Los Angeles Times

The risk of taking on Syria

Quick strikes rarely achieve enduring political goals — and often produce more costs or unintended consequences than benefits.

By Robin Wright  August 28, 2013

     So the U.S. launches a military strike. Then what?

     As the Obama administration and the U.S. military plot military action against Syria, they should be spending just as much time — and arguably more — considering what happens next. Once Washington crosses the threshold of action, there's no retreating from blame for anything that follows, whether through action or inaction. And in the weeks and months to come, dangers will only deepen.

     First, quick hits rarely achieve enduring political goals — and often produce more costs or unintended consequences than benefits. I've seen it so often before.

     I lived in Lebanon in the fall of 1983 when the Reagan administration ordered the Marine peacekeepers deployed in Beirut to open fire on a Muslim militia. The commander bluntly warned Washington that a strike would have dire consequences for U.S. policy and his troops. "We'll get slaughtered down here," he predicted. Nonetheless, the cruiser Virginia stationed offshore fired 70 deafening rounds on the Lebanese fighters.

     It was supposed to be a quick hit. It was supposed to send a warning.

But 34 days later, on Oct. 23, a yellow Mercedes truck carrying the equivalent of 6 tons of explosives drove into the Marine barracks as the peacekeepers slept. In my head, I can still hear the thundering bomb blast. It was the single largest nonnuclear explosion anywhere since World War II. It produced the largest loss of American military life in a single incident since Iwo Jima.

     Four months later, the world's mightiest military was ordered to leave Lebanon, its mission incomplete. The embryo of what became Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, had forced the retreat of American, French, Italian and British troops.

     This time in Syria, Washington may again consider its action limited and specifically targeted. But Syria and its allies, notably Hezbollah, surely won't. And they can respond in many ways.

The last five presidents have tried limited strikes with specific messages in various crisis spots, many in the Middle East. The track record is pretty sorry for both Republican and Democratic administrations.

     Again during the Reagan administration, I reported on the 1986 U.S. airstrikes against Libya for bombing a Berlin disco, a hangout for American troops. Three had been killed and more than 200 injured in the blast, not all Americans. Ten days later, U.S. airstrikes sent a kinetic message to Moammar Kadafi about the costs of terrorism.

     Operation El Dorado Canyon hit Kadafi's military headquarters and other military targets in Tripoli and Benghazi, although several bombs missed their targets and hit civilian areas. The strikes did little to end the outrages. Two years later, Libya masterminded the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that killed 270 people. And Kadafi remained in power another quarter-century.

     In 1998, I covered Operation Desert Fox, when the Clinton administration launched four days of cruise missile and bombing strikes against Iraq. Saddam Hussein's regime had failed to comply with United Nations resolutions and weapons inspectors for a year. The goal was to "degrade" Baghdad's ability to manufacture weapons of mass destruction and to destabilize Hussein's hold on power.

     The impact was negligible. Hussein held on for five more years, until the George W. Bush administration launched a ground invasion that cost hundreds of billions of dollars and nearly 4,500 American lives over the next eight years.

And in the end, the United States discovered that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction anymore.

     I also covered Operation Infinite Reach, when the Clinton administration ordered cruise missile strikes on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998. It was a response to twin bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Twelve Americans had been among the 224 killed.

     But a year later, I was in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden's camps were still thriving. The U.S. strikes had made him even more popular and powerful on the terrorist circuit. And he skillfully adapted Al Qaeda's tactics. In 2000, a suicide dinghy struck the U.S. destroyer Cole docked in Yemen, killing 17 sailors. And then the 9/11 suicide planes, the most successful attack against the United States since Pearl Harbor. Bin Laden may be dead, but the franchises born of his movement are thriving from North Africa to the Persian Gulf.

     So the idea of quick hits or short campaigns is often an illusion. The one notable success was the 2011 air campaign that helped oust Kadafi. But it had the full endorsement of the Arab League, the United Nations and , NATO, which ran the international mission. Thousands of Libyans actually did the fighting, while the Transitional National Council provided a viable alternative government from inside the country. And still Operation Unified Protector lasted 222 days.

     In the case of Syria, a few days of strikes against military targets may assuage moral outrage over its heinous use of chemical weapons. But they also carry the danger of widening the war by legitimizing or deepening involvement by other foreign powers, notably Iranian and Russian support for Damascus.

     I lived in Beirut during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon to evict the Palestine Liberation Organization. It achieved the immediate goal, yet Operation Peace for Galilee also backfired: Iran deployed Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon and created Hezbollah, which ultimately drove out both Israeli troops and American peacekeepers. It was Israel's first retreat — made voluntarily due to inexorable costs — in the long Arab-Israeli dispute.

     So, as the U.S. and its allies take on Syria, they need to ensure that the costs do not ultimately outweigh the benefits, and that another military mission doesn't backfire.

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Foreign Policy

 Iran’s Young “Determinators”

Robin Wright

They’re the determinators—the politically savvy, socially sassy, and media astute young of Iran. And they count, quite literally, as never before as a new president takes over.

President Hassan Rouhani owes his election to the young, who are Iran’s largest voting bloc. At the last minute, vast numbers opted to back him rather than boycott the poll. They’re also now the centrist cleric’s biggest headache, as he has to meet their expectations. Two-thirds of Iran’s 75 million people are under 35—and they vote again in four years.

But the Islamic Republic’s long-term survival may also be determined by the first post-revolution generation, born in the 1980s and now coming of age. For Iran’s baby boomers reflect the regime’s almost existential conundrum—and the nexus between economic and nuclear policies.

To be credible, the world’s only modern theocracy must better the lives of its struggling young majority. And to jumpstart the economy, Tehran will have to compromise with the outside world on its controversial nuclear program to get punitive international sanctions lifted. It’s a huge—but increasingly inescapable—price to pay for keeping the determinators on board.

The regime has limited time to act. Iran’s young are antsy because they are better educated and more skilled than any earlier generation. Literacy has almost doubled since the revolution—to over 95 percent, even among females. Iran won a U.N. award for closing the gender gap.

