BRANDEIS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL NOVEMBER 2013

According to the Expert:Interview With Professor Eva Bellin By Arielle Gordon

Arielle: To start, would you give a brief description of how you read the current situation on the ground?

Professor Eva Bellin: I think we are in a better place today than we were a month ago. At least there is international attention fo-cused on the conflict. There are posi-tive steps being made to limit chemi-cal warfare – so that is a positive. I don’t think we are anywhere closer to solving the conflict between the reb-els and Assad.

A: You mention that we’re not any-where closer to ending the conflict. Do you think that the international world is focusing on the wrong aspect of the conflict? Do you see the chemi-cal weapons agreement as a delay tac-tic, avoiding the real issue at hand? Or do you think the fact that we’re actually putting “Syria” on the table, and that its being addressed in some capacity, is a step forward?

EB: That’s a good question – I don’t see it as a delay tactic, but I also don’t see the engagement with the chemical warfare issue as in any way advancing a solution to the civil war. Put simply, with any luck, we’ll remove one means of conducting that civil war. I don’t see it as a delay tac-tic; I don’t think people are focusing on this in order to avoid focusing on the larger issue. People are avoiding focusing on the larger issue because it seems so insoluble. If anything – and this is me putting my optimistic hat on – as people say,

the engagement of the United States and Russia in talking about chemical warfare might foster some more com-munication that might allow them to come to some sort of agreement on how to handle the larger conflict. It’s not clear how that would go, but at least they’re talking, which is some-thing. But I don’t see it as an either/or. I don’t see focusing on the chemi-cal weapons as a way to avoid the larger issue. I think, if that’s being avoided, it’s because, um, there is not an obvious solution– not a simple so-lution to that conflict, for any of the parties involved.

A: You call the solution “unsolvable,” that it’s so difficult to manage you have to find just one thing to even just symbolically address. But could the fact that the international world – and the U.S. as an international leader – is focusing on such a small is-sue, could that sabotage the space to talk about an actual resolution?

EB: I don’t think it’s either/or – I think focusing on a small issue may facilitate conversations between Russia and the U.S. If you were to ask me where the solution lies, the solution lies not in the battlefield on the ground in Syria – it lies in nego-tiations between the United States, Russia, and Iran. Once these parties, if they can, come to some agreement about how to handle Assad – whether to cut him off, or how to cut him off, or how to facilitate some sort of tran-sition from an Assad regime to some national government embracing all

the parties, if that’s even possible – that’s where the solution lies.

A: Speaking of national interest, I’m going to gear towards Obama’s “Red Line Declaration.” Now that the U.S. has spent so long not getting involved, everybody is harping on Obama that he made this red line. Do you see it as something that is moralistically mo-tivated, as a way of implicating the U.S. in the Syrian conflict? Or – be-cause using chemical weapons was something nobody thought Assad would do with UN agents so close by – was it almost a way of keeping the United States’ strategic interest of non-involvement?

EB: I mean, I think the lat-ter – you hit it on the nail. I think when Obama spoke, he spoke in a mo-ment of inattention. He blurted that out, and the blurt was motivated by a deep moral commitment. I think in his heart, he is probably persuaded by Samantha Powers and Susan Rice: that there are some behaviors that are so vile, we cannot stand by and allow them to happen.But moral commitment is not the same thing as political commitment. I think he is morally committed to that, but then he realizes that there are po-litical realities out there that have to govern when we can act on our moral commitments and when we cannot. We cannot always act on every moral commitment, no matter how justi-fied, because we don’t always have the ability. We don’t always have the re-sources to do it. And so he said it was

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motivated by moral commitment, but in a moment of political inattention – and probably, as you say, believing that the bar was so high that it would never really implicate us. And then when it did, he got caught, and he backtracked, as we saw.

A: Speaking of moral commitment: knowing what has happened in Libya – some call it a failed state, the rise of radicals – is that a reason to not use R2P [Responsibility to Protect] in Syria? How do you think the specter of Libya affects the way we look at humanitarian intervention in Syria, aside from the red line implications?

EB: This is a very compli-cated issue. There is something called a consequentialist ethic. In the inter-national sphere, we don’t intervene only based on a universal principle that whenever certain wrongs are enacted, we consistently respond. You can’t do that in the international sphere, because no one has the omnip-otence or the omniscience to always be able to intervene. So, what we embrace instead is a con-sequentialist ethic, which is we in-tervene when there is moral reason, but only when we think we are like-ly to succeed in achieving a greater good. Because I’m not omnipotent, I can’t say every time there is a danger of mass civilian murder we will in-tervene. We can’t always intervene, and we can’t always know the situa-tion on the ground so well. So we say – and this is my approach to the whole thinking about it – we should inter-vene when we believe that our inter-vention will be effective, and when it is not outrageously costly. So that’s a very pragmatic way of calculating when to respond to our moral com-mitments. I do not argue that every time there is a moral wrong, we must intervene, because we cannot, and we cannot always do it well. So you have to think about: Are we likely to be ef-fective? Is the outcome going to be better than non-intervention at all?Now in the Libyan case, there seemed to be an immediate threat to civilian life: mass murder seemed to be in the

