Beirut — Syrian regime forces are steadily overwhelming rebel-held strongpoints in besieged eastern Aleppo in fierce fighting backed by a pulverising Russian air campaign that is shaping up to be Syrian President Bashar Assad’s most important victory of the war.

The fall of the rebels’ last major urban stronghold will not mean the end of the war, however.

“What’s happening in Aleppo will only fuel chaos and terrorism,” France’s UN Ambassador François Delattre warned during an emergency Security Council session on November 30.

The objective of the Syrian regime and its main backers — Russia and Iran — appears to be to reconquer the sector of the northern city held by rebels since mid-2012 before Donald Trump is sworn in as president of the United States on January 20.

With all of Aleppo in regime hands, Assad and his two key allies should be able to absorb any change in US policy on Syria and hold the high cards in any US-backed peace initiative aimed at halting the conflict.

The rebel forces in Aleppo, about 8,000 strong, are heavily outnumbered and outgunned, cut off from any relief after being hammered for months by the relentless Russian-led aerial blitz and shelling by regime artillery.

The rebels, who have been losing ground since Russia intervened in September 2015 to save Assad from what looked like certain defeat, were reported to have recently lost 40% of the territory they held as the regime tightened the noose around the opposition bastion.

Eastern Aleppo is becoming “one giant graveyard”, UN humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien warned on November 30th as regime forces spearheaded by Hezbollah’s elite Radwan regiment advanced in fierce street fighting.

With much of eastern Aleppo in ruins and its streets strewn with bodies from day-and-night bombardment, about 50,000 of the estimated 250,000 shell-shocked inhabitants who have survived months of the regime’s starvation tactics have been seeking to flee the city.

The exodus is likely to swell as regime forces close in for the kill, with the United Nations and the United States unable to prevent the final bloodbath.

The seemingly inevitable rebel collapse in a historic city that was once the heart of Syria’s economy will greatly bolster Assad’s position and his allies in any negotiations to end the war. Some 400,000 people have died and half of Syria’s pre-war population of 22 million has been driven from their homes in nearly six years of conflict.

UN-mandated and US-backed efforts have failed. Russia, its power in the Middle East restored by the 2015 intervention to save Assad, now seems to be in the driver’s seat and able to negotiate from a position of strength.

In what appears to be a fresh diplomatic effort, opposition sources reported that at least four rebel groups linked to the Syrian National Coalition are having secret negotiations in Ankara with the Russians, brokered by Turkey, with the immediate purpose of ending the bloodletting in eastern Aleppo.

These talks, the first to involve a large number of key opposition groups, have reportedly made little progress.

The gathering underlines Russia’s growing importance in the Middle East and possibly signals a new phase in the quest for a political settlement to end the war with Russian power in the ascendant while US influence in the Middle East wanes.

Moscow is reported to have been seeking to arrange a meeting in Damascus of key rebel leaders, possibly as early as January, to discuss having a national dialogue that would later be attended by Assad’s government.

The objective, according to political sources, is to achieve a political agreement that would lead to parliamentary and presidential elections in which Assad would run for a fourth term while overseeing the transition of what has been essentially a one-party state to a power-sharing arrangement with Assad remaining as president.

Amid Moscow’s efforts to secure a ceasefire, however, Russian warplanes continued their blistering day-and-night bombardment of eastern Aleppo, where whole neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble.

A political settlement to the conflict remains a distant prospect even though the impetus for getting rid of Assad by Western and Arab powers such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey has grown as the war drags on with no end in sight.

The seemingly inevitable regime victory in Aleppo could unleash new dangers, not least of which would be providing motivation to the jihadist forces that have become the core of the resistance to the minority Alawite Assad regime’s sectarian policies which have tormented Syria’s Sunni majority for decades.

Nor is there any sign of a lessening of largely covert US support for rebel forces outside Aleppo where the Islamic State (ISIS) is the prime target, particularly in northern Syria where anti-regime Kurdish groups are strong.

According to British analyst Charles Lister, who has interacted with most rebel factions, they have about 150,000 fighters in the field, with only 5% of that total in Aleppo.

