Do MOAR in Syria

There are plenty of smart, very frustrated folks in the US State Department who apparently want President Obama to do more in Syria: to engage in airstrikes against Assad's forces and not just ISIS's.  I get that, and I get that Assad is the key problem in all of this--that he has killed far more people than ISIS AND his brutality is ISIS"s best recruiting tool.

BUT

Since Russia is providing air support for Assad, attacking Assad might just lead to more confrontations in the skies between US and Russian aircraft. Indeed, these folks are aware of this:

The memo acknowledged that military action would have risks, not the least further tensions with Russia, which has intervened in the war on Mr. Assad’s behalf and helped negotiate a cease-fire. Those tensions increased on Thursday when, according to a senior Pentagon official, Russia conducted airstrikes in southern Syria against American-backed forces fighting the Islamic State.

The State Department officials insisted in their memo that they were not “advocating for a slippery slope that ends in a military confrontation with Russia,” but rather a credible threat of military action to keep Mr. Assad in line.

Um, some magical thinking here--we don't want more tensions with Russia, we just want to be striking those that Russia is supporting.  Is Syria worth the risks of US-Russian conflict?  Sorry, but no. 

What we have learned from the past 15 years of intervention is that coherent local allies with compatible interests are key ingredient in reaching some level of success.  Any of those here?  No.  Maybe earlier?  Not so sure.

All I know is that making threats without really being able to back them up is a mistake Obama has already made in Syria (chemical weapons anyone?), so he is not going to repeat that.  If Hillary Clinton wants to do this next year, then she can do so.  But this current President has been burned by those who have advocated for the use of coercive diplomacy--threats via air strikes--in Syria and also has found past interventions to be far more problematic than advocates of said interventions have recommended.

Oh, a side note: I have seen safe havens bandied about again.  Unless one wants to create killing fields a la Srebrenica, safe havens require someone, which would end up being the US, to go to war--to push back forces and keep them back to create a relatively safe space in Syria.  So, if you want a safe haven, just go ahead and advocate war.  Otherwise, you safe haven fans are trying to fool everyone else in addition to yourselves.

And, yes, I used to be an advocate of intervention (in some cases, not all), but I have a learning curve.

Evergreen Post: Who Is the Proxy We Can Count On?

Yesterday, I had the chance to speak to a group of Global Affairs Canada (Canada's State Dept that changes its name every few years) who were taking a short course on security issues.  My job was to discuss the various flavors of multilateralism that Canada can choose from--NATO, coalitions of the willing, UN--when intervening around the world.  Of course, I talked the most about NATO since that is the one that I know the most.

Anyhow, in the course of conversation, one of "favorite" topics came up: in reaction to a question about Responsibility to Protect (a UN 'norm' that Canada promoted), I suggested that we have two choices when an R2P situation arises: regime change or come up with some kind of deal that leads to power-sharing or its alternatives.  And the regime change option is mostly dead these days because we have learned that we are good at breaking regimes but not replacing them.

I have been calling for humility lately precisely because the lessons of Afghanistan and Libya include: the local leaders appointed or sponsored or supported by the outsiders have their own agendas.  Whenever I hear folks criticize Obama and others over Syria, I ask: who should we have supported and how? What are the alternatives to ISIS or Assad?  The Kurds?  That gets complicated fast and only resolves who rules in relatively small spots, not in the entire countries of Syria or Iraq. 

The good news is that folks are more aware of this problem.  Hence an article on the next steps in Libya with the basic question being asked: who do we send the arms to?  Good start, but even if we find suitable proxies, how do know or ensure that they use the weapons in ways that we intend?

As always, we have lousy choices.  As long as we know they are lousy, we can go in with eyes wide open and try to figure out who we can support, what kind of support would be least problematic if it gets into the wrong hands (hence no ground to air missiles), and perhaps what measures to take to incentivize our "friends" to do what we would like and not do what we would dislike.

Is Impossible Too Strong?

I used the word "impossible" in a short twitter conversation to discuss Syria.  Was/is intervention in Syria impossible?  Well, it is a pretty strong word, and depends on the goal, of course.  Self-sustaining Syrian government?  Um, impossible?  Saving lots of lives?  Hmmmm.

