Does Syria need the International Criminal Court?

 Kenneth Roth, who was executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022, tells us that Syria "needs" the International Criminal Court, which holds its sessions at The Hague.  His 'explanation' is more an insult and display of ignorance than an explanation.

A few comments.

First:

Syria's justice system is not, as Roth proclaims, "a shambles".  Assad's justice system was a shambles.  The transition government is far along in the process of replacing it.

Second:

There is no reason to believe that placing Syrians under the tutelage of pompous international jurists will in the end produce better outcomes than what Syrians are producing themselves.  The quality of justice isn't measured entirely or even predominately by lovely procedures.  It is measured, most of all, by outcomes.

Syrians are bringing hundreds among the many thousands of Assad's criminal henchmen to justice right now.  In most of these cases, the facts are not in dispute - to the Syrians who have suffered through their tortures, yet prevailed. Indeed these facts are not disputed by most of the accused, who proudly or shame-facedly admit to their acts, often recorded by cellphones.  No doubt some innocents are punished and no doubt that would not be the case were they all placed in the hands of nice Western Europeans and their well-behaved acolytes.  No doubt as well that the International Court would bring at most %1 of these criminals to justice (that's a really generous estimate), after years and years.  Indeed the majestic sluggishness of International Court procedures are the main reason that, time after time after time, the criminals get away, and for good.

Third:

Yes, no doubt The World won't trust the Syrians' will and competence to mete out justice.  It's unclear why Syrians should care.

They have accomplished more in the cause of human rights than the rest of the world put together.

Fourth:

Roth's comparison with Iraq is embarrassing.  The US-installed Iraqi government consisted primarily of horribly oppressed Shia taking clearly unbridled and understandable revenge on Sunnis rightly or wrongly associated with Saddam Hussein. They had little use for canons of evidence.

Nothing remotely similar is happening in Syria, where cellphones recorded so much of what occurred. What's more these cellphone videos and images are now vetted meticulously, by Syrian experts , by open source intel experts, and also by experts among the mainstream media.  But sure, for Western Europeans, these bearded rebels look untrustworthy.  They probably don't even know what evidence is.

Let Syrians govern as they have fought and died for.  The idea that Western guidance would produce better results runs counter to the virtually the entire historical record. Better that Western saviours review that past.

Justice in Defeat: For Syrians, what now?

 

Assad, a monster, has won.  He has a firm grasp on all major cities and ports:  Aleppo, Damascus, Hama, Homs, Tartus.  He has enough control of even the most restive regions, the Daraa and Sweida Governates, to ensure his survival.  His lack of control near the Turkish border is a mere annoyance.

No military force poses any threat to him, not least because no regional or international power has any desire to unseat him.  He knows that he has nothing to fear from the US and its subservient ‘allies’.  For one thing, they want him in power because they fear Islamists would replace him.  For another, were there the will to unseat him, there isn’t the way.  The West has the military means to crush him, but those means are unusable for domestic political reasons.  To unseat him and destroy the régime would require a long-term commitment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops.  No Western government would dare to propose any such thing to their electorates.

Assad and the whole world know this.  They saw US ‘coalitions’ first effectively deliver Iraq to Iranian proxies, and then suffer humiliating expulsion from Afghanistan.  Clawing back his territory inch by inch, Assad has never wavered in his determination to repel forces that once occupied districts of greater Damascus.

The few who predicted this, two or three years after the outbreak of the Syrian revolution, were condemned as blinded by cynical prejudice.  But they were right.  The defeat is no less real for all the objections raised by those in denial.  It does not matter that the country is in ruins: so were some victorious nations in 1918 or 1945.  It does not matter if Assad exists at the good pleasure of Russia, Iran and, if the truth be told, the US and Israel.  It does not matter that, given the support or connivance of these external powers, it was never a fair fight.  It does not matter that, in the minds of some powerless expats, ‘the struggle continues’.  The reality is that Assad has obtained his objectives, and the rebels have not, nor have they any prospect of attaining theirs.  None of this is likely to change, unless it be in Assad's favour.  This is apparent in the current push to normalize relations with his régime.

In this grim situation, some Assad opponents seem fully occupied with their outrage.  They fail to address the most pressing question:  what can be done for Syrians, not only those who live a miserable existence in fragile, imperfect refuge from Assad's operations, but also those who must live fully within his grasp.

For those fully outside Assad's reach, the answers are clear:  they are refugees.  The ways to help refugees are well-known.  If there is a big gap between knowing what should be done and seeing it is done, at least there is no mystery about making progress towards the objectives.  And some work tirelessly to achieve these goals.

But what of those who must live in areas under his control, or in areas where he still can inflict atrocities on those he detests?  These amount to millions of innocent people.  And once the realities of defeat are taken into account, their prospects are even worse, much worse, than normally supposed.  That's because Assad and his régime will almost certainly continue to commit atrocities well into the foreseeable future.  Since he has won, why wouldn’t he?  There will be thousands more victims, perhaps some yet unborn.

Picture a determined opponent of the Syrian régime, looking for a course of action with some chance of putting an end to this catastrophe – to overthrow Assad.  It is hard to imagine anyone coming up with a winning strategy today.  Assad’s opponents must now operate from a position of weakness.  Winning strategies would therefore have to come from a close watch on current realities, and a search for whatever opportunities the future may hold.

Unfortunately most of what we hear today about Syria has nothing to do with some future attempt to overthrow Assad.  It isn’t even aimed at helping Syrians living under his rule.  Instead of strategic thinking, we hear moralizing, dreams of vengeance and other varieties of wishful thinking, all wrapped up in talk of justice.  But it is just talk.  It has little to do with justice in any real-world sense.  It has little to do with even an intention to alleviate the suffering or restore the rights of the Syrian people.

Western media have - The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Guardian, and more centrist outlets like CNN - have been sympathetic to the Syrian revolution since its outbreak in 2011.  But this support has a particular slant.  There have been admiring portrayals of the democratic Syrian opposition - the Westernized, secular or liberal Muslim activists and politicians, the artists, the writers, overwhelmingly non-military figures.  There have been respectful accounts of brave journalists who bring back the news from these unthreatening sectors of the opposition.  There is much investigative work, documenting Assad’s atrocities and arguing, at great length, with those seeking to deflect guilt from the régime.  In defeat, these investigations tend to turn away from the present and towards the past.  Opposition has become, more and more, a matter of analysis and indignant commentary.

