The Power and the Money

Dictatorship rising

In 2011, John Quiggin hypothesized that we were on the verge of eliminating old fashioned tyranny, “in the historical sense of absolute rule by an individual who has seized power, rather than acquiring it by inheritance or election.” 

I can understand his optimism. In the below photo, I am standing atop an abandoned monument to the absolute dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in Albania. There are a lot of former dictatorships in the world.  

But ...

In 2011, in response to a post by John Quiggin, Doug Muir pointed out that there were still quite a few dictatorships left. We defined dictators as (1) a solitary leader, who (2) wields tremendous personal power, and (3) rules in a generally illiberal manner, and (4) will not leave office or surrender power unless compelled by force majeure, and (5) is not a traditional monarch. So we do not include Arab monarchies (like Saudi Arabia), collective one-party states (like Vietnam), illiberal democracies (like Hungary), elected governments formally limited by unelected bodies (like Iran), or military juntas (of which there seem to be none at this moment.) 

Still, back in 2011, you could see a pattern. The New World was free of dictators outside Cuba. Every other dictatorship other than Syria was either in post-colonial Africa or the post-imperial Soviet space. And the Syrian dictatorship, many thought, was not going to be with us for much longer. 

Another but ...

Today that pattern no long exists. Dictatorship is everywhere. Consider the countries that were dictatorships in 2011 and are still dictatorships in 2018: Angola, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chad, Congo Republic, D.R. Congo, Cuba, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Rwanda, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.

The only two three countries to leave are Gambia, Zimbabwe and South Sudan ... the latter by dint of falling into prolonged civil war. (In comments, J.H. pointed out that Gambia is no longer a dictatorship.)

What about newcomers? Well, we have Fiji, Maldives, Nicaragua and Tanzania, and Togo ... plus Egypt, Russia, Turkey and Venezuela. It seems as though China has joined them and Honduras is making a play after the incumbent got the Supreme Court to nonsensically overrule the constitution and then blatantly stole an election. 

In total we have six small newcomers and five major ones. Only two are in sub-Saharan Africa. Two have nuclear weapons.

The world is still more peaceful than ever before. But inasmuch as you believe that said peace is due to the spread of democracy, we may have some frightening years ahead.

I would like to be wrong. Please tell me that I am wrong.

Attack of the drones, updated

 New information emerged fast regarding that drone attack in Syria. From the Washington Post:

1. Nobody seems to know who was responsible. Yesterday we noted that the Islamic State controlled no more territory; experts suspect a different rebel group was responsible;
2. The Russians claim the attack involved 13 drones, 7 shot down and 6 disrupted by electronic countermeasures;
3. The drones appear to have traveled at least 50 kilometers.

In terms of the Syrian Civil War, this is a nothingburger. It does not represent a rebel resurgence. Nor is does it mean anything for the Russian presence, which was already being drawn down in the wake of Putin’s declaration of victory.

But in terms of the future of war, it’s a harbinger. I want to know more about those electronic countermeasures.

Attack of the drones

 One day we have to continue our fisking of Ghost Fleet. I don’t like panning anything, but the book was full of howlers. Fine for fiction, but it was dispiriting to see so many people take it so seriously.

But one thing the book got right was the use of drones in future conflict, including a good scene during the Chinese invasion of Hawaii (page 69).

It now seems that life is catching up with fiction, right on schedule.

The Islamic State used drones regularly as weapons. Sometimes they placed bombs on the drones themselves; other times they would drop mortar shells from the UAVs. Now, however, the remnants of the Islamic State appear to have upped their game and attacked Russian forces en masse. They claim to have destroyed an S-400 missile launcher.

Unsurprisingly, the Russians claim something rather different.

A more neutral take supports the Russian claim that their Pantsir S-2 anti-aircraft cannon was successful in shredding the attack by a small fleet of commercial quadcopters.

All this said, the Islamic State no longer controls meaningful territory and couldn’t be expected to mount much of an attack. But what happens as the drones get better? Like, say, by mounting a small kerosene jet engine on ‘em? Or, more frighteningly, by going the other way and making ‘em smaller and smaller and ever harder to detect?

I’m relatively sanguine about this development. It won’t bring down civilization. But it may revolutionize ground combat. I’m not sure what the defenses against slaughterbots will look like, but I am sure that we’re going to see some dramatic changes in military tactics over the next decade.

Thoughts?

Department of Things That Will Obviously End Well

Many years ago, in what seems like another life, I wrote a case about Blackwater. When I began researching the case in 2008, not long after my time in Afghanistan, the company was at the peak of its ambitions. It’s training ground in Moyock, North Carolina, was very impressive — and it still is — but the amazing part of Erik Prince’s vision was that he wanted the company to manufacture, deploy and operate a panoply of advanced hardware. These included the Grizzly APC (interior pictured), an armed frigate (see page 53), armed reconnaissance blimps, and a small private air force.

There is a rationale behind the idea of privatizing some military functions. Much of what is called “combat service support” has a civilian equivalent. In theory,  a private company could maintain a large reserve support capacity and rent it out to various clients, including the military, for less than it would cost any of those clients to maintain such capacity internally. In practice, it’s less clear that outsourcing logistical and support functions generates savings or improves readiness, but that’s an issue for another day.

The issue for today is that Russian Federation appears to be deploying private organizations to take and hold Syrian territory in return for oil and mining concessions. (The link is to the New York Times.) This is bad on about a hundred different levels. The small problems have to do with the problems of outsourcing core military functions to private organizations. The big ones have to do with the incentives.  

Not only do these contracts encourage Russian companies to go buccaneering, they encourage Moscow to broaden the war as much as possible. They also encourage Moscow to pressure Damascus into fighting to the bitter end and give corrupt Russian officials incentives dump public resources into subsidizing ostensibly private military operations. The officials don’t even have to be corrupt in a Venezuelan bribe-taking sense; all you need is an open-door between public service and lucrative private posts in the companies that stand to benefit.

Private military forces are, sadly, a thing. Erik Prince is running a small private air force for the UAE in Libya. But I’m not sure that I’ve heard of mercenaries paid with contingency fees financed out of the spoils of war. That seems new. I am sure that there must be a giant hole in my logic and this experiment with profit-driven pacification will end well.

Was Sykes-Picot treacherous?

 I used to go to the Middle East a lot. But then stuff happened. I got disinvited by the government of Bahrain, wound up on Hezbollah’s side of a debate over energy policy in Lebanon, and experienced a surprisingly less-than-warm trip to Israel. Plus, the one time my wife and I get to Dubai, the Burj was closed! These days I have not been travelling there as much.

But this is the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot. So let’s visit the agreement. In the Arab middle east, Sykes-Picot is usually used as a shorthand for the European carve up that laid out the modern borders of the region between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. (Inasmuch as those borders still mean anything.)

But Sykes-Picot, in fact, laid out a rather different plan from the borders that actually emerged, as the below map shows.

Well, the map sort-of shows the agreement. You need to read the text of Sykes-Picot to really make sense of it. In essence, it worked as follows:

1. There would be an Arab state encompassing both area A and area B on the map. France and Britain would each retain preferential rights in A and B respectively, but those rights were economic, paralleling the Anglo-Russian Entente in Persia:
   • Preferential investment rights;
   • Limits on the presence of advisors to the Arab state from the other country.
2. France and Britain would engage in separate negotiations with the Arab state over their “direct or indirect administration or control” of the territories colored blue and red. 
3. The brown area around Jerusalem would be internationalized, with the exceptions of Haifa and Acre, which will go to Britain. 

The agreement is often blamed for the current chaos, In the words of the Economist:

Even so, Sykes-Picot has become a byword for imperial treachery. George Antonius, an Arab historian, called it a shocking document, the product of “greed allied to suspicion and so leading to stupidity”. It was, in fact, one of three separate and irreconcilable wartime commitments that Britain made to France, the Arabs and the Jews. The resulting contradictions have been causing grief ever since.

 Except, well, the agreement does not seem to have contradicted British promises to the Arabs. See the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence. In letter no. 4, the British say, “With regard to the vilayets of Bagdad and Basra, the Arabs will recognise that the established position and interests of Great Britain necessitate special administrative arrangements in order to secure these territories from foreign aggression, to promote the welfare of the local populations and to safeguard our mutual economic interests.” The Arabs agree to that in letter no. 5, as long as the occupation is temporary and accompanied by compensation. In letter no. 6, the British state that they have to give Aleppo and Beirut to the French; the Arabs agree in letter no. 7.  

As for the Zone A/Zone B division, that was not a partition; rather, it laid out spheres of influence inside a sovereign state, along the lines (as mentioned above) of the Anglo-Russian Entente in Persia. The British were committed to handing back the “indirect” administration in the east ... but the Arabs agreed to allow London to decide for how long it would be held.

In other words, Sykes-Picot only violated Arab expectations by hiving off the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem ... although the Sharif of Mecca was to get a seat at the table in administering it. Otherwise, Sykes-Picot wasn’t the betrayal; the betrayal was that the ultimate borders didn’t follow it. 

That said, it’s hard to see how the Sykes-Picot borders would have been any, you know, better. You would have had one giant state combining most of what we call Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, including big swathes of Kurdish territory. You would have had an “Iraqi” province, mainly Shia, eventually turned over to the giant Arab state. (I am sure that would go well, as the peoples of East Timor and Spanish Sahara can attest.) France would have carved out a strange country combining Arab Alawites, Arab Christians, Arab Shia (non-Alawite Shia), Druze, Arab Sunnis, and a whole bunch of Turkish peasants. Jewish settlers would have still flowed into the area under international administration. It would have been a mess, albeit a different mess.

Just not a “shocking” mess.

Any change to our assessment of the Syrian civil war?

 No change.

Back in 2012 we thought some of the other minorities might join the Alawites as relatively enthusiastic supporters, since their position in a post-Assad Syria would be pretty precarious. But this hasn’t really happened — support sometimes, enthusiastic no.
The majority of Assad’s combat troops are Alawites, because he can’t trust anyone else. That’s why he has to supplement with Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and whatnot. Even so, this means he’s perpetually, desperately short of manpower.

Sure, I could imagine a scenario where the government gradually rolls up the cities and large towns, one by one, and slowly strangles the various rebel groups or drives them out of the country. But it would require levels of administrative efficiency and resource mobilization that we haven’t really seen yet, and some diplomatic chops as well. (Or full-scale Russian intervention, which is not going to happen.)

My prognosis: no Assad victory this year. 2017 could theoretically happen but I would bet against it, even with a very generous definition of “victory.”

Caveat: replacement of Assad by someone more palatable or competent could throw things up for grabs. Assad is of course aware of this, which is why his personal security is very very tight.

Powerful

 Watch this.

In Soviet Russia, wars train for you

 From Putin’s annual Q&A, a question about the cost of Russia’s military operation in Syria, where its warplanes began a campaign of air strikes in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s forces on September 30:

“It does not impose additional pressure on the budget. We just used a portion of the finances we had allocated for training and military maneuvers to conduct our Military-Space Forces’ operations in Syria. It’s hard to imagine any better training ... We can train for quite a long time there.”

[Credit: Will Baird Doug Muir for news and Doug Muir Will Baird for title.]

A French poll you may have missed

 According to an Ifop poll, 56% of the French public favors sending the Armée de terre française into Syria.

That is, they did two months ago. You can only imagine what opinion looks like now. 

For comparison, back in August about 52% of the American public favored sending ground forces against the Islamic State. 

In short, people, Europeans are from the same place on Mars as we are over here. For better or for worse.

The French dilemma

 I found out about the attacks in Paris the old-fashioned way: reading about them on the front page of a Mexico City newspaper. (I was there briefly for a conference on organized crime; an in-and-out two-day visit.) I would like to make two points, both of which I am sure are being made elsewhere.

First, the attack was not unprecedented. Mass casualty events of this size are rare, but they do happen. The below figure uses data from the Global Terrorism Database and removes all incidents in Northern Ireland. (The Troubles would otherwise drive the results; they more resembled a low-level civil war than “terrorism” per se.) Political violence was far more common in the 1970s and 1980s. There were fewer mass-casualty attacks, but they did occur. After removing airplane bombings in 1970, 1974 and 1988, you have 76 people dead in the 1980 explosion at the Bologna train station, 61 dead in the botched hostage situation at the Rome airport in 1973, 37 dead in the 1980 London nightclub firebombing, and 19 other incidents with double-digit death tolls over those two decades.

If the Islamic State manages to make this the first of a wave of attacks, then it would be something new ... but I would be surprised if they have the operational capability to carry out multiple mass casualty assaults.

Second, France is limited in what it can do. French airstrikes are not likely to accomplish more than the U.S. coalition has already accomplished, as Kevin Drum has pointed out. Now, the air war against the Islamic State is not played out. The coalition has only now started to target the oil trade, which will weaken the Islamic State’s finances. But it is not clear how stepped-up French participation in the air war will alter the correlation of forces. It is more likely to simply let the USAF ease up a bit on its operational tempo.

