Here is one of the cruelest facts of life: You only get to make peace with your enemies.
Here’s another: Peace
means an end to organized violence. You
do not have peace while the perpetrators of organized violence are not
restrained (see Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Mali etc etc etc).
This, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with America’s
insistence on excluding Iran for the negotiations to bring peace to Syria
ongoing in Montreux.
As Ian Black reported in The
Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/21/us-russian-co-operation-key-hope-progess-syria-peace-talks
“The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, stated on his website his belief
that the talks have little hope of success. ‘Because of the lack of influential
players in the meeting, I doubt about the Geneva II meeting's success in
fighting against terrorism ... and its ability to resolve the Syria crisis,’
Rouhani said. ‘The Geneva II meeting has already failed.’”
So long as Iran continues to supply fighters (some Iranians,
but many more Hizbullah warriors from Lebanon) in support of Syria’s criminal
President Bashar al-Assad, there will not be peace. Excluding the Iranians from the peace talks
does guarantee their failure, since it all but takes away any reason for Teheran to
restrain either Assad or Hizbullah.
America offers 2 quasi-rationales for the exclusion: (1) the
Iranians have not committed in advance to the goal of the conference, the
transitioning out of power of President al-Assad and his government, and (2)
the presence of the Iranians would trigger a boycott by our favorite rebel
group, the Syrian National Coalition (SNC).
Both points have their flaws: (1) the Iranian position is more or less the same
as the Russian position, but the Russians have not been booted from the talks,
rather their participation is considered one of the keys to any potential success;
and, (2) the SNC by itself can contribute to peace, but cannot come close to
assuring it, as it remains out-gunned and out-organized by the rest of the
rebel movement, the radical Islamist forces, many allied to Al Qaeda, who have
rejected the talks from the moment they were proposed.
Negotiations only succeed when all the controlling
stakeholders can derive some benefit from them.
Excluding a necessary stakeholder to keep a less crucial one on board makes no sense. Our rebels need and benefit from peace too much to pull out, no matter what they threaten.
So, who are the stakeholders here? (1) The wretched Syrian government and its
1%ers, the Assad family and its closest associates; (2) The Syrian rebel forces; (3) The Syrian
people, most of them bullied by, but not loyal to any of the contending forces;
(4) Assad’s regional supporters, almost all of them Shi’ites, of whom Iran and
Hizbullah are the most important; (5) Assad’s regional opponents, almost all of
them Sunnis, of whom Saudi Arabia and Qatar are the biggest funders of the
rebels; (6) global kibitzers like
Russia, the United States and its allies in Western Europe.
What benefits might convince each of the stakeholders to
make and sustain peace?
(1) For Assad and the other beasts of his herd the prime
benefit of agreeing to peace and giving up power would be that they will not
only be allowed to live, they might be guaranteed immunity from prosecution,
judgment, incarceration and loss of all their worldly goods. As if this
opportunity were not enough in itself, the Washington Post editorial board says
it might seem more valuable were it more aggressively threatened by the Obama
White House.
More on this exercise in facile fatuity later.
(2) The benefits for
the anti-Assad forces are both obvious and, alas, fatally incomplete. “Peace” declared in Switzerland will not
become peace in Syria until the SNC’s fellow rebels, their Islamist rivals in
rebellion, are subdued, and, as events in Iraq next door daily illustrate,
subduing the jihadis will be hard to
do. But like including the Iranians, subduing
the Islamists is not a choice, but a necessity to peace.
(3) Making “peace” pay
real-life dividends for the Syrian people will demand not just freeing them
from Assad’s homegrown tyranny and the equally overbearing, mostly foreign,
Fundamentalist threat, but freeing themselves from their ruinous addiction to
sectarian conflict. Syria’s majority Sunnis
must convince their opponents in the Alawite, Shi’ite, Christian and Maronite
communities that they are willing to live civilly, even harmoniously, alongside
them, that bygones from this brutal war will indeed be bygones. In many ways this is a more complex, maybe
even more difficult task than defeating the Islamists. But again, necessary.
(4) The promise of a
Levant ruled by law, and based on inter-communal co-operation would relieve
Assad’s allies, Iran and Hizbullah of a conflict that has grown ruinous in
blood and treasure. It also might lead
to a future in which both the Iranian government and Hizbullah’s leadership could
use their strengths of political and social organization to grant their peoples
infinitely better lives, safe from foreign threats or local violence.