When I say impossible or nearly so, it is because it would require some random actor* to do the following:

• Convince Russia and Iran to stop supporting Assad.  All we know about the international politics of intervention is that when outsiders pour in support on opposing sides, the conflict endures, which implies more casualties.  So, we need to get the folks who are supporting Assad to switch sides.  To be clear Assad is killing more Syrians than ISIS, so if you want to save lives ....   
• Figure out which local ally is going to have heft domestically and have interests that line up with the outside supporters.  Given what we know what happens when there are more veto players, um, not good. 
• Find some kind of interest that will justify for the audiences at home (that is, within random actor x) the tax dollars, the loss of life, etc. that the intervention will cost.  
• Staying power: any intervention in Syria would require not just a quick invasion, but an occupation/peacekeeping effort that would take at least twenty years (see Afghanistan).

By themselves, meeting any of these conditions is really, really hard.  Let's say that each has a 10% chance of happening, which might seem too unlikely or too likely, but take it as a guess.  Then admit that these are jointly necessary.  That success will not happen unless each and everyone of these conditions are met.  They may not be sufficient, but I think they are all necessary.  So, 10% * 10% *10%  *10% = .01%.  Good news, intervention to stop the bloodshed is not impossible.  Just very, very unlikely. 

*  And don't kid yourselves: that random actor is the US.  Nobody else has the capabilities to do the job.  It could be the US+ as in NATO or as in US and coalition of the willing, but nothing meaningful can happen without the US. 

Elusive Pursuits Book Launch

A week from today, on October 29th at noon, we are holding a book launch of the next edition of Canada Among Nations, Elusive Pursuits: Lessons from Canada's Interventions Abroad.  The event will be in room 270, 2nd floor, Residence Commons, at Carleton University.

What is the book about?  Every year, NPSIA assesses Canada's place in the world via a Canada Among Nations volume.  For the past few years, it has been in partnership with CIGI.  The theme of this issue is on learning the lessons from past interventions.  Why?  Because we have been profoundly frustrated by the mixed results and by the government's refusal to learn lessons.

Afghanistan was supposed to be different, as the government did put together a serious lessons learning exercise.  At the end, it was buried--not only have I not been able to access it via Access to Information (my appeal is now more than two years old), but it was also not disseminated to the people making and implementing Canadian foreign and defence policy.

Thus, we decided to take on the task of examining past efforts by Canada to make a difference in the face of starvation, humanitarian disasters, ethnic violence, and terrorism.  With the election of Justin Trudeau and a Liberal majority, participation in peacekeeping is likely to come back into vogue.  To be clear, the Canadian Forces never stopped deploying, but rather the focus went from UN missions to NATO efforts.  Canada has always not just been among nations, as the series title suggests, but in them, seeking to improve the lives of those facing violence, degradation and poverty.

The volume addresses the legacies of the Somalia mission, legal challenges of the Libya mission, Canada's efforts to shape events in the Arab world, the domestic politics of the Afghanistan mission and operations down range, police training in Haiti, and intervention in the form of foreign aid.  Thematic chapters focus on gender in the Canadian Armed Forces, Responsibility to Protect in practice, Harper's interventions, and the challenges of intervening in the future with an older society facing the problems of a younger world.

Our book lacks a conclusion because we want people to draw their own conclusions.  What did I conclude from this effort?  That humility needs to be a key theme in Canadian foreign/defence policy:

• Canada cannot and will not operate by itself anywhere, and can only send a fragment of what is needed to complete any operation.  But Canada almost always shows up when allies call up on it.
• Good intentions need to be carefully examined for their practical impact.  Feeding people is a great aim, but it could alter existing power relations as food aid becomes a commodity in the war economy.
• Agencies can vary widely even when they aspire towards the same goal.  Improving the position of women in one's agency meant very different processes, goals and doctrines in foreign affairs and in the Canadian Armed Forces.
• Staying out of a conflict has consequences, too.
• Canada is just about as impatient as any other democracy.  Police training, for instance, does not happen overnight.
• How we frame our policies can shape how effective they are.  
• Being responsible is really hard and very complicated.

Much of this can be distilled into one basic lesson: we need to be humble.  Canada can make a difference in many difficult places in the world, but intervention is hard, it is complicated, and it requires more patience than we usually have.  Choosing not to intervene also has consequences.


What did I learn in the course of shepherding this volume along with Fen Hampson?

• Canadian scholarship on international affairs has a great future, as about half of the contributors represent the next generation, and they do awesome work.
• Producing a volume with half of the chapters written by women is actually quite easy as there are many smart women doing terrific work on Canadian foreign and defence policy.  Indeed, it would have required real effort to come up with an all male set of contributors.
• Canada is a far more interesting and dynamic actor in international affairs than I had thought when I first moved here.  It has its metaphorical hands in heaps of metaphorical pies around the world.

