Category Archives: Middle East

Would a U.S.-Led Intervention Drag Out the War in Syria?

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The debate over whether or not to intervene in Syria draws on two logics that portend inaction. First, political scientists claim that external meddling in internal conflicts only leads to protracted wars – interventions lengthen, not reduce, conflicts. Second, to actually arm Syria’s rebels would require armaments such as manpads and other hardware that could be used against Israel were an Islamist government to assume power in a post-Assad Syria, not unlike how the Afghan mujahedeen turned against the United States after the Soviet invasion.

Let’s dissect the above. First, scholars find that interventions, especially those on the side of rebels, do prolong civil wars. But the evidence, drawn mostly from the Correlates of War (COW) dataset, may be heavily skewed because of a few protracted conflicts – namely civil wars in places like Angola that saw no shortage of external involvement – and also suffers from selection issues. For instance, it is possible that outside powers select into civil wars because they are protracted, not that the act of arming one side makes war last longer (Page Fortna points to similar selection issues to explain “successful” outcomes of UN peacekeeping missions). Indeed, it is unclear why tipping the balance of power toward one side would make war last longer. The supply of arms and other supplies is less studied. In at least one case – the French intervention against the British during the American Revolutionary War – the supply of arms after the Battle of Saratoga definitely tipped the balance of power in the Yankees’ favor (of course, it helped that the French sent their navy too). Also, Iraqi insurgents enjoyed very little external support yet were arguably able to fight the United States to a long (ten years and counting) and ugly stalemate (We also know that unarguably the presence of a NATO no-fly-zone drastically reduced what would have been a drawn-out civil war in Libya). In other words, not arming the Syrian rebels does not mean the war will end any sooner, it only means we will have no skin in the game in a post-Assad Syria.

In Never Ending Wars (2005), Ann Hironaka argues that the spate of outside interventions was a function of the spread of weaker states after World War II which were unable to control their borders. Nearly 3 out of 4 civil wars since 1945 have experienced third-party intervention, most of which have entailed the supply of arms, aid, and bases, not putting boots on the ground. Of the 49 conflicts with no third-party intervention, the average length of conflict was 1.5 years. By contrast, those with outside intervention saw an average length of 7 years. However, these conflicts were protracted largely because outsiders were intervening on both sides (external intervention by major powers during the 19th century was more one-sided and thus actually made such crises shorter, not longer).

Indeed, I would argue that the literature on external interventions is not entirely undivided. Nile Metternich, for example, finds that interventions by international organizations (e.g. NATO), especially those with democratization mandates, are associated with shorter conflicts, provided rebel leaders come from ethnic groups representing more than 10 percent of a country’s population (which would fit Syria’s largely Sunni opposition). Clayton Thyne looks at unobserved variables (e.g. high levels of resolve among the combatants) that contribute to the resolution of conflicts even with third-party interventions.

The notion that somehow arming Syria’s opposition means a long and protracted war is misguided and driven by a realist-inspired desire to stay on the sidelines and never intervene anywhere. Several foreign policy experts chalk it up to a political gesture and a way to check the box that we are merely doing something. That is bunk. Arming the opposition would send a clear signal to the Assad regime that the president’s words are not merely rhetoric, that there is a responsibility to protect citizens and refugees, and that we can tip the balance of power in the rebels’ favor. It would also help wean the influence of Islamist actors in the region, since many of the arms flowing into their hands are coming from Qatar and other places that favor Islamist over secular groups.

On the second point, would arming the opposition have blowback effects against allies such as Israel after the war ends? This is obviously a concern but it should not lead to a policy of paralysis. Israel, after all, has responded to attacks from the Assad regime and has even provided military intelligence related to alleged chemical weapons use in Syria. We should no doubt screen which factions within the opposition receive light weaponry, but more importantly, we should be clear that the opposition is not predisposed to turn against the United States or Israel should Assad fall in the near future. That can be done through providing them with assistance – intelligence, training (which we are doing in Jordan), funds, etc. – contingent on future behavior. A stronger opposition will face less chance of a reconstituted Alawite faction trying to wrestle control of a Sunni-led regime (albeit the risk is that we may be arming them to fight the Alawites should Assad fall, a risk worth taking).

