Posts by PaulPillar:
Getting to Negotiations on Syria
November 7th, 2016
Even some observers of the war in Syria who have wisely given up the idea of forcibly destroying the Assad regime still argue that greater force, including U.S. military force, should be used to induce that regime to negotiate a settlement of the war. Stated that simply—as it often is—the argument reflects misunderstanding, in at least two important respects, of how the military status of a war relates to opening negotiations for a peace.
First, a peace negotiation requires at least two parties. Both sides in a war need to see an advantage in negotiating rather than not negotiating, and they need to see it at the same time. This fact certainly is pertinent to conflict in Syria; opposition forces have used as much uncompromising language as has the regime in expressing ambitions of achieving military victory. The military situation in Syria will be conducive to negotiation if both the opposition and the regime, and their external backers, have dropped any such ambitions and have reason to negotiate seriously and to make concessions about the future political shape of Syria. It’s not a matter of killing dreams of victory on just one side.
Second, for a belligerent to be willing to negotiate requires not only that the war not be going too well for it, but also that it not be going too badly. Going too well means continuing to harbor ambitions of achieving an outright military victory, with no need to make concessions at a negotiating table. Going too badly means fear of having a losing hand at any such table. It means having an incentive to keep fighting to reverse the tide of battle and develop a stronger hand before sitting down at the table.
This principle also is quite pertinent to the Syrian war. The Assad regime, whose very existence is at stake, has strong incentive to keep fighting if it has a losing hand and if there is any chance at all of turning it into a somewhat better hand. With the backing of Russia, it can count on having such a chance. Russian aid to the Syrian regime has already appeared to be designed not to give the regime the ability to win an outright victory but instead to keep the tide of battle from going so badly against it that it would be a loser either on the battlefield or at the negotiating table.
Earlier wars have demonstrated these principles. A particularly instructive example that involved the United States was the Korean War. That war saw a year of intense back-and-forth combat before negotiations began for an armistice that was signed two years later and remains in effect today. During that first year of the war, either one side or the other, or both, saw the war as going either too well or too badly to want to negotiate.
For the first three months after North Korea’s surprise attack across the 38th Parallel in June 1950, neither side looked to negotiations, as the North’s forces pushed southward and reduced their opposition to a perimeter around Pusan at the end of the peninsula. For the Communists, the war was going too well to want to negotiate, with military success holding out the prospect of uniting Korea under their rule through force alone. For the United States and the United Nations Command it headed, there was no thought of negotiations during this period because the war was going too badly. All thinking on the U.S. side was instead focused on reversing the tide of battle.
That reversal was accomplished with Douglas MacArthur’s brilliant landing at Inchon in September. With Communist forces still holding most of the peninsula but retreating northward, the Communist powers briefly made some efforts, mostly through Soviet diplomacy at the United Nations, to get armistice negotiations started. But as the retreat continued, the Communists soon lost interest in negotiations. Sometime in October, as U.N. forces moved northward across the Parallel, the Chinese reached their decision to intervene. Meanwhile, the post-Inchon turnaround in military fortunes had been so sudden that American thinking went straight from not wanting negotiations because the war was going too badly to not wanting negotiations because the war was going too well, amid visions of MacArthur’s forces liberating everything up to the Yalu and a united non-Communist Korea emerging.
The Chinese intervention in late November reversed the tide of battle once again, and just as suddenly. For the next few months the diplomatic posture of each side was again as it was during the first three months of the war: the Communists were not interested in talks because the war was going too well; the U.S. was not interested because it was going too badly, with U.N. forces thrown back into the southern part of the peninsula.
U.N. forces stopped the Chinese advance by January 1951 and then slowly pushed the front line back to the vicinity of the 38th Parallel. In April, President Truman said the United States was finally ready to negotiate. The Chinese still hoped to push the front line southward again, a hope that died with the failure of a Communist offensive in May. In June, the Soviet ambassador at the U.N. indicated that the Communist side was willing to start armistice negotiations, which got under way in July.