Yet one of the theocracy’s biggest successes has proven to be one of its greatest vulnerabilities.  It can’t absorb the post-revolution babies.

Iran’s young face rampant unemployment, estimated officially at up to 30 percent but unofficially at up to 50 percent. During his first appearance at parliament, Iran’s new president acknowledged in June that 4 million university graduates were jobless—and a mushrooming problem.

The core economic issue has had a rippling effect. In a country where the median age is 27, vast numbers can’t afford to marry or move out of their parents’ homes. One-third of females and one-half of all males between 20 and 34 are now unmarried, according to the Statistical Center of Iran.       

Frustration is reflected in soaring drug use. The State Welfare Organization reported this year that almost 72 percent of Iran’s drug addicts are between 18 and 25.

Born after both the monarchy and the revolution, the young often refer to themselves as the lost generation because they have little to do and even less to inspire them. Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini died when they were in diapers. And most were tots during the traumatic eight-year war with Iraq, which produced more than 1 million casualties in the 1980s. The conflict shaped the goals, fears and nationalism of their parents and the current political leadership.

But for the young, the war is relegated to history--and the now fading public billboards of the previous generation’s war “martyrs.”

Sixty percent of Iran’s young now say the Islamic Republic needs to adopt new ways of thinking to secure its future, according to an Intermedia Young Publics survey released in May. One-third of those polled between the ages of 16 and 25 said they would abandon Iran if given the option.

The implications can’t be overstated. Iran’s post-revolution generation is the largest baby boom in Iran’s 5,000-year history. Its influence will only grow due to one of the world’s most unique population bumps.

Iran’s twenty-somethings were born during a decade-long blip in between two ambitious family planning programs. The shah promoted birth control during his final decade. By the end of the 1970s, 37 percent of women practiced family planning.

After the 1979 revolution, the ruling clerics reversed course and called on Iranian women to breed, breed, breed an Islamic generation. And they did. The population almost doubled from 34 to 62 million in about a decade.

But the theocracy soon realized that it couldn’t feed, cloth, house, educate or eventually employ those swelling numbers—and voters. So it launched a novel (and free) birth control program, including required family planning classes for newlyweds. By the 1990s, the average family fell from six children to less than two—lower than during the monarchy.

Iran's 70 percent drop was "one of the most rapid and pronounced fertility declines ever recorded in human history," according to Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. The birth rate plummeted so far that former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned in 2010 that Iran would be stuck with a “dangerous” aging population in another 30 years.

By actuarial standards, Iran’s baby boomers will have disproportionate clout for at least the next half century on most aspects of Iranian life.  Politically, their impact could even be more enduring than the current ruling theocrats. They’ve already shown demonstrated in many forms how far they’re willing to go.

In 2009, students led eight months of Green Movement protests after the disputed presidential reelection of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They mobilized millions in cities across Iran during the “Where My Vote?” campaign, the largest challenge to the regime since the 1979 revolution.

The determinators may no longer be able to protest on the streets. But can make or break politicians. Their interest and energy turned the 2013 presidential campaign around in the final days, boosting Rouhani to a surprise, come-from-behind victory over five other candidates.

Their voices resonate across Iran in other ways too. As the region’s largest network of bloggers, they boldly diss on their revolution, daring to post criticism, jibes, jokes and political cartoons on banned social media through circuitous routes.

They’re increasingly creating an alternative culture, pushing boundaries further than any time since the 1979 revolution. The stereotype of their parents’ generation was a black-shrouded woman or a young man sporting a headband that vowed martyrdom for Islam.

Images of the young today are more likely to be mall-hopping, increasingly in flashier fashions that defy conservative Islamic dress. Or they may be at play, including performing parkour, a holistic sport that combines running, climbing, swinging, vaulting, jumping and rolling that resembles open-air gymnastics but in public places. 

In a telling sign of changing times, Iran’s young have even popularized rap as the rhythm of dissent in the world’s only modern theocracy. They hold back little in their warnings to the regime, as Yas, Iran’s leading hip-hop artist, rapped defiantly,

“Listen to my words and see the agonies I suffered

What my generation has seen, made our tears fall

Those without such pains—how they saw ours,

They became even more cruel, what a pity for our land!”

The Atlantic

The Fires Facing Iran's New President 
And why Hassan Rouhani will have to put them out, fast.
By Robin Wright

One of the most important questions in the Middle East this year is whether Hassan Rouhani's election will mark a new era -- both for Iranians and the outside world. The answer could mean the difference between peace and (yet another) war. Rouhani's campaign certainly made lots of promises. One of his most striking posters was a bright blue textograph of his face crafted from a slogan promising "a government of good sense and hope." The Scottish-educated cleric energized an election many Iranians had considered boycotting after pledging that "freedoms should be protected." He also won over key youth and female votes by vowing in televised debates to "minimize government interference" in culture and society and to give women "equal rights and equal pay."

The upbeat promises have continued apace since the June 14 election, particularly on Rouhani's two English and Farsi Twitter accounts. "This victory was a victory of wisdom, moderation, progress, awareness, commitment and religiosity over extremism & bad behavior," @hassanrouhani tweeted on June 15. The "bad behavior" was clearly a dig at outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose status has plummeted over the past year. He leaves office almost in disgrace.

Online, Rouhani even discreetly tipped his turban to the Great Satan. Four days after the vote, his account tweeted a decade-old picture of Rouhani visiting a U.S. field hospital set up after the devastating 2003 earthquake in historic Bam. He is pictured next to an American female medic.

Now Iran's new president has to deliver. After the Aug. 4 inauguration, Rouhani faces a grueling test of the popularity he won at the polls against five other candidates. Iran's economy is toxic. Political divisions border on schisms. Regional allies--both secular and Islamist--are literally under fire. And the outside world has threatened military action if Tehran does not compromise on its nuclear program. Rouhani will find few quick fixes either. His gentle smile will only get him so far.