Not arming the rebels both scratches our realism itch to not involve ourselves in messy internal wars, as well as not arm a potentially hostile future Syria that would pose a threat to Israeli citizens. The second scenario is real, but the first should be discounted: doing nothing (or at the least, giving the rebels non-lethal equipment and some humanitarian aid) is not an option. The U.S. will get pulled into the conflict, either on our terms and our timeline, or on terms we do not foresee (consider a Syrian strike against Israel, which would draw us in). To be sure, by arming the opposition we will be taking sides in a seriously bloody civil war. But this is not Vietnam or Afghanistan in the making. Arguably Syria matters more than these two states to their respective regions’ balance of power. As Syria goes, so goes the Middle East. A victory by Assad cements the continuing influence of Iran and Hezbollah to stir up trouble in the region, from nuclear proliferation to terrorist attacks. The removal of Assad at least provides an alternative, albeit less predictable, path forward for the region. Yes, Islamists would likely wield more power in a post-Assad Syria but that is not guaranteed to spell deteriorating Israeli-Syrian relations or war. Israel still possesses a powerful nuclear deterrent and the backing of the U.S. The worst possible scenario for Israel is a worsening civil war on its doorstep, not an Islamist in power in Damascus.

The fate of Syria will reshape the Middle East for generations. The Obama administration’s defeatist attitude and deer-in-headlights policy will only prolong the conflict, not hasten its successful conclusion.

Barack Obama has Nothing to Gain from Promoting Middle East Peace

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There has been a lot of talk the past few weeks about President Obama’s visit to Israel, both in government circles and the media. The gist of the chatter is quite similar across the board; Obama should take this opportunity to renew efforts towards achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. This is certainly a noble endeavor, I mean, who doesn’t want peace? But when we start examining the deeper content behind these calls to Obama, it quickly becomes clear that “peace” means very different things to different people, both domestically and abroad. Not only is the topic contentious in America’s domestic politics, but it has the potential to further destabilize an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has been quietly seething in recent months. It appears a third intifada is closer today that any time since the end of the second, and neither Israel nor the Palestinians are in any position to renew good-faith negotiations that could actually lead anywhere. Obama would be wise to avoid pushing either side back towards the negotiating table; nothing constructive can result from such action.

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Condemned to Repeat It: Revisiting the War in Iraq

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On the ten year anniversary of the War in Iraq, Peter Feaver “celebrated” with a post on Foreign Policy about five “myths” that pervade views about the war. Lists are fun. And this is a fun list. I say this because I hope nobody is taking this list seriously. I appreciate Feaver’s effort to try to clear up what happened in the build-up to the war. To be honest, I am still not sure exactly why the war in Iraq occurred. I do agree with Feaver’s implicit claim that monocausal explanations of the war are doomed to fail; this is a complicated policy issue that evolved in unpredictable ways from 2002 through 2004 that now cloud our ability to judge what happened.

All that being said, I don’t think Feaver’s attempt to clear the air makes a significant contribution to our knowledge about the war for three reasons. First, some of the “myths” are strawmen with which no serious observer of international politics would actually agree. Consider, for instance, the following myth:

The “real” motivation behind the Iraq war was the desire to steal Iraqi oil, or boost Halliburton profits, or divert domestic attention from the Enron scandal, or pay off the Israel lobby, or exact revenge on Hussein for his assassination attempt on President George H. W. Bush.

Feaver then proceeds to debunk each of these in turn. This is not necessary. Evocation of such arguments against the war come about only through serious misreadings of The Israel Lobby, Rise of the Vulcans, and, perhaps, Orientalism. In Feaver’s defense, he does admit that these are opinions held by “far left (and right) fringes.” But is this really who Feaver is targeting with this post?

The second type of myths are oddly-timed reaffirmations of some of the same arguments used in the build-up to the war a decade ago. For instance, Feaver rebuts John Mearsheimer’s claim that the Bush administration lied about the al-Qaeda-Iraq link as follows:

The first is the question of links between Iraq and al Qaeda. As I noted above, while the Iraq files contain no “smoking gun” of an active operational link, the record includes ample evidence of overtures originating from either side — each pursuing precisely the kind of enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend alliance of convenience that Bush worried about.

Ok. So, in conclusion, then: no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. I sincerely hope that this country’s national security apparatus does not consider “overtures” proper casus belli.

Finally, Feaver correctly addresses the myth that the Bush administration wanted to democratize Iraq from the start with two fairly persuasive points: (1) learning from Desert Storm, Bush officials were only committed to Saddam Hussein’s forcible removal from power, and (2) once Saddam had been removed, the administration promoted democracy as the best option for a post-Saddam Iraq. Obviously, the administration was woefully underprepared for this endeavor. Nonetheless, Feaver’s description of the timing of the motives is sound. However, he offers little clarity in his description of the primary cause of the war:

Bush was committed to confronting Iraq because of the changed risk calculus brought about by 9/11, which heightened our sensitivity to the nexus of WMD and terrorism (believing that state sponsors of terrorism who had WMD would be a likely pathway by which terrorist networks like al Qaeda could secure WMD)

This sentence barely means anything. Mostly, it’s just national security buzzwords strewn about a couple of proper nouns and “WMD” to lend an air of credibility to a nonsensical policy decision. It’s especially curious that Feaver would call Iraq a “nexus of WMD and terrorism” given the overwhelming evidence that it had neither in the spring of 2003. While it is important to clear the air surrounding some of the overtly biased arguments against the War in Iraq, it is equally important not to revert back to the same myths that led us into this mess to begin with.