Mission Creep! Booooo!!!!

For Halloween this year, I have dressed as Mission Creep:

Tis a villain that threatens any potential military effort!!

Actually, I think that "mission creep" has been a scare word used by those opposed to the mission in Iraq.  There are good reasons to oppose that mission, but "mission creep" is not one of them.  Canada did not creep into Kandahar, but made a very careful decision.  So, going to Kabul in 2003 or Kandahar in 2002 did not lead to an inevitable and deceptive slide into Kandahar in 2005-2006.  So, I pushed back when asked about Mission Creep during my TV appearances the last couple of months.

And here is the real message of my costume: I am not scary even dressed as Mission Creep--except to easily intimidated undergrads.  So, we should be concerned about the use of force, but only fear Mission Creep when he knocks on your door, demanding candy.

How About Some Humility?

In today's CIC post, I argue that we have tried pretty much everything in the Mideast from nothing (Syria) to bombing (Libya) to massive intervention (Afghanistan, Iraq), and have not been very successful.  Perhaps we have learned some humility about what outsiders can do?  Well, many of us, not John McCain.

One can argue that each effort was imperfectly deployed, raising all kinds of counterfactuals that suggest we could have done better: we could have surged in Afghanistan in 2002 and not 2010; we could have had a plan for Iraq after the regime fell in 2003; we could have done more in Libya besides drop bombs; we could do more in Syria right now, and so on.

Indeed, if, if, if.  Reminds of the partition debate, which would be swell if done correctly.  In that case, the imperfections were largely baked in--that it was inherent in the enterprise to do it badly.  Maybe not so much for Mideast interventions these days, but I cannot gain much confidence that we, the outsiders, have gotten any better or could get any better in the political/governance side of things.  That is:

• picking the right guy or being brave enough not to pick the right guy but let the domestic processes shake out without our thumb heavily on the scale (although that might not be much better); 
• figuring out how to dump some money into a country for development without distorting everything and accelerating corruption;
• having the various outsiders work by the same or similar rules (we suggest this is unlikely);
• making sure the various government agencies within each country play well together (not likely, given what I learned for the next book).
• and on and on.

I am not saying that we (US/Canada, NATO, whomever) should never intervene, but that force has limited utility.  It is good for breaking stuff, not putting governments together.  This seems basic but John McCain and some other folks keep forgetting.

Anyhow, with great power comes great responsibility but not necessarily great effectiveness/efficacy.  And that is something we should keep in mind.

Why Political Scientists Hate "Political Will"

I can guarantee you that if you asked most political scientists, especially IR types, to write lists of the top ten phrases they cannot stand, "political will" would appear on a vast majority of them.

X will not happen because there is no political will.  Y happened because there was political will.  How do you know political will exists?  Because that policy you wanted happened.  Circularity can be fun, but not particularly enlightening.

The concept (if we can dare call it a concept) is so utterly vague that we can mean anything by it, so let's see if we can make a list of some possibilities.  The absence of Political Will means:

• politicians lack incentives
• politicians lack resolve
• politicians lack effective/efficient/efficacious policy options
• countries cannot agree to a course of action
• countries cannot agree who will take care of the course of action 

I am sure there are others (please add to this list via comments).  For political scientists, the job starts by figuring out why there is a failure to cooperate (a.k.a. absence of political will).   Some will focus on the incentives politicians face--the timing of elections; public support or opposition to acting; the power, strategies and efforts by lobbyists (of all kinds including businesses, diasporas, etc); the stances of parties.  Some will focus on resolve and whether reputation, whether it really matters or not, might cause politicians to stick to a line in the sand.  Others will examine the costs and benefits of various policy alternatives and figure out whether any might work, might appeal to particular groups at home (even if the policy does not work), and so on.

If countries need to cooperate, and in most cases, cooperation is a necessary ingredient for success, then we have heaps of theories that attempt to explain under what condition cooperation happens.  Drezner's Zombie book shows how many different theories produce different expectations when cooperation is needed.

And it is one thing to agree that something should be done.  It is another to get folks to kick in.  As we cite in our book, "force generation is begging."  Even NATO has to go around with a cup in its virtual hand asking for units to be sent (and paid for) by each member.

The point is that when someone says something didn't happen because of an absence of political will, they are doing one of two things--expecting politicians to be magicians or avoiding taking a serious stance on the issue.  Indeed, there may be a third thing we need to keep in mind--Newton.  Inertia must be overcome, and wishing is not good enough.  So, what are the incentives, the interests, the dynamics that compel politicians to make hard decisions, to risk their electoral futures, to spend scarce resources and what are the factors that cause other actors to concur?