***

"It's the economy stupid" applies as much in the Islamic Republic as in any capitalist society. Rouhani inherits an almost existential challenge in putting out the financial fires. The economic situation is beyond grim due to a combination of punishing international sanctions and Ahmadinejad's gross mismanagement.

Iran's currency has lost about half its value since mid-2012. At least one out of four young people is now unemployed--including 4 million university graduates--in a country where more than half the voters are under 35. The Central Bank put inflation at 36 percent this spring, but Rouhani said his incoming team estimated that it was closer to 42 percent. Disgruntlement is visible. Sporadic demonstrations, including a July rally by steelworkers outside parliament, have protested unpaid salaries and layoffs.

Iran's economic lifeline is oil. But crude oil exports were cut by almost 40 percent in 2012--to 1.5 million barrels per day, the lowest in more than a quarter century, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. By July 2013, the World Bank reported that Tehran had not paid back loans totaling $79 million for more than six months (out of $679 million due overall), which also meant Tehran would be ineligible for new funding and would find it harder to get new money from commercial creditors.

"For the first time since the imposed war [with Iraq from 1980 to 1988], our economic growth has been negative for two years in a row. And this is the first time that negative growth is accompanied by high inflation -- the highest inflation in the region or perhaps in the world," Rouhani told the country's parliament in July. In Iran's unusual political system, the president's biggest portfolio is the economy--and it could make or break his presidency.

***

During the presidential debates, Rouhani was quite conciliatory toward the outside world, at least compared with the defiant and discordant Ahmadinejad. "We need to move away from extremism," Rouhani said on national television. "We should maintain the country's interests and national security to provide conditions where we create opportunities." The key, of course, will be whether Iran and the outside world can settle longstanding questions about Iran's nuclear program.

Unlike the economy, Rouhani is uniquely qualified on this issue. He is a mid-ranking cleric, but he was also the national security adviser for 16 years. As chief nuclear negotiator, he brokered a rare deal with the West in 2003-4, when Iran temporarily suspected uranium enrichment, a fuel process that can be used for both peaceful nuclear energy and the world's deadliest weapon. He left the job shortly after Ahmadinejad took office in 2005.

Rouhani actually took a potshot at Ahmadinejad's team--including Saeed Jalili, the chief nuclear negotiator and another presidential candidate--in the campaign this summer. Among the six major powers negotiating with Iran, Jalili was famed for his long-winded tirades and stalling tactics that went nowhere during the five rounds of diplomacy since April 2012. The joke in Washington was that U.S. officials would actually not have minded if Jalili won the election, because at least they would no longer have to sit across from him at the negotiating table. He may have had the same reputation in Tehran.

"The nuclear issue will only be resolved through real negotiations, not just announcements," Rouhani said during the debates. "Iran's foreign policy should be placed in the hands of skilled, experienced people -- not people who do not know what they are talking about."

The sixth round of negotiations--with the United States, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia--is expected to resume this fall. "Iran will be more transparent to show that its activities fall within the framework of international rules." Rouhani said in his first press conference after the election. The International Atomic Energy Agency--the U.N. nuclear watchdog--particularly wants access to facilities and scientists so far off-limits to the outside world. The looming question is also whether the regime will finally agree to direct talks with the United States to expedite resolution.

"Relations between Iran and the United States are a complicated and difficult issue. It's nothing easy," Rouhani said at his first press conference. "This is a very old wound that is there, and we need to think about how to heal this injury. We don't want to see more tension. Wisdom tells us both countries need to think more about the future and try to sit down and find solutions to past issues and rectify things."

Rouhani knows the nuclear program intimately. He also knows that a deal that lessens or eliminates sanctions would in turn be the key to reversing Iran's rapid economic decline. "It is very good for [nuclear] centrifuges to spin," he said in the final debate on foreign policy. "But it's also good for the lives of people to spin." For all his realism, however, Iran's new president remains committed to the unique ideology of the world's only modern theocracy. He also opposed terms of a deal offered in 2009.

***

The central challenge for Rouhani is that he will not have the last word on virtually anything. In Iran's hybrid political system, a cleric is the ultimate executive. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has virtual veto power, sometimes in subtle ways, over everything from cabinet appointments to political agendas and foreign policy. The last three presidents ended up alienating the supreme leader--and losing influence for themselves and their political factions.

Tehran also has rival power centers. To win support for his initiatives, Rouhani will need to be a master wrangler to keep Iran's herd of bull-headed politicians in the same corral. He will have to navigate a balance between hardline principlists (so called for their rigid revolutionary principles) at one end of the spectrum and reform sentiments at the other, with many political shades between the two poles. For all their differences, Iranian and American politics actually have something in common--intense government rivalries that produce gridlock.

After the election, Rouhani told a packed press conference that his government would include "moderates, principlists and reformists. There will be no restrictions. I don't like the word coalition, it will go beyond factions and be based on meritocracy."

But blocks have already formed to hold Rouhani in check. Iran's unicameral parliament -- the Majlis -- is dominated by conservatives and hardliners, while Rouhani is a centrist. In a recent letter, 80 principlist members of parliament warned against naming "seditionists," a reference to reformers. Their six-point demands included absolute commitment by any appointee to revolutionary principles in domestic and foreign policies and total obedience to the supreme leader.

Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards also wield enormous political influence. Under Ahmadinejad, veterans from the 1980-88 war with Iraq strengthened their hold on top government jobs, both nationally and in the provinces. The Revolutionary Guards also are a dominant economic force, holding billions of dollars in government contracts having little or nothing to do with the military. They are not shy when it comes to getting their way.

So the honeymoon may be brief for Rouhani. Like his Western counterparts, he probably has 18 months to two years to produce something tangible before risking the leverage gained by his surprising first-round victory. Then he will have to begin thinking about the next election cycle.

What the World Will Learn in Iran's Election

Foreign Policy 
June 6, 2013
By Robin Wright

  

The field of candidates may be limited, but the outside world can still learn a lot from Iran’s 2013 presidential poll. The election will provide three pivotal metrics about the Islamic republic now that the Ahmadinejad era is ending. 