For more of his thoughts on US Foreign Policy, follow William on Twitter.

In Syria, Don’t “Give War a Chance”

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Editor’s note: the following is a piece by The Smoke-Filled Room contributor Lionel Beehner that originally appeared in The Huffington Post.

News that the White House nixed a plan last summer to arm the Syrian rebels was attributed to election-year politics. But maybe the administration’s decision not to intervene was motivated by other impulses. On one hand, there is concern that the conflict in Syria could spill across its borders and export sectarian violence to neighbors like Jordan or Lebanon. On the other, there are those that might like to see a bludgeoned and weaker Syria emerge from the wreckage.

A weakened Syria, this theory goes, would mean less ability of Syria to carry out political assassinations in Lebanon, act as a conduit for arms for Hezbollah or home of groups like Hamas, and serve as an ally to Iran. War is bad, but there are undoubtedly some voices in Israel and the United States, among other places (like Turkey or Saudi Arabia), that might like to “give war a chance.” Or at least allow for a bit more bloodletting, the better to weaken Iran’s position in the region and prevent a postwar Syria – regardless of whether the rebels or regime emerges victorious – from continuing its prewar policies of being an exporter of instability. As Yitzhak Laor wrote last summer in Haaretz, “That’s why the United States is in no hurry to intervene … It’s looking for an effective dictatorship. Not another ‘Iraqi democracy.’ Meanwhile, let them bleed.”

In terms of the scale of bloodshed, Syria obviously does not compare to wartime Europe. But similar dynamics played out among some powers in the early 1940s that preferred to see Germany and the USSR bleed themselves to death, before intervening to end the war. Harry Truman, before he was president, proclaimed in 1941 that “if we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” Similarly, after Lenin pulled Russia out of World War I, he said “In concluding a separate peace now, we rid ourselves…of both imperialistic groups fighting each other.”

The phrase “give war a chance,” of course, is a loaded one whose Balkans origins in the 1990s describe the interference of international peacekeepers to impose a settlement to temporarily staunch the bloodshed, but with the unintended consequence of allowing the warring parties to rearm and thus live to fight another day. Such an imposed peace does two things: It prevents the war from playing itself out to see a clear victor emerge; and it unwillingly extends the war by buying time for the belligerents to rest and rearm themselves. Andrew Tabler and Bilal Saab,writing in Foreign Affairs, have resurrected this phrase by suggesting that a decisive rebel victory should prevail over a negotiated settlement.

But that could last years, as the war ledger in Syria is unlikely to tip in the rebels’ favor barring greater international support. Outside of Ankara, there has been little clamoring for a military intervention, much less a more limited show of force, such as a Libya-style no-fly zone. Which is perplexing, given France’s recent successful, if limited, military intervention in Mali and NATO’s success in Libya at ridding the world of Qaddafi. Obviously both interventions were far from perfect (let’s not rehash Benghazi here). But one has to assume that powerful forces are blocking Western intervention in Syria, using the convenient straw-man argument that the Russians and Chinese are blocking any meaningful action in the UN Security Council (especially since such objections did not prevent NATO from intervening in Kosovo in May 1999). One has to conclude that there are privately held views that Syria should get the wrecking-ball treatment as a way of shifting the regional balance of power in favor of the United States and Israel and against Iran. Call it the St. Augustine strategy: Lord, make Syria peaceful, but not yet.

Of course, much in the region still remains in flux. For instance, it is unclear which side of the power ledger Iraq or Egypt falls, given that both are improving ties with Tehran. Would a Sunni-dominated Syria remain an ally of Iran or Hezbollah? Would it seek closer ties with Iraq? Also, what would Syrian-Israeli relations resemble, given Israel’s recent alleged bombing of a research facility outside of Damascus? Finally, up until the war began in March 2011, Syria’s relations with the US had been warming. Is Washington privately seeking a weakened Syria, regardless of who wins the war, in the hopes of keeping Syria out of Lebanon and denying Iran its most important ally in the region?

