. This is how he looked at the ongoing slaughter in Syria, quote: ‘It’s bizarre how ‘never again’ has come to mean ‘again and again,’’ he said. ‘It’s obvious that we live in a world where Srebrenicas are still possible. What’s happening in Syria today is almost identical to what happened in Bosnia two decades ago.’

“He could not be more correct. Syria today is indistinguishable from Bosnia in the 1990s, with one exception: In Bosnia, President Clinton finally summoned the courage to lead the world to intervene and stop the killing. It is worth recalling his words upon ordering military action in Bosnia in 1995: ‘There are times and places,’ President Clinton said, ‘where our leadership can mean the difference between peace and war, and where we can defend our fundamental values as a people and serve our most basic, strategic interests. [T]here are still times when America and America alone can and should make the difference for peace.’

“Those were the words of a Democratic President who led America to do the right thing in stopping mass atrocities in Bosnia. And I remember working with my Republican colleague, Bob Dole, to support President Clinton in that endeavor. The question for another Democratic President today, and for all of us in positions of responsibility, is whether we will again answer the desperate pleas for rescue that are made uniquely to us, as the United States of America – and whether we will use our great power, as we have done before at our best, not simply to advance our own interests, but to serve a just cause that is greater than our interests alone.”

No quick fix for Syria: It’s game on!

Putin and Obama in Los Cabos

There is no quick fix for Syria. It’s game on!

I suppose that’s what Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Barak Obama agreed at their meeting yesterday on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico.

Speaking after the two-hour meeting, Obama said he and Putin had pledged to work with "other international actors, including the United Nations, Kofi Annan, and all interested parties" to try to find a solution to the 15-month-old Syria crisis.

Putin said the two countries had found "many common points" on Syria.

“We agree to cooperate bilaterally and multilaterally to solve regional conflicts,” the leaders said in a joint statement, adding: “In order to stop the bloodshed in Syria, we call for an immediate cessation of all violence and express full support for the efforts of UN/League of Arab States Joint Special Envoy Kofi Annan, including moving forward on political transition to a democratic, pluralistic political system that would be implemented by the Syrians themselves in the framework of Syria’s sovereignty, independence, unity, and territorial integrity. We are united in the belief that the Syrian people should have the opportunity to independently and democratically choose their own future.”

But despite the optimistic rhetoric at the meeting, the Obama administration is unlikely to change its stand on many issues, including Syria. This is what a former member of the Reagan Administration, Paul Craig Roberts, told Russian 24/7 English-language news channel RT.

“I am convinced Putin does not want a conflict with Washington. He wants to resolve the issue of the missile bases that are surrounding Russia. He does not want conflict. And Obama does not want any conflict either. But he is just a member of the government that wants regime change in Syria. And Obama is not exactly in position to be able to stop that.”

“Obama will do what he can to get along with Putin, but still has to represent the agenda of regime change,” Roberts added. “And the situation I think is unresolved.”

BBC News in turn quotes correspondents as saying there were no smiles between Obama and Putin during the news conference, and their interactions seemed stiff and strained.

Bouthaina Shaaban, a political adviser to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, said after talks in Moscow this week with Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov that Damascus “welcomes the (Moscow) idea” of convening an international conference on Syria.

Later today, UN Security Council members will be briefed in consultations by the head of the UN Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS), Maj.-Gen. Robert Mood. The briefing has taken on further significance following Mood’s decision last Saturday to suspend UNSMIS activities until further notice.

It is also likely the Council’s next briefing from Annan himself may be moved forward from its currently scheduled date of June 26 to later this week.

The long and short of all this is that the give and take over the Annan mission, the UN monitors’ task and Russia’s proposed Syria conference will resume ad infinitum.

And the carnage will not stop anytime soon.

Editorially, leading Lebanese political analyst Nicolas Nassif, writing this morning for the staunchly pro-Assad Beirut daily al-Akhbar, believes the Syria stalemate will “probably persist another few months.”

In his think piece -- titled “Syria: The regime in daytime and the rebels at night?” – Nassif lists a series of observations regarding Russia’s stand on the Syria crisis. He says unnamed Lebanese officials formed the impressions on the sidelines of their just-concluded “mission” in Moscow.

Nassif itemizes five of their specific observations as follows:

1.     Moscow “behaves as though there is no Syria crisis. It carries on fulfilling military contracts signed with the Syrian government. It explicitly ignores Western sanctions against the regime, saying it doesn’t bother about them and they are irrelevant. It reiterates its determination to fulfill all contracts signed between the two countries.”

2.   Moscow does not conceal its “full coordination with Damascus on events and developments facing the regime, particularly as concerns its opponents who are being funded and armed unconditionally.” Russian officials do not deny being aware of escalating violence against the regime, which says it is in a position of legitimate self-defense. Contrary to previous impressions, “Russia is neither surprised nor embarrassed by the growing violence.” In step with Damascus, it lays the blame at the door of the opposition’s Western and Arab backers.

3.     Moscow reads the election of Syrian Kurdish activist Abdulbaset Sieda head of the Syrian National Council (SNC) as “an attempt to introduce the Kurdish factor into the equation and broaden the scope of confrontation with the regime religiously, socially and ideologically. Another aim of Sieda’s election is to turn the Kurds against the Syrian president who naturalized them and gave them their civil rights at the onset of the crisis.”

4.  Inasmuch as they are adamant about standing by Assad’s regime, and notwithstanding their call for an international conference on Syria, the Russians acknowledge that one reason for their own opposition’s demonstrations against Putin is his endorsement of Assad. But having been duped in Iraq, Libya and Yemen, the Russian officials told their Lebanese opposite numbers they won’t let this happen with Syria, whether inside or outside the UN Security Council.

5.     Moscow’s “confidence in the survival of the regime of Assad and his inner circle parallel its blind faith in the Syrian army’s unity and cohesion. Russians consider the Syrian army an immutable bedrock that will “protect the regime, prevent its collapse and preclude the president’s forcible ouster…”

On the ground in Syria, Nassif registers pluses and minuses for the regime and its opponents over the past three months.

Among them:

• The army has “lost control of cardinal sections of the rural areas of some major cities such as Damascus, Aleppo and Idlib… The chaos there was condensed in a sentence: ‘The regime in daytime and the rebels at night.’”

• The number of mass protests against the regime has dwindled considerably.

• Save for Homs, “which has been marginalized, destroyed and depopulated,” the regime maintains full control of the big cities, specially the capital Damascus.