offing, or at least that’s what Susan Rice and others argued. There was a feeling like, “We can be very effec-tive. We can move in quickly, with this bombing campaign at low cost, and prevent this immediate, horrible outcome.” So that, to me, persuaded me at the time to say, “Okay, we can intervene.” Some, like Steve Waltz [a political scientist at Harvard], argue even to this day that intervention in Libya was wrong because, he says, the con-sequences of it mean we are likely to end up with more civilians killed than had we allowed Qaddafi to go in and even machine gun 10,000 people – because the war will go on, because there will be a failed state. And so in the long run we’re not even achieving the objectives we want. The problem is that nobody really knows. What’s your time frame? What’s the time frame for measur-ing the consequences of your ac-tions? If you say, “I’m going to look 10 years down the line” – well maybe you’re right [in arguing for non-in-tervention]. If I say that I’m going to look within 3 months, well, maybe it’s better to intervene because we’ll save 10,000 civilians. The problem is the longer you extend your time frame for evaluating consequences, things get muddier and murkier and there’s all sorts of other variables that come into play. You cannot pre-dict. If that were the way we measure consequences – evaluating the conse-quences of our actions 15 years down the line – we would all be paralyzed. No one would ever take any action be-cause who knows?So what does that mean? You’ve got to take a somewhat short-term ap-proach towards the consequences. In Syria, for me, the limiting factor that persuades me that we should not in-tervene is not a measurement of the consequences, in terms of whether our intervention will stop mass mur-der or not. If we intervene, it would have immediate, obvious, benefits for humanity in terms of ending mass murder. No question. If we sent in our army, we could stop the civil war

in Syria – Syria’s a small country! 22 million? Assad’s not that powerful. For me, the question is can we do it in a cost-effective way? And it would be extremely costly for us to intervene. It’s a very brutal war – Assad is not going to give up without a huge fight. He has important weapons, and we would have to commit huge resourc-es, huge numbers of American lives to sacrifice for that outcome. From a political point of view, that’s just too costly.

A: Idealists would like to say that we can intervene, that we can do some-thing. Pragmatists would say that that’s not possible. Bringing Russia into the mix, having it come from Russia, having the proposal come from Russia – what is the significance of that U.S.-Russia alliance? Does it matter that, as opposed to France or Britain, the U.S. has allied with spe-cifically Russia?

EB: Russia’s role is essential to this. Russia has to be involved. I mean, the reason why Assad survives, the reason why he can continue fight-ing, is because he is supported by Rus-sia. I mean, Russia is providing him with the arms, and Russia’s provid-ing him with some financial backing, and without that there would not be a stalemate. Assad would have been vanquished long ago. So bringing Russia in is absolutely essential. This is something I’ve argued for a long time: to some degree, the only way out is to give Russia ownership of this conflict. In other words, Russia is invested in this conflict in part be-cause it is a stage where it can estab-lish its status, its stature in the world system. That’s what they care about. They don’t care about Assad – people talk about Syria’s importance to Rus-sia because it is a port in the Middle East. It’s a dinky little port that really provides almost nothing to Russia. This is a game of status. Putin wants to make points at home by showing that Russia counts on the world stage, that Russia is a player. So, that is what we have to be appealing to. We

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have to try to somehow harness Rus-sia’s ambition to be seen as a player, and use that in some fashion – some jujitsu-like fashion – to get it to, I don’t want to say “abandon” Assad, but see Syria through to some kind of post-Assad solution.But is Russia our ally? Ally is the wrong word. Russia is our partner, and we have to try to find some com-mon ground between us, between the United States and Russia, that will enable Russia to embrace the idea of some post-Assad settlement. To some extent, our interests are in conflict. There is a certain degree of zero-sum-ness in our relationship, because if Putin is concerned about status, sta-tus is almost always a zero-sum game. You rise higher; someone drops low-er. So to some extent we have been in conflict, and we’ve had to be very creative to think about ways to work through that in order to come to some solution.

A: So, without dichotomizing it too much, who wins then? Because on the one hand, with Russia being allowed to perceive itself as having the major

role, not only does it get to be on the international stage, but the chemical weapons agreements also preempted U.S. military intervention [in con-flict with Russia’s interests]. There are a lot of components that would al-low one to argue that Russia is “win-ning”. But on the other hand, for the U.S. – who to some degree is keeping in mind a solution beyond just the chemical weapons agreements – the involvement of Russia could ease some sort of political solution down the line, and bringing them into the talks might be considered in the U.S.’ best interest.

EB: Here’s the thing. The cardinal rule of diplomacy and nego-tiation of conflict is you always want to achieve a win-win situation. You want both parties to win, or you want them to at least perceive that they are both winning. That’s how you get people on board. So you want the Russians to believe that they are winning – and they have to win something – and we want to win as well. So that’s where the creative diplomacy comes in. Can

you find, in this Venn diagram, where that common ground is where you can both win? The goal is to figure out a way so that Russia can feel like its stature is confirmed, while at the same time having it let go of support-ing Assad in this brutal civil war. If we can figure out that, how they can retain their status and end this brutal civil war in a way that doesn’t leave a failed state, then we have won, and Russia has won, and that’s what you want to achieve.

Eva Bellin is a Professor of Arab Politics in the Department of Politics and the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Bellin is the author of Stalled Democracy: Capital Labor and the Paradox of State-Sponsored De-velopment and has written extensively on the authoritarian persistence in the Middle East, the political economy of development, the evolution of civil soci-ety, and the politics of cultural change. She has been a Carnegie Scholar and a Princeton University Fellow and has served as an editor of the journal Com-parative Politics since 2005.

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Senior Crown Center scholars discussed Middle East conditions last year at a panel at Brandeis University.

Source: The Brandeis Justice

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