These efforts must at some point have had a role in the condemnations issued by important Western institutions – in official government statements, legislated sanctions like the American Caesar act, international arrest warrants, and the degradation of diplomatic relations with the Syrian régime.  These developments are sometimes described as victories, triumphs.  Indeed you can find defenses of Assad only in the ever-insignificant American left.

Yet Assad is no less a victor for all these declarations, researches, loud condemnations and dramatic gestures.  Not one of his captive subjects is any better off or more protected by this incessant outpouring of cruelly empty ‘support’.  Not one of them is helped by elegant commentators offering acidic observations about Gulf State, Egyptian or Jordanian, even Turkish cynicism.  This ‘support’ has indeed produced some results – the sanctions, the international indictments, the refusals to normalize.  It’s just that the results are valueless, as is the entire effort that produced them.

This does not mean that trying to help the Syrian people is hopeless.  It means that no one so much as contemplates the decisions that might offer some hope.  Instead, we have moralizers pontificating as if they were victors.  They pretend to mistake Assad, a victorious sovereign, for a hunted criminal.  They scorn the prospect of allies who do not espouse their high principles or standards of behaviour.  This refusal to back Assad’s most dangerous enemies helped him wreak his atrocities during his battles.  It continues to do so.

It’s only when this moralistic fantasizing is thoroughly discredited that it will become possible even to think about stopping Assad.  That means grasping the futility of attempts to bring him to justice, or to cement his isolation on the international stage.  What follows describes the absurdity pursuing these goals from a position of defeat.  Then it becomes clear that any chance to weaken the Syrian régime has to involve its strongest regional opponents – Turkey and the Islamist militias in Idlib – whatever their moral failings.

I will examine first the attempts to make the régime pay for its past atrocities, and then the measures designed to weaken Assad.

Justice

The current campaigns for justice aim address two horrors – Assad’s human rights violations and his war crimes.  The prospects of success in these ventures are, at most, negligible.

Human rights violations

The nicely calibrated, meticulously implemented version of justice popular among Assad’s Western opponents is entirely incapable of making a dent in the criminality so deeply entrenched within the Assadist régime.

Yes, a handful of incautious régime emigrants and government officials are captured and and judged.  This simply has no relationship to the scale or character of the injustices supposedly being addressed.

The official Syrian Security Services, responsible for most of the torture and murder, number around 120,000, not counting presumably thousands of informers, not counting the secretive and fearsome Air Force Branch.  The unbridled viciousness of these forces is not some secret, recently revealed by plucky investigators.  Indeed, Human Rights Watch issued a report decrying the situation the year before the start of the Syrian uprising.  Syria's security services were notorious at least back to 1980, when Tadmor (Palmyra) prison became the scene of a well-known massacre.  For those with even longer memories, there was the brutal terror of essentially the same régime in the mid-1950s.

This brutality bore no resemblance to the Nazis' intermittent efforts to conceal their crimes, much less with any "I was only following orders" protests of the Nazi torturers and their complicit bureaucrats.  On the contrary, the security services were happy to make their cruelty known.  So here is a state of affairs where the quasi-totality of 120,000 personnel were significantly involved, especially according to the current norms about complicity in such crimes.

This ongoing horror has all taken place within a régime that has beaten off the most determined revolutionaries, and which learned from Obama that it has nothing to fear from Western military intervention.  Out of 120,000, a dozen or so security force criminals have been foolhardy enough to get themselves brought to trial in Western Europe.  The idea that this constitutes even a hint of justice for the victims is absurd.  The idea that these arrests might be some harbinger of a deterrent effect is, well, a descent into madness.

War crimes

The same impunity that applies to Assad's torturers, also applies to his war crimes.  It must not be thought that these were the top-down strategies of a sophisticated military power, like the gas warfare of World War I or the Allied bombings of Axis cities.  The Syrian army is probably capable of sophistication, but the war crimes it committed beginning in 2012 did not, for the most part, have that character.  In a brilliant piece by Kheder Khaddour, the Syrian army emerges as something like a corrupt bureaucracy, divided into localized fiefs that react to threats with considerable flexibility and autonomy.  This has much to do with who is responsible for the crimes that some, dreaming about justice, imagine prosecuting.

The main crimes attributable to these Syrian armed forces are massacres, poison gas attacks, and barrel bombings.

The massacres have been carried out by thugs belonging to roaming militias.  These shabiha are sometimes steroid-crazed monsters, slitting throats with huge garish knives or perpetrating other atrocities.  They sometimes act in cooperation with Syrian army units, but not as Syrian army members.

The gas attacks are carried out by Syrian army members, or possibly allied forces with access to Syrian army stockpiles.  It is not clear how high in the army command chain the plans have been initiated.  What is clear is that the attacks were not the project of a disciplined modern army.  The delivery systems were extremely crude improvised munitions (IRAMs), rocket-assisted gas canisters, quite dangerous to the perpetrators.  No modern army would use such weapons.

In terms of lives lost, air attacks on hospitals, residential areas and breadlines were the worst.  The breadlines, crucial to Syrians, were hit with double-tap attacks, where a second munition was dropped once rescuers showed up.  Here again, most of the attacks were nothing like the work of a modern army.  They involved barrel bombs, improvised munitions not much above the level of a pipe bomb, un-aimable and typically dropped from helicopters.  Once more, the atrocities have the earmarks of disjointed, loosely directed, unsophisticated military forces.

For the purposes of justice, what matters here is that responsibility spreads throughout the Assadist forces to an unusual extent.  The issue is not whether Assad himself is responsible.  If he had only %1 responsibility in all the slaughter and torture, it would more than enough to merit the most severe punishments justice could impose.  But the ragged, diffuse nature of the atrocities means that, again to an unusual extent, a heavy burden of responsibility is diffused throughout the hundreds of thousands that formed the military resources of the Syrian régime.

Could Assadist outrages ever meet with just retribution?  The verdicts of the Nuremberg trials, followed by decades of lesser prosecutions, imposed penalties on only a fraction of those responsible for Nazi war crimes.  But compared to what international tribunals can deliver to Assadist criminals, the Nazi war crimes prosecutions would count as a stunning success.  The decentralized, anarchic, undisciplined bunch - one could say, a population of war criminals in Syria - will never show up before tribunals hundreds or thousands of miles away.  They will all get away with it.  Only a prolonged and very determined military occupation would change that, and the prospect of such an occupation simply doesn’t exist today.