First, the (real) turnout at the polls will indicate how many Iranians still have an interest in the world’s only modern theocracy. The government is quite obsessed with the number of people who vote to prove it still has a public mandate. Voting has become almost an existential issue for the ruling clerics.

"A vote for any of these eight candidates is a vote for the Islamic Republic and a vote of confidence in the system and our electoral process," Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a public appeal on June 4. He charged that the outside world was plotting to ensure a low turnout. Leaders clearly hope at least 60 percent of the estimated 50 million voters will turn out.

Second, reaction to the results will signal whether the public deems the election process itself legitimate. It’s no small issue. Many Iranians believed the 2009 presidential poll was fraught with fraud—and that Ahmadinejad was not really reelected. The reaction sparked the greatest challenge to the Iranian regime since the 1979 revolution. It gave birth to a new opposition movement.

Over the next eight months, millions turned out in cities across Iran to challenge the results—and to demand “Where is my vote?” The regime had to use brutal force, arrest thousands, and hold Stalinesque trials to quash the new Green Movement opposition.

In 2013, the regime has already witnessed signs of discontent even before the vote. On June 4, thousands reportedly turned the funeral for Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri into an anti-government demonstration in Isfahan. Taheri had been the Friday Prayer Leader in Isfahan. He had earlier criticized the regime for corruption, eventually resigning from the post. He also called the 2009 election “invalid.”

At his funeral, supporters chanted “death to the dictator,” a reference to the supreme leader and a rallying cry from 2009. Others shouted “Free Mousavi and Karroubi,” the two reformist presidential candidates in 2009 and co-leaders of the Green Movement. They have been under house arrest for more than two years.

Again, the regime has publicly conceded its concern about the day-after-the-vote. On June 4, the supreme leader charged that unnamed foreign powers were plotting to foment “sedition” after the poll.

Third, the new president—if the election is credible—may indicate who is capturing the public imagination. Iranians surprised the outside world—and themselves—in electing dark horses in both 1997 and 2005. The regime favorites were trounced in both polls.

In a stunning upset, the 1997 election brought to power Mohammad Khatami, a purged former culture minister who was director of the national library. The vote marked the beginning of the reform era.

In 2005, the final runoff was defined as a battle between “the turban and the hat” – or a cleric against a layman. Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president, ran against little- known Tehran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

For the first time since the revolution’s early days, a cleric did not win. The vote was widely interpreted as public rejection of the clerical monopoly of power—more than as overwhelming support for Ahmadinejad, an engineer and specialist in traffic management.

            Because of past controversies and regime paranoia, the list of candidates in 2013 offers little variety—arguably less than in any election since the revolution. Even former President Rafsanjani was disqualified from running—along with more than 670 others candidates. Two of the 2009 presidential candidates—a former prime minister and a former speaker of parliament—are still under house arrest.

But the eight candidates, all ardent supporters of the revolution and Islamic rule, don’t have cookie cutter views. The televised debates have even had flashes of disagreements over the economy, censorship, academic freedom, and women’s rights.

The election will also be telling about the key to Iran’s future–its disproportionately large young population. Because the Islamic regime aggressively encouraged larger families in the 1980s, its population almost doubled from 34 million to 62 million in a decade. Today, about two-thirds of Iran’s 75 million people are under age 35. Even more striking, about half of voters are reportedly under 35.

 The young also face the widest array of challenges in Iranian society, from inadequate access to higher education and serious housing shortages to increasing unemployment or underemployment. All three are pivotal to independence and marriage. Frustrations among the young have been reflected in several growing social problems, from narcotics to prostitution.

The big issue for the regime, however, is the level of political engagement. Half of Iran’s electorate was born after the revolution. They have no memory of the monarchy—or the factors that inflamed passions behind the revolution. Since youth played a huge part in the 2009 protests, their interest in voting, their choices at the polls, and their reaction to the results could also be disproportionately important—and potentially decisive.

  In the end, Iran’s president may not have real executive power. Khamenei—ironically himself a former president—still dominates the policy process. Iran’s supreme leader has a virtual veto over almost everything.

Yet the president does matter in Iran. His administration strongly influences the tone of politics, the economy and the cultural atmospherics—as well as many appointments.

Khatami allowed the flowering of an independent press, fewer restrictions on women, and wider cultural expression in the arts. He talked about bringing down the “wall of distrust” with the outside world and introduced the idea of a dialogue among civilizations at the United Nations. He also brought many other reformers with their own ideas about ways to open up Iran into top jobs.

In contrast, Ahmadinejad brought into power many from his days in the Revolutionary Guards during the 1980-1988 war with Iraq. His closest aide was an in-law through the marriage of their children. Both men framed policy considerations in terms of the return of the missing 12^th imam, whom many Shiites believe went into “occultation” or hiding in 941 AD and whose reemergence would bring peace and justice to the world.

So this vote will count. Despite the huge array of restrictions on the election, Iranians will be able to signal a lot about what they’re thinking at a particularly important juncture in Tehran’s relations with the outside world. 

Syria: Assad's Playbook Is Now Empty

The Atlantic

by ROBIN WRIGHT   DEC. 14, 2012

The last of the three conditions keeping Syria's dictator in power finally collapsed this week.

The Assad dynasty, which has ruled the most strategic chunk of land in the Arab world for more than 40 years, may now face insurmountable odds. The three fundamental rules in a dictator's playbook of power have changed over the past two weeks.

Although modern autocrats rarely rally a majority, my experience is that they need at least 30 percent support at home to survive serious opposition challenges. They also need powerful foreign allies to prevent international isolation or invasion. And they also need to prevent viable, credible, or recognized alternatives to their leadership so they remain the only source of order.

President Bashar al-Assad is now closer -- much closer -- than at any point in the 20-month conflict to losing out on all three. And his use of imprecise but deadly Scud missiles against his own people this month demonstrates that he has no backup game plan.