Nobody knows. The trouble with any kind of bloodletting policy is threefold: First, it is a form of collective punishment strategy, since the bulk of the victims are Syrian civilians, many of whom never favored the Assad’s killing of Lebanese politicians or partnering with Iran. Most Syrians I’ve met in my past visits seek warmer relations with the West, are suspicious of Iran, and do not wake up in the morning wishing Israel off the map or murmuring “Death to America.” Second, this kind of strategy could easily backfire, as it will only create resentment among those Syrians in the crosshairs of this war who we should be protecting, push them into the hands of Islamist, and needlessly radicalize them to be distrustful of us (and at worst, hate us). Third, as Thucydides warned, the longer a war drags on, the greater the chances for accidents or improbable events to occur. A devastated Syria might weaken Iran’s position in the Middle East in the near term, but the longer-term consequences could make the Syrian civil war a seminal event by virtue of its duration. Just as the long civil war after the fall of Saddam in 2003 ignited Shiite and Sunni tensions beyond Iraq’s borders, a similar dynamic and cycle of revenge killings could (and already is, to some degree) erupt in the region, the longer the war drags on.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the actual motivation of outside powers is that Syria, unlike Mali or Libya, is too messy a place to intervene on the cheap. Maybe there is a real sense that for a postwar government to have any legitimacy, the Syrian rebels should “own” the outcome and win the war themselves, rather than allow some English-speaking Syrian Chalabi-type being installed by the West. Maybe the Venn diagram of idealists and realists in Washington overlap on Syria – the latter not viewing the war as a vital security concern, while the former sees an intervention as having imperial overtones.

Beyond its obvious normative implications, such a strategy of letting the war play out to its end will invariably produce a bad outcome beyond our control, a postwar Syria of resentful citizens and ruined cities, and a regional dynamic that may or may not favor the balance of power in our favor. Nor is it clear that a weakened Syria, particularly if Assad remains in power, might not seek to intervene in places like Lebanon even more to settle old scores or distract Syrians from their postwar woes.

Hence, an 11th-hour intervention by the West after years of bloodletting will backfire. We should seek to end the war immediately, not after Syria is reduced to ruin, even if there is no clear victor.

(Democratic) Peace in the Middle East?

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Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Michael Poznansky, Ph.D. Student in Foreign Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics, University of Virginia

The Middle East is in trouble. If the ongoing civil war in Syria, fears of nuclear proliferation in Iran, and a tenuous cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas were not enough, Egypt has recently passed a constitution instantiating the precepts of Islamism. In a recent article in the New York Times, John Owen suggests that proponents of Islamism—a brand of political Islam forged by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s—are thriving in the new Middle East, espousing an alternative to the secular tradition of Western liberal democracy. In this post, I explore the future of Egypt’s regime and its impact on any potential democratic peace with the U.S. In the remaining space, I address three issues: (1) the state of the Egyptian regime and its implications for democratic peace; (2) what history and theory can tell us about analogous situations; and (3) how these lessons inform the future of U.S.-Egyptian relations.

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The Rise of the Israeli Right: An International Politics Explanation

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It is undeniable that since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 Israeli politics has undergone a dramatic shift to the right, manifested by disappearing support for the peace process, an expansion of Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank, and a more antagonistic policy towards Israel’s Western allies. Populist politics has become a winning strategy and the Israeli center-left of Rabin has been decimated while the religious and nationalist right have enjoyed unprecedented electoral success. The Peace Process is dead and it’s not just the Palestinians’ fault. A recent alteration to the ruling party’s platform has removed even the token nod to a two state solution. This phenomenon has not gone unnoticed (see articles here, here, and here). However, existing explanations tend to focus on electoral fortunes of right-wing parties. Of course, electoral outcomes are exactly that, outcomes, and do not explain the rise of the right and Israel’s increasingly aggressive policies; they are merely its political manifestation. In order to truly understand the rise of the right, we must turn to theory. As it turns out, we do not need to search very far, but theories of domestic politics do not get us quite as far as theories of international politics. Changing conditions in the international system, combined with an appeal to theories of rational choice, do an excellent job explaining why the Israeli right has enjoyed such a meteoric rise (for example, see Gourevitch’s Second Image Reversed or Putnam’s Two Level Games). A severe and growing imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians combined with Israel’s successful escape from the consequences of an anarchic international system characterized by the self-help imperative suffices to explain the changing shape of Israel’s domestic political landscape. Continue reading →

A Tale of Two Wars in Turkey

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Editor’s note: the following is a piece by The Smoke-Filled Room contributor Lionel Beehner that originally appeared on The World Policy Blog.