Now, with U.S. airlift and cooperation from neighboring countries, France could assemble three brigades to invade and destroy the Islamic State. Inasmuch as attack planning happens in Syria, that might even have a salutary security effect. (The U.S. really did disrupt Al-Qaeda’s ability to plan after it invaded Afghanistan.) France has fallen behind its 1999 commitment to be able to deploy 30,000 troops on short notice, but with American airlift and ISR support it has enough capacity to deploy and sustain half that figure (see also here and here and here). Consider how rapidly French deployed to Mali (including allied African forces):

But what then? Three brigades could probably disrupt ISIS forces on the ground and retake all of the territory it occupies. But it would not be enough to hold it. You could turn the area over to the Syrian National Army, but that seems impossible (on multiple levels) unless you had a political settlement of the civil war.

You could also try to magically cook up a third force capable of holding the area, but good luck with that ... it did not work terribly well in Iraq the first time around. Invite in the Egyptian army? Paging Marco Rubio: That would be a bad idea even were it possible, as the commentator here argued convincingly.

You could leave the area in chaos, but then you would have accomplished precisely nothing in terms of preventing terror attacks against the Hexagon or other parts of the West. 

Moreover, with such a small footprint, it is hard to see how the collateral damage from retaking Iraqi and Syrian cities would be anything less than enormous. Which means a lot of angry civilians and some awful propaganda losses.

So you could settle in for a long-term occupation, but I do not believe that anyone in their right mind wants to try that again.

In short, while the French (with American help) probably could dispatch the Islamic State in short order, they won’t. 

Unless there is another attack, in France or in the United States. Now, I doubt that it will come to that; it seems unlikely that ISIS has the capability to launch multiple mass attacks. Moreover, intelligence and law enforcement is now on high alert. But unlikely does not mean impossible. It just means mildly improbable.

Should another attack happen I fear that a ground war would be politically inevitable. Futile and likely counterproductive, but inevitable. A terrible dilemma for whomever is in charge.

A request below the fold.

Russia in Syria

 It is not easy to make sense of the Russian buildup in Syria, but here is what we think needs to be watched.

If the buildup stops soon, then this was some weird propaganda play on the not-so-cheap. But if it does not, then it would seem that the Russians have decided one of three things:

1. Assad’s regime is about to collapse. Since the Russians are not willing to see Assad fall, they are starting to throw Hail Marys.

2. Russian planners have convinced themselves that with a little bit of backing the front lines can be stabilized, after which they can go back to their barracks and broker a peace agreement. The Vietnam analogy here is with McNamara’s March 1964 memorandum. Obviously, there is no direct Syrian analogy for what McNamara proposed in Vietnam, but a rough parallel would involve a Russian buildup of a 10,700+ man intervention force and increasing direct involvement in SAA and NDF operations. (The SAA is the Syrian Arab Army; the NDF is an acronym used for state-financed defense forces.) 

3. Russia believes that the Islamic State poses a serious ideological threat inside the Russian Federation. The government has decided that the best way to deal with such a threat is to inflict a short sharp defeat on the ground, liberating territory from the Islamic State and breaking its preferred narrative. 

How to distinguish? Options (1) and (3) should show a sharper logistical ramp-up than option (2). And option (1) would, in the words of one analyst, “include militia units and a bunch of other high stakes risks that the others wouldn’t. A Berlin Airlift of crazy.” How would the armed forces of the Russian Federation sustain a Berlin Airlift of crazy? Not a lot of countries can do that at such distance; maybe only one these days. So a very large-scale intervention on the scale of the 1965 entry of U.S. combat forces in Vietnam seems unlikely. 

Right now, then, it looks like the Russians are going with option (2). Which assumes, of course, that they believe that public opinion at home will accept some small level of casualties and that the lines can be stabilized with relatively little effort. 

The problem, as pointed out by that same analyst, is that Americans are already deep in the field. If the Russians aren’t careful, they could wind up killing a bunch of American special forces. But that same analyst thinks they will be careful. 

Shades of 1964. But not 1965.

Syrians to South America?

 Here is a question for you: why aren’t flights from the Middle East to South America crowded with Syrian refugees?

On paper, most of the Southern Cone countries have remarkably liberal immigration regimes. Start with Argentina. Refugees are automatically accorded two years of residency and receive legal representation. (See the 2010 Migration Act.) Now, the law is not as liberal as American activists would have you believe: undocumented migrants can still be deported (page 17), but the Argentine government has explicitly opened its doors to Syrian migration. Uruguayan immigration law is even more liberal than Argentine. All you need to do to migrate to Uruguay is demonstrate an income stream of $500 per month. After that, naturalization comes within a few years. Brazil has a liberal new refugee law. 

The problem isn’t cost. A ticket costs around $800, rather less than the monetary cost of making it overseas to Europe. 

But in practice, all three countries are pretty much closed.

Start with the official Argentine program for Syrian refugees. The refugees need to have links to an Argentine sponsor either through family ties (out the fourth generation) or via a “pre-existing personal relationship based on whatever legal, reasonable, and justifiable reason: family, social, educational, work, etcetera.” 

Unless a Syrian in a camp somewhere can demonstrate a tangible documented link with somebody in the Argentine Republic, then they do not get a visa. This policy lets Buenos Aires claim that the doors are open while actually keeping them firmly shut. 

The policy may change, depending on how seriously Argentine authorities take the definition of a family link. Supposedly, 4 million Argentines trace some ancestry to Syria. In reality, no. In the peak years of 1897-1913, net migration from Syria came to about 103,000. To get from that to 4 million you have to assume almost total exogamy, which is not likely. (For the pedantic: if you assume the same birthrates as the general Argentine population, a generation of 35 years, and total exogamy, then about 3.4 million Argentines should have some “Syrian” ancestry by now.)

Moreover, a 1936 census registered only 11.2% of the Syrian-born residents of Buenos Aires as Muslim. (Page 17, once again.) Some of that is surely conversion, but it also implies that the “Syrians” came much more from Lebanon than from Syria.  

Nor is this policy in violation of Argentine refugee law. Article 10 exempts anyone under U.N. protection. Article 11 exempts anyone who has “voluntarily settled inside or outside the country which he left owing to fear of persecution.” Depending on the definition of “voluntarily settled,” that could include precisely every Syrian refugee. It certainly includes anyone in a UNHCR camp. Only a few hundred people have escaped under this not-so-generous regime. 

Uruguay is worse. After the country took in a whopping 42 refugee families, a counterreaction set in, and the door are now firmly shut. In theory, the country has pledged to admit ... wait for it ... 120. Now, Uruguayan law opens up an interesting way from European countries to send their unwanted refugees to Uruguay: give them an airplane ticket and a $500 per month stipend. That said, given what happened with the 42 refugees the law would be changed right quick if a European government tried to take advantage of it. 

Chile, meanwhile, has a liberal refugee law that only considers people who manage to make it to Chilean territory. So no visa for that plane ticket from Dubai. 

And then there is Brazil, which had settled 1,740 Syrian refugees as of March, and 2,077 as of this month. That is nice, but still a very small number. The Brazilian issue is that the bureaucracy is slow, so even without formal quotas few applications get processed. (The Brazilians also exempt anyone under U.N. protection.) It is probably the most open, but still not enough for a mass exodus.

The Brazilian case shows how much bureaucracy can turn an ostensibly open process into a closed one. The Mexican government is coming under a surprising amount of domestic pressure to accept 10,000 refugees. I bet there will even be a bill. And it will sound good.

But the devil will be in the details. Do not wait for Latin America to open its doors in any serious way.

Dictators, revisited

 Four years ago this week, I had a debate with John Quiggin over at Crooked Timber. Briefly, he said that dictatorship was on the way out as a form of government. I sharply disagreed. Four years seems like a reasonable amount of time to circle back and ground-truth.

Here is the original post. Take a moment to click through, so that we’re all agreed on definitions. Good? Okay, then: Who are the world’s remaining dictators, and have their numbers changed since 2011? The 2011 list is below, with original comments in italics and 2015 updates in parentheses.

Angola: Dos Santos has been the President nonstop since 1979. There are significant limits on his power, but IMO he qualifies. (Dos Santos celebrated 35 years in power last year. NO CHANGE.)

Azerbaijan (NO CHANGE)

Belarus (NO CHANGE)

Cambodia: Hun Sen, a bland and retiring little man, has ruled unchallenged since the middle 1980s. (He rules still. NO CHANGE.)

Cameroon: Paul Biya since 1982. The country has kept the trappings of a democratic republic, including opposition parties, but Biya is in charge and he’s not going anywhere. (He hasn’t gone anywhere. NO CHANGE.)

Chad (It’s still Idriss Déby. NO CHANGE.)

Congo Republic (NO CHANGE)

Congo, Democratic Republic: President Kabila, son of the late President Kabila, is likely to stay in power for the foreseeable future. He’s in a tie with Aliyev of Azerbaijan for youngest dictator — they’re both just 40. (And now they’re both 44. But otherwise, NO CHANGE.)

Cuba: Raúl, not Fidel. It’s surprising how many people think it’s still Fidel. (NO CHANGE.)

Djibouti (NO CHANGE.)

Equatorial Guinea: This is a nasty one. Doesn’t get much attention, of course. (It’s still nasty. NO CHANGE.)

Eritrea: Afewerki is another nasty one. A shame, since his rule started with really high hopes. (NO CHANGE.)

Ethiopia (Ethiopia’s long-term dictator Meles Zenawa died in 2012. However, his successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, has been governing in much the same manner — centralized one-party rule with no public opposition or criticism. In May 2015 Ethiopia held parliamentary “elections”; the ruling party won 90% of the seats and its allies took the rest.  Ethiopia’s human rights record continues to be dire, and it looks like Desalegn has settled in for the long run. NO CHANGE.) 

Kazakhstan (NO CHANGE.)

North Korea (Supreme Leader Kim died in late 2011, and was replaced by his son, Supreme Leader Kim. NO CHANGE.)

Rwanda (NO CHANGE.)

South Sudan: I’m jumping the gun here, because the country of South Sudan is just a few months old. But President Kiir has already made it pretty clear that he’s not going anywhere. (And he hasn’t. Four years later, Kiir is a post-colonial African dictator in the classic style. But the country is in the middle of a civil war, and therefore by definition not stable. So ... CHANGE.)

Sudan (NO CHANGE.)

Syria: At least for the nonce — I think Assad has a decent chance of sticking around. (And four years later he is still around. You can argue whether he’s a proper dictator, though, as he has now lost control of about half his country’s population and ¾ of its territory. I’ll give this CHANGE.)

Tajikistan (NO CHANGE.)

Turkmenistan (NO CHANGE.)

Uganda: To nobody’s surprise, President Museveni won a fourth term a few months ago. (And he’ll likely win a fifth next year. NO CHANGE.)

Uzbekistan (NO CHANGE.)

Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe, still hanging in there at age 87, has been the world’s oldest dictator for a while now. (And, good grief, he’s STILL hanging in there at age 91. NO CHANGE.)

So, of 24 clear dictatorships in 2011, two have perhaps slipped out of that category — South Sudan is in the middle of a civil war, and Syria’s Assad has lost control over much of his country.

Did we overlook anything in our original list? Gambia has a good case: Yahya Jammeh came to power in a 1994 and shows no sign of leaving soon. So did Burkina Faso, but Blaise Compaoré fled at the end of 2014. Acting retroactively, that would make Burkina the third country to have left dictatorship since the original post. 

Have any new dictatorships been added? We would say yes, three. Two of these are pretty minor and one is not minor at all. The minor ones are Fiji and Togo, both of which I listed as borderline cases back in 2011. In Fiji, the Prime Minister operates within what looks like a British-style constitutional framework, but a permanent legislative supermajority, a hand-picked judiciary and an unfree press means he can basically rule at will. In Togo, President Gnassingbe has just won another “election” and looks good to stay in power indefinitely.

The not so minor one is Russia. Back in 2011 I said that Russia was authoritarian, but not a dictatorship. But in the last four years, Russia has become dramatically more illiberal, power has been ever more centralized, multiple critics and opponents of the regime have been prosecuted, imprisoned, or murdered outright, and the cult of personality around Putin has grown extreme. All of these things were just getting started in 2011, but they’ve moved very rapidly since. At this point we think it’s reasonable to call Russia a dictatorship.

We also have two new borderline cases. The small one is Burundi, where President Pierre Nkurunziza plunged his country into unrest after what looks to have been a power grab. He hasn’t established full control, however, so it’s not a dictatorship and looks unlikely to become one. The big one is Venezuela. A while back, we argued that the Polity IV database had jumped the gun by classifying the country a dictatorship. It still isn’t there yet — President Maduro does not rule by decree and he is facing contested legislative elections in December. But the trend since Chavez’s death has been sharply authoritarian. The government has banned opposition candidates, refused to permit foreign observers, and arrested opposition leaders. We hesitate to call it a dictatorship yet, however — partly because this trend is fairly recent, and partly because it is not clear how much power is really consolidated in President Maduro’s hands. The December elections should provide strong evidence one way or another.