In short, bloodshed continued and negotiations did not begin during the first year of the Korean War, just as much because a belligerent was losing and felt the need to improve the military situation before sitting down to talk, as because a belligerent was winning and smelled military victory. So too with the current war between the regime and opposition in Syria. The likely result of added military pressure on the Assad regime would be not a greater willingness of Assad to negotiate, but instead a greater determination to keep fighting to move the military situation more in its favor—with the help of Russia, playing a situation-moving role somewhat similar to the role the Chinese played in Korea.
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Our Hardliners Are Still Helping Iran’s Hardliners
September 19th, 2016
By Paul R. Pillar.
The unrelenting urge among American politicians to keep punishing Iran—or more precisely, to be seen supporting steps with that objective—continues to work against sensible statecraft and U.S. interests in multiple respects. One of those respects concerns how measures taken by the United States affect political competition within Iran. Here’s the current background to questions of U.S. policy toward Iran. The most important development in recent years regarding such policy—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the formal name for the agreement that limits Iran’s nuclear activity—has been in effect for over a year. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which does the detailed monitoring of the Iranian program, Iran is fully in compliance with its obligations under the agreement. Those in the United States who have opposed any agreement with Iran all along continue to seek any possible basis for accusing Iran of violations. One of the most recent such accusations concerned some issues of implementation that opponents described as “secret exceptions” granted to Iran.
They were in fact not that but rather were typical of the detailed questions that inevitably arise in implementation of any agreement this extensive. A Joint Commission was created under the agreement precisely to resolve such questions, and it has successfully been doing exactly that. The principal real questions of adherence to the agreement involve whether the United States and the West have been fully living up to their obligations regarding sanctions relief and refraining from further steps to damage the Iranian economy.
Despite the record of Iranian compliance, the months since conclusion of the JCPOA have seen a stream of anti-Iran bills introduced in Congress. Examination of most of these bills yields little idea of how if they were to come into effect they would advance any U.S. interests pertinent to Iran, and little evidence of any thought that in this respect went into the writing of the bills. The bills instead seem to be vehicles for members to demonstrate, through their sponsorship or support of such legislation, their anti-Iran credentials. Typical of these proposals is a recent amendment introduced by Representative Ron DeSantis (R-FL) that would require any issuer of securities, as it registers with the Securities and Exchange Commission, to declare in its registration statement whether it does business in Iran or with any entity organized under the laws of Iran. Although this may sound like an innocent requirement for information, existing law already requires such a disclosure by issuers of securities with regard to any business done with the government of Iran, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Iranian central bank, the entire Iranian petroleum industry, and certain other Iranian individuals and entities subject to sanctions. So the DeSantis amendment would only serve to impose the reporting requirement on those dealing with portions of the Iranian private sector that not only have no connection with the Iranian regime but also have given no reason to be sanctioned in the long history of U.S. sanctions legislation directed against Iran. This would discourage commerce with the very sectors in Iran that are most in favor of peaceful engagement with the rest of the world.
The legislation would be counterproductive with regard to any political and economic evolution in Iran in a direction favorable to U.S. interests. (The legislation also probably would violate the U.S. obligation under the JCPOA not to take any new steps to prevent Iran from realizing the economic benefits of sanctions relief.) Another recent example of a backward approach to affecting political competition within Iran is an interview with Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for New East Policy. Ross, operating squarely within the school of thought that sees nothing good coming out of any business with Tehran and who sees Iran only as an object for confrontation and punishment, focuses on Iran’s conduct within the Middle East. As usual with that topic and that school of thought, there are many general references to Iranian “aggression” without considering exactly what Iran is or is not doing in the region and why, say, Iranian assistance to an incumbent regime in Syria is any more “aggressive” than what other powers have been doing to stoke a rebellion and to try to overthrow the regime. And Ross’s attempt to square his position that Iran “cannot be a partner in the struggle against ISIS” with the fact that in Iraq, Iran is, just like the United States, not only supporting the incumbent regime but also actively opposing ISIS, seems to come down to an assertion that the Iranians are following narrow (undescribed) policies in Iraq that will leave a lot of angry Sunnis on their Western doorstep but evidently are too stupid to realize that is what they are doing.