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Gaziantep is surprisingly quiet, despite the ruckus of metal workers plying their trade in the town’s souk. Not thirty miles south of this Anatolian city sits the Syrian border, beyond which massacres and military air strikes have become an almost daily routine. The violence has pushed over 100,000 Syrians to seek refuge along Turkey’s border in camps and cities like Gaziantep (I’m told vendors at the local mall and souk have been brushing up on their Arabic). Cross-border shelling by the Syrian military in recent weeks has killed five Turkish civilians. Syrian defenses also shot down a Turkish fighter jet. Yet none of these violations of Turkish sovereignty has provoked a mass retaliation or convinced most Turks of the need for escalating the war with Syria.

Turkey has responded in a restrained fashion, with limited tit-for-tat artillery strikes against Syrian targets across the border. Ankara grounded a Russian commercial plane bound for Damascus on suspicions of spiriting radar equipment to the Assad regime, while its parliament green-lighted a motion for military intervention. But Turkey has mostly put pressure on the Assad regime through indirect means: By providing safe haven to Syrian opposition parties and rebel groups like the Free Syrian Army and allowing the free flow of arms and other aid across its 500-mile border.

All of the above might be cause for alarm among Gaziantep residents, whose backyard could become the next flashpoint of Mideast violence. But Turks, whether in “Antep” or Ankara, do not believe that war with Syria is imminent. Moreover, most of the population remains at odds with the government over the Syria issue. Despite repeated provocations, large majorities do not favor military retaliation or escalation, according to recent polls, for fear of being sucked into what some here call “Turkey’s Vietnam.” But it would be incorrect to chalk this gun-shyness up to pacifism among the Turkish public. After all, in response to a surge of cross-border attacks by the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, holed up in the hills of Iraqi Kurdistan, polls indicate that two-thirds of the population favor responding with greater military force. Even while conceding more social and cultural rights to its 14 million Kurds, Turkey has preferred using sticks over carrots against the PKK. So what explains this yin and yang stance among Turks toward war?

The Syria question bedevils Turkish policy-makers, namely because their government has led the charge in favor of Syrian regime change, even at the costly imposition of some kind of no-fly zone in the north to tip the balance of power in the rebels’ favor. While this approach has won it admiration among humanitarian interventionists abroad (myself included), it goes against the wishes of Turkey’s public and vocal business community. The government got too far ahead of itself in its belligerent rhetoric, their thinking goes, perhaps assuming Assad would have fallen by now or that NATO would have rallied behind it, and now finds itself in the awkward position of calling for regime change but lacking sufficient leverage to do anything about it.

The AKP leadership has been motivated by mixed impulses. On one hand, it found itself on the wrong side of history by not supporting NATO’s intervention into Libya more forcefully. On the other, the government is motivated by genuine humanitarian concerns as well as the presence of a bloodbath on its doorstep, to say nothing of the refugee crisis such a one-sided war would cause. Yet without NATO’s backing, Turkey will not unilaterally intervene in Syria. It will continue to respond in kind to any cross-border attacks, but it cannot impose a meaningful no-fly zone, much less depose the Assad regime. That is partly because of Turkey’s divisive domestic politics – the country has enough on its hands trying to rewrite a new constitution – but also because Turkish forces are mostly defensive in nature, not offensive, according to a recent report published by IHS Jane’s. Hence, Ankara must rely on its soft power to cajole allies and assist the Syrian opposition.

Yet, what we sometimes fail to appreciate in the West is that the main war on most Turks’ minds is the ongoing conflict against the PKK, not the one next door in Syria. The PKK issue receives scant attention abroad, but it continues to galvanize the Turkish public after three decades of violence. The conflict for many Turks presents an existential crisis that threatens the nation’s social and cultural fabric, whereas the Syrian issue is viewed as a passing threat, serious in scope but something to be managed like countless others in the region.

Of course the two wars are intertwined. The escalation of PKK violence in recent months has coincided with spikes in attacks from Syria. Ankara accuses the Assad regime of providing Syrian Kurds safe haven and material support in hopes that they take their fight across the border into Turkey. Damascus’s logic is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and ostensibly Assad wants to punish Turkey for assisting Syrian rebel organizations and drive a wedge between its Kurdish communities and the Free Syrian Army. There could be blowback to this strategy of course if Kurds throughout the region become more organized and raise greater demands for an independent state, which could end up carving up parts of northern Syria and Iraq as well as Iran.