(5) Peace in Syria
would not guarantee, but would certainly make more possible, both a wider peace
and even a stable region. The blessings
of peace in Syria would be constantly communicated to the peoples of the rest
of the Arabic-speaking world by vigorous and competitive news media, hopefully
growing a regional constituency for rule of law and civility. The chief bankrollers of the Syrian
rebellion, Saudi Arabia and especially Qatar are much happier being merchandising
states than militarizing states, and a Mideast without war plays directly to
their strengths and interests. The
removal of the semi-Shi’ite Alawites from power in Syria, the retreat of
Hizbullah back to Lebanon (and even better, back to more civil, less brutal political
competition within Lebanon), and the predictable advantages of Sunni majority
power in Syria would more than offset having to play live-and-let-live with the
Shi’ite triumphalists in Nouri al-Maliki’s government in Baghdad. Selling out
their temporary allies-in-regime change, buying them off, or helping kill them,
would not, I’m betting, be a big problem for either the Saudis or the Qataris.
(6) The reduction in
bloodshed, and progress towards stability would be the biggest payoffs from
peace for almost everyone, from the Syrian people who would no longer be
dodging daily bombs and bullets, to the regional rulers in Riyadh and Doha, and
the global powers in Moscow and Washington who could go back to making money
and self-congratulatory pronouncements. Another
important benefit, for Putin, Obama, Hollande, Cameron and the royal, military
or democratic leaders of the Islamic world from ending the conflict in Syria would be the
opportunity to join forces in eliminating the irreconcilable guerillas. No one in any of these governments and almost
no one in their countries would mourn their demise.
(7) What benefits
could convince Al Qaeda and its allies to call off their war and seek the true
triumph of jihad, personal religious
purity and discipline? Probably, there
are none, which is why they rejected the peace talks and why they must be
defeated.
But, let’s be honest here.
Worthy as these goals may be, they simply cannot be realized without
Iran’s assent. One monkey, the old
saying goes, can stop the show, and in the Mideast, Teheran is the headquarters
of one hellacious combination of peace-stoppers.
The opportunity to improve their chances to be accepted into
the community of peace-makers, and allowed to prove through actions that they
are a nation worthy of respect and equal economic and political treatment has
proved quite alluring to Iran in the context of its nuclear ambitions. If Teheran can be convinced that similar
benefits would accrue to them and their people, and their allies from Beirut to
Bahrain, Iran might rehabilitate itself to everyone’s profit.
The diplomatic negotiation which may well have put Iran on a
path to nuclear restraint was called Geneva I.
The people who have put together, and then tossed Iran out of, this
week’s conference in Montreux call it Geneva II, for the same reason the folks
who play football in New Jersey’s Meadowlands call themselves the New York
Giants and Jets: marketing.
But as the humorist Finley Peter Dunne wrote, “Politics
ain’t beanbag;” and peace-making ain’t football. Branding the conference in the name of the
city where a watch-makers convention (really!) displaced the diplomats to the
smaller town an hour’s drive away won’t accomplish anything. Real give and take, even with our enemies, is
the only way to make peace a best-selling product.
Oh, yes, -- I mentioned the WaPo editorialists and their
suggestion that Barack Obama can force humanitarian concessions (even the
Posties don’t think he can force real peace) “by presenting Mr. Assad with the choice of accepting them or enduring U.S.
airstrikes.”
As if bluffing a
guy into giving up just one of his still supreme arsenal of weapons means you
can bluff him out of power itself. This
is just self-inflating, self-deluding crap.
For the
editorialists who, I’m sure, would also recommend that Obama back up his bluff,
if it were called, I have my favorite 3-word question, the one policy-makers
and conference table commanders never seem to ask themselves, “And then what?”
Lob a few bombs, kill
off a bunch of bad guys, and then…??
Wasn’t that Don Rumsfeld’s prescription for Iraq? Not even the Post’s own eternal optimists
would buy that sack of ignorant shit a second time. Or would they?
Better to try to
find a deal that meets almost everyone’s need to think it got them something
good.
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