In short, criminal investigation and prosecution will do absolutely nothing to restore the rights of the Syrian people - much less offer protection from brutal murder.  The prosecutions of Assadist criminals will reach a vanishingly small proportion of the culprits.  And that means a level of justice approaching zero.  Though much is made of 'holding Assad accountable', or anyone else accountable, this is an equivocation.  It only means identifying a very, very few of the culprits, who will go on to lead untroubled lives.  It does not mean imposing appropriate punishment on them.  Talk of accountability offers only the most fragile illusion of justice, not the reality.

The whole enterprise of research, documentation, investigation, analysis and prosecution of Assadist crimes will, in short, do nothing at all for the Syrian people.  It will not do anything to restore their rights.  It will not deter future atrocities.  It will not even bring some vastly inadequate consolation to the tiny proportion of families who see their persecutors condemned.  But will anything else help those suffering under the régime?  What about sanctions?  What about normalisation?

Sanctions

The appeal to sanctions must be that, somehow, they will make things better for Syrians:  sure, there will be some negative consequences, but overall, the régime will bend, and comply with something resembling minimal standards of decency.  Anyone believing this could hardly venture further into the depths of denial.

Assad won his war under sanctions, and Syria has been under sanctions since 1979.  Some argue that sanctioning Syria “hurts the people much more than the regime.” 

It's hard to see how this could be false, but suppose it is.  Even so, sanctions have failed to bring any substantial change anywhere, it seems.  No doubt the régime is hurt in the sense that it doesn't get the latest and greatest technology, and its backers have trouble getting desirable consumer goods, or doing business.  But the régime doesn't need any of this to continue its oppression or cement its rule.  No doubt sanctions give the régime less power to resist Western military action, but it's precisely this action which Western nations are steadfastly resolved to avoid.

This has been the net result of sanctions everywhere.  Here is a specialist commenting on the evasion of current sanctions against Russia.

“I don’t think there’s any secret what’s going on,” said Gary Stanley, a trade compliance expert who advises businesses in aerospace and other industries. “How long have we had Cuban sanctions? How long have we had North Korean sanctions? How long have we had Iranian sanctions? It never seems to put these folks out of business.”

It seems that demand for sanctions, and the sanctions themselves, are best understood as an expression of outrage.  Promoting sanctions seems unrelated to any expectations about making anything better for Syrians, or indeed to any concern about making things worse.  It complements the futile reliance on internationally imposed justice.

Normalisation

Maybe the idea about sanctions is not so much that they work, but that lifting them would be a sign that we weren't outraged any more.  Much the same might hold with other aspects of normalisation.

Many reports have focused, not on Westerners' outrage, but on the pain which many Syrians experience to see Assad rehabilitated in the region.  This focus gets us nowhere, because nothing can be done to alleviate their pain.  Indeed much of the commentary from anti-Assad sources stresses the callousness of, for example, the Gulf State rulers, who obviously care nothing for the suffering of the Syrian people.

This isn’t news.  No one, in the entire course of the Syrian revolution, has ever suggested that those who came to promote normalisation were anything but callous in the face of Syrians' agony.  Where Syrian rights and Syrian well-being are concerned, nothing has changed.

The only other question has to do with the effects of normalisation.  One aggrieved party says that "This weekend’s Arab League summit will embolden the regime to continue its crimes, including the forced disappearances of hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians."  The sentiments behind the claim deserve respect, but the claim itself isn't plausible. 

The Syrian régime has never, at any point in seven decades, showed any hesitation to engage in its atrocious practices.  It has never shown the slightest sensitivity to international indignation, or any response to stigmatization.  It has at most offered some paper-thin imitation of human decency when playing on the international stage.  Nothing suggests even a remote chance that external pressure would bring change for the better.  Nothing suggests that normalisation will make things worse, because the régime in its isolation already allowed itself the full measure of horror.

Normalisation may bring some changes.  Perhaps it will expand imports of Western consumer products.  It might boost the economy.  It might mean that some humanitarian aid gets though - to the Syrian government, which will know how to turn that aid to its own advantage.  Syria might be stronger; this might help the Syrian people, or it might make things even worse for those exposed to Assad's vengeance.  Most likely, it is as with sanctions: on balance lifting them will do no good, and not lifting them will do no good.  Normalisation won't help, and withholding it won't help either.

Hopeless, but for whom?

In summary, for those who demand nothing less than justice, there is no hope at all.  And this would mean there is no hope at all for the Syrian people.  They will continue to suffer at Assad’s good pleasure.  This could go on for years, even decades.

When the lives of so many Syrians are under such atrocious and open-ended attack, it seems natural, reasonable to suppose that what matters most are Syrian lives: saving them, perhaps improving them, should count most in decisions affecting them.  But for many Westerners, and some Westernized Syrians, saving Syrian lives is by no means what matters most.  What matters most is to make choices that affirm various high principles, and reject choices that don’t.  It is the mentality of someone who sees an apartment block set ablaze by arsonists, hears the screams of the occupants, but won’t call in the police and fire, because they’re dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters.  Thus even the most vocal refugee advocates didn’t offer so much as a murmur in support of Erdogan, whose continued rule shields the lives of many Syrians outside Assad’s grasp.

This perverse fastidiousness is most apparent in decisions about Syria itself.  If the terrible state of Syrians represents the problem, no one now can suppose that prosecutions or sanctions constitute the solution.  A solution, then, would have to involve a full-scale, long-term military intervention, one that ends the régime once and for all.  But then the problem becomes:  who’s going to intervene?  Here is where every public analysis of Syria’s agony simply freezes up, and has done so ever since it became apparent that the pro-democracy, Westernized Syrian factions were not going to enter Damascus in triumph.

Yet the prospects for military intervention, were Western countries to support it, have got better, not worse.  Russia will certainly emerge weaker from the Ukraine conflict, not stronger.  Just two years ago, the prospect of serious confrontation with Russia made military action in Syria a non-starter, because it posed a tiny but still unacceptable prospect of all-out world war.  Today, that prospect is tinier still, and seems acceptable to many political actors - as the Ukraine conflict, again, has shown.