Rebel forces, including ISIS, still hold Idlib province in the north along with much of neighbouring Aleppo province. It is likely to be the regime’s next objective. The rebels also hold sizeable territory in southern Syria.

Ed Blanche has covered Middle East affairs since 1967. He is the Arab Weekly analyses section editor.

Copyright ©2016 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 December 2016
Word Count: 847
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BOSTON — The Middle East-related policy world of former and hopeful officials, think tanks, analysts, scholars, and researchers in the United States that I have followed at close range in the past three months is more turbulent than ever, given the Donald Trump presidential victory and the considerable uncertainty it portends for the region. This universe is now running in overdrive, with the usual string of study group reports, policy recommendations, seminars, and lectures anticipating and suggesting what the United States might do in the Middle East, amidst irritating unpredictability of Trump’s priorities and policies.

Within this swirling arena of imprecision and speculation, one issue seems to have captured the attention of assorted credible experts and analysts: whether President Barack Obama should use his last seven weeks in office to lay down a more emphatic U.S. position on the status of the occupied Palestinian lands and the ultimate shape of a permanent Israeli-Palestinian agreement. Former President Jimmy Carter and the respected International Crisis Group, among others, have called for moves such as Obama formally recognizing the State of Palestine, issuing a set of parameters the United States supports for a permanent peace agreement, or supporting a UN Security Council resolution that would affirm such parameters that all council members agree upon.

It is fascinating, first of all, that men and women of wise and serious ways would pick out the Palestine issue and the unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict as a specific foreign policy move that Obama could make in his last weeks in office. This runs against the broad trend in policy circles in the United States that discounts the Palestine issue as a priority, because the Middle East is consumed with more urgent dangers and problems. My sense is that this partly reflects exasperation among officials and other experts whose attempts to broker Arab-Israeli peace have failed miserably and consistently, and partly the continuing ability of Israel’s Likud-led government to influence thinking about Israel-Palestine among many American officials in Washington.

Palestine is a low priority issue in the Arab world, according to many mainstream U.S. and Israeli policy circles that feel the new administration should not waste time entering into new diplomatic mediation. This is desirable in the eyes of the Israeli government that wants to continue its colonization of Palestinian lands without the irksome interference of foreign mediators seeking to reverse that process. It is also convenient for the U.S. policy elite that has run out of ideas, after trying many peace-making ideas that all failed, decade after decade.

So it is noteworthy that respectable and serious quarters in the United States and Europe would continue to grapple with the idea that Obama should make a forceful and substantive diplomatic gesture on the Israel-Palestine issue before he leaves office. The arguments made in their favor of such a move are logical and realistic, including that they generate a clear global consensus on the core elements of a fair and achievable resolution of this long-running conflict, and that Trump would be able to engage on this issue if he desired with the benefits of an American position that is widely supported, without having to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel.

Such suggested moves also assume that the U.S. position would forcefully affirm the security and legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-June 1967 borders, with agreed mutual adjustments, while demanding the end of Israel’s colonization, siege, annexation, collective punishment, extra-judicial assassinations, and other illegal policies. This position would be supported by virtually the entire world; in fact, it is now already supported by virtually the entire world, including the American government.

So here is the dilemma that policy experts and advocates still dance around without coming to a credible conclusion: Reaffirming existing positions on the inviolability of Israel’s security while condemning its colonial occupation policies, and giving this position a slightly more robust stamp of approval by the United States and other governments through the UN Security Council, achieves nothing in the realm of practical politics or in changing conditions on the ground. It is a feel-good, zero-impact approach.

If the United States or other countries, unilaterally or via the UN, wish to make a gesture that affirms equal rights among Israelis and Palestinians, they need to seriously explore a more effective approach. They need to find ways to link their welcomed rhetorical statements with practical political, diplomatic, and economic actions that would prod Israelis, Palestinians, and other interested Arabs to actually retreat from the current cycle of confrontation, violence, and mutual degradation and death. Israel in particular, being the stronger occupying and colonizing power, must pay the price for its harsh policies that the world objects to. Statements that oppose colonization need triggered penalties that deter and end colonization.

Statements, parameters, and international recognitions on paper are always welcomed, but they have had zero impact in the past century of this conflict. Any moves in this direction should ponder this reality and change it, rather than perpetuate it.