In summary: two medium-size countries have fallen out thanks to ongoing civil wars. One small one has ousted its dictator. Meanwhile two small countries and one large important country have joined the club.

In other words, dictatorship does not seem to be on its way out as a form of government.

Sticking by our prediction in Syria

 At some point, we need to go through this blog and mark all its beliefs to market. But right now, let us just say that this prediction from December 2014 is looking good. In fact, the prediction is actually from July 2012, where we ran the numbers and predicted that the Assad regime would eventually run out of manpower reserves.

Now it seems that Assad is publicly admitting that he is running out of manpower. Speculation is that this presages serious peace offerings. I would agree with such speculation. What I am less sure of is that any significant portion of the rebel forces, in their current form, will agree.

Discussion bait forthcoming

 But a foreshadowing: I do not agree with Mr. Drum that Senator Rubio gave that bad an answer to the question of what U.S. strategy against the Islamic State should be. The Islamic State also control Syrian territory, so Baghdad’s opposition is not a deal-breaker. Moreover, it might be worth trying to persuade the Iraqis to cooperate if a suitable Sunni force can be raised. It is hard to see which countries could put up the troops, but Bangladesh certainly has a long-standing tradition of hiring out their armed services. So does Pakistan. And it is not crazy to try to persuade Jordan and Saudi Arabia, even if I doubt that it would work.

I am not saying that I agree with Senator Rubio. To be honest, I think it would be impossible to persuade Sunni nations to put up the forces. And if it were, I would worry about Phase V operations: can a combination of Arab Sunni forces and Muslim peacekeepers from South Asia establish order? Would their governments be willing to bear to cost in blood of a prolonged operation, even if the United States paid the cost in treasure? I do not think that I would try to set up such an operation, were I somehow elected president. 

But it is not crazy on its face. Even if Senator Rubio thinks the effort to raise such a force will fail, it is not unreasonable for him to suggest it. 

I agree with Steve Benen that the Senator is trying too hard to distinguish himself from the President, but Mr. Benen is being completely disingenuous. He knows exactly why the Senator has to do that. The weird Iran flub is more disconcerting, but it does not strike me as dealbreaking or a sign that Senator Rubio is clueless. Rather, it strikes me as a simple gaffe, understandable in the heat of a CPAC conference, where Iran policy is a separating issue for the gathered faithful.

Messrs Benen and Drum strike me as bringing up small potatoes in a (gulp) slightly partisan way. Go ahead, talk me into why I should disrespect the good Senator from the great state of Florida regarding his Levantine policy. Because right now I don’t.

What is Arnold Kling talking about when he says Jordan is tougher than the United States?

 A few weeks ago, I wrote about a review of my book by Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman. I thought that she had a lot of good points, intriguing notions worth thinking about.

But I was very annoyed that she just plain ignored the facts of my argument. She wrote, “It’s hard to see how the horse-trading that achieved partial compensation for dispossessed investors was terribly different from any other bruising business transaction.” Only I presented lots of evidence that there was no horse-trading! The American investors got everything they wanted, and more.

Now along comes Arnold Kling to write about the decline of American empire hegemony. He writes of a possible cycle in which the U.S. feels less prosperous because there is less globalization, making its government less willing and able to intervene in the world, leading to more disorder and less globalization ... repeat. It is an intriguing notion, worth thinking about.

Only he goes on to just plain ignore the facts. He writes, rather unbelievably, “On a related note, what should we make of the fact that in response to the murder of one of its citizens, the United States is less forceful than Jordan?”

What??? Between February 5 and February 8, Jordan launched 56 airstrikes. And as of January 19, the United States Air Force alone had launched 9600, not counting sorties by U.S. Navy aircraft. Moreover, our F-22s escorted all of the Jordanian F-16s on those retaliatory raids that have Kling all kvelling.

So what in the name of God is Arnold Kling talking about? I find his speculations interesting and I am fine with his opinion. But I am very annoyed that he is just plain ignoring the facts.

Our declaration of not-quite-war on the Islamic State

 Full text here. Minus stylistically-awful preamble below:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This joint resolution may be cited as the “Authorization for Use of Military Force against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.”

SECTION 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) AUTHORIZATION.—The President is authorized, subject to the limitations in subsection (c), to use the Armed Forces of the United States as the President determines to be necessary and appropriate against ISIL or associated persons or forces as defined in section 5.

(b) WAR POWERS RESOLUTION REQUIREMENTS.—

(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION.—Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.

(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS.—Nothing in this resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.

(c) LIMITATIONS.— The authority granted in subsection (a) does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces in enduring offensive ground combat operations.

SECTION 3. DURATION OF THIS AUTHORIZATION. This authorization for the use of military force shall terminate three years after the date of the enactment of this joint resolution, unless reauthorized.

SECTION 4. REPORTS. The President shall report to Congress at least once every six months on specific actions taken pursuant to this authorization.

SECTION 5. ASSOCIATED PERSONS OR FORCES DEFINED. In this joint resolution, the term ‘‘associated persons or forces’’ means individuals and organizations fighting for, on behalf of, or alongside ISIL or any closely-related successor entity in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.

SECTION 6. REPEAL OF AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ. The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 is hereby repealed. 

Regarding that preamble, when did the endless list-of-whereas style become the norm? They’re really horrible to read. The AUMF for the Spanish American War limited itself to one:

Whereas, the abhorrent conditions which have existed for more than three years in the Island of Cuba, so near our own borders, have shocked the moral sense of the people of the United States, have been a disgrace to Christian civilization, culminating, as they have, in the destruction of a United States battleship, with 266 of its officers and crew, while on a friendly visit in the harbor of Havana, and can not longer be endured, as has been set forth by the President of the United States in his message to Congress of April 11th, 1898, upon which the action of Congress was invited:

Therefore, Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

First. That the people of the Island of Cuba are, and of right ought to be, free and independent.

Second. That it is the duty of the United States to demand, and the Government of the United States does hereby demand, that the Government of Spain at once relinquish its authority and government in the Island of Cuba, and withdraw its land and naval forces from Cuba and Cuban waters.

Third. That the President of the United States be, and he hereby is, directed and empowered to use the entire land and naval forces of the United States, and to call into the actual service of the United States, the militia of the several States, to such extent as may be necessary to carry these resolutions into effect.

Fourth. That the United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Islands except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the Island to its people.

Approved, April 20, 1898.

Returning to the current proposal, what is “enduring offensive ground combat operations” is supposed to mean? Sounds to me like Congress is authorizing anything including invasion, as long as we do not stay there forever. Not that the current administration has any desire to invade, of course. But why spell out the list of grievances in agonizing length only to leave vague the limits on the action? Go ahead, Congress! Take a whole page to spell out exactly what’s okay and what’s not!

I also have to wonder why there are no geographic limits on the current resolution. For example, “Within the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic or, with the permission of their internationally-recognized governments, the territory of any States bordering on the Syrian Arab Republic.” Instead we got, well, nothing. (FWIW, the 1898 resolution was also pretty vague. We did, however, follow it up with an actual declaration of war two days after Spain declared war on us.)

Is this just kabuki?

It is a good thing to repeal the 2002 AUMF. And it is a good thing for Congress to weigh in. But this strikes me as an open-ended check.

The real new thing here is the three-year limit ... which I think is not kabuki. But I am open to arguments.

Violent rebellion in theory and practice

 Many have speculated that drought set off the Syrian Civil War. We presented some evidence from Mexican history that supports the hypothesis ... but we also showed that the Mexican results were highly sensitive to how you defined “revolutionary activity.” 

Is there more evidence that drought causes unrest?

Cornelius Christian and James Fenske of Oxford University provide an interesting answer. In French West Africa during the colonial period, low rainfall or high temperature are associated with more unrest. Interestingly, however, they find that the effect is less in places where the French took over existing pre-colonial states. In those areas, the story goes, the French were able to use existing institutions to collect taxes even in the face of peasant resistance. In other places the state only arrived with the French, and resistance was commensurately higher.*

Does the same pattern hold in modern Francophone West Africa? No! First, they find some correlation for rainfall but none for temperature. In fact, for temperature the effect is sometimes reversed. Second, it no longer matters whether the area was part of a 19th-century kingdom; that part of the past really does seem to be past. 

I am not sure if the results have a direct application to Syria. The Syrian drought does appear to have been record-breaking; the West African shocks are not of the same magnitude. But they do imply that the correlation between unrest and drought is not one-to-one. They also provide a useful corrective to the recent spate of articles that in effect argue that history matters once: history matters, a lot, but its effects are not permanent.

The Syrian government hits the limits

 A year-and-a-half ago, we argued that the Syrian government was going to very slowly lose the war. We argued that the Assad government in 2012 (unlike France in 1958, facing its own civil war in Algeria) lacked the manpower to successfully occupy the rebellious territory. It would therefore face a war of attrition that would wear down its ability to field forces. Eventually the fight would become unsustainable. 

There is now evidence that the Syrian government has now hit those limits. Its combat strength has fallen precipitously. Worse yet, attempts to reverse that decline are angering regime constituents. 

And it is not just manpower. Other resources for the civilian economy are running dangerously short.

The question is whether those constituents see the war as an existential fight or simply as a pointless battle to re-establish control over regions about which they care nothing. If the former, then the current troubles will pass and the regime will fight on, albeit not to victory. (Defining victory as control over the prewar territory of Syria.) If the latter, then the government is in trouble. 

The Islamic State was a existential and ideological threat to your average Syrian in the street, practically without regard to sect or ethnicity. But the United States is destroying the offensive ability of the Islamic State. Unless Al-Nusra emerges as a serious threat (which could happen) then the Assad regime is unlikely to be able to call upon its constituents to make the kind of sacrifice that, say, the Soviet people made against the Nazis.

So unless an existential threat re-emerges, then 2015 is when the violence will start to diminish. (Not end.) The government will either begin negotiating cease-fires or start to implode; our bet is on the former.

Watch Al-Nusra.

A question about the Islamic State

 Reports are that American airstrikes are taking their toll. To be fair, a German journalist reports otherwise. But I suspect that the wheels are coming off the Islamic State bus.

Which raises a question. Why did they choose to antagonize the United States? They could have pushed against Baghdad while avoiding the Kurds; they could have released the American hostages. Sure, at some point their expansion would have come up against an American red line, but why start early? I can think of three hypotheses:

1. Backwards induction. You will have to fight the United States at some point. It’s inevitable. And there is no guarantee that you will be stronger then. 
2. Overconfidence. If the U.S. invades, it will be bad, but you can suck them into a losing counterinsurgency. So they won’t invade. But if they do not invade, then they will not be able to disrupt your expansion. You can gain a great propaganda victory at little cost. 
3. Inevitability. The Islamic State needs to do crazy things in order to maintain its internal cohesion. It had no choice but to behead hostages and attack Kurdish villages.

I do not really buy (3). After all, victory builds morale. And European hostages were released for ransoms. It just seems inconsistent.

But there is a big difference between (1) and (2). Thoughts?

Syria war update

A few obscure facts about the war from various sources ...

The number of refugees in Lebanon just passed 900,000 people in a comically-exact 197,409 households according to the United Nations. More on their conditions of life here and on their effects on Lebanon here. Regardless, the numbers are astounding: it is the equivalent of 7.2 million refugees arriving in Canada over a two-year period. We have a lot of Canadian readers here; what would happen?

The Syrian government is still vulnerable to what once would have been called “sabotage” within its own territory. Attacks continue to disrupt natural gas supplies to power plants. One way to know if a government victory is possible is the reduction of such attacks to the level of nuisance. Unless that happens, then government forces will continue to be tied down in policing their own notional territory.

It seems, disappointingly, that we here at TPTM were not the first to analyze the black market rate of the Syrian pound. It is, I suppose, reassuring that other analysts being asked have come to the same conclusion that we did, namely that the markets are bullish on  regime survival. That said, I am not greatly reassured. I used to think dollarization was a great idea but empirical evidence has convinced me otherwise, so I find it hard to receive intellectual comfort from those who still hew to that old-time religion.

Finally, the manufacturing sector has held up surprisingly well. Aleppo appears to have been wrecked, but there seems to have been rather little physical damage elsewhere. Once the violence ends, I predict a rapid rebound in economic recovery. The real problem will not be the war damage to buildings and roads and sewers; it will be the lost education of a generation of children and the disappearance of the refugees who may never return.

The future of Syria: Three scenarios from the past

In February of 2013, a group of scholars at NYU developed three possible scenarios for Syria’s future through 2018. With some updating through June 2013, you can find them at this link. Obviously none of them will happen in detail, but the general outlines are not implausible.

None of the three scenarios involves regime collapse nor government victory. Scenario #1 is an internationalized civil war that destabilizes the neighbors. Scenario #2 is a protracted but contained conflict. Scenario #3 is partition, with U.N. peacekeepers separating a government-held south from an unstable rebel-controlled north.