The trouble is that Western reluctance to intervene in Syria has increased at a rate that far outpaces the increasing ease of intervention. There are several reasons for this. The West’s humiliation in Afghanistan makes another mission supremely unattractive to Western publics.  The discovery of vast natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean makes Syria irrelevant to Western concerns about energy supplies.  And the need to replenish Western armaments sent to Ukraine, combined with concerns about China, make Western militaries ever more reluctant to take on another large-scale burden.

But this does not mean that there can be no hope for Syrians.  It only means that hope cannot rest on Western military intervention.  It does raise the possibility that the West would finally back a regional power, Turkey, in such a venture.  This would mean military assistance to Turkey, in quantity and quality, orders of magnitude greater than today.  So armed, Turkey would be in a position to end Assad's rule.  To be clear, this would require cooperation with some sector of the Syrian revolt.  That means Syrian Islamists because, in the words of one specialist,

As it stands, the most capable and powerful factions which are able to launch an offensive against the Assad regime are the Islamist rebel groups in north-western Syria.

For the West, backing Turkey to the hilt is far, far cheaper than any of America’s recent wars.  Turkey already has a large and capable army.  It would be happy to get the F-35s it was promised, and could therefore achieve air superiority: the sticking point was supposed to be its S-400 anti-aircraft system, yet there was no fuss about Greece’s S-300.  Strengthening Turkey, which controls all access from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, would also strengthen an important counterweight to Russia in the region. 

Even better, Turkish intervention would allow the US to withdraw from Syria altogether.  This might be a good idea, especially for those appalled by Assad.  In the Northeast, the US backs the SDF, a front for the PKK.  The PKK is designated as a terrorist organization by both the US and the EU.  Much more important, the PKK/SDF and its political counterpart the YPG are intermittent, discreet and fractious but crucial allies of Assad:  They have played an important role in his victories ever since 2012.  They are also proponents of the normalisation so deplored when Arabs propose it.  There is strong pro-Kurdish sentiment in Europe, but there are other ways of satisfying it, for example by backing the PKK rival, the KDP.  Yet Western nations affect bemusement when Turkey seems to object to NATO powers sheltering a PKK-dominated force in northwest Syria, a branch of an organisation conducting military operations within Turkey.

At the moment, this possibility is not a live option.  Perhaps it will never be.  The main obstacle is that no one so much as suggests it. The reason is unclear.

What’s clear is that, in Western eyes, Turkey, in the person of Erdogan, represents a kind of regional Donald Trump.  He is a ‘conservative’ Muslim, anything but LGBTQ-friendly.  Even after winning a “highly competitive and consequential” election, he is a dictator.  He consorts with Islamists, who fulfil the role of something like the Proud Boys in the US.  He is considered financially reckless and given to grandiose projects. His wife is veiled, perhaps submissive?  In short, his brand is terrible.

In contrast, his enemy the PKK has a wonderful brand:  the PKK is secular, a brave underdog, and features strong, attractive female leaders and fighters.  This is not sarcasm: branding really seems to be at the root of many commentators’ political choices, who after all have no skin in the game.  But why the partisanship?  No social or sexual minorities will be better off because Western decision-makers dislike Erdogan and Turkey.  While deploring Trump might have some effect on what actually happens in the US and even Europe, deploring Erdogan will change nothing for Turkey’s minorities. Its only effect is to make the most plausible route to helping Syrians unthinkable.  It is as if the value-based decisions affecting Syria are divorced from any consideration of cause and effect.

For there to be hope for Syrians, there must at least be people whose desire to end Assad’s atrocities outweighs their branding preferences and their pet causes.  They would recognize that if there are no good options, that’s not a cue to shake one’s head and walk out on Syrians’ agony.  This shouldn’t even look like a hard choice.  Leaving the Syrians to their awful fate is not going to produce some democratic, LGBTQ-friendly, feminist, journalist-respecting state in either Turkey or Syria.  Indeed it is hard to understand how hatred of Erdogan and the Islamists must somehow transmute into useless indignation that might as well be cruel indifference.

It would be disingenuous to pretend that Turkish-Islamist intervention has no real drawbacks.  It certainly would not satisfy all legitimate Kurdish demands.  There are impressive analysts and commentators who would agree with my pessimistic arguments but just shake their heads at the very idea of supporting an Erdogan initiative linked to his most likely potential ally, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the increasingly powerful Islamist leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).  But what could these knowledgeable writers suggest?

They could not, with a straight face, pretend to expect Western powers to intervene, after all this time and in this very tense world situation.  They would have to weigh misery under Assad against the possibility of something better under a Turkish-Islamist administration.  Jolani and Erdogan have both taken pains to give the impression of moderation.  Are they sincere?  Even if they are, could they keep the situation in hand?  Would the Western or regional powers cooperate in their efforts?  Could some solution placate the Russians and Iran?  The answers are simple: we can’t possibly know.  The choice is between the absolute certainty of unending disaster, for millions, and the distinct but lesser possibility of some other type of disaster.  It would be irrational to prefer the former.

Nonsense about the US withdrawal from Syria

This attempts to counter some of the foolish comments made about Trump's withdrawal from Syria.

The least foolish of these is that the battle against ISIS is not won.  No it isn't, and Trump's claim that it is, is plainly false.  But to harp on this is absurd.

For one thing, there isn't the slightest possibility that keeping US troops in Syria would win the battle, or prevent an ISIS resurgence.   ISIS' ultimate strength lies, not in its Syrian or Iraqi enclaves, but in what the West and Arab authoritarian governments have done to the peoples of the region, and in the conditions in Muslim countries worldwide.  These conditions guarantee a literally unending stream of militants seeking justice and revenge.  The notion that 2000 US troops would affect this dynamic is ludicrous.  Equally foolish are the tiresome recommendations that the underlying conditions be addressed.   The sage pundits who say these things know perfectly well that the West will never, ever address these conditions:  it can't, because they occur in sovereign states.  It would take a Western occupation of those states, involving hundreds of thousands of troops for decades, to cure the injustices of the region, and even then it's not clear that the economic basis for healthy societies exists.  In other words, whatever the West is going to do, whatever leadership it has, ISIS won't be defeated.  What then is the point of warning us that Trump's withdrawal will not defeat ISIS?

For another, forget the mantra about how effective the Kurds have been against ISIS.  Their victories are almost entirely the result of overwhelming US air and artillery support.  Their actual capabilities are better assessed by looking at how even a much-weakened ISIS can rout Kurdish forces with attacks during storms and under other conditions inimical to air operations.  The Syrian rebels, not to mention the Turkish army, would be at least as effective as the Kurds in combating ISIS, and they wouldn't need a US ground presence to do it.