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 December 2016
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When François Fillon won the first round of the presidential primary of the right on November 20, 2016 with 44% of the vote, the French newspaper Libération headlined the story “The French Miracle.” The miracle was that all the polls up to the last minute had predicted he would come in third in a field of seven with little more than 10% of the vote.

This has been a bad year for pollsters, but a gap of this kind outdoes by far the far smaller predictive error in the U.S. elections. How did this happen and what does it portend for the general election to come?

The formal structure of elections in France is somewhat unusual. Unless a candidate wins over 50% of the vote on the first round (normally rather difficult to achieve), there is a second round a week later in which only those with the two highest number of votes on the first round are on the ballot. This works well if there are two main parties. In that case, the first round displays the range of views and the second round permits the smaller parties to rally round their favorite, which is supposed to be a choice between center-right and center-left.

The system breaks down when there are three parties contending, each of significant strength. This is currently the situation in France. At a national level, the three parties are currently the Socialists (center-left), the Republicans (center-right) and the National Front (far right).

The situation is even more complex because within the Republican Party, there were three main candidates: Nicolas Sarkozy, Alain Juppé, and François Fillon. Expectations had been that Sarkozy and Juppé would share the second round. This is what did not happen.

Sarkozy is a former president of France and also president of the Republican Party. Juppé and Fillon were both Prime Ministers, Juppé under Jacques Chirac and Fillon under Sarkozy. Sarkozy stood for a program that would appeal to voters attracted by the National Front and therefore would win on the second round of the national elections. Juppé stood for a program that would appeal to undecided centrist voters and even Socialist voters (both in the primary and in the general election). Almost no one paid any attention to Fillon’s program. The predictions were that Juppé would be a stronger candidate in the general elections and would therefore probably be the next president of France.

How wrong everyone was. Not only did Fillon come in first, but Juppé was next and Sarkozy only third, therefore being eliminated from the second round. Sarkozy promptly endorsed Fillon for the second round, detesting Juppé and merely scorning Fillon. The second round gave even more decisive results. Fillon got two-thirds of the vote cast.

Meanwhile, in the forthcoming primary of the left, the divisions are massive. It is probable that President François Hollande, whose figures of support are miserable and who has said he will announce whether he is standing for re-election sometime soon, will probably withdraw from the race. Otherwise, he risks the humiliation of not even winning the primary of the left. But since there is no one who stands out clearly on the left and probably no one who can rally the troops after a second round, it is likely that the left will not even have a candidate in the second round of the national elections.

If then the second round of the national elections has Fillon standing against Marine LePen of the National Front, it becomes urgent to see on what program Fillon is standing. Before the first primary, Fillon had published his three priorities, along with 15 specific measures to implement these priorities. The three were “(1) liberate the economy, (2) restore the authority of the state, to protect French persons, and (3) affirm our values.”

Translating slogans into clearer language, Fillon proposed combining a Thatcherite economic program to appeal to business-first voters, an anti-immigrant program to appeal to middle-class voters fearful of personal economic decline, and a socially-traditionalist program to appeal to right-wing Catholic voters. He had one other element in his support. Juppé had received the support of a major centrist figure, François Bayrou. But Bayrou had endorsed Hollande in the previous presidential election, and was considered a traitor by many on the right, who attributed Hollande’s defeat of Sarkozy in 2012 to Bayrou’s misdeeds.

If his combination of themes seems to you similar to those of Donald Trump and of the Brexit voters in Great Britain, you are not mistaken. The major difference lies in the two-round system in France. The question now becomes how effective LePen can be in a struggle with Fillon. The French mainstream center-left newspaper, Le Monde, warns of a weakness in the Fillon position. His support in the primary lacked what they call “the popular vote.” His support came largely from urban professionals and entrepreneurs plus retired persons. Popular classes by and large abstained from voting. Can Fillon keep these voters from finding a more adequate president in LePen?

LePen has already denounced Fillon as a spokesperson of class division, promoting the “worst such program that has ever existed.” Florian Philippot, vice-president of the National Front, thundered: “Savage globalization has its candidate; his name is François Fillon.”