That doesn't mean that he will be forced out quickly or easily. In many historic last-gasps, the final battle is the bloodiest. But the odds are now decisively against the Assad regime's open-ended survival.

First, every indicator suggests the despot of Damascus no longer has one-third of the population behind him. The Assad father and son had relied on an unusual collection of minorities with interconnected political and economic self-interests. The political math added up large chunks of Alawites (12 percent), Christians (10 percent), Kurds (9 percent,) plus business elites, the corrupt who were bought, and civil servants in a bloated bureaucracy who were loyal (or apolitical) in exchange for jobs.

The numbers were important as much for security as for politics in a country without any real rights. They ensured Assad could recruit security forces with motives worth putting their lives on the line for him.

But the critical quota has been dwindling since the summer, as the regime's crackdown has grown ever more bloodthirsty and rebels have seized territory. A growing number of Alawites, an offshoot sect of Shiite Islam to which the Assad family belongs, are alarmed enough to distance themselves from the ruling clan.

Assad's army -- on paper -- was about 300,000 strong when the first protest erupted in remote Daraa, after teenagers were arrested for scribbling anti-government graffiti on public walls in March 2011. Today, the number of reliable troops may be as low as 70,000 to 80,000 in a country of 22.5 million, according to Arab and Western officials.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh lasted 13 months because he still had significant political and military support. Libya's Moammar Qaddafi held on for eight months because he had a mix of the military, tribes or clans, and the oil-corrupted. Assad has lasted the longest, but also at the greatest cost to his base of support.

Second, autocrats also need powerful allies. Assad would not have lasted this long without Russia, China, and Iran. Tehran has aided and abetted Damascus with weaponry, intelligence capabilities, lessons from its experience in tactical repression from its own 2009 uprising, and indirect economic assistance, according to Western and Arab officials.

Russia has been even more important. With an assist from Beijing, Moscow has blocked credible international sanctions to squeeze Syria, which was vulnerable because its modest oil exports were already declining.

But on Thursday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov conceded Assad might not make it. "Unfortunately, it is impossible to exclude a victory of the Syrian opposition," he said, according to Russian press reports. "We must look squarely at the facts, and the trend now suggests that the regime and the government in Syria are losing more and more control and more and more territory."

Russia is also developing plans to evacuate thousands of Russians now in Syria, Bogdanov reportedly said. Moscow has longstanding military, diplomatic and commercial interests in Syria, its strongest Arab ally. The leaks are a major indication of the cracks in an alliance that blocked punitive U.N. measures against Syria.

And finally, Syria has a new(ish) opposition that claims more credibility as an alternative than the feckless group of exiles that squabbled away 20 months -- and in the process left Assad the only political game in town. Under intense U.S. pressure, the Syrian National Council was reconfigured and expanded to include insiders under an unwieldy title -- the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (SOC).

The opposition is still fragile and fraught with infighting. It may still prove as hapless as the Iraqi National Council, which was also crafted by the United States. But the transformation was enough for President Obama this week to announce American recognition of the SOC as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, with 100 other countries joining in.

The emergence of a recognized opposition changes the internal and international dynamics of the conflict and opens the way for many other forms of aid, too.

Predictions about anything in the Middle East are always dicey. Many of us who know Syria well -- and have had our own encounters with a very determined dictatorship -- have been stunned that Assad has lasted this long. I still owe lunch to a colleague who predicted a longer struggle than I did. But his target date for Assad's ouster has also long passed.

Assad's demise will require that his support ebbs further, that his allies move more decisively against him, and that the new government-in-exile prove itself. But the forces have never been so solidly arrayed against the Assad dynasty. Syria may have finally reached a long-illusive tipping point.

After the Arab Spring: Two Years Later

Los Angeles Times 

Revolutionary fervor has given way to the hard realities of running countries

By Robin Wright

Dec. 9, 2012

The most enduring image from my travels across the Middle East this year was a Libyan street lined with bridal boutiques. Mannequins in bouffant white dresses, with beaded bustiers and satin rosettes, evoked Cinderella transformed by her ball gown.

Outside, however, the street was lined with heaping piles of garbage wrapped in tatty plastic bags. Tripoli literally stank.

On the second anniversary of the Arab uprisings, millions across the Middle East still have dreams of makeovers. But revolutionary fairy tales have devolved into the reality of running countries that are still without fully functioning governments or basic laws. Providing fundamental public services, much less addressing economic woes that sparked the uprisings, is still a very long way off.

The old order has yet to be replaced by a new one.

"We are a stateless society today," lamented former prime minister Mahmoud Jibril, a  rebel leader. "For 42 years, Moammar Qaddafi was the state. When he died, the state died too." In July, Jibril's coalition won the largest block of seats in the new national assembly. "We're starting from scratch," he told me last month.

Phase two of the Arab Spring is proving far harder than the first phase, as has become painfully evident in Egypt's turmoil. Despite a theoretical embrace of democracy, factions fear each other in practice. The latest flash point is the country's draft constitution, scheduled for a vote this week.

"I suffer from polarization in my own family," a senior Egyptian official told me. "Two of my kids blame me and [President Mohamed] Morsi for all Egypt's problems. They say you're robbing me of my future."

Egypt is consumed with a democracy of distrust. Young revolutionaries resent that the Muslim Brotherhood has been the primary beneficiary of an uprising it did not spark. The Morsi government made a power grab last month out of fear that a deep state cabal from the ancien regime was plotting to undo it. Secular and liberal activists suspect that the two religious parties, which won more than 70% of the seats in a parliament since disbanded by the courts, are scheming to create an Islamic state.

And, in the ultimate irony, the Islamist parties aren't crazy about each other either. The Brotherhood views the ultraconservative Salafis as backward and naive. Salafis criticize the Brotherhood for compromising the Islamist code.

Variations of the same issues are visible throughout the region.

In the spring, I went to Sidi Bouzid, where a young Tunisian fruit vendor triggered the Arab uprisings by setting himself on fire on Dec. 17, 2010, to protest government corruption and abuse. I asked other fruit vendors on his old corner what the Jasmine Revolution had done for them.