There is more foolishness.

It is said that withdrawal shows the US to be an unreliable ally, and that this is a dire mistake.

In the first place, nothing says you're unreliable like supporting, with weapons, troops and air power, the armed, active enemy of your ally.  That's what the US did when it backed the Syrian arm of the Kurdish PKK against its NATO ally, Turkey.  So Trump's withdrawal of this support could well be seen as a return to reliability, not the abandonment of it.

Second, it's unclear that appearing unreliable in this instance would make much difference to the US position in the world.  Nations are allied to the US, not because they have touching faith in America, but because they have little choice.  They don't want to fall under Russian or Chinese domination.   The idea that alliances are made and preserved on trust runs contrary to all historical precedent.  It's childish.

It is said that US withdrawal is a gift to Putin.

This carries absurdity into insanity.  The unspoken truth about the US' Kurdish 'allies' is that they are also allies of Russia and Assad.  In the 2015 campaigns against rebel Aleppo, Russia and Assad even provided air support to the Kurds.  Later, Assad secured for the Kurds a road whereby they could move between their Northeastern and Northwestern territories.  He also pays for much of the infrastructure in the Northeastern provinces.  This means that, in allying with the PKK/YPG, the US is allied to Assad, Russia...  and Iran.   It's true that Putin probably enjoys seeing the US leave; he doesn't want a US presence in Syria.  But it's also true that Obama, and until now Trump, have been fighting on Putin's side.  He now faces an expanded Turkish presence in Northern Syria, which threatens and complicates his relations with Assad and Iran.  Because Turkey backs the rebels, it even threatens the security of Russian bases in Latakia and Tartous.  Trump's withdrawal means the US will mend relations with Turkey.  That in turn means Putin can't expect to pry that country - a real strategic prize that until recently seemed almost within his grasp - away from its Western alliance.  Finally, the US retains its air bases and naval presence in the region, so that US withdrawal of 2000 troops from Syria makes not the slightest difference to the regional balance of power.  Some gift.

It is said, with feeling, that the Kurds have been betrayed.

Even if there is some truth to this, it is foolish.  For one thing, the Kurds have been supremely opportunistic in their choice of allies.   They feigned neutrality when the rebels were strong, yet with increasing frankness came out on Assad's side when the rebels faltered.  For another, the morality of betrayal depends on circumstances.  The Kurds chose to ally with a régime so monstrous that adjectives like 'brutal' can't begin to capture the extent of its atrocities.  When the King of Italy abandoned Mussolini in 1943 he betrayed Hitler.  Was that reprehensible?

The criticism of Trump's withdrawal, though couched in the language of morality and even honour, is curiously oblivious to the sort of humanitarian considerations that you'd think would belong to those values.  The most likely consequence of US withdrawal - should it really occur - is that Northern Syria will become a refuge for perhaps millions of Syrians, under Turkish protection.  Meanwhile in the rest of Syria, as widely predicted, Syrians in formerly rebel areas are subjected to arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and murder.  But sure, pontificate some more about the US withdrawal.

The Syrian failure: aftermath and legacy

The reaction to Syria's horrors did nothing to mitigate them.  They will continue for decades.   It may be useful to review just how throughly and deeply irredeemable is the failure.

To say that there were war crimes and human rights violations is like saying Charles Manson misbehaved.  Assad's crimes have been documented in heart-stopping detail, not least by the 'Caesar', who smuggled out prison files and fifty thousand photographs, at great risk of a fate worse than death.  His efforts, plus the meticulous work of the individuals and groups who proved that the régime was the culprit in chemical weapons attacks...   these efforts too are now, beyond any doubt or hope, in vain.

To  say that Assad and company should be brought before an international tribunal is self-deluding sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Let's be clear.  Assad and company will never be brought to justice.   Tribunal verdicts will have no effect at all.  All the evidence painstakingly assembled, sometimes at the cost of brave lives, counts for nothing.  There will be no reconciliation, and there is no truth to come out, because more than enough is known already.  There is no point in making more people aware of that truth, because it's too late.  That won't even produce useful sentiments, let along useful non-psychological reactions - sentiments don't stop homicidal rulers.  If someone declares, somewhere, that the Syrian repression was a genocide, so what - it's not even true.  'The world', the 'international order', some 'community', don't matter.  Assad is far too secure.  There is absolutely nothing to be done that any collection of worthy countries or institutions would ever be willing to do, and rightly so, because the only effective response would be a military intervention so massive as to risk, given the Russian presence, nuclear war.  It's great to help the refugees, the victims, but that's cleaning up after Assad, not something that could lead to restraining him or his ilk.  Indeed most refugees will stay or end up in Syria, left to his tender mercies.  As for reconstruction, that of course will make Assad much stronger.  It will focus on his supporters, not those most in need.

All that's left, all that might conceivably have some positive effect but won't, is to expose the thinking that encouraged the Syrian betrayal.  Try comparing the reaction on Syria to reactions to other horrors.

There are greater and lesser atrocities.  Pinochet murdered more than 3000 people, some tortured to death with terrible cruelty. There are people who approve of Pinochet, or brush off his slaughter.  They may be condemned, but like Henry Kissinger they continue to be accepted in the mainstream.   They shouldn't be, but this indicates that society, the mainstream, is prepared to accept this level of brutality.

Then there are major atrocities:  Cambodia, Rwanda are clear cases.   Anyone who brushes off those killings would not be considered normal, but treated as a pariah.  No one hears from such people.  No one suggested helping Pol Pot with reconstruction and reconciliation.   No one said that, well, realistically, we need to consider whether we have any vital interest in Rwanda.  Not even Kissinger.

The atrocities committed by Assad are very clearly in the second category, not the first.  Yet people who obliquely place them in the first group are considered not only mainstream-tolerable, but, quite often, intelligent contrarians.  One hears from them a lot.

But that's not the worst of it.   Assad apologists fall into three categories.  There are Iranians and Russians. Those countries have long-standing alliances with the Assads and might be considered to have some sort of security interest in the régime.  Their stance is disgusting but hardly worth highlighting, since no one will do anything about it.  Then there are members of Syrian minorities whom Assad has implicated in his crimes.   And then there are leftists, stuck in the 70s or so, who don't matter.  Obsessing about Assad apologists does no one any good.