(An earlier version of this post gave my opinions here. I need to stop editing as I go.)

Are we headed towards something like one of these scenarios, and if so, which one?

The black market rate of the Syrian pound

The Syrian government, unlike the Venezuelan one, allows data to be published on the black market rate for the Syrian pound. There are occasional crackdowns, but in general the market is open. In fact, the Syrian central bank regularly engages in currency transactions at what it calls the “intervention rate,” often to stabilize the black market rate. It is much more of a gray market than a black one, akin to Argentina’s “blue market” for the peso.

The below chart shows the gray market value, derived from more-or-less weekly quotations found in the Syria Report.

Before the war, Syria had a fixed exchange rate, with capital controls, but the central bank could more-or-less supply enough the national currency at the pegged rate. There was a brief run on the pound in May 2011, when the government deployed the Army against the protestors. The central bank then tightened exchange controls and flooded the market with dollars. Things rapidly returned to normal.

Problems emerge around the end of 2011. In March 2012 the value of the pound plunged, but heavy dollar sales by the central bank soon stabilized the market rate. In July 2012, there was another brief crisis when the Free Syrian Army attacked the National Security building in Damascus.

The wheels started to come off the bus around the end of 2012, probably because that is when it became clear that inflation was starting to accelerate . The government briefly got  a handle on things, but the pounds almost continuously lost value throughout April and May of 2013. In June, however, it looked like the central bank had regained control.

The big crisis hit in June 2013, when the Obama administration announced that it will arm the rebels. Interestingly, the central bank restabilized the currency a month before the first credible accusations of large-scale chemical weapons use by the Syrian regime. The threat of Western attack did not cause any large-scale currency dumping in favor of dollars. That might have been because nobody in Damascus worried about an attack, or because they thought it would do little harm, or because of something else. At worst, the threat of war may have slowed the rise in the Syrian pound back to 150.

(An earlier version of this post transposed sentences dealing with 2012 and 2013. A good timeline can be found at Politico, of all place.)

Since then, the market seems to have more-or-less stabilized. Take what you will what this says about the projected lifespan of the current Syrian government.

Data available on request.

Soyuzneftegaz and Syrian offshore gas

Upon reflection, it is possible that Russia might gain from its involvement in Syria. But a lot of things will have to go right.

The state-owned Soyuzneftegaz has signed an exploration deal with the Syrian government. Soyuzneftegaz will spend $15 million on exploration and drill at least one well for $75 million.

The thing is, development and exploration cost Noble way more than $90 million, and Noble is one of the most efficient companies in the business! Noble hoped to drill its first exploratory well in the Tamar field for $40 million ... it cost $145 million. In the Leviathan field, planning and three exploratory wells cost $800 million. Ultimately, Tamar cost $3.25 billion to develop over four years.

And note that Noble really is best-in-class. The below chart shows depth on the vertical axis, time to production on the horizontal, and represents the amount of resources by the size of the circle. (The data come from Goldman Sachs Top 360 Projects Survey; the chart is from Noble.) Noble projects are in yellow: they take noticeably less time to complete.

A group of my students carried out a valuation exercise for the Tamar field. They calculated it as $2.51 billion, net of development costs ... but the Tamar field is aimed at the Israeli domestic market. Syria right now does not have much of a domestic market.

This sounds terrible ... but if Soyuzneftegaz finds gas it can always sell its stake. My students’ preliminary estimate of the value of the Leviathan field (assuming LNG for export) is $4.1 billion. That value, however, is contingent on being able to bring Leviathan on-line by 2016 ... the more you push it back, the lower it goes.

In other words, if Soyuzneftegaz gets serious about exploration, and if it finds gas, and if a market can be found for that gas, then the field might be sold. Maybe for $4 billion, maybe for $2 billion, likely for much less.

And right now Soyuzneftegaz does not look serious, not unless it commits a lot more than $90 million to exploration.

But when you think of the agreement to spend $90 million as an option, it does not look like a bad deal for Soyuzneftegaz’s owners, e.g., the Russian Federation. I am skeptical that Soyuzneftegaz will find gas in a reasonable amount of time, but the Assad regime is unlikely to renegotiate any deals.

Moreover, Russia is almost certainly selling arms to Syria on credit: if it gets paid (a not inconsiderable if, but so far Syria seems to be paying) then the net cost of involvement will be positive: profits + interest + the value of any gas less the opportunity cost of the loans to Syria + $90 million.

Add that to the satisfaction of seeing Russian classes in Damascus and the spiritual happiness from pretending that a bunch of piers are a real overseas naval base, and yeah, Moscow’s involvement starts to make some sense. Not much ... but some.

The Syrian civil war is not yet fully conventional and is not yet ending

Not all civil wars are created equal. Some civil wars look a lot like a conventional interstate war: two coherent sides controlling solid blocks of territory. In other civil wars, guerrillas and urban terrorists operate in the same territory as government forces: this is the typical “insurgency.” (In a third type, there is no “government”: the state has collapsed and everyone is fighting it out among each other.)

Two political scientists, Laia Balcells (Duke) and Stathis Kalyvas (Yale), have recently taken a good look at the two kinds of civil war. They found that the first kind of conventional civil war was more intense ... but also a lot shorter. They are also more likely to end in a negotiated settlement or rebel victory than insurgencies.

They suggest that Syria is starting to look more like a conventional war. The implication is that the war may be much closer to ending than we currently think.

I am not so sure. First, the conflict has many more irregular qualities than many appreciate. Power supplies are subject to regular sabotage. Almost half of the land-lines are out, also due to insurgent action. In September, an attack on a fiber optic cable took out the internet. The government certainly has the upper hand in most of its territory, but it still faces insurgent violence. Moreover, it has had much trouble in maintaining its operational tempo and lacks enough troops to consolidate its territorial gains without losing control over other areas. (We here at TPTM mentioned this problem a while ago.)

Second, as is well known, the opposition has fragmented. (Only the Kurds have consolidated territorial control, but they face international opposition, not least from the government of Iraqi Kurdistan.) This is not the face of a rebel army ready to emulate Franco and sweep away the government; nor is it a force likely to make the government choose to compromise at peace talks.

Finally, the Syrian regime is being propped up from the outside. For example, Iran has agreed to finance food imports.

Put it together, and I see neither the conditions for a rapid regime collapse nor a swift government victory.

What Russia won in Syria

One of the strangest memes to come out of the recent near-intervention in the Syrian civil war was that somehow Russia had won. The logic was unclear: Russia had humiliated the United States by convincing Syria to give us what we wanted. Or it was somehow a stealthy plan to shore up Russian influence.

I was not convinced that Russia had won anything other than kudos at heading off a Western punitive expedition and helping to get rid of  Assad’s chemical stockpile. Consider Russia’s two big gains: keeping the naval “base” at Tartus and the Soyuzneftegaz did get an exploration license for offshore gas.

The naval “base” consists of two small piers and few buildings. (This Russian video of the base will tell you all you need to know. It makes me wish I spoke Russian: the reporter seems surprised at how Mickey Mouse it all appears.) As for Soyuzneftegaz, it will have to spend $90 million with a strong chance of finding nothing or being unable to develop what it does find for many years. For example, Noble Energy discovered the Tamar field in the Eastern Med in 2009 but just started producing last March.

But now we know what Russia wanted!

In September, Syria will begin teaching Russian as a second language in its schools from the seventh grade on!

Note that Syria began teaching English from the first grade in 2001. (The decree is mentioned at the bottom of page 14 at the link.)

Also note that Russian will compete with French.

And do consider that it will be hard to ramp up Russian-teaching what with millions of kids out of school.

But hey, it’s something. What with Russian in steep decline, every little bit helps.

In seriousness, the Russians seem to have shipped up arms shipments to the Syrian government, presumably on credit. I have no idea what they get from it, other than the eventual Syrian payments. Unless those gas fields pan out or the people in the Kremlin get great satisfaction from hearing Syrian high schoolers butcher their language ...

The impact of the Syrian refugees on Lebanon

Having the population of your country increase by a fifth in three years is, well, somewhat problematic. That said, the country is handling it remarkably well, at least in economic terms.

Important context: the GDP of Lebanon in 2012 came to $42.9 billion and government expenditures of $13.3 billion against revenues of $9.4 billion.

First, schools. There were about 350,000 students enrolled in the Lebanese public school system. (If that number seems small for a country of 4.4 million people, it is because most Lebanese send their children to sectarian schools.) The Ministry of Social Affairs (MOSA) reported that 33,000 Syrian students have registered since the start of the war, at a cost of about $1,000 per student. (Only 0.4% of government revenue.) The good thing? Syrian schools still have a spare capacity of 90,000 seats. The bad thing? That capacity isn’t where the refugees are. UPDATE: The really bad thing? Even 90,000 would not come close to providing seats for all school-age refugees.

Second, health care. The national government is hands-off, leaving it to NGOs, UNHCR, and local governments. So far, UNHCR has covered about 85% of health care expenses, but MOSA reports that Lebanon is on the hook for $425 per refugee annually, born mostly by local governments. MOSA also reports a total cost of $267 million (2.8% of revenue) ... the implication being that they still have not accounted for the full impact of the current refugee population, let alone what might arrive in the next few years.

Third, public services. MOSA estimated that in 2012 local governments and electrical utilities needed $450 million, or 4.8% of total government revenue, to cope with additional strains on garbage disposal, water provision and electrical grids. Next year MOSA reports that the cost will jump to $1.2 billion ... a very substantial 13% of total revenue. And this in a country that still has not recovered from the damage the Second Lebanon War wreaked on the grid back in ‘06; peakload gaps range as high as 40% of capacity and brownouts are endemic. The state-owned Electricité du Liban has its work cut out for it.

Fourth, inflation. Last year, inflation ran 10.1% in Lebanon. Now, Lebanon has had some recent issues in collecting CPI data. Even if it hadn’t it wouldn’t be fair to attribute the increase from 4.4% to 10% to the refugees. But what is telling is that inflation has jumped by much more in the areas that have received a lot of refugees: 40% in Labweh, 50% in Tyre, 100% in Majdel Anjar and 200% in Saida.

Finally, jobs. In agriculture, the Beirut Research and Innovation Center study commissioned by Oxfam reported that Syrians in rural areas are willing to work for $6 a day, against a prevailing local wage between $15 and $20. That said, in many regions local authorities reported that the refugees had little effect  and in at least one district, Aley, locals are grateful for the opportunity to rent spare rooms to the newcomers. (Page 40.) In general Lebanon has been doing the right thing in a tough circumstance regarding the refugees, but the government has made one boneheaded move: the Ministry of the Economy has ordered the police to prevent Syrian refugees from opening businesses. (Also page 40.)

(The photograph above is at a restaurant south of Beirut founded and run by Palestinians; stopping Syrians from doing the same seems idiotic, although I can understand the political pressures the government is under to do something.)

I do not know how easy this will be if the number of refugees continues to grow. And I am certain that the political reaction is going to be very bad if this goes on. (The war, of course, has already spilled over to some extent.) But so far, despite serious pressure, Lebanon has coped remarkably well.

More study is needed, but so far this looks a lot like Mariel.

The impact of the war on Syrian refugees to Lebanon

The refugee crisis caused by the Syrian civil war has assumed biblical proportions. According to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) the number reached 2.33 million in at the beginning of this year. Roughly 868,000 of them are in Lebanon, with another 576,000 in Jordan.

The number for Lebanon is astounding: the entire country has (had) a population of only 4.4 million. This is where it’s tradition to say something like, “This would be the equivalent of having 61 million people settle in the United States over a three-year period.” Problem is, that number is too big to imagine; the comparison does not help.

So let’s do something more relevant. Lebanon has  roughly half the land area of New Jersey and also has about half the population. The crisis is the equivalent of an influx of roughly 1.8 million people to the State of New Jersey. (Alternatively, accomodating 1.5 million people on Long Island by population or 303,000 by land area.)

The Lebanese government has refused to create camps for Syrians on its soil. They do not want to repeat their experience with the Palestinians. The government, fearful of upsetting Lebanon’s delicate sectarian balance, corraled the refugees from what is now Israel into camps. The Palestine camps became semi-autonomous enclaves. It would be wrong to say that the Palestinian presence triggered the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, but it is true that the first violence occured between PLO members and uniformed Maronite militiamen. In 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon and pushed PLO forces north; around 15,000 wound up based in the camps around Beirut. That did not end well for Lebanon, and the enclaves have continued to be focal points for violent unrest.

(In 2011, I visited the Burj al-Barajneh camp in the south of Beirut. It was unlike anything I expected.)

As a result, Lebanon and Jordan are taking contrasting strategies during the new influx. Jordan has established camps: in August, the New Yorker ran a very good profile of the Za’atari camp. Lebanon, in contrast, is letting refugees scatter to apartments, existing camps (the one I visited in 2011 is undergoing an influx) and informal agglomerations of tents and shanties (which is what is shown in the Lebanese inset on the above map).