The case du jour is Syria.*  Yes, the humanitarian catastrophe that is the Syrian civil war is appalling.  Countries are not acting, making it seem like Rwanda all over again.  But we cannot simply complain about a lack of political will.  Because that explains nothing.  It is less a starting point for analysis and more of a distraction.

* I wrote this before seeing that Stephen Hawking has written an op-ed on Syria.  I do not want to suggest that he is committing the sin that I have identified here (although I am not saying he does not commit that sin).

Alas, I am sure this call to drop the use of this phrase will fail ... because there is not enough political will to do so.

Breaking vs. Unbreaking

How best to illustrate the problem of post-conflict reconstruction?

Thanks to twitter conversation, I came up with this at CIC.

And the soundtrack inevitably would be this.

Five Rules of Dodgeball and Regime Change

To continue this morning's musings about Libya and such, I realized that the rules of dodgeball can make sense of US strategies in the aftermath of regime change:

• Dodge: Once you break the opposition, try to get an international organization to do the very minimum (Afghanistan with non-NATO ISAF at first)
• Dip: Once you break a country, hand over the reins to emigres and run out of the country (Iraq, plan A)
• Duck: Once your effort to dip has failed, create a half-assed agency that is only slightly connected to the inter-agency back home, let it make bad decisions but then avoid responsibility (Iraq, Bremer and his Can't Produce Anything authority).
• Dive: Break a government without any commitment of troops, and then wait for others to manage the place (Libya)
• Dodge: Once an ally breaks the opposition, try to get regional/international organizations to run the place (Mali).

Did I miss any rules?

The Taco Theory of International Intervention

Will McCants, who defeated me in our round of twitterfightclub months ago, reminded me today that I owed him an explanation:

@will_mccants "Intervention is like a taco ...."
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) June 8, 2012

So, how is intervention like a taco?  If I remember what I was thinking a month ago, I think the answer is: messy.  But that is too easy.  Let's think of the ingredients that go into a taco and the obvious or less than obvious parallels in an intervention:

1. Let's start with the main filling: it can be beef (ground or not), pork (carnitas are a personal favorite), chicken, fish (very popular in some areas but never to me), shrimp, turkey, fake-meat, whatever.  In an intervention, the key question is who joins?  Is it mostly a US effort, which makes for a more robust, filling taco but one that could cause bloating (too much intervention can be a problem)?  Is it a bunch of European countries?  This would make for a blander taco (chicken--skipping the obvious joke and focusing more on the meh quality) that would perhaps be less likely to upset a delicate digestive system.  It could be a mixture of lesser militaries from countries that prefer to export their armies rather than have them hang out at home, which would be the tofu filling.  Not quite the real thing, not likely to upset a stomach, but not really what people have in mind when they think intervention.
2. The next decision is about what kind of beans to include: black or refried.  Often it is the case that an intervention builds on a previous one.  IFOR supplanted UNPROFOR, for instance.  That would be a case of refried beans.  The choice here is mostly determined by path dependence--what have you got at the point you are making the taco/intervention?  Building on a previous one?  That is often the case.
3. What vegetables to include? For a good taco, you need a good balance of meat and veggies.  For a good intervention, you need a good balance of military and civilian efforts.  The only problem with this analogy is that a good intervention might have a civilian dominate the effort, such as the High Rep in Bosnia, but, in personal opinion, the veggies should never dominate the meat in a taco.  Oh well, there are limits to any analogy.  A good mix of lettuce, onions and peppers works for me.  The UN would be the lettuce here, providing some structure and glue.  The EU would be the peppers (not hot peppers, just red/yellow/green ones) to provide critical fiber and flavor (reconstruction).  The non-government organizations would be the onions, as they are all over the place--often too much in one spot, too little in others, not really coordinated with anything.
4. Next: you have the guac and sour cream.  In moderation, these can provide some flavor and bind the ingredients together.  Too much, and not only do they overwhelm the rest of the ingredients, but they cause the taco to fall apart quickly and most messily.  So, what is the appropriate analogy here?  Hmm, how about the media?  You need to have them involved to spotlight the situation, to drive up awareness and foster oversight and accountability.  But too much or too misdirected can mean that secrets that need to be secret get blown, like negotiations or attack plans.  
5. Penultimately, you have the salsa.  It can be mild, medium, hot or muy caliente.  These refer, obviously, to the rules of engagement and the resolve behind them.  An intervention with heaps of caveats and limited rules means that it will not make much of an impact.  A taco with mild salsa is not likely to create much of a reaction.  
6. What wraps all this up?*  A soft tortilla or a hard shell?  The reality is that either will break upon eating.   This is really a trick question: the hard shell is akin to a UN effort.  If eaten forcefully, the shell will crumble quickly, making an utter mess.  However, if eating slowly, carefully, it can last a while.  On the other hand, NATO interventions are soft tortillas: surprisingly strong in containing a mixture of ingredients, but must be consumed quickly before the liquid-y materials soak through.  Kosovo and Libya were the NATO tacos par excellence: despite all of the ingredients almost bursting out, the tacos could be consumed without making too much of a mess.  Afghanistan, on the other hand, was simply too long, so that the various pieces of the NATO effort began to spill out.  The Dutch ingredients, followed by the Canadian, and then French.  Soon, the consumer just had bits and pieces of American and British meat dangling from the soaked tortilla.