Those who do matter aren't the obvious offenders, but respected observers whose attempts or pretense at objectivity or decency betrayed the Syrian people.  They obscure Assad's place in the second category, among the very worst of the monsters.  These people may condemn the régime in ringing terms, they may say 'doing something' about Assad's atrocities is 'urgent'.   But they nonetheless demote the urgency of the matter, because for them, everything is 'urgent'.   It is 'urgent' that an imprisoned journalist be released, that a child is reunited with its parents, that minority rights are respected, that 'genders' get the toilets they need, and so on.  And perhaps these things are all indeed urgent, but they do not compare in urgency with stopping a man who has murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands.

Human rights organizations are prominent in this morally and politically witless denial of priorities.  So are any number of analysts and commentators.  They talked about Assad as they would not talk about Rwanda or Pol Pot.  They would not, in those cases, have spoken of  'difficult choices', as they did about Assad and the Kurds and 'the jihadis'.  They would regard any accommodation with Assad as no more to be contemplated than with the fanatic responsible for so many dead, tortured Cambodians.  They would not have insisted the world weigh heavily that some rebels didn't believe in democracy and espoused a repressively conservative social agenda.  They would not have relentlessly conflated this social conservatism with, incredibly, some sort of terrorist threat.

These analysts should be treated as moral lepers if their warnings played a role in the West's betrayal of the Syrian revolution.  No one warned the world about Vietnam's rescue of the Cambodian people on the grounds that the Vietnamese were naughty communists.  No one thought it was a tough choice whether to back the murderers of Rwanda or their victims.  No one reduced the description of these régimes to "brutal dictatorship".

It is far too late for this to make any difference to Syrians.  Assad has won and he will endure. He will be condemned as a reprehensible leader, but a leader nonetheless.  He is protected by powerful allies, UN vetoes, and discreet commitments from 'indignant' Western powers not to challenge his rule.  But perhaps it is not too late to prevent this sort of kindler, gentler, 'hard choices' whitewash from recurring.  Those who preached caution, scepticism and realpolitik about the Syrian rebels made choices that should never be forgotten or forgiven.   It doesn't matter what nice things they now say about refugees.  It doesn't matter what righteous outrage they express about Assad.   When it counted, they didn't even begin to  impart to the situation the moral urgency, even the panic, that it deserved.  They were not willing to accept that their worries about extremist and terrorist rebels were as nothing compared to the importance of stopping a monster.  That is a poisonous legacy.

Let no one reply that these analysts were realistic.  At its limits, morality and even Realpolitik converge.   All nations have an interest in keeping barbarism within practical limits.  Slaughter and mistreatment may sometimes be genuinely advantageous, but for that very reason it's a good idea to act when slaughter and mistreatment become an open-ended, sadistic orgy, engulfing tens of thousands and exceeding anything plausibly endorsed by rational self-interest.  Mad tyrants, as we see, create floods of fugitives, and potentially destabilising wars.  They also create militants out to punish the comfortable nations who betrayed the victims.  Auden was right:

I and the public know,
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

This is likely the last post I will write on Egypt or Syria.   My sole aim has been, however ineffectually and wrong-headedly, to defend their revolutions.  Such attempts are pointless now.

Betrayers in Egypt, betrayed in Syria: Liberalism’s Arab Winter

The sufferings of Egyptians and Syrians will go on for decades.   That will allow plenty of time for think tanks, graduate students, journalists, op-ed writers, scholars and security analysts to build or enhance their careers on the ‘lessons’ of these events.  This essay offers the one lesson that none of these efforts will produce.  It is that, if the Middle East has a future, it does not lie with freedom, democracy, ‘empowering’ this or that favored sector of society, investing in this or that or the other thing, shoring up anti-something efforts, or ‘standing up’ for something-or-other.  It lies, for better or however worse, with Islam.

This is not an Islamist claim.  It doesn’t really have a lot to do with the nature of Islam in any of its forms.  It has to do with the role of liberals in the so-called Arab Spring, and with the role of the political tendencies and institutions they hold dear.   The following will argue this from the conduct and motivations of liberals in Egypt and Syria, and from the record of secular government in the region.  To examine this conduct, you need to consider the nature of the events we’re dealing with.

Their very name invites distortion.   The term 'Arab Spring' reveals the delusions deliberately or, much more often, unthinkingly promoted by those who sympathise with the now-failed revolts in Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia (which won't be discussed here).  The spring in the name comes from the 1968 "Prague Spring", well-known as Czechoslovakia's nonviolent striving towards nice, Western, democratic ideals.  The idea was to portray the revolts in the same way:  nice, non-violent, pro-Western, pro-democracy, and 'democracy' in the Polly-Annish Western sense of a practice where only People Like Us get elected.

None of this applies to the revolts.

Even in Egypt, they were not non-violent: indeed this lie is also a grievous insult to the heroic Egyptians who fought police and snipers like lions.  The idea that only non-violent resisters should be held up for admiration pervades not only Western but middle class Middle Eastern propaganda.  Apparently, it is only in the West that fighting tyrants is acceptable.

As for nice ideals, that held for the leadership and much of the vanguard in the very first days of the revolts.  But this induces a misunderstanding:  that the vanguard was the heart and soul of these uprisings.

They were not.  Had this been true, the 'Arab Spring' would have been just another of the many pointless middle class cameos in the story of stagnant or dynamically monstrous Middle Eastern régimes.  There would have been some arrests and things would have got right back to normal.  But it was what's annoyingly called the 'Arab Street' that was out to finish what the middle class liberals started.  The ordinary Egyptians (and Syrians), the ones who didn't make themselves heard on web sites or social media, were not Prague Spring types.  (When the song Sout al horreya refers to hunger, it is not singing about the middle class.)  They were religious and had become increasingly so as the hopes raised by Nasser’s secularist vision faded.  Their religion, as it reached out to those trapped in poverty, inevitably acquired political overtones.  It affected their notions of freedom and democracy: Morsi’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, did not count as some dangerous threat to their version of those ideals.  Unlike the middle class, they wanted real social change, better lives, not institutional reform.  Some of them wanted power.   They felt their time had come, and their rule would not conform to a liberal, secularist model.