They had far more freedom, they said, but far fewer jobs. Nationwide unemployment was about 17%, but 40% among the young. By the fall, when I returned to Tunisia, new graffiti blasted the new government.

Emboldened and ambitious Salafis, who have entered politics after 14 centuries of rejecting participation, also now seek to re-create life as practiced by early Muslims, a central tenet of al Qaeda's ideology. Many but not all reject violence.

During my visit, six weeks after a Sept. 14 attack by Salafi radicals, the large windows at the U.S. Embassy in Tunis were still blackened and broken. Bulletproof glass at the entry was shattered and warped.

Among Mideast countries in transition, Libya has the most going for it, with vast resources and a small population. Oil production is back to about 90%.

Yet for six days in October, water sellers set up stands all over the capital because the city of 2.2 million was bone dry, and no one seemed to know how to fix broken pipes and pumps.

It wasn't entirely the fault of the country's new leaders. After international sanctions were lifted in 2008, Qaddafi initiated huge construction projects with foreign companies without provisions for maintenance.

Revolutionary rivalries, spurred by democratic openings, have intensified the trauma of transition in Libya. One basic clash is over who is a real revolutionary — and not a "post-revolution revolutionary" cashing in politically or financially after the fact.

In recent months, the Warriors Commission has registered 240,000 men from 300 militias. "Some pretend they were revolutionaries," commission spokesman Abdel Rahman Mansouri told me. "So we ask for proof. Some lie. Some fail. Some are pro-Qaddafi." Cellphone combat videos — I saw many, most of them quite bloody — are a hot item to prove bona fides.

Only a fraction probably fought, officials said. So not all may win benefits, which could have an impact on both politics and national security.

"There are at least four guns for every man, woman and child in Libya," former Deputy Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagur told me.

Libya is far from lost, however. Like the bridal shop, some images reflected hope about the future — even around Bab Azizia, the sprawling fortress where I first interviewed Qaddafi in 1980. He had received visitors in a hokey tent of colorful quilts inside the compound's concrete walls.

Pummeled by NATO warplanes and finished off by rebels, Bab al Azizia is now a pile of rubble. But across the street is a more than 500-yard wall divvied into billboard-size sections. For the revolution's first anniversary in October, young artists, including teenage girls, painted their visions of a new Libya. Several featured promising symbols such as scales of justice or white doves.

In a country long associated with extremism, terrorism and the Mideast's most radical factions, the most eye-catching sign was emblazoned with a single word in big bright colors: Peace.

Mideast’s dynamic opportunity for peace

Reuters 

By Robin Wright
           The Arab world may be in turmoil, but its leaders actually need an enduring peace—now in Gaza and long-term with Israel—because regimes across the region are vulnerable as never before.

Whether they like it or not, that’s true for newly elected Islamists. And old-order autocrats need resolution to prevent protests at home from turning against them.

            The challenge for Washington is taking advantage of the vulnerability to work with the new political roster, including players it doesn’t know all that well. The tectonic political shift over the past two years offers a rather dynamic opportunity.

            Committed U.S. diplomacy could not only spur meaningful movement on the 64-year conflict. It could enhance Israel’s security and prevent a whole new type of tension with the region’s new governments.

            The potential is visible in budding relations between President Obama and Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate who has evolved since June from an unknown engineering professor to the most powerful Arab leader. They’ve talked often during the crisis.  He is now brokering what happens next.

             Washington's relationship with Morsi will also influence Phase 2 of the Arab awakening. U.S.-Egypt relations under a Muslim Brotherhood president will shape American ties with the wider Islamic world too. 

           The Obama administration needs to move through three phases. Phase 1 is a lasting truce—not just a “period of calm.”

Ceasefires never last if not followed by substantive solutions. So Phase 2—in weeks, not months—is tackling immediate flashpoints, including real security for Israel, easing the crippling blockade of Gaza and a settlement freeze in the West Bank.

Hamas has no incentive to end military pressure on Israel unless Israel eases economic pressure on Gaza, and vice versa. Hamas can never win militarily, but it can thrive politically by not losing—the Hezbollah model from the 2006 war. The now weakened West Bank government of President Mahmoud Abbas Bank won’t convince Hamas rivals to consider any deal without proof that Israel is seriously engaging.

Phase 3 is negotiations on a broader Palestinian-Israeli peace. Ironically, after four years of virtually neglecting the peace process, Hillary Clinton now has an opportunity to pick up where Bill Clinton left off in his final days as president. The working assumption has long been that the Camp David plan outlined 12 years ago would form the basis of any peace. Phase 3 needs an urgent deadline that doesn’t slip, as have efforts since the original 1993 accords.

Diplomacy short of all three means indefinite rounds of these conflicts which neither side can win militarily. The administration needs to move at a clip to ensure events on the ground don’t again overtake diplomacy. The moment of opportunity is short.
Phase 3 could begin to take shape when Morsi makes his maiden visit as president to Washington next month. The new Egyptian government reflects the broader political reality today: Fragile new Arab governments are no longer resistance movements. Their primary focus is on creating jobs, writing constitutions, reconstruction, and disarming militias.

They don’t have a lot of time. Egypt, Tunisia and Libya all face elections over the next year for permanent parliaments, after writing constitutions. They know there is more power on the streets today than in presidential palaces. They also know utopian expectations are not being met.  Over the past two months, I’ve tasted the growing public disillusionment in travels from North Africa to the Gulf.

Islamist parties have stronger ties to Hamas than their secular predecessors. But ideology may not be preeminent—at least now. Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalem, son-in-law of Islamist leader Rachid Ghannouchi, visited Gaza Saturday. Yet when I saw Abdessalem and Ghannouchi last month in Tunisia, both were consumed with staggering domestic challenges.

            Unemployment was 17 percent, but 40 percent among the young, Abdessalem lamented. “Among the young, half are college graduates. So it’s not finding them just any job.”