Absent the camps, how are the Syrian refugees faring? Oxfam commissioned the Beirut Research and Innovation Center to conduct a survey and find out. Their results were fascinating. Abriged:

1. Average household size is five people, in line with pre-war Syria;
2. The refugees in Lebanon are not skewed towards the very poor or very rich, but have a slight over-representation of the urban middle class;
3. Households have moved on average 1.5 times within Lebanon, taking mostly whatever rental accomodations they can find;
4. Average household income is $3,000 per year; median is $2,400. It varied a lot by region, however. Richer families settled in Beirut, where the average was $6,564. Thirty percent of the refugees reported no income. (Income, note, does not include assistance, debt, or the use of savings);
5. Assistance from U.N. agencies came to $912 per year on average, mostly in the form of food packets;
6. Expenditures came to $6,240 per year, which is rather more than the $3,000 in income. The average household brought only $370 in cash, although half arrived with nothing. So savings have not covered the gap. 17% of households reported that have sold (on average) $1,237 in jewellery; still not enough to cover such a large gap on an ongoing basis;
7. Of the $520 per month in expenditures, food came to $275 and rent came to $225;
8. The refugees are heading deep into debt after taking into account income plus aid of $3,912 versus expenditures of $6,400;
9. The amount of debt that they would admit to ($454) is clearly not enough to cover the gap;
10. In short, families covered expense as follows: 39% from income, 12% from U.N. aid, 6% from private charity, 9% from savings (now generally exhausted), 7% from debt, and 27% from sources that they did not want to describe to interviewers.

In addition, 52% of the families are not sending their children to school; an additional 26% are sending only some oftheir school-age children. In a surprise, however, girls are far more likely to be going to school in Lebanon than boys. The biggest factor for going to school should not be a surprise: United Nations assistance. In a change from earlier policy, however, this time around the Lebanese are not excluding refugee children from the public schools.

Amazingly for anyone used to Latin America or Africa (but not, I am told, unusual for the Arab world) nobody seemed much worried about crime.

Why would the refugees be unwilling to explain how they financed a quarter of their consumption? And what will happen when (or if) the mystery lifeline runs out?

Next up: the impact of the influx on Lebanon.

Stories that matter from Syria, and stories that do not

Stories that do not matter:

1. The opposition seizure of an oil field. The field in question has not been operational for some time. The oil cannot be exported other than to government-held territory; without large-scale refineries, the rebels are unlikely to use much of it for fuel.
2. Peace talks might be starting. Yes.
3. The suicide bombing in Lebanon. The attack revealed no new information and altered no strategic calculus.
4. Soyuzneftegaz is exploring for gas offshore. This is a big bet on the regime’s longevity, and could more than make up for the loss of the eastern oil fields ... but nothing will happen for years.

Stories that do:

1. Opposition fighters have kept the Damascus-Homs highway effectively closed. Damascus is not cut off (its routes to Lebanon are open) but until this road is secure the regime will not be truly be winning.
2. Iran lent Syria $3.6 billion for oil imports in October. That is enough for almost nine months of imports.
3. Gas fields continue to produce and the electricity net is reorienting around them.
4. Nonetheless, as of June about half the country’s electric generation capacity stood idle, including a 640 MW plant in Aleppo, a 400 MW near Hama, 600 MW in the Tishreen plant near Damascus and 350 MW in the Zeyzoun plant. The main reason for the idle plants is a continuing shortage of fuel oil, not war damage. The exceptions are the Tishreen plant, where the gas pipelines feeding it come under regular attack, and the Mhardeh plant near Hama which lost its gas supply from the Omar field two years ago. (The Omar field is the one that rebels recently seized.)
5. Weirdly, however, the government still subsidizes electricity. Until July 8, the price per KWh was 2.5 pounds for users of less than 800 per month, 3.5 pounds for 801-2,000, and 4.0 pounds for 2,000 and up. Now those prices are 6.0, 6.5, and 7.0 respectively ... still incredibly low.
6. When schools opened in September, only 4.5 million children registered, down from 5.6 million before the war.

Upshot: the regime is winning ... but it has not yet won, even in its restricted territory. When the roads are secure and the lights are on, then that will have been achieved. Do not pay attention to offensives in the southeastern suburbs of Damascus or retreats in the far east of the country.

More later, when I have digested the most recent UNRWA economic report.

Did drought abet the start of the Syrian civil war?

I have no idea. But there was a bad drought in Syria in 2006-11. (Hat tip: Wonkblog.) It is not unreasonable to think that there might be a connection.

Have we historical evidence?

Maybe. Many historians believe that the Mexican drought of 1906-10 played an important role in setting off the Mexican Revolution. Melissa Dell set out to test that hypothesis, combining one dataset of pre-1910 precipitation and another one of Revolutionary violence. She found that drought-affected counties were more likely to experience violent mobilization during the revolution.

I think she is right ... but I am not sure that her data is good enough to show it. The data on revolutionary mobilization were not the best. They came from the Encyclopedia of Mexican Counties, taking on a value of zero or one depending on whether the authors of the Encyclopedia noted spontaneous violent mobilizations. The data are summarized in this map:

The counties singled out on the map are  few of the ones where the coding is unclear. Tlahualilo, for example, produced few local leaders or organized revolt, but there were not a few complaints of banditry in 1911 and when Pancho Villa did roll in, the locals supported him. In Camargo, the Loyal Camargo Brigades formed an important part of the Villista army. (Inasmuch as they were no violent mobilizations in Camargo, it appears to be because the Revolution took over the state quickly enough to let Villa use it as a place for serious R&R as early as 1913.) If you go through all the possible switchers (and note that there might be something special about Yucatán) the results are weaker. Contagion models could weaken it further.

This does not mean that the argument is wrong! Just that more data is necessary.

Which brings us back to Syria. The report from the Center for American Progress (see page 25) is damnably vague. But data on precipitation, internal displacement, and the pace of revolutionary mobilization in the country should exist. (Doug? Carlos?) If they do, then it should be possible to see if climactic stress is linked to unrest or violence, at least in the modern Levant.

Weirdly, both Assad and President Obama could win this confrontation

This blog already discussed the way in which the Obama administration seemed to be resurrecting the old European idea of the punitive campaign. (The Clinton administration excelled at them, as did the Reagan presidency.) We expressed some doubts about the efficacy of the punitive strike, but reluctantly thought it was what we would do in the President’s position.

Well, with Secretary Kerry’s apparently accidental declaration that Assad could avoid a strike by giving up his chemical arms, we have abandoned the old European way of empire and gone back to the Roman one. Rome would send ambassadors to foreign countries to recite a set of demands. The foreign country (or tribe or clan or whatever; we are not the first empire to deal with non-state actors) then had 33 days to comply. If they did not, the ambassador then returned to Rome and asked the Senate what to do. They would then declare that a state of war existed and start fighting.

This strikes me as a more logical way of doing things. We unsuccessfully tried this strategy in Gulf War I ... and we sort-of-successfully (and also accidently) used it in the Kosovo War, where there is evidence that the threat of ground invasion convinced the Serbians to withdraw. It is far from unprecedented. But it also seems like something that states are unwilling to do these days, since without the blessing of the U.N. Security Council it is, in point of fact, an illegal negotiating strategy.

But hey! Senators Joseph Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-North Dakota) got there first. Well before Secretary Kerry spoke this morning, Manchin and Heikamp proposed that we make the strike conditional on a demand that Assad sign the Chemical Weapons Convention. I did not notice at the time. But now, it seems like the brilliantly logical thing to do.

And if Assad agrees, as there is some evidence that (with Russian encouragement) he might, then he will be doing the Zetas one better. Handing over the people who ordered the attack would be emulating the Zetas. Handing over the strategically-useless weapons while winning a major propaganda victory and a lot of international credibility (including an implicit green light to continue killing his enemies and perceived enemies and anyone in the way with kinetic energy) ... that would be just brilliant.

Assad has a way to win a major victory that also gives the Obama administration the perception of same. Unless there are logistic problems that make it impossible, he would be an idiot not to surrender his chemical weapons.

Good analysis on Obama, Congress, and Syria

Juan Cole has good analysis on why President Obama chose to go to Congress before attacking Syria. Short version: it is reasonable to argue that the U.N. Charter empowered the President to go to war without Congress in Libya. (This is not a universal interpretation, but it is nonetheless a reasonable one.)

In Syria, though, there is no UNSC resolution. Worse yet, there are few other sources of international support, with NATO declining to get involved and the U.K. Parliament voting no. (The Arab League has now given wishy-washy and vague support to a strike.) Finally came the news that U.S. signals intelligence suggested that the sarin attacks might have been “the action of a local colonel who either went rogue or made an error in mixing too much sarin into crowd control gases.”

So by Friday, Obama had painted himself into a box with repeated statements that he had to attack Syria because of the gas attack. But as he looked behind him, the troops he was leading had thinned out faster than Custer’s at the Little Bighorn.

With regard to domestic politics, Obama would be pilloried on Capitol Hill if he backed down as his international support (and elements of his case) collapsed. If he went forward with a unilateral strike, he would be alone and exposed, and risk extreme reputational damage if the operation went bad. (What if a cruise missile went astray and hit a village, killing women and children? What if the missile strikes riled up radical Shiites in Iraq and U.S. facilities in that country were attacked?)

Obama made a clever political calculation. The Tea Party and the GOP in general had been demanding that he submit the Syria file to them. So he obliged them. If they say ‘no,’ as the British parliament did, then Obama is off the hook. If they say ‘yes,’ then they are full partners in any failures that result. Either way, the issue is taken off the agenda of the 2016 election and Democrats are held harmless.

Those who think a ‘no’ vote will make Obama an early lame duck do not reckon with how all the votes have been ‘no’ for some years now. Nothing will change in that regard.

In short: without international support, the strike was looking dicier, but the President did not want to hand the GOP a political cudgel to use in 2014 and 2016. You might almost think that he wants to lose the vote. Almost.

Damn facts keep changing

Now that Britain has rejected killing Syrians over chemical weapons use, my opinion has changed. We should not act.

A taboo should be a taboo. That is, it should be hard to conceive of before the fact, and inspire near-universal revulsion and a desire to punish afterwards.

The fact that the Chinese and Russian governments do not want to support a chemical-weapons taboo means little. After all, they are trapped by duelling desired-taboos: they would like to (for the time being, at least) create a no-interference taboo.

But the fact that neither the democratically-elected Parliament of the United Kingdom nor the not-democratically-elected governments of the Arab League countries means that the taboo is not really yet a taboo. A strike might dissuade Assad himself, but it is not looking like the effect will be the desired one. There is no taboo to uphold.

Indications are that the Obama administration will go ahead anyway. I hope those indications are wrong. Oh, this is still a low-risk operation from the U.S. point-of-view, but I no longer think it worth the cost in lives.

When the facts change ... and what Assad could learn from the Zetas

It seems as though the United States has some evidence that the chemical attack in Syria was not ordered at the highest levels of the government. Rather, U.S. intelligence intercepted the following last Wednesday, August 21: “In the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people.”

Now, it would be a screw-up of unprecedented proportions for a regime to use chemical weapons by order of a low-ranking Army officer. One might imagine how it could happen in the midst of an invasion from another state, during which all sorts of authority would be pushed down the chain of command. Letting it happen during a civil war when your side is gaining the initiative and against civilians is criminal stupidity.

If correct, however, it changes my calculus regarding a punitive strike ... but only a little. Criminal stupidity deserves punishment to make sure that it does not happen again. I think. (Counterarguments welcome!)

But if lower-downs were responsible, it opens a way for the Syrian government to avoid a strike. Consider that when the Zetas accidently ambushed USDA vehicles in Tamaulipas, they released the Americans and apologized. When the Zetas idiotically shot and killed an ICE agent in San Luis Potosí, the Zetas practically handed the man responsible over to American authorities. That is, in fact, Zetas SOP for anything that might bring down the heat from either the United States or the Mexican industrial elite. (See page 5.) If your people do something stupid that could cause trouble for the organization, kill them or turn them in.

If it is true that low-level Syrian officers ordered the use of sarin without higher approval, then Assad could take a page from the Zetas’ book and turn those officers over to the International Criminal Court. It would be strongly in his interest both in terms of winning propaganda points and heading off intervention. Moreover, the ICC might refuse to take them, in which case it is win-win-win for Mr. Assad.

He won’t do the above, of course, because that would mean conceding that the Syrian state has no right to use chemical weapons despite having refused to sign any of the international conventions on the subject. He should, the weapons serve no real purpose, but he won’t.

Miguel Angel Treviño may have been a better student of the dictator’s handbook than Bashir Assad. Which is somewhat sad.

The world is complicated, Syrian edition

The world is complicated. My wife pointed out to me today that I think striking Syria with cruise missiles is a bad idea, but also that I would do it if I were President. Huh?

Here is the logic. Cruise missile attacks on the chemical weapons command systems, especially attacks constrained to disrupt other military activities as little as possible, are not very likely to succeed.