The recent history of resistance to the state testifies to this.  Those who died opposing the military in Egypt were, overwhelmingly, Muslim Brotherhood, and this after the middle class ushered in a military dictatorship in the name of liberal values.   In Syria, when resistance had to arm itself or perish, it was Islamist militias who increasingly dominated the middle class movements with their business-suited leaders in Turkey or Europe.  These Islamist movements were not the heart and soul of the demonstrations that are now reviewed with nostalgia.  But they were the heart, soul and muscle of resistance, when the going got really tough and rebel units, in the face of massacres outside the main urban centers, established themselves in the countryside & smaller cities.  And as usual, in the countryside, people were more conservative and less liberal.

What the middle class liberals started gained historic significance because it almost instantaneously drew in hundreds of thousands who were neither middle class nor liberal.  How did the liberals react?

The liberals’ conduct.

In Egypt, their reaction can be summed up in few words.   When Egypt’s first free and fair election brought in Mohamed Morsi, whom they considered an Islamist, they spun tales of how he was a sinister authoritarian in disguise.[i]  They poo-pooed the idea that democracy was as it had been defined for two thousand years, as majority rule, and decided it had to guarantee that liberal voices and ideologies predominated.  More important, they decided that yes, they actually preferred the murdering, torturing military to Morsi, who they feared was the thin edge of a Brotherhood wedge.  The very idea that they didn’t know what their prominent participation in Morsi’s overthrow would bring to Egypt is beneath contempt.

In Syria, it’s more complex.

The liberals fall into three categories – ex-officers in the Syrian armed forces, exile politicians, and highly literate activists.  Though middle class, they could not have behaved more differently from their Egyptian counterparts.   For the most part they steadfastly refused to abandon their Islamist allies, despite strong pressure from the US.

Perhaps the liberals relied on the Islamist forces to keep Assad at bay.   Perhaps, adequately supported by the US, they would have turned on the ‘extremist’ militias.   But the fact is, they never did.   This, however, proved the undoing of the Syrian revolution.

Here the fateful decision for the liberals was not so much with whom to ally domestically, but with whom to ally outside the country.  They chose, or tried to choose, the West.  They did not choose the region's counterpart to Morsi:  Erdogan, incessantly labeled an anti-liberal authoritarian.  To have chosen Erdogan would have meant, were the revolution to succeed, decisive Turkish involvement and influence.  This would mean, in turn, that the liberals were irreparably subordinated to the Islamist tendencies represented by Erdogan himself and by the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.  The liberals, it seems, were not dead set against alliance with such forces when it was a matter of physical survival.  But to accept Islamist leadership, if not immediately then in Syria's future, was something the liberals could not contemplate.   So they persisted in their dream that they were indeed fighting for Freedom and Democracy, and so was 'Syria' itself.

But those where not 'Syria's' objectives.   A large though unknown proportion of Syria's anti-Assad masses weren’t liberals; they were likely more conservative than the Muslim Brotherhood itself. (Indeed despite strenuous efforts to highlight the role of women in the demonstrations, the crowds were overwhelmingly male, to an extent that defies attempts to present the 2011 uprising as predominantly secularist.)  Many others, not Islamist or even conservative, turned to the Islamist militias as their best counter to Assad.   Western governments knew this and quickly soured on the revolution.  Long before the emergence of ISIS and ‘Al-Qaeda affiliated’ group, the West was nervous about the Muslim Brotherhood component of the Syrian National Council and the Free Syrian Army.  Though it took some time to become apparent, once this happened, the game was up.

From the very start of its ‘efforts’, the US and denied the rebels anti-aircraft weapons they feared might fall into the hands of the rebels’ Islamist battlefield allies.  Without such weapons, the rebels couldn’t hang on to their territorial gains and couldn’t protect their civilian populations.  Soon arms deliveries slowed to a trickle.  The same fear of Islamist domination prompted the US to decide it didn’t, after all, want the revolution to succeed, nor even give it the support it needed to survive.  And it did not survive.   So the choice of the West over Erdogan was indeed fateful, and the liberals played a major role in making it.

By allying, not with Turkey but with 'the West', i.e. the US and its ever-serviceable partner, Jordan, the liberals had mired the Syrian uprising in false hopes and, eventually, worse, a partly successful attempt to convert the desperate revolutionary forces away from rebellion, to become mere Western proxies in the fight against ISIS.  It was also to invite the West to promote reliably anti-Islamist forces, the Kurdish PKK, in preference to the rebels and in sneaking, tacit alliance with Assad.

Turkey held the only promise of deposing Assad, because it held the only promise of an understanding between the anti-Assad forces, Russia and Iran.  Turkey couldn’t care less that Russia annexed the Crimea, nor that Russia wanted an expanded presence in the Mediterranean.  It didn’t care about Hezbollah and had important economic ties to Iran.  There was, then, a chance that Russia and Iran could be persuaded to sideline Assad in return for an important regional ally who would be fine with an expansion of Russian bases in the area.  On the other hand, a rebel-US alliance meant that potential allies, Iran and Russia, had to be enemies.

The liberals’ choice also hobbled Turkey.  The West’s bright idea for fixing Syria was to support the YPG, the Syrian branch of the Kurdish PKK.  They were Assad’s allies and Erdogan's military enemies.  On top of this, the West (and sometimes the liberals) consistently incited secularist rebel units against hard-line Islamist forces, so that the rebels were weakened still further.  Erdogan, beset by a pro-Assad opposition, potential Russian pushback and the US’ protection of the Kurds, could not provide the military muscle the rebels needed.  So the US betrayal was the end of the road.  Choosing the West meant, unwillingly, unknowingly but unavoidably, choosing Assad.  That was the terrible price for placing faith in Western democracies.

Why did the liberals make their choices?

Though the choices of Syrian and Egyptian liberals were radically different, their ultimate motivation was the same.  They found the prospect of an Islamist future intolerable.

It would be hard for those who have never seen Egypt to fathom the frustration experienced by liberals there, even under Mubarak’s secularist rule.   A Muslim librarian, gone to buy a washing machine, is berated by the salesman for not wearing a veil.  She complains that her assistants constantly slip religious tracts into her display cases.   Alcohol is bought and consumed semi-clandestinely, amid disapproval.  A woman is told that if she smokes on the street, "everyone will think you are a prostitute."  Even modestly dressed, women are subject to constant harassment - and sometimes they would rather not be modestly dressed.   You leave a famous antique shop to find the landing entirely occupied by devout employees at prayer.  You can't have bacon and eggs, or kiss on the street, or sign into a hotel with a male other than your husband.  To enter into a mixed marriage requires a high tolerance for outraged opposition.  The liberals, by and large wealthy enough to travel and even live partly abroad, find the country stifling.   These lifestyle preoccupations are pervasive, unceasing, and, the truth is, far, far more important to most liberals than whether they live under freedom and democracy.  They were much happier under Nasser's aggressively secularist dictatorship.