            Economics triggered the greatest change in the modern Middle East. A young Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire over the right to a job, not to vote for the party of his choice. Enduring hardships can’t be overestimated as the pressing political factor.

            In Libya, Tripoli literally stinks from garbage lining streets while the ingénue state figures out how to function. Last month, the capital was without water for six days. And a Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarian fretting about disarming 240,000 armed men from 300 militias.  “So far, integration into the military and security institutions is not going all that well,” Neizar Kawan told me.

Only Syria has no interest in either a short or long-term peace. Gaza diverts attention from the daily slaughter.  That says a lot about the changing Middle East—and the possibilities for U.S. diplomacy. A real peace process may have a rippling impact too.

I’ve covered every Middle East war since 1973. This conflict really has critical differences—and opportunities.

Robin Wright, a joint fellow at the US Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center, is author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion across the Islamic World.”

Don't Fear All Islamists, Fear Salafis

The New York Times 

 Aug. 20, 2012 

 By Robin Wright
      THIS spring, I traveled to the cradle of the Arab uprisings — a forlorn street corner in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, where a street vendor, drenched in paint thinner, struck a match in December 2010 that ignited the entire Middle East. “We have far more freedoms,” one peddler hawking fruit in the same square lamented, “but far fewer jobs.” Another noted that Mohamed Bouazizi, the vendor who set himself on fire, did so not to vote in a democratic election but because harassment by local officials had cost him his livelihood.
      As the peddlers vented, prayers ended at the whitewashed mosque across the street. Among the faithful were Salafis, ultraconservative Sunni Muslims vying to define the new order according to seventh-century religious traditions rather than earthly realities.
     For years, many Salafis — “salaf” means predecessors — had avoided politics and embraced autocrats as long as they were Muslims. But over the past eight months, clusters of worshipers across the Middle East have morphed into powerful Salafi movements that are tapping into the disillusionment and disorder of transitions.
      A new Salafi Crescent, radiating from the Persian Gulf sheikdoms into the Levant and North Africa, is one of the most underappreciated and disturbing byproducts of the Arab revolts. In varying degrees, these populist puritans are moving into the political space once occupied by jihadi militants, who are now less in vogue. Both are fundamentalists who favor a new order modeled on early Islam. Salafis are not necessarily fighters, however. Many disavow violence.
      In Tunisia, Salafis started the Reform Front party in May and led protests, including in Sidi Bouzid. This summer, they’ve repeatedly attacked symbols of the new freedom of speech, ransacking an art gallery and blocking Sufi musicians and political comedians from performing. In Egypt, Salafis emerged last year from obscurity, hastily formed parties, and in January won 25 percent of the seats in parliament — second only to the 84-year-old Muslim Brotherhood. Salafis are a growing influence in Syria’s rebellion. And they have parties or factions in Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Yemen and among Palestinians.
      Salafis are only one slice of a rapidly evolving Islamist spectrum. The variety of Islamists in the early 21st century recalls socialism’s many shades in the 20th. Now, as then, some Islamists are more hazardous to Western interests and values than others. The Salafis are most averse to minority and women’s rights.
      A common denominator among disparate Salafi groups is inspiration and support from Wahhabis, a puritanical strain of Sunni Islam from Saudi Arabia. Not all Saudis are Wahhabis. Not all Salafis are Wahhabis, either. But Wahhabis are basically all Salafis. And many Arabs, particularly outside the sparsely populated Gulf, suspect that Wahhabis are trying to seize the future by aiding and abetting the region’s newly politicized Salafis — as they did 30 years ago by funding the South Asian madrassas that produced Afghanistan’s Taliban.
      Salafis go much further in restricting political and personal life than the larger and more modern Islamist parties that have won electoral pluralities in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco since October. For most Arabs, the rallying cry is justice, both economic and political. For Salafis, it is also about a virtue that is inflexible and enforceable.
      “You have two choices: heaven or hellfire,” Sheikh Muhammad el-Kurdi instructed me after his election to Egypt’s parliament as a member of Al Nour, a Salafi party. It favors gender segregation in schools and offices, he told me, so that men can concentrate. “It’s O.K. for you to be in the room,” he explained. “You are our guest, and we know why you’re here. But you are one woman and we are three men — and we all want to marry you.” Marriage may have been a euphemism.
      Other more modern Islamists fear the Salafi factor. “The Salafis try to push us,” said Rachid al-Ghannouchi, founder of Ennahda, the ruling Islamist party in Tunisia. The two Islamist groups there are now rivals. “Salafis are against drafting a constitution. They think it is the Koran,” grumbled Merhézia Labidi, the vice chairwoman of Tunisia’s Constituent Assembly and a member of Ennahda.
       Salafis are deepening the divide between Sunni and Shiite Muslims and challenging the “Shiite Crescent,” a term coined by Jordan’s King Abdullah in 2004, during the Iraq war, to describe an arc of influence from Shiite-dominated Iran to its allies in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Today, these rival crescents risk turning countries in transition into battlefields over the region’s future.
       The Salafis represent a painful long-term conundrum for the West. Their goals are the most anti-Western of any Islamist parties. They are trying to push both secularists and other Islamists into the not-always-virtuous past.
      American policy recently had its own awakening after 60 years of support for autocratic rulers. The United States opted to embrace people power and electoral change in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Yemen. Yet Washington still embraces authoritarian Gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia, tolerating their vague promises of reform and even pledging the United States’ might to protect them.
      Foreign policy should be nuanced, whether because of oil needs or to counter threats from Iran. But there is something dreadfully wrong with tying America’s future position in the region to the birthplace and bastion of Salafism and its warped vision of a new order.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/opinion/dont-fear-all-islamists-fear-salafis.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
       Robin Wright, the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World,” is a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

After Tahrir, Finishing the Revolution

On the anniversary of Egypt's historic protests, a 49-year-old mother tries to hold the military accountable—one body at a time

Wall Street Journal Jan. 21, 2012

As Egypt's tumultuous uprising has deteriorated over the last year, Ghada Shahbender, a former soccer mom, has adopted a grim vocation.