But what is success? Stopping Assad from using chemical weapons again, in order to establish an international taboo. That could happen.

Or it could fail. But if it fails, so what? Internationally, that is a nothingburger. Oh, the foreign policy Village will bleat about American credibility and all that, but this is not Munich. We did not lose credibility after the fiasco of the second Gulf war and subsequent occupation. (Heck, we retained enough influence to get European countries to force down the Bolivan president’s jet.)

The certain loss would be the Syrian soldiers (and possibly civilians) who would die. That is not a loss that I would take likely, but it would be worth establishing a red line regarding chemical weapons use. If the attempt to create such a red line fails, then it would be a tragedy. But it seems a cost worth paying for the chance.

So what are the risks? One is Iranian retaliation, but I admit to being sanguine about that. Another would be worries about tipping the balance in the civil war, but if the strikes erred on the side of weakness then that risk would not exist. A third would be the fact that the legal basis for an American strike would be shaky. (The domestic ship of Article I, Section 8, has sailed long ago, back during the Jefferson administration in fact, but Articles 2 and 42 of the U.N. Charter are still in port.)

Finally, there would be pressure to do even more in the event that Damascus uses chemical weapons again.

That last one is a risk with somebody else as president, but were I the President then I would not worry about it. With myself as President the only risk would be devaluing the UNSC’s notional monopoly over authorizing the use of military force across international boundaries ... but inasmuch as the relevant articles of the U.N. Charter are “still in port,” it is an exceedingly stormy one.

So yes, as President, I would roll the dice. And then if Assad used chemical weapons again, I would throw it to the Security Council, since it would then be obvious that stopping their use required regime change and that I would not countenance unless the Security Council so decided. 

But I am not the President, thank the Lord. Barack Obama is the President. Will he be able to resist the pressures for further involvement should Mr. Assad use chemical weapons again despite the strike?

Whether I support an attack hinges on the answer to that question.

The American plan of attack and lessons from the Clinton Administration

The New York Times has a nice article laying out the likely outline of the American attack. The U.S. will use cruise missiles to attack the command and control systems governing the chemical weapons. It will avoid attacking the sites themselves, for fear of either releasing chemical agents or allowing the opposition to grab the stores.

Cruise missile attacks are hard to launch against mobile targets, simply because it is hard to get the missiles to arrive simultaneously. This provides warning that an attack is underway. In addition, they cause more collateral damage than equivalent aircraft-launched weapons or JDAMs: “Naval officers and attack planners concede that the missiles are not entirely controllable for elevation near the target, and when they fly slightly high carry the risk of blast effect to structures and people behind or near the targets.”

In case you are wondering, the U.K. will participate. It will launch cruise missiles, plus Storm Shadow missiles fired from Tornado GR4 jets far outside Syrian airspace. (The Storm Shadow has a range of 155 miles.)

Apparently the U.S.-U.K. coalition (probably with some French help and possibly a NATO fig leaf if no UNSC resolution is forthcoming) will not try to degrade the Syrian government’s military capacity other than with regard to chemical weapons. I guess I sort of called it yesterday? No, David Allen did.

Back to the 1990s indeed. I am going to re-read David Halberstam’s War in a Time of Peace. Despite the fact that this is most assuredly not a time of peace for the United States, we seem to be reliving that period, doing the same things, likely with the same results. Which were not terrible.* But they were not that good, either.

What are the lessons that we should be learning from that earlier period of long-distance low-casualty non-war wars?

Punitive expeditions

In central Asia and Africa in the 19th century, governments would often organize “punitive expeditions” to punish governments or non-governmental actors that had offended them or violated international laws or norms. The record is not particularly illustrious.

Commentor David Allen raises the possibility that the United States would engage in the equivalent of a punitive expedition rather than try to materially affect the course of the war or overthrow the Assad regime. I think he is correct that this is what the U.S. will do. In fact, that is how I read press stories like this one. We will launch cruise missiles, back-to-the-Nineties style.

But there are still problems. First, what will the missiles target? Given that Damascus now knows an attack is coming, they presumably have dispersed and hardened their chemical weapons depositories and command systems. Now, if Assad is a good player of 11th-dimensional chess, he won’t do that. Rather, he will let the United States and its allies extract their pound of flesh by destroying his weapons and allowing him to get on with fighting his war the old-fashioned way, free of the fear of American intervention. Problem is, Assad shows few signs of being an astute chess player, let alone in eleven dimensions.

If the missiles target other aspects of the Syrian command system, the same problem applies. Similarly, cratering airfields is emotionally satisfying, but easy to fix, and doesn’t much slow helicopters anyway.

Second, what will be our counter-counter to the inevitable counter-moves? Will Iran and Russia increase their assistance? They might. Will Syria start stepping up artillery barrages? (Artillery is an extremely effective weapon of depopulation.) Can we be sure that the attacks will be targeted so as to not aid anti-American opposition forces? If we are playing 11-dimensional chess, it might be worth it to strengthen the regime while appearing to attack it ... but nobody has ever been good at that game. (I welcome historians to prove that last clause wrong!)

At the end of the day, I suspect we will use cruise missiles against the chemical weapons capacity as best as we can (which is not very well) and hope that provides sufficient disincentive to keep the Assad government from using them again. (Presumably Damascus would fear that we would be forced to attack the regime directly the next time around, cost be damned.) That is probably what I would do if I were President, even without unified international support. After all, it holds out the possibility that by weird quantum kabuki further chemical attacks might be prevented, and that is a taboo worth establishing.

But a missile attack on the chemical weapons systems is by no means assured of success and it is by no means an obvious course of action. The debate is open.

The annoyance of unipolarity

It is very annoying to realize that pretty much the only two countries with the ability to use military force in Syria are Turkey and the United States. Which means the United States, since a meaningful Turkish intervention means an old-school invasion. 

So what can the United States do in response to the alleged chemical strikes?

I don’t suppose that anyone doubts that an air campaign against Syria would be a massive undertaking. Still, Brian Haggerty of MIT has done the heavy lifting in documenting exactly what it would take. And it would take a lot. More than anybody but the Unites States could handle.

First, he documented a minimum of 448 targets that would need to be surpressed in order to achieve air supremacy:

Air Superiority Campaign Targets	141
IADS C2 facilities, early warning radar sites	22
SAM batteries (SA-2, SA-3, SA-5, SA-6)	150
Airfields (4 targets x 8 bases)	32
Aircraft shelters	205
SSM batteries	27
ASCM batteries	12
TOTAL	589

He calculates that the campaign would require at least 191 aircraft. (A more likely number is 300.)

He goes on to ask how many aircraft would be needed to protect a safe zone in Syria. Of course, that depends on the size of the Syrian ground forces that need to be protected against. The more Syrian targets, the more aircraft. And thus, this table:

Emerging Targets	Strike Aircraft Airborne	No. of Sorties	No. of Aircraft
2	2	12	12
4	2	12	12
8	2	12	12
16	4	24	23
32	8	48	45
64	16	96	90

“Emerging targets” are the number of Syrian targets (troop concentrations, artillery units, etcetera) that could mobilize during any given four-hour period. (If one unit could emerge more than once during that period, then it would count as multiple targets.)

In case this is too abstract, Haggerty broke it down:

If a typical Syrian armored division were divided up into battalion-sized elements with some mix of tanks, armored fighting vehicles, artillery and rocket launchers typically used in the Army’s assaults on Syrian cities and towns, these notional elements might include something on the order of 15 tanks, 9 armored fighting vehicles, 2 self-propelled artillery pieces and 1 rocket launcher (for a total of 27 targets). A small number of towed artillery pieces would also be added to this mix. The aircraft requirements based on engaging up to 64 emerging targets calculated above would thus reflect the potential need to engage roughly two of these battalion-sized elements during any four-hour period (30 tanks, 18 armored fighting vehicles, 4 self-propelled artillery pieces, 2 rocket launchers, and some towed artillery). The Syrian Army has somewhere in excess of 200 of these battalion-sized elements at its command.

Oh boy. That is a lot of aircraft.

And it gets worse, because a whole plethora of UAVs, EW aircraft, and tankers would be needed to support the effort.

France used to be able to engage in full-spectrum operations. Oh, France. Spend a little more! Bring back the draft! Whatever you have to do. Just take the burden off us, willya?

Actually, to Alex Harrowell and Doug Muir and others ... is there any prospect of any other nation (or coherent non-U.S. alliance) having these capabilities in the next two decades? Or are we doomed to being the world hegemon until my son hits draft age?

Why would Assad use chemical weapons?

We at this blog thought that Assad was going to lose the war. Slowly, over years, but still lose. The reason was that we did not think that a stalement would be sustainable. We began to change our minds over the last few months. Assad gained more material international support than we expected, albeit less than in the fever dreams of a Canadian politician.

Over the weekend, there was a poorly-reported bit of bad news that reinforced our growing belief that Assad could win this thing. Kurdish refugees suddenly started flowing into Iraqi Kurdistan. Why? We do not know, but the reason likely involved fighting among the rebels. It bode ill for the rebellion.

So with Assad consolidating, the rebels dividing, and the prospect of a stable partition on the table ... why would the regime risk it all by using chemical weapons? You can read what the CIA thought of their use during the Iran-Iraq War. (Answer: not much. Here is a PDF of the same document.) Spain used chemical weapons with abandon in the Rif rebellion in Spanish Morocco. They killed a lot of people. But the strategic advantage? Not so much. Ditto Saddam in Kurdistan.

To be frank, however, the governments of Spain and Iraq had no reason not to use chemical weapons against their rebels. The government of Syria has lots of reasons to refrain from using such weapons.

I can only come to three conclusions. (1) Assad is absolutely sure that chemical weapons use will not threaten his support from the axis of unpleasantry or lead to intervention; (2) the story is false; or (3) he is an idiot.

Am I missing something?

The economy won’t stop Assad

The Syrian economy is in bad shape. But it is not in bad shape for a country fighting a total war. And that is what matters.

The areas under government control are in total mobilization. What matters are physical limits, not “money” in the colloquial sense. If it can be produced and the government needs it, then the government can tax it, borrow it, conscript it or buy it with freshly printed money. Syrians may be liquidating their investments in-country and using the receipts to buy assets in Lebanon and Turkey, but the farms and factories in government territory are still there. (Aleppo may be a different story; there are reports of machinery being packed up and moved wholesale to Turkey.)

Total mobilization means that the resources available to the Syrian military have considerably increased. Figures in a report by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) can be used to calculate real military spending in 2000 pounds. Expenditures have gone up from S£30.2 billion in 2011 to S£95.6 billion (at an annualized rate) in 2013. And this despite a drop in real GDP of 51% from the 2010 level!

And do not discount what Syria can produce at home. The textile industry was based in Aleppo, and Aleppo is not producing much at the moment: the headline decline in real manufacturing activity over 2010 is 88%. But Syria is producing what it needs to produce to keep the war machine moving: the same DIY techniques used by the rebels are available to the government. (By the way, click the DIY link! It is amazing.)

Will manufacturing recover? I suspect it will. During the Mexican Revolution, manufacturing output collapsed in 1914-16, when battling armies interdicted the railroads. Once the fighting settled down, output recovered rapidly. The below map shows how fighting not only divides rebel territories from government-held ones, but divides up government-held territories. Once the government establishes secure internal routes, the sector will rebound.

I will be surprised if the manufacturing sector does not start to grow rapidly, even if the fighting continues. It will not reach its previous levels, but it will recover.

There is one hard limit, however: imports. Syria needs imports of fuel, food and replacement parts. It cannot tax or print pounds for those; the government needs hard currency. In 2012, oil exports fell to 164 thousand barrels per day (see page 8) down from 385 in 2010. Production is down because many of the oil fields are either under rebel control or need to export through rebel-held territory. As a result, exports have dried up.

But the Syrian government is making do. First, it is spending down its reserves. Second, it is scrounging around for foreign resources wherever it can. Third, it is rationing imports to preserve foreign exchange. Finally, it is getting a lot of support from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. (The report at the link is worth reading. Platts, by the way, tracks tankers into Syria, although you need to pay for the data. It is a lot of tankers.)

The aid from the axis of unpleasantry — Iran, Russia and Venezuela (and to a lesser but surprising extent Angola) — is not completely free. Syria is falling into debt to pay for it. (In the Venezuelan case, it swaps crude for refined products.) But the debt is manageable. According to UNRWA, foreign debt has gone from 7% of GDP in 2010 to 17% this year. (See page 18.) That is a long way from a solvency crisis.

If import shortages or economic problems were causing trouble for the Syrian military, one would probably expect the effects to first be felt in the air force. Data on the number of airstrikes compiled by the Institute for the Study of War, however, does not support that hypothesis:

The only way in which the economy could cause the regime to collapse would be a generalized revolt against the harsh conditions of total mobilization. But that ship seems to have sailed a long time ago. Shortages may be widespread, unemployment massive, displacement horrible, and food rationed. But its ability to fight continues.