In response, Turkey’s routine raids against PKK strongholds in Northern Iraq could extend into Syria on a more regular basis. These violations of sovereignty raise thorny issues for international legal scholars, but not among Turks. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan warned Syria that his government would “not stand idle” in the face of cross-border incursions, and “is capable of exercising its right to pursue Kurdish rebels inside Syria, if necessary.” That script sounds vaguely similar to what a retired Turkish general told the BBC back in 2007, regarding incursions into northern Iraq: “I believe operations will continue on this scale–pin-point operations, hot-pursuit raids and carefully controlled air strikes.” Turkey has also lashed out at foreign forces – even its nominal allies – for abetting the Kurdish insurgents. Ankara even went so far earlier this year as to accuse Israel of using its surveillance drones to assist the PKK.

The surge in PKK violence has killed some 700 people over the past 15 months, according to the International Crisis Group, including a car bomb that killed nine in Gaziantep last August blamed on Kurdish rebels. Turkey finds itself in the awkward spot of aiding rebels whose ranks include untold numbers of Syrian Kurds that could take up arms against Ankara after the Assad regime falls (Syria’s Kurds have struck deals with the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian government as a way to both hedge its bets and remain autonomous). In this way, the buffer zone Ankara is calling for along the Syrian border, not unlike the one imposed on Northern Iraq in 1991 to halt flows of Iraqi Kurdish refugees, might actually provide Kurdish militants with greater cover to carry out cross-border attacks in Turkey.

That may explain why the public mood in places like Gaziantep, which is 30 percent Kurdish, remains reflexively antiwar when it comes to Syria. Despite impressive growth in recent years, businessmen here are also worried about their bottom line, which has suffered as relations with Russia and Iran, two of Turkey’s most important energy partners that are both aligned with the Syrian regime, spiral downward. Turks also suspect the opposition in Syria is too Salafist and fear that an Islamist government unfavorable to Turkish interests will succeed Assad. Better the secular devil you know than the Islamist devil you don’t know, this theory goes. A final oft-heard view holds that Turkey, as a rising regional power striving to fill the perceived security void left by the United States as it redeploys forces out of Iraq and “pivots” toward Asia, should be deploying its “soft power” abroad and in the region, not its hard power. The phrase gets invoked so much among experts here, I half-expected to see a statue of Joseph Nye next to Ataturk. These analysts see Turkey’s role in the region as an honest broker of disputes arising out of the Arab Spring and a middleman between the Muslim world and Western powers.

But a state’s ability to project soft power is incumbent on the strength of its own values and perception abroad. On the PKK issue, soft power has taken a backseat to hard power. This heavy-handed approach is partly rooted in public opinion – after peace talks with the PKK stalled two years ago, many Turks lost hope that political dialogue could resolve the crisis and turned increasingly hawkish — but it is also partly rooted in Turkey’s Kemalist past, which has traditionally favored blunt force to quash domestic uprisings of any kind. As a retired army colonel told me, “Turkey has a long history of exaggerating internal threats.” Under Ankara’s draconian anti-terror laws, thousands of pro-Kurdish activists, lawyers, and journalists have been imprisoned by the AKP government. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Turkey jails more journalists than any other country, including even Iran and China. Over the past six months, its military has staged around 1,000 counterinsurgency sorties against PKK targets.

Standing in the gleaming conference room of one of 90 new universities Ankara has erected over the past decade, a Turkish political science professor gazed out the window eastward. A vast panorama of construction projects punctuated an otherwise barren landscape of twisted olive groves.  “If you look out that window,” he said, “the only democracies you see are Japan and India.” He was correct, but his point was to situate Turkey’s important place not just in the region but in the whole Eurasian landmass. Westerners fret that Turkey is reorienting itself eastward and away from Europe. At the same time, given the creeping authoritarianism of the current government in power, the professor claimed that Turkish exceptionalism was weakening. Moreover, Ankara’s foreign policy of “zero problems” on its borders appears to be in tatters. Its relationship with Iraq was imperiled after Ankara gave shelter to Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni vice president accused by the al-Maliki regime of being involved in death squads. Turkey’s relations with Israel, though reportedly on the mend, remain strained after the infamous 2010 Marmara flotilla raid.

After making great strides to open up its border with Syria to ease cross-border trade, Turkey now finds itself on the precipice of not one but two wars. So far its military has acted with surprising restraint in response to Syrian attacks. Yet on the PKK front, Turkey has gone on the offensive and doubled-down on the military option. The trouble is that it is next to impossible to favor a peaceful and diplomatic solution to Turkey’s interstate conflict with one hand while applying hard power to its intrastate crisis with the other. Expect Turkish soft power to suffer as a result.

The Return of Israeli Moderation?