Will the Fillon miracle fizzle in the general elections? Or can he find a way to get popular support, either by voting for him or at least by abstaining from voting? Whatever the outcome, France is clearly joining the rightward trend of the United States and the rest of the Global North. All eyes will now be on Germany, to see if it will resist this trend.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2016 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 December 2016
Word Count: 941
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — The sad spectacle of the truncated “summit” of Arab leaders in the Mauritanian capital Monday was even more embarrassing than usual for this recurring event. It highlights again the often-frivolous behavior of Arab leaderships, and the massive challenges they are failing to meet. The most troubling aspect of the event was its affirming again the capacity of Arab leaderships to ignore the actual, home-grown, causes of their countries’ problems, and instead to repeat clichés about fighting terrorism and seeking peace — two areas in which the Arab world has failed to make any headway.

The dismal state of collective and individual Arab leadership is far more troubling today than it has been in recent decades, due to the deteriorating conditions across our region. Arab leaders who care to do so have many serious options to address the real problems facing their societies — at least those Arab countries that are not at war at home and with neighbors, under international sanctions, actively struggling to avoid total disintegration, or becoming the world’s leading sources of refugees and terrorists.

The summit was destined for ignominy and irrelevance from the start when during the opening session Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail invoked his President Abdelfattah Sisi’s call for “an Arab strategy of struggle against terrorism.”

Such calls totally lack credibility, because it should have become obvious by now, including to incumbent Arab officials, that during the past two generations the main reason for state fragmentation, sectarianism, tribalism, and now terror across much of the Arab world has been government mismanagement of state resources and national development, alongside corruption and sustained absence of democratic participation by citizens. Those are realities that Arab officials, including the ones who attend Arab summits, can repair, if they wish — but there seems to be no sign of a wish to do so.

If there is a genuine will among Arab societies — citizens and governments — to work collectively on issues of common concern, then Arab summits need to be radically reconfigured to achieve that sensible goal. The first step in that direction must be the capacity of Arab citizens to have some credible input into the decisions of their governments. Citizen participation in decision-making and holding accountable state institutions and the private sector alike remain grossly absent from the modern Arab world. The result is that major policy decisions in small and large Arab countries continue to be made in a whimsical and often impulsive manner, reflecting personal inclinations, emotions, self-aggrandizement, and self-interest, more than the studied collective well-being of the citizenry. This includes decision of war-and-peace related to places like Israel, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and Lebanon, supporting insurrections within Arab states, and launching ambitious showcase “development” projects that mostly reflect the profit motives of crony capitalist circles close to the existing power structures.

Even the occasional sensible ideas, like those suggested by Saudi Arabia and Egypt to create regional forces to fight terrorism, usually remain unimplemented, in large part because they have not been securely anchored in the expressed will and capacity of Arab citizenries to work together to achieve these goals. This is due to a very large extent to the inability or unwillingness of Arab leaderships to recognize their own domestic, self-inflicted causes of their disequilibrium, vulnerability, turbulence, and insecurity.

These causes are big-sticker items like frivolous application of the rule-of-law, the slow collapse of the public education system across the Arab world, increasingly erratic access to clean water and sanitation, and security systems’ dominance of executive, judicial, and legislative authority, leaving ordinary citizens almost totally helpless in the face of the power of the state. These and other constraints eventually usually lead to one of two conditions — either states fragment and sometimes collapse (Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Sudan) or result in authoritarian state control as demonstrated in Egypt today, with somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 of its citizens in jail, mainly for holding views that are not shared by the small group of men and officers who manage the levers of state power.

These structural faults in Arab governance are magnified when leaders behave in the erratic manner that defines most recent Arab summit gatherings. Even when they say something sensible — such as the Mauritanian president’s call for fresh efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because regional instability would continue until it was resolved — the Arab leaders leave this hanging in the air without any credible follow-up action. This is also hampered by our not really knowing very clearly whether Arab populations want to make war or peace with Israel, support or help lay siege to Palestinians, isolate or normalize relations with Israel in its current state, or collectively shape and push an international campaign to achieve a negotiated, fair peace with Israel based on the 2002 Arab Peace Plan that itself emerged from an Arab summit.