The U.S. is not trying to prolong the Syrian civil war

Our co-blogger and Dan Drezner independently suggested that the United States might be arming the rebels as part of a deliberate strategy to prolong the civil war. I found the argument about the aims convincing, but argued that the costs of such a strategy outweighed the benefits, compared with doing nothing. Kevin Drum expressed doubts that the Obama administration might be so Machiavellian.

We now have evidence that Kevin Drum was correct. The New York Times reports that the flow of American arms and training to the rebels is risible at best. Neither training nor materiel will arrive for months, and the latter won’t go beyond small arms and ammunition. A grand plan to keep Syria in chaos this is not.

So what is it? Two non-exclusive possibilities come to mind. The first possibility is that the Obama administration is doing the minimum necessary to head off domestic controversy. After all, President Obama declared that the use of nerve gas would bring consequences. Once the evidence mounted that Assad had indeed used nerve gas, then the Administration needed to do something. The program described by the Times appears close to the minimum value of something.

The second possibility is that the Administration sees an opportunity to seize control of Arab arms shipments to the rebels:

After the announcement, one senior Arab official said the United States would act like a “quarterback” — coordinating not only American arms shipments but also expanded deliveries of weapons from other allies, and probably providing opposition groups with intelligence reports on the movements of Syrian government forces.

If Qatar and Saudi Arabia really have agreed to let the United States coordinate their arms shipments, then the Obama administration has won a significant victory that will make the United States more secure. The problem is that the quote from the anonymous Arab official is the only proof given.

In short: We are not arming the rebels in order to prolong the civil war; the scale of our aid is too small and too back-loaded. We may be trying to take control of Qatari and Saudi arms shipments, but there is no direct evidence for this. We are most likely, then, simply doing the minimum needed to mollify domestic and allied pressure to intervene.

Not terribly satisfying, but grand strategy these days is really not like Game of Thrones.

Don’t arm the Syrian rebels

Judging from comments, I have been unclear in my earlier posts. Let me try again.

From a purely realist perspective, for the United States, doing nothing trumps arming the rebels.

With a rebel victory off the table for the time being, arming the rebels aims to forestall a government victory and prolong the war. So let’s look at each outcome.

Government victory: What is good for the United States about this outcome? Assad returns much weakened. The chance of violence spreading to Lebanon falls drastically. The fear that rebel factions might be radicalized disappears. The U.S. has no strategic interest in the geography occupied by Syria, so nothing will be denied. (No oil interest, no need for bases, no strategic trade routes, no large-scale investment.)

What is bad for the United States about this outcome? There is some hit to our prestige, seeing as we have (for good reason!) already rhetorically backed the rebels. Hezbollah could claim victory, although given the Lebanese political situation I strongly doubt that they could capitalize on it. The refuge problem would persist after the end of the war.

It seems, then, that an Assad victory would have few costs for the United States. The question then becomes, would a prolonged civil war have an even lower net cost?

Prolonged civil war: What is good for the United States about this outcome? In terms of Assad, the difference is null. He is not a threat while he is fighting rebels, but nor is he a threat if he wins.

Iran is “bled.” I would like to try to estimate an upper bound of the cost of Iran’s involvement, but let’s be wild and call it 1% of GDP. What does costing Iran 1% of GDP get the United States? It doesn’t weaken Iran’s ability to project power in the Gulf. That depends on Iranian ballistic missile strength and naval capability, something not visibly affected by their aid to Assad. Nor does the expense reduce Iran’s influence in Iraq. Finally, it is not enough of a cost to generate substantial domestic unrest. Blogging Bogging Iran down might have meaning were Iranian troops on the ground or were Iran spending a substantial amount of national income, but the first is not true and the second does not appear to be true. The benefit of bleeding Iran is minimal.

Hezbollah is “bled.” The cost to Hezbollah of the war is more substantial, since the organization has limited resources (much of which come via Syria) and has put its own men on the ground. Hezbollah, however, is not a major American security concern ... I would not rank this benefit as particularly important.

What is bad for the United States about this outcome? The big danger comes from the risk that the war will become even more sectarian as it goes on. An increasingly sectarian Syrian civil war risks driving Baghdad closer to Tehran, thereby increasing Iranian power. It also risks having the violence spread to Lebanon, with major risks to the United States.

A prolonged war also risks generating radicalized fighters. Presumably most will remain in Syria fighting the war, but they could generate blowback once it eventually ends.

Finally, the refuge problem will be at least as bad as in the “Assad wins” scenario.

Bottom line: The humanitarian issue is unclear — a victorious Assad might slaughter as many people as a prolonged war will kill — but that is a reason to judge based on cold-blooded national interest. In those terms, there seems to be no discernible net benefit to the United States from prolonging the Syrian civil war. Therefore, there seems to be little reason to arm the rebels.

Avoiding involvement has an orthogonal benefit: it reduces the chance of mission creep and allows the U.S. to stand aside if our preferred side begins to lose. That becomes more costly in reputational terms the more we have invested in the conflict.

Of course, the civil war will probably prolong itself without us. But that is another issue.

When realism is unrealistic

Dan Drezner and co-blogger Doug Muir have independently suggested that destabilizing Syria is in America’s interest. In Doug’s words: “But in the short to medium term, from a cold-blooded self-centered U.S. point of view, a grinding war of attrition in Syria where neither side can win is probably the least bad outcome.”

They may be correct about the Administration’s thinking. But I do not see why a grinding war of attrition is in U.S. interests.

Consider the alternatives:

1. Rebel victory.  Most likely outcome is more civil war, only without U.S. abetment. Best case is a somewhat less hostile Syrian government. Worst case is we swap one hostile regime for another. But regardless few seem to think that the levels of support currently under consideration would let the rebels win.
2. Government victory. Assad will be much weaker than before the war. Hezbollah might claim some credit for the victory, but their objective power won’t change: it will just be back to the status quo ante. 
3. Mostly-peaceful stalement. All the benefits of a grinding war of attrition, without the deaths.

Protracted war weakens one already-weak quasi-enemy: the Syrian government. But (1) and (3) accomplish that near-pointless result without the deaths and destabilization. (2) meanwhile leaves us with a weakened pariah government in Damascus, which is not a threat to U.S. interests.

In fact, our co-blogger said as much when asked what the U.S. should do if the tide turned in favor of the Syrian government despite American aid to the rebels: “Not thinking that anyone should get too terribly upset (from a purely strategic POV) if Assad starts to win.”

Given that we should not care if he starts to win, I do not see why we should try to the drag out the war. From a purely self-interested realist perspective.

Oh, boy, big mistake

Did I just hear on the BBC that Senator McCain heard the President declare that we would begin arming the Syrian rebels?

OK, I did.

I hope this turns out to be less than meets the eye. Arming the rebels is not going to end well. Syria is not Libya.

UPDATE: Well, limiting the shipments to small arms and ammo is just enough to make things worse without putting Assad under pressure. I see not the point.

If the Qataris and Saudis are not already shipping in enough small arms, then the reason is likely a rebel inability to absorb them.

If the Qataris and Saudis are shipping in enough, then our aid is pointless, unless we have identified a subset of rebels whom we wish to support.

If we have identified a subset of rebels whom we wish to support but whom the Qataris and Saudis do not like, then we are arming a faction to fight a civil war that will follow the civil war.

Assuming that the current civil war ends soon. Which seems unlikely. Unless we send more weapons to the rebels.

I am getting an unpleasant whiff of a cycle here, which could end with American soldiers shooting at Syrians. Syria is not Libya.

Convince me that I am wrong and this is a good idea. Please?

A self-refuting argument for intervention in Syria

The pressure is mounting on the United States to intervene in the Syrian civil war. Yesterday the New York Times ran an op-ed from Bill Keller proposing the following plan.

“President Obama articulates — as he has not done — how the disintegration of Syria represents a serious danger to America’s interests and ideals. The United States moves to assert control of the arming and training of rebels — funneling weapons through the rebel Supreme Military Council, cultivating insurgents who commit to negotiating an orderly transition to a nonsectarian Syria. We make clear to President Assad that if he does not cease his campaign of terror and enter negotiations on a new order, he will pay a heavy price. When he refuses, we send missiles against his military installations until he, or more likely those around him, calculate that they should sue for peace.”

To his credit, Keller recognizes that success is not guaranteed. “It might well be that the internal grievances are too deep and bitter to forestall a bloody period of reprisals. But that outcome is virtually inevitable if we stay out.”

In short: these terrible things will happen without American intervention. Thus we should intervene regardless of our ability to stop them from happening. That would seem to be a self-refuting argument.

I would prefer to be constructive. Keller’s plan leaves six unanswered questions.

1. What do we do if Assad does not negotiate? 
2. What do we do if Assad retreats into the Bekaa Valley under pressure from U.S. airpower?
3. With whom does he negotiate? 
4. Should the negotiations succeed, how do we keep the rebels from fighting among themselves?
5. How do we keep government supporters from continuing to fight even if Assad chooses to surrender?
6. How do we prevent ethnic cleansing in Alawite territories? 

These questions may have answers, although I fear that they will involve boots on the ground and a whole lot of money. I also fear that they may not have answers. Failure, we should remember, is an option.

Not Happy To Be Right

It looks like I’ve won another bet with John Quiggin. February 2013 has come and gone, and Hafez Assad remains in power in Damascus.

If you’re interested in my analysis of the Syrian conflict — and, really, why would you be? — here’s what I wrote two months ago. Basically nothing has changed since then. Assad is still going to lose, it’s still going to take a long time, and a lot of people are going to be killed, maimed, impoverished or otherwise immiserated first.

For the record, here’s what I wrote back in August 2011: “Assad will still be in Syria, and still the leader of an internationally recognized (though very diplomatically isolated) government. It’s possible that he might be assassinated by then, but I don’t think it likely. I don’t see a blue-on-blue coup taking him out now, and I don’t think he’s anywhere close to cutting and running. Foreign military intervention is (for reasons I’ve discussed) unlikely... the regime may well have lost control of large swathes of the country. Syria will probably be increasingly violent, impoverished, and immiserated. And Assad may well be — in effect — just a powerful warlord in a country that has a number of warlords. But he’ll still be there, and will still be at least nominally the head of state. More’s the pity.”

I’ve been arguing with myself as to whether I want to re-up the bet for yet another six months. I’ve won twice now; why not go for the trifecta? Well ... in my opinion, those first two wagers (Assad will last a year beyond August 2011; Assad will last another six months beyond August 2012) were sucker bets. That first bet was something like 10-1 in my favor. I could have lost, but the odds were quite firmly on my side. The next six months... eh, the odds are still on my side. But not by as much. It’s still a good bet, but it’s no longer in the candy-from-a-baby category.

But that’s not why I’m hesitant about betting again. 2-1 is still good odds, after all. But I’m getting a little weary of betting on the loathsome dictator who is plunging his country into blood and horror. “Oh hey, another week, looks like I’m going to take some more of John Quiggin’s money” is fun. “Another week, another thousand people mangled or dead in the Syrian meat grinder” is not. Wagering on the outcome is starting to seem tasteless.

That bet grew out of a debate in August 2013 about dictators. John Quiggin thinks that dictatorship is an institution in decline, and that the number of dictators around the world is likely to decrease; I think that it’s an institution that’s in reasonably good health, and that the number of dictators around the world is likely to remain more or less stable. It’s only 18 months since we started watching this, so it’s certainly too early to declare a trend. But... in that time, the number of dictators has not changed significantly. One dictator (Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia) died of natural causes and has not yet been replaced. Zenawi was an old-fashioned charismatic revolutionary. His replacement as President is a mild-mannered figurehead, with a junta of revolutionary veterans really running things from behind the scenes. Those sorts of arrangements don’t tend to be long-term stable, so let’s see how this evolves over the next little while. Ethiopia’s an interesting place, and I could imagine a range of outcomes, from “heading for liberal democracy! hurrah!” to “more dictatorship” to chaos.

Meanwhile, though, Presidents Bongo of Gabon and Gnassingbe of Togo — two authoritarian African leaders who inherited the positions from their fathers — have both been growing steadily more dictatorial. Bongo, in particular, seems to be evolving into a classic old-fashioned African kleptocrat. I put both these guys on my “borderline” list back in August 2011. Today I’d move Bongo, at least, into the full-fledged dictator category today.

So, no net change. It’s still early days, but I have to say there’s more evidence for a “dictatorship is doing fine, thanks” hypothesis than the “dictatorship is inevitably doomed” position.

Finally, let’s note that Syria is proving a useful cautionary tale for dictators around the world. You want to tacitly tolerate those street protests, people? See where that leads! You want to end up like Syria? Guys like Lukashenka of Belarus and Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan — both of whom were visibly jumpy about the fall of Qaddafi back in August 2011, and clearly concerned that the Arab Spring might be heading their way — have visibly calmed down since then. State-controlled media in authoritarian countries around the world have been quick to depict the Syrian conflict as a plucky Assad attempting to hold the breach against terrorism, civil war, foreign intervention and chaos. At this point the Syrian conflict has turned into a small but real net positive for dictators around the world, and will continue so for a while no matter how it turns out.