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Not too long after the Israel-Hezbollah war, George Packer wrote an excellent profile of Israeli author David Grossman for the New Yorker. Grossman is an Israeli author who, along with several of his liberal cohort, has been engaged in a full-front assault on Israel’s hawkish foreign policy. Packer describes, in detail, how Grossman’s political opinions have evolved, like that of many Israelis, over the past few decades:

[At the time of the Yom Kippur War], his political views were conventional: Israel, surrounded by enemies, was destined to fight an eternal war, and the only imperative was survival. In 1967, the year of his bar mitzvah, Israel won the Six-Day War and occupied Gaza, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. In “The Yellow Wind,” Grossman wrote of his generation, “The surging energy of our adolescent hormones was coupled with the intoxication gripping the entire country; the conquest, the confident penetration of the enemy’s land, his complete surrender, breaking the taboo of the border, imperiously striding through the narrow streets of cities until now forbidden.” At the beginning of the occupation, Jewish families used to drive through the West Bank and Gaza on weekends, on tours organized by transportation companies like the one where his father worked; they would buy Arab kaffiyehs for next to nothing and wear them triumphantly in the streets of Hebron and Jericho. The Palestinians were crushed, and the Israelis were seduced by what Grossman calls “the temptation of strength, the temptation of arbitrariness.” At thirteen, he felt unambivalent pleasure about Israeli power. As he grew older, though, he became troubled by it; when friends or Army comrades urged him to join an outing to the occupied territories, he refused, saying, “They hate us, they don’t want us there. I cannot be like a thorn in the flesh of someone else.”

Much time have passed since this profile and since Grossman began his campaign. For years, it seemed, to those of us on the outside, that such pleas for moderation fell on deaf ears. While the settlements issue is not resolved, it appears that the Israeli “consensus” on a hardline against Iran is far from unassailable. Israel’s policy is already shifting away from military action. In a recent editorial in the New York Times, Graham Allison and Shai Feldman argue that the change of policy comes as the result of internal divisions within Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, primarily between Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Indeed, several prominent Israeli political figures, including President Shimon Peres, have spoken out against unilateral military action. Moreover, as Allison and Feldman point out, the Israeli military establishment has unified in its opposition to military strikes.

Several obstacles remain, however. Most pressing, perhaps, is the possibility of a re-emboldened Netanyahu emerging from the January elections. Possible permutations of center-left coalitions consistently poll lower than Netanyahu’s coalition. In the last elections, in 2009, Netanyahu was able to form a rightist coalition despite receiving the second-most seats in the Knesset, the Israeli legislature. The centrist Kadima party, which received the most votes in 2009, was unable to form a governing coalition. It is unclear whether they will be able to unify various other centrist parties in order to succeed at this task in January. Much hope rests with Ehud Olmert, the former embattled Kadima Prime Minister. However, as Judy Rudoren argues in a Times op-ed, he faces many complicated challenges–some political, some legal, some moral–in his attempt to become prime minister once again. The titular question then can only be answered by a cautiously optimistic “maybe.”

No matter the outcome, these developments emphasize the non-unitary nature of Israeli domestic politics and foreign policy. In many ways, this mirrors a critical analytical hurdle that the field of International Relations faced several decades ago. As a recent “state-of-the-field” review article in the Annual Review of Political Science by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith argues, IR has more or less overcome this crutch. Scholars have made countless important contributions to our understanding of international politics by exploring domestic political developments explicitly.

Perhaps nowhere is this domestic turn in IR more clear than in John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s controversial work on the US Israel lobby. Moreover, this analysis more or less reflects the public view of US foreign policy-making, whether true or not. It is not clear why this understanding has not extended to Israeli politics, which continues to be black- boxed in public discourse. Whatever the result of the next few months’ debate and politicking in Israel, the critical lesson for the rest of us should be not to essentialize Israeli foreign policy positions based upon the hard line it has taken so far.

For more of his thoughts on developments in Israel, follow William on Twitter.

‘It Is Our Soul’: The Destruction of Aleppo, Syria’s Oldest City

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Editor’s note: the following is a piece by The Smoke-Filled Room contributor Lionel Beehner that originally appeared in The Atlantic

Parts of Aleppo’s historic souk, or marketplace, have been burnt to the ground. The storied Sissi House, one of the region’s finest restaurants and famous for its tasty cherry lamb kebabs, has reportedly burnt down. Dar Zamaria, part of a wave of chic boutique hotels being carved out of Ottoman merchant houses (and which I reviewed for the New York Times in 2009), has also reportedly been destroyed. We are witnessing a sectarian civil war, and the dreadful human carnage that comes with it. We may also be witnessing the destruction of a way of life that’s evolved over centuries around one of the Arab world’s architectural treasures.