Unless Arab citizens can express their views openly, and participate in shaping decisions and holding decision-makers accountable, our Arab region will continue to lurch from one crisis to another, plagued by our self-inflicted incompetence in shaping a coherent relationship between our citizens and our states, who largely exist in two very different universes.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 July 2016
Word Count: 856
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BEIRUT — The failed military coup in Turkey and the country’s many links with key regional actors in Syria, Russia, Iran, and NATO clarify how difficult it has become to achieve political solutions to individual conflicts, because local, national, regional, and global interests of any single party do not line up nicely in a coherent and clear balance sheet of desirables and undesirables.

The astounding reality today is not just that events in Syria and Turkey are intimately linked, but also that Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran effectively have to be seen as a single geo-strategic arena in which hundreds of local and national actors engage one another. They also all keep their links open to regional players like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and global powers who are militarily engaged in the region, especially the U.S., Russia, U.K. and France.

The heart of this complex regional situation remains Syria. In the past few days American and French air strikes allegedly killed over 100 Syrian civilians in the area around the strategic town of Manbij being contested by forces of the Islamic State (Daesh) and American-backed and -vetted Syrian rebels in the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces. This has caused other Syrian rebels to ask the foreign powers to stop their air attacks that kill civilians.

That would be a problem because such air power, combined with local fighters, has been critical in halting and reversing the expansion of Islamic State (Daesh) in parts of Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian arm of Al-Qaeda, has emerged as probably the strongest and most effective rebel group fighting to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. It has consolidated its presence in several parts of the country, especially in the Idlib governorate and the pockets in the north-west mainly. Recent credible reports indicate that it has grown significantly in recent months, may field 15,000 trained fighters, and is considering transforming its territory into a formal province (emirate) of Al-Qaeda, giving it a new major leadership base in the heart of the Middle East. Its success reflects its close links with many other fighting groups on the ground, and working out mutually beneficial relations with local communities who share its goal of toppling the Assad government.

In principle, the United States and other foreign powers want to attack Nusra forces, but in reality such attacks run the risk of killing other rebel groups and civilians whose lives, positions, and facilities are deeply intertwined with it. Weakening Nusra also weakens other rebels. Nusra on-and-off also fights against Islamic State (Daesh), but largely focuses on entrenching itself among Syrians and fighting to topple the government. Until the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey and other foreign actors appreciably bolster the non-Nusra rebels and protect civilians, Nusra is likely to maintain its leading role on the ground and among many Syrians.

Russian and Syrian air forces simultaneously constantly attack all these forces that challenge the Syrian state, including Nusra, Islamic State (Daesh), U.S.-supported rebels, other major rebel forces like Ahrar esh-Sham, and the remnants of the Free Syrian Army, and ordinary civilians who pay the highest price in the end. The latest twist in this drama is that the United States and Russia are negotiating an agreement to coordinate their military attacks against Nusra and Islamic State (Daesh), hoping to weaken or destroy them so that a political transition can get underway in Syria and end the war.

The possibility of actual achieving this is zero, because of the massive contradiction between the many different aims of the several principal camps that now face off in the country. Russia, the U.S. and the Syrian government seem to want to defeat Nusra and Islamic State (Daesh); but the U.S. supports other Syrian rebels who want to topple the Syrian government; and many of these rebel groups and their local support communities are closely linked to Nusra’s fighting capabilities and their common aim of toppling Assad.

Turkey further complicates this situation by fighting against some of the Kurdish forces in Syria that the U.S. supports in the battle against Islamic State (Daesh) and Assad. The Turkish government has three strategic priorities in Syria that often are in contradiction — destroying Islamic State (Daesh), toppling the Syrian government, and preventing the establishment of an autonomous proto-state by Syrian Kurds who are the most effective ground troops in the battle against Islamic State (Daesh).

The interests of Iran, Israel, NATO, Saudi Arabia and others also come into play on most of these issues, making it virtually impossible for any power like the United States, Turkey, or Russia to achieve any consistency or clarity in their policies. The Syrian government siege of Aleppo that is now taking shape is likely to add new pressures on all parties, as humanitarian tragedies pile up, refugee flows spike again, and the bitter consequences of everyone’s contradictory existing policies become more clear.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 July 2016
Word Count: 818
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