Maybe better to say this:  the liberals wanted cultural freedom, and, for some, the freedom to write political commentary linked to their media careers.  But they weren't interested in political freedom.  Though pretending otherwise, they viewed it with hostility when they saw it in operation.  Political freedom meant democracy and democracy meant the Brotherhood.

The liberals, bluntly put, view the Muslim Brotherhood and its followers with deep hatred.  They felt accommodation was impossible.  They were prepared to live in the 'pre-Spring' atmosphere, but feared that, with the Brotherhood in a governing position, life would become genuinely intolerable.  So the emergence of an Islamist government was seen as an existential threat - not to the existence of liberals, but to the existence of the lifestyle they worked hard to maintain.

The Syrian liberals' situation was almost the mirror-image of the Egyptians'.   Despite sincere hatred of Assad's Syria, liberals could well imagine that his overthrow would bring something much like what the Egyptian liberal experienced and very probably what they feared for the future.  Though the Assad régime was repugnant, though the course of events made armed revolution the only possible response, Syrian liberals were deeply concerned to retain control over the revolution's course.   This could not exclude alliance with conservative Islamist forces, but it had to involve some external constraint on the extent to which Islamists would dominate a post-Assad future.   That constraint could only come from close, fruitful alliance with the West, and, since the Europeans were far too timid to act on their own, with the US.   Unlike their Egyptian counterparts, the Syrian liberals never contemplated the betrayal of the revolution undertaken.  (Indeed the entire history of independent Syria indicated that any attempt by members of a liberal élite to rejoin the fold would end in torture and death.)  But they hoped against hope that US support would enable them to retain strong leadership of the anti-Assad forces.

So in Egypt and Syria alike, fear of Islamists pushed the liberals into decisions disastrous for their revolutions.   But did they really have an alternative?   If they did, was it anything more than an unappetizing choice of some supposedly lesser evil?

The future

Suppose that the liberals were completely justified in their attitudes towards political Islam.  Suppose they  had a deeply principled commitment to the values that happened to underwrite their lifestyle.  It hardly matters.  Political Islam is the only road to change left in the Middle East.  It might be a dead end or even a road to hell, but nothing will improve unless that road is taken.  It’s the only way to bring the sort of real change that sidelines the élites - often the 'notable families' who have run things since Ottoman times - who have so conspicuously failed to provide good government.

The reason Islam offers the only realistic hope for change is simple:  there are no plausible alternatives.  Sure, liberal democracy or some other secularist tendency might in theory offer some wonderful solution.  But they cannot offer a plausible solution because their record is so indelibly tainted, especially but not exclusively in the Middle East.

A rational observer of history has to conclude that, believe it or not, Islamism offers the safest alternative, because literally every major atrocity in recent history has been secularist, including the mass slaughters of Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Congo.   True, history also offers some good secular régimes, including liberal democracies, but these failed to ward off the horrors of, for example, Franco Hitler and Stalin, not to mention two world wars.  Someone might argue that, despite these unusual cases, secularist and in particular liberal democratic government offers rewards that outweigh the risks.   But that won’t work if, as a rational Middle Easterner would do, you focus the secularist record in the Middle East.

There we have just two régimes that might possibly be considered liberal democracies.   Israel, with its bloodshed and its dedication to racial sovereignty, can hardly attract emulation.  So there remains Lebanon, which even has a roughly Western-style economy.  But Lebanon’s civil war cost 175,000 lives, and no one suggests a repeat is out of the question.  Yet when we look at other secularist régimes, the record is even worse.

The secularist governments of the Middle East have included some non-disasters, countries where torture and repression are rife as the society slowly deteriorates – in Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco.  Otherwise, secularism has been a catastrophe.  There’s Saddam, the Assads, and the Shah of Iran.  There’s Iraq after the American occupation.  Gaddafi drifts into insanity after inflicting terrible suffering in Chad and Libya itself.   Secularist government brought Yemen nothing but war and starvation.  Algeria’s horrifying struggle with Islamists cost another 175,000 lives.

But it is not just the terrible record of secularism that make it an implausible solution.  Woven into these disasters is the West’s dogged resistance to every single secular or moderate ideology that gained some traction in the Middle East – as opposed to the gallery of dictators that have benefitted from Western support.  Communism wouldn't do.  Arab nationalism and Arab socialism weren't good enough either.  Their greatest and most successful exponent, Nasser, became a pariah among Western democracies; he was undone by the Western-sponsored and secularist state of Israel.  Moderate Islam, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, has labelled extremist and ruthlessly suppressed by the entrenched élites it threatened.   The West may not have overthrown Morsi, but they quickly accepted the coup and have been lavishing military and economic attention on the Sisi régime ever since.   Yet if a secularist project wanted to please the West and dedicated itself to repressing even moderate Islamist groups, it would have time and energy for nothing else.

With secularism offering no plausible promise of change, only Islam remains.  Even if what matters most is the defeat of political Islam, that will never happen unless Islamists are discredited.  To be discredited, they would have to be given a real, full chance to govern, free from the sort of deep state sabotage that marked Morsi's so-called reign in Egypt.  Only then will political Islam prove or disprove itself.  If it brings positive change, great.  If it doesn't, the secularists will get their new chance, without the encumbrance of a strong Islamist opposition.

 

Given the whole secularist record in the Middle East, I wouldn't be optimistic how that would turn out.  The abiding contemporary liberal stance is loud espousal of freedom and democracy.  But these only have to do with the forms and legal structures of government, not with policy.  They don't give people jobs or address climate change.  There is also, of course, commitment to diversity, which means we will all acquire full participation in our disastrous societies.  In the early days of liberalism, liberals at least offered laissez-faire capitalism, a bad program but a substantive program nonetheless.  Today they have nothing.  I can't see why they would be more likely than Islamists to find substantive solutions.

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[i] For a critical analysis of this claim, see Mohammed Fadel, “What killed Egyptian democracy?”, Boston Review, January 24, 2014, http://bostonreview.net/forum/mohammad-fadel-what-killed-egyptian-democracy