If the West is not going to intervene in Syria, it should at least do more to prevent this UNESCO-protected site — a city that lays claim to being among the world’s oldest — from becoming a 21st-century version of Dresden.

Aleppo is arguably the most enchanting city in the Middle East. Awash in mosques and minarets, the city is also stuffed with Armenian churches, Maronite cathedrals, and even a synagogue, a consequence of its unique position at the crossroads of Ottoman, French, and Jewish influences. Its maze-like souk and massive citadel on a hill are remarkable enough. But throw in hospitable people, trendy rooftop restaurants whose waiters sneak alcohol in teacups to Westerners with a wink and a nod, and the welcoming aroma of underground shops lined with tasty sweets and pistachio nuts, and Aleppo would seem to be custom-built for vacationers seeking a relaxing setting to kick back and nibble on mezze (appetizers).

I traveled to Aleppo, or Haleb as it is known in Arabic, during the holy month of Ramadan back in 2009. Turkey had just opened its borders so that its merchants could cross the nearby border visa-free. And the United States was making overtures toward the Assad regime to repair its sour relations. It was muggy when I visited. But a calm in regional tensions meant that several thousand Westerners began pouring into the city’s famed labyrinthine souk to snap up olive soaps, to peruse its gardens, and to bathe in the local hammam, or bath house. I remember the patio of the city’s famous, if slightly musty, Baron Hotel, where Agatha Christie once resided, was crammed with loud Europeans smoking late into the night. Across town in Al-Aziziah, Syrian students huddled in front of large screens to watch bad soap operas, smoke water pipes, and sing karaoke.

Like Prague in the early 1990s, Aleppo felt like it was on the verge of discovery, an idyllic (and safe) place for Westerners to sample the best of Arab culture and cuisine. Expatriates would revel in Al Jdeida, an Armenian district of quiet squares and quaint restaurants. This part of the Old City holds a kind of mythical draw for outsiders. Its tangle of narrow cobblestone streets and tucked-away courtyards full of jasmine and citrus trees are a pleasure to peruse; the inlaid wooden doors of its storefronts as ornately carved as the back of a backgammon board. But you can also find austere modernist high rises and wide Soviet-style boulevards (a towering Sheraton hotel in the middle of town looks like it was lifted from Moscow). Perhaps this is what drew a wayward Muhammad Atta, the 9/11 hijacker, to write his thesis on preserving Aleppo’s Old City. When I was there, I met with a team of prim German urban planners hired by the city to make Aleppo’s districts more livable, less congested, and less ugly.

Aleppo’s cultural treasures, including its Grand Mosque and centuries-old souk, are in danger of being permanently damaged by war. The city of Hama just to the south, famous for its wooden waterwheels and aqueducts, was flattened when government forces massacred tens of thousands in 1982. Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, then purposefully left open the main highway that ran through Hama so that everyday Syrians could see the devastation wrought on the city and be cowed into docility. The current government has done much the same, stepping up its use of indiscriminate attacks against civilian targets in urban areas. Authorities appear prepared to turn Syria’s commercial hub into rubble to root out rebels hiding in its souk.

The loss of Aleppo’s historic edifices fills residents with as much grief as any human casualty. “It is our soul,” a local doctor told The New York Times.

Aleppo is surrounded by sweeping plains dotted with olive groves and “dead cities,” abandoned ruins from the Byzantine age. They serve as vivid reminders of what happens to once-prosperous trading centers left abandoned. The international community owes it to Syrians to defend UNESCO-protected sites like this one. Syria does not need any more dead cities.

An Organizational Explanation for Anti-American Protests

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Apparently, colleagues of mine at MIT reacted to the most recent anti-American protests in the Middle East as any person would: by opening up statistical software packages. While my first instinct was to look at other’s work, theirs was to see whether existing data held predictive power to identify where protests erupted to date. Nick Miller and Chad Hazlett, writing on the Foreign Policy website, find “countries’ wealth, growth rate, unemployment, age structure, state capacity, civil liberties, democracy level, and the percentage of the population that is Muslim were all utterly unhelpful in predicting where protests would occur.” Instead, they argue for an organizational explanation: “Accounting for all the variables listed above, we find that protests occur most frequently in countries that had any reported demonstrations during the Arab Spring movement (a measure of recent mobilization), have an Islamist political party, and/or have organized radical militant organizations.” They admit that none of these variables are causally identified; in other words, it is possible or even likely that other unobserved variables lead to the emergence of both Islamist political parties and anti-American protests. But I still think it’s an interesting finding that these measures of organizational presence dramatically outweigh the explanatory value embedded in huge social factors like wealth, youth population, and regime type.