Syria in 2013

So we haven’t written much about the war in Syria. Long-time readers of this blog may recall that back in the spring and summer of 2011, we were posting something about the Libyan conflict every couple of weeks or so. Why the relative silence?

Well, a couple of reasons. One, the Syrian conflict is complicated. Libya was a relatively straightforward military struggle, with clearly defined, mostly contiguous areas of rebel and government control. There were fronts and supply lines and any number of classic set-piece battles. You could look at a map and instantly have some notion of what was going on. Syria, not so much.

Two, there was a painful dearth of decent analysis on Libya. I called the date of Qaddafi’s downfall (late August) several months before it actually happened, and I did it using amateur methodology that any bright high school senior could have come up with. What’s striking is not that I got it right but that nobody else did, at least in the public sphere. (In retrospect, it looks to us that the Obama administration and the Pentagon had the same date in mind.) Syria, on the other hand, does not lack for informed commenters; you can begin at Josh Landis’ Syria blog, which is something of a clearinghouse, and then just start clicking through links. There’s enough good stuff out there that I don’t really think I’d be adding much of value.

That said, here are a few throwaway observations.

• Assad loses. The correlation of forces has begun to tilt against him; as with Qaddafi, he’s trying to climb a slope that is only getting steeper. The Russians are backing away (and never provided significant material aid), his army has shrunk down to an Alawite core with unreliable auxiliaries, he’s running out of money, yadda yadda.
• It’s probably going to take a while. Back in August 2011, John Quiggin bet me that Assad wouldn’t last a year; I won that bet. We extended it for another six months, to the end of February 2013. I expect to win that bet too. The regime still has real sources of strength — it controls the capital, has almost all the heavy weaponry, can still access cash and weapons via Iran, the Sunni merchant class hasn’t bolted yet. I don’t dare pick a date, but I think it’s still months and months away. Meanwhile, I’m sorry to say that a lot more people will die, and even more will be impoverished or immiserated. (To understand the dynamics, you could do worse than to read Che Guevara’s book.) 
• It’s not going to destabilize the region. Jordan’s stable in part because its neighbors are so screwed; Jordanians who might be inclined to rock the boat have only to look at Iraq and Syria to reconsider. Israel will be fine, at least until a new Syrian regime gets properly settled in. Iraq’s problems are driven by internal politics, not stuff happening in Syria. The one partial, limited exception is Turkey, where Assad’s clever stroke of liberating his Kurds is having some knock-ons. I can’t however really consider it “destabilizing.” The Turkish state is not at risk and the status quo in Turkey is very unlikely to change. (In fact, there are signs that the fallout from the Syrian civil war may be having a constructive effect.)
• In fact, a surprising thing about Syria is how little impact it’s had on regional and world politics so far.
• Boots-on-the-ground foreign military intervention remains extremely unlikely. No-fly zones or a Libya-style bombing campaign are conceivable but very unlikely any time soon. (There is evidence that Assad considered the use of chemical weapons, which would have prompted intervention, but the operational benefits from doing so were iffy at best and the strategic consequences all negative. This is unlikely to change.) 
• There’s not going to be an Alawite fortress state in the west. (Or at least, not for long.)
• What follows won’t be pretty. The Islamist Menace (UNDER THE BED AND ALWAYS EVIL) is one of the more tiresome tropes of modern U.S. politics. That said, some pretty unsavory types are coming to the fore. The longer the fighting goes on, the worse this is going to get. Post-Assad Syria will be a fissiparous place and probably pretty violent, and the many interests of outside parties aren’t going to make matters any better. When some sort of stability finally does emerge there’s no reason to think that it will be dominated by bien-pensant liberal democrats.

All of these seem pretty obvious, but I emphasize again that I’m not a Syria expert — this is that same “bright high school senior” level of analysis. If I turn out to be right about most or all of this stuff, I’m actually going to be rather annoyed with our foreign policy commentariat.

Syrian September

Four days ago, I wrote this:

Foreign military intervention is (for reasons I’ve discussed) unlikely, though not out of the question; watch for Turkish agitation to create a “safe haven” in northern Syria or rebel attacks on Syrian Air Force bases and other assets. (That Turkish plane that got shot down a few weeks ago? Very probably a probe of Syria’s air defenses. As long as those are still working, military intervention will be hard and expensive. So if the rebels suddenly start going after bases and air defense batteries, then that’ll be suggestive.)

This morning comes the news that Syrian rebels have attacked and looted an air defense base in Eastern Syria. In fact, it looks like this may be part of a sudden shift towards attacking air defense facilities; there was another, separate attack on an airbase yesterday, and one last week that went unnoticed until now.

Now, there are other reasons for the rebels to be attacking airbases. The Air Force is widely and particularly hated — traditionally because it’s long been a stronghold of Alawite influence, more recently because of indiscriminate bombings of civilian neighborhoods. And air defense bases have surface-to-air missiles, which the rebels will be delighted to get their hands on. But multiple attacks on bases and air defense sites in a few days? Yeah, that looks a lot like someone has been whispering in the rebels’ ears.How this plays out... well, I doubt the rebels can severely damage Syria’s air defense capability. But they can definitely degrade it. A lesson going back for decades, to Algeria and Vietnam, is that it’s damnably hard to maintain air bases in the midst of a hostile countryside. (I’m writing this post in Belgrade, Serbia. Belgrade has a fascinating Air Museum out at the airport. It includes half a dozen German and Italian aircraft, captured during WWII when the Yugoslav Partisans launched surprise attacks on Axis airbases in occupied Yugoslavia. The Partisans didn’t capture that many aircraft, of course — most, they just blew up.) It’s not impossible, by any means — that’s another lesson from Vietnam — but the regime will have to allocate money (in short supply) and loyal soldiers (in dangerously short supply) to garrisoning its air bases. Over time, it will probably have to consolidate its air defenses in fewer sites and bases, making it strategically more vulnerable. So, definitely an ominous development.

Now, since this is the Middle East, it’s also possible that there’s a second game. The attacks on airbases may be a signal that someone — the Turks, the West — is getting serious about intervention. A signal to who, though? The regime is probably past caring. The Russians?

Syria: the next six months

Okay, so I’ve won the first bet with John Quiggin. More on that in a bit. Meanwhile: what lies ahead for Syria?

Well, the best summary I’ve yet seen can be found in this excellent article from our friends at the Crisis Group. It’s so good that I’m going to quote it at considerable length.

One is tempted to say that the regime has been uniformly cold-blooded and indiscriminate from the start, but that is not so. The conflict experienced several phases: from the regime’s political concessions, both half-hearted (which prompted stronger popular demands) and coupled with brutal repression (which further undermined their credibility); to its so-called security solution (which, by seeking to force entire communities into submission further energised the opposition and pushed it toward armed resistance); and, finally, to its so-called military solution (a scorched earth policy of rampant destruction and looting that turned what once was viewed as a national army into a broadly reviled occupation force).

With each stage, the regime burned yet another bridge, leaving it with neither way back nor way out. Just as the political solution undermined those involved in politics and the security situation wrecked the security services’ ability to operate, so did the military solution eviscerate the army’s credibility.

This strikes me as a cogent summary of the regime’s shifting strategies over the last 18 months. It’s largely forgotten now, but the Syrian government did attempt to make some minor political concessions, including local and municipal elections in 2011 that were (by Syrian standards) remarkably free and fair. If I were to point to a moment when the political strategy stalled out and failed, it would be the parliamentary elections held earlier this year. The government seems to have dithered at first, then decided that the purpose of elections was not to allow opposing views in the legislature, nor to co-opt moderates and broaden the base of popular support, but to reaffirm the legitimacy of the Baath party and the regime. The result was, unsurprisingly, a landslide “victory” for the Baath and a further alienation of moderate opposition.

One thing that’s not discussed is the regime’s strategy towards the Kurds. Short version: they’ve basically given autonomy and near independence to the Kurds in return for Kurdish neutrality. And they’ve done this by deliberately handing over power to the Kurdish faction that’s associated with the PKK, the anti-Turkish Kurds. This is a calculated risk, because it increases the probability of Turkish intervention in Syria. But it means that the Kurdish regions will be run by people who are violently hostile to the opposition forces that are backed by, or friendly with, Turkey. From here it looks like a thoughtful strategy that is, so far, paying off — while there are a few small Kurdish groups working with the opposition, the majority of Kurds look likely to sit this thing out.

As to what may happen going forward, the article offers this bracing analysis:

Of all the ongoing changes, perhaps the most significant and least appreciated is what, over time, has become of the regime. The one that existed at the outset of the conflict almost certainly could not have survived the spectacular killing of top officials in the heart of its traditional stronghold; street combat in Damascus, Aleppo and a string of other towns; the loss of important border crossings with Turkey and Iraq; all amid near-total economic devastation and diplomatic opprobrium. That, a year and a half later, its new incarnation not only withstood those blows but vigorously counterpunched sends a message worthy of reflection.

As its political backbone disintegrates, the regime is being reduced to its repressive apparatus, while the latter itself gradually morphs into an entity more akin to a militia than an army in both make-up and ethos. The regime essentially has been stripped down to a broadly cohesive, hardcore faction fighting an increasingly bitter, fierce and naked struggle for collective survival. It is mutating in ways that make it impervious to political and military setbacks, indifferent to pressure and unable to negotiate. Opposition gains terrify Alawites, who stand more firmly by the regime’s side. Defections solidify the ranks of those who remain loyal. Territorial losses can be dismissed for the sake of concentrating on “useful” geographic areas. Sanctions give rise to an economy of violence wherein pillaging, looting and smuggling ensure self-sufficiency and over which punitive measures have virtually no bearing.

That the regime has been weakened is incontrovertible. But it has been weakened in ways that strengthen its staying power. (emphasis ours)

The regime has been undergoing a very rapid Nietzschean “what does not kill us” evolution. It has become much less effective as a government — indeed, it may end up hardly being a government at all. But it has become much more effective at surviving. And this leads to a sobering conclusion:

There can be nothing more to expect from a regime that, by its very nature – never much of an institutionalised state, no longer genuinely a political entity – has ceased being in a position to compromise, respond to pressure or inducement or offer a viable solution. Which means that the traditional international panoply of actions, from public blandishments to condemnation, from threats to sanctions, is not about to work. And that, while one still can hold out hope for a “clean break,” that moment when the regime neatly collapses or surrenders, it hardly warrants holding one’s breath.

This leads to my own tentative prediction (which matches my co-blogger’s assessment): six months from now, Assad will still be in Syria, and still the leader of an internationally recognized (though very diplomatically isolated) government. It’s possible that he might be assassinated by then, but I don’t think it likely. I don’t see a blue-on-blue coup taking him out now, and I don’t think he’s anywhere close to cutting and running. Foreign military intervention is (for reasons I’ve discussed) unlikely, though not out of the question; watch for Turkish agitation to create a “safe haven” in northern Syria or rebel attacks on Syrian Air Force bases and other assets. (That Turkish plane that got shot down a few weeks ago? Very probably a probe of Syria’s air defenses. As long as those are still working, military intervention will be hard and expensive. So if the rebels suddenly start going after bases and air defense batteries, then that’ll be suggestive.)

Six months from now, the regime may well have lost control of large swathes of the country. Syria will probably be increasingly violent, impoverished, and immiserated. And Assad may well be — in effect — just a powerful warlord in a country that has a number of warlords. But he’ll still be there, and will still be at least nominally the head of state. More’s the pity.

Counting chickens, jumping guns

So I think my first bet on the Assad regime is looking pretty safe. For those of you coming late, a year ago I bet that Syrian dictator Bashir Assad would still be in power one year later — that is, at 5:00pm EST on August 31, 2012. John Quiggin of Crooked Timber took the other side. The loser will pay $50 to a charity of the winner’s choice.

A quick glance at the calendar will show that I haven’t won this yet. In theory, the rebels could storm the presidential palace tomorrow. Or Assad could get on a flight to Moscow next Tuesday bound for a long quiet retirement in a beachside villa outside of Uglegorsk. But I don’t think it’s very likely. Assad has some problems! But he’s probably not going to fall in the next 18 days.

Close followers of this blog may recall that back in April, I challenged John to a second bet: viz., that Assad would continue in office for another six months beyond August 31. He accepted. So it’s entirely possible that I could win this bet, but lose the second one. These things happen; let’s see how it goes.

Meanwhile, two things. First, you may recall that this bet arose out of a more general discussion on the topic of dictators and their place in the world of the early 21st century. I’m mulling over a “one year later” post on this topic. Comments and suggestions are welcome! Second, I have to think about what charity I’d like John to pay his $50 towards. Suggestions on this are most definitely welcome. (No, I’m not going to ask him to contribute $50 to the Scaife Foundation. Play nice.)