For the present purpose note what Ross says about the connection between U.S. actions and political contests within the Iranian regime. He says we should try to decrease the influence of General Soleimani and the Revolutionary Guard, who favor a more “confrontational approach,” relative to the influence of president Rouhani, who favors more of a “normalizing approach.” So far so good. But how is the United States supposed to affect that Iranian political balance? Ross says we should do it by being confrontational ourselves—by “applying pressure”that would “demonstrate the costs to Iran of Soleimani’s actions.” When asked what this means in practical terms, Ross mentions military contingency planning with Israel and the Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Let’s see if we have this straight. We supposedly are all agreed that we would like to see less influence in Tehran for hardliners such as those centered in the Revolutionary Guard.
Those hardliners are the ones who, in debate within Iran, argue that doing peaceful business with the United States (as with the JCPOA) does not bring any benefits to Iran, that the United States is determined to use its military might and other power to harm Iran, that Washington will always be acting in cahoots with Iran’s regional rivals in Israel and the Gulf Arab states, and that Iran thus has to stand firm and tough against such predatory U.S. behavior in order to protect Iranian interests. So acting in a way that confirms the hardliners’ narrative is supposed to reduce their influence in Tehran? The groundlessness of such an argument can be seen with some role reversal. Such confrontation from a foreign adversary tends to strengthen, rather than to weaken, hawkish and hardline sentiment in U.S. politics. It works pretty much the same way in Iranian politics.
The sort of illogicality voiced by Ross has some general roots in American exceptionalism and the notion that the United States should be able to push other states around but that other states don’t push the United States around. There is more to it than that, however, where Iran is involved, as suggested by comparing the Iranian case with other cases that offer some parallels. One worth looking at is Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar). President Obama announced this week that the United States is ready to lift economic sanctions on Burma, in light of political reforms there. This decision is not an obvious call. The Burmese military, which maintained a harsh and closed dictatorship for many years, retains much political power. The former opposition leader and now de facto head of the civilian government, Aung San Suu Kyi, has made many concessions to the military and has become in important respects a partner of the generals rather than a replacement of them.
The treatment of ethnic and religious minorities, most conspicuously the Muslim Rohingya community, is still bad. Human rights organizations believe the sanctions are being lifted too soon. The U.S. administration decided, however, that enough change has taken place in Burma to warrant change in U.S. policy toward Burma. At least as important, the administration determined that further economic and political change in a favorable direction in Burma would be more likely by opening up the country to normal commerce and relations than it would by keeping it isolated. President Obama’s Republican opponents in Congress have, on this issue, taken a constructive and balanced approach. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who has had a strong interest in Burma, made remarks on the Senate floor that appropriately noted both the progress to date and the significant problems and challenges that remain.
That’s a much different approach than McConnell and his colleagues take on Iran, and it is a difference in the approach itself and not just in the two countries involved. If they applied to Burma the same perspective they apply to Iran, what we would be hearing is that moderates in Burma don’t matter, that it is nefarious hardliners who still run the show, that gross human rights violations continue, that any relief from sanctions would mean the military-dominated regime would have more resources to do bad things, and that Obama is making a big mistake by lifting sanctions. Two explanations chiefly account for the difference. One is the objective of denying Mr. Obama any significant foreign policy achievement, consistent with Senator McConnell’s earlier declaration that the number one objective of his caucus was to deny the president a second term.
The opening to Iran and the JCPOA constitute such a significant achievement; nothing the administration is doing on Burma is of comparable importance. The other explanation is that continued isolation and punishment of Iran is part of a larger objective of the administration’s opponents of taking sides in the Middle East, and in particular to take whatever side the Israeli government is on. Ross’s mention of military contingency planning with Israel directed against Iran represents not so much a way to scare Iran about costs of General Soleimani’s activities but instead the side-taking that underlies the impulse to keep Iran perpetually isolated and punished in the first place. And the counterproductive effect of confirming the Iranian hardliners’ narrative is not really counterproductive if the objective is to maintain Iran as a bête noire forever; if you want a bête noire, a regime in which hardliners dominate is the best kind of bête noire to have.
For more on Paul Pillar, pleas visit: http://nationalinterest.org
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