*Yes, at any burrito shop, the tortilla is the first choice but it made sense to conclude with it here.

You can tell that I am somewhat biased in what I like in my taco and what I like in an intervention.  I prefer a mixture of meats for more flavor and a mixture of countries for a portfolio of capabilities and backgrounds.  I prefer black beans--that an intervention is the first one rather than refried--a repeated effort with heaps of failed international efforts to proceed the latest taco/round.  I prefer a few strong vegetables rather than too many kinds and fewer but stronger civilian efforts so that they can be coordianted.  I prefer a modicum of guac and sour cream to hold things together.  The media is a vital part, but should not be the show.  Restraint is required so that people are not endangered, that risks can be taken--such as bargaining.  I prefer hot salsa rather than muy caliente--too much discretion to the troops on the ground can be a dangerous thing.  Caveats are a blunt way to influence behavior on the ground.  Again, moderation is the key.  Finally, I prefer soft shells to hard--they are less likely to break.

So, there you have it, the Taco Theory of Intervention.

Discrimination in IR? No? Yes!

Check out my first piece at Political Violence @ a Glance.  It attempts to deploy a bunch of scholarship  about intervention in a straightforward way.  Let me know if it worked (besides the fact that I need to edit more).

Political Will? Will Not!

One of the most annoying and empty phrases in the IR biz, especially when it comes to intervention, is "political will."  X didn't happen because there was no political will.  What does that mean?  Well, I guess it means that x didn't happen because people/countries/whovians didn't want something to happen or did not want it enough to make it happen, right?  Why no intervention in Syria yet?  No political will. 

But the problem with this is that it really does not answer any question at all.  If the problem is that countries didn't want to do it, this raises two questions: why not? and if you want something, does it always happen?

Ok, first: if countries are not sufficiently motivated to overcome the various obstacles to cooperate to do something of significance (which is probably costly and/or risky), then saying so really sheds no light.  To shed some light, one ought to focus on the motivations and their absence/competing interests AND the obstacles, as motivations, competing interests, AND the possible costs all may vary systematically (or not).  Those are the things we need to understand: why intervention?  Because of oil, because of ethnic affinity (see my first book), because of fears of immigration (see my second book), because of security concerns, because of the interconnections between commitment in place A and commitment in more important place B (that last one not only covers Vietnam/West Europe but also Bosnia/Europe.  If intervention does not occur, the answer is not the lack of political will, but perhaps the economic costs, the likely response of public opinion, the fear of using up scarce resources, the difficult of the task, because of the consequences of uneven burden-sharing (see my next book when it exists)and so on. 

Second, I invoke the Rolling Stones rule of International Cooperation: You Can't Always Get What You Want.  There have been many efforts made in human history to cooperate, but these efforts sometimes fail because the tasks are really hard or because the solution was not the right one.  Piracy still exists, right?  Somalia is still a failed state.  Afghanistan is still a mess.  The idea that if you work really hard, you get what you want reminds me of the students who insist that they worked really hard, but didn't get an A.  Well, sometimes trying really hard is simply not enough.  Sometimes you need the right idea with perfect oversight over well-designed execution.  How is that Egyptian democracy working out?  Containment of the Soviet Union required more than just political will--it required creativity, it required insight, it required patience, it required tolerance of failure and of overreaction, and so on. 

Not only you can't always get what you want, you don't always get what you need.  But sometimes, if you try real hard (and get lucky), you get what you need.  To conclude, political will is not the end of an answer or explanation--it is, at best, a start, but mostly it is the step two in the underwear gnomes' plan--a shoulder shrug.