"It's hospital after hospital, morgue after morgue," the divorced mother of four told me. "I started back in February, about the time that the camel drivers attacked us in Tahrir Square. I was trying to get a body count, but I was chased out. The government didn't want us to know how many people really died."

As clashes between protesters and security forces escalated in the fall, Ms. Shahbender and other volunteers learned to reach coroners quickly to prevent them from lying on death certificates under government pressure.

"There's often an awful battle over writing a report about what really happened—like when a body arrives with a gunshot wound in the forehead and a coroner tries to make it a car accident," said Ms. Shahbender, a secular voter (and former screenwriter) who sees the country's Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF) as the key remaining obstacle to democracy.

On Jan. 25, Egypt marks the one-year anniversary of epic protests that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in a mere 18 days. The Arab world's most populous country has just wrapped up the freest election in its 5,000-year history. By June, a committee from the new parliament is supposed to write a constitution, and then Egypt will elect a president.

Yet across teeming Cairo, there's a sense now that the revolution has only begun—and that the last body has yet to be counted. Egyptians increasingly frame the next five months as a third phase of their rebellion. The first was the ouster of Mr. Mubarak. The second played out in sporadic clashes from October to December. The third phase will be shaped as elected officials struggle to dismantle Egypt's military empire. Many here fear it could take years—and prove harder than ousting Mr. Mubarak.

Underneath its autocratic surface, modern Egypt was effectively a military state. Since the Free Officers Movement toppled the monarchy in 1952, all of the country's presidents have been military men. The SCAF, which holds power now, abandoned Mr. Mubarak partly because it wanted another general, not Mr. Mubarak's son, to succeed him, Egyptian analysts contend.

The military has long influenced everything from legislation to the media and foreign policy. And, according to reports, it may control up to 30% of the economy, including vast tracts of land.

The generals want four controversial guarantees before ceding power, according to Amr Hamzawy, who won a parliamentary seat as an independent. They seek immunity from prosecution for human rights violations, including hundreds of deaths, since taking over on Feb. 11 last year. They want to preserve their political leverage, including an effective veto over legislation. They want to retain their business interests. And they seek control over the military budget, which under Mr. Mubarak was kept secret even from parliament.

"These are not issues that will be decided once and for all in June," Mr. Hamzawy said. "Does that mean they will not hand over power? It means they will hand it over constitutionally and on paper. And the new parliament will draft limits and checks and balances that then will take time to enact."

"I don't know whether we will be successful," he added.

Meantime, the disparate array of protesters is demanding that SCAF allow elected civilians to rule Egypt for the first time. At Cairo's Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the yearlong uprising, graffiti that once carried anti-Mubarak slogans now target the generals. "Death to the rule of the military," declares one.

Tensions between protesters and SCAF have deepened particularly since a four-day crackdown in December killed dozens more activists. Over the past year, according to Human Rights Watch, more than 12,000 civilians have been tried by military courts, some simply for insulting the military.

Rival anniversary commemorations reflect the rising tensions. Protesters have called for massive demonstrations against SCAF on Jan. 25. SCAF responded by calling on Egyptians to turn out to honor the military's role in ousting Mr. Mubarak. The Islamist parties, on the eve of gaining power after winning almost 70% of the seats in the new parliament, want to avoid new turmoil, but they are also savvy about street sentiment. They have called on the public to turn out to celebrate "martyrs" who died in the uprising.

Whether or not the competing passions of Jan. 25 spark confrontations, Ms. Shahbender and her daughter Nazly Hussein, 28, are preparing to count more bodies. Ms. Hussein takes a video camera along to document death and injuries for the new group Mosireen, Arabic for "the determined," which posts them on the Web.

"I've been to the morgues so many times I lost count," Ms. Shahbender said. The hardest deaths to document, she said, were the bodies crushed by military vehicles.

Over the past year, Ms. Shahbender, 49, whose latest film was abruptly deferred after the uprising, has become a leading activist—a reflection of the fact that Egypt's protest leaders are not just young people. She smuggled supplies into Tahrir Square, created networks of activists and became a popular voice on Twitter. During the recent elections, she exposed thousands of discarded ballots in a Cairo district and forced a revote.

"This can't all have been for nothing," she told me while navigating Cairo's chaotic traffic en route to an open-air rally for Kazeboon, a group formed last month to counter the military's propaganda against the protesters. (Kazeboon means "liars.") On a frigid night, the demonstration packed Union Square with protesters to honor the "Eyes of Tahrir," the more than 1,500 activists who lost an eye from beatings or from pellet guns, according to human rights activists and doctors.

Among them was Ahmed Harara, a young dentist who lost an eye on Jan. 28 last year, the day protesters pushed security forces from Lovers' Bridge and occupied Tahrir Square. He lost his other eye during protests on Nov. 19. Ms. Shahbender is documenting his and other cases for the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights. At the rally, an ophthalmologist showed gruesome slides of bloodied corneas on a screen made from sheets.

Bassem Youssef is a cardiac surgeon who tended to the injured at a makeshift clinic at Tahrir Square during the uprising's first phase. He has gained fame since March as the Jon Stewart of Egypt after he launched a satirical news show. Mr. Youssef has now started ridiculing SCAF.

"It's not just how many tanks they own," he reflected after a recent taping. "How do you build a highway here? You go to the military as it has the resources. So the idea of turning over control—I just don't see it happening. After Mubarak stepped down, he went on trial. Will the generals go on trial? I don't think so." He started the show, he said, to expose "the hypocrisy and lying."

After a year of unrest, Ms. Shahbender says that she is inured to fear. "I can't get over the sight of the one-eyed and the blind. The more I look at the paraplegics who were shot in the back, the more I want justice. The dead actually may be in a better place," she said. "I can only pray that these generals pay the prices of these grievances with their own health."

—Ms. Wright, a joint fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center, is the author of "Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion across the Islamic World."