To Sarah Carr, on Finkelstein and Morayef

Norman Finkelstein makes a fool of himself by suggesting you have been anything but forthrightly opposed to military rule from the word go.  He's over the top about Morayef as well.  That's a shame, because he might have made a more measured criticism of her that would lead, unfortunately, to a more measured criticism of you. I'm risking a furious reaction here because Morayef, I know, is all but sacred.  I take the risk because my reservations about your stance seem less unproductive than what Hellyer, sleazily, likes to call "the blame game".

Here's what you say à propos of Morayef.

As for his cheap little slur against Heba Morayef, I’ll let her respond to that should she choose to. The only point I want to make is that one can have crap politics and still be a good human rights monitor, just as one can have good politics and be a crap human being. A human rights monitor’s job is to monitor, as objectively and as neutrally as possible, regardless of his or her political views, and if Norman Finkelstein believe that Heba Morayef failed to do this, and if he is unaware that she is one of the few high profile Egyptians to have retained their professionalism, neutrality and humanity while the rest of the country went mad then he knows even less about Egypt and what happens here than I feared."

           

That's the response of a friend, but it's not accurate.   Professionalism and neutrality would not countenance Morayef's pronouncements against Morsi.  They go well beyond what you describe as her job: "to monitor, as objectively and as neutrally as possible, regardless of his or her political views".  They extend to very contestable analyses of Morsi's role and rule.

I contested them here and indirectly here.  Maybe I'm wrong about the alleged Morsi-SCAF alliance, but even then enough remains to establish that Morayef's comments impinge on her alleged professionalism.  It is not reasonable to see neutrality in a person so forthright in condemning Morsi yet so wishy-washy about condemning the coup, as she certainly was here:

EMMA ALBERICI: Tell us why is it that millions of people who fought so hard for democracy just a matter of a couple of years ago are now trying so hard to overthrow their first democratically elected government?

           

HEBA MORAYEF:  "Do ya know, I think that's not really the question. I think the question is: why did 14 million people turn out on June 30th. I think some of the coverage of this crisis in Egypt right now is oversimplifying it as a choice between democracy or the military and it's really far more complex than that. Because 14 million people is the biggest demonstration that Egypt has ever seen and that was not a pro-military demonstration. That was an anti-Morsi demonstration. So the question is: why have we got to a moment where 14 million people turn out in opposition to President Morsi's rule and what has he done in the last year to bring us to this moment? Now there are those at this point who would welcome the military in with other open arms. There are others who have deep reservations about a military - a return of the military to power. But I think the question is not purely one of legitimacy versus a coup. And in a sense, President Morsi's speech has framed it in that way. His speech last night spoke only of the legitimacy of his rule and addressed no concessions to the millions of Egyptians who are deeply, deeply dissatisfied with his rule."

One could add that someone who accepted without demur the military's crowd estimates doesn't inspire confidence as a neutral  observer.  But this isn't just about a lack of neutrality; it's also about the job of a director of Human Rights Watch.  If their job is merely "to monitor", Human Rights Watch doesn't seem to have got the message, because they very actively condemn régimes and developments that in their view harm the cause of human rights.

The coup was just such a development, and that was entirely obvious.  It was entirely obvious that cementing the military in power would be a far greater blow to the cause of human rights than Morsi's so-called administration, which was never 'his' in the first place. If nothing else, Morsi could never hope to acquire a tiny fraction of the repressive resources the military has always had at its disposal.  So if ever there was a time for Human Rights Watch to condemn, without ambiguity, a political change, it was in July.  This wasn't 'complex' and it wasn't time to talk about how dissatisfied people were with Morsi.  Failing to meet voter expectations isn't a violation  of human rights.  Everyone knew with absolute certainty that the army would systematically mutilate those rights, and a human rights 'professional' had an obligation to say so.  So Morayef both failed to be neutral and, beyond this, to fulfill her professional responsibilities.

Why did this happen?  Why have you insisted, contrary to the record, on her neutrality and professionalism?  The answer may lie in your own record.  You loathed Morsi and covered him with ridicule.   Sandmonkey* is sure that the ridicule from the circle of sophisticated liberal social media users, to which you belong, was incredibly damaging to Morsi, simply beyond comparison with anything visited on Sisi.  I doubt it was as damaging as all that but it represented a choice.  You and many others may claim clean hands because you were and are equally opposed to SCAF and to the Brotherhood, to Sisi and to Morsi.  But that's just why your hands don't seem very clean.  There is no doubt that Sisi is far worse, has far more blood and repression to his name.  It was utterly clear that this would be the case.  Your even-handedness - or if  you prefer, your insistence on nuance - took no account of this weighting.  That's a shame.

The Arabist* claims that Egyptians were naïve and could not see what June 30th would bring.  That's the excuse he might offer you, assuming you're as naïve as the average Egyptian is supposed to be.  But I cannot for one moment believe that the average Egyptian wasn't much more aware of the realities than those of us who predicted them.  I don't think this was or is about naïveté.

There is a more plausible and very simple explanation for the disastrous even-handedness of the 'principled' liberals and 'revolutionaries' who wrongly portrayed Morsi and the military as two equally bad alternatives.  It is a sort of anti-Islamist revulsion which does great political damage, even when it does not descend to the hatred against persons that you yourself have noted.

Secularists of all kinds cannot but detest the stifling, repressive norms that Islamists would impose on Egypt.  'Would' is wrong.  The Islamists have imposed these norms with increasing success since the start of the 1990s.   The visceral reaction of those whose lifestyles are under attack is natural.  But even a detestable régime bent on upholding detestable norms is far better than puffed-up military scum who smirk at torture and massacre.

Islamists can be fought with the framework of a democracy, even one with questionable constitutions and institutions.  The Egyptian military cannot be fought except by an alliance of secularists and Islamists.  It would indeed be naïve to expect such an alliance.  But if there is any hope at all for Egypt's future, it is in willingness to at least postpone the antagonism.

----------------------

*  twitter exchanges

The problem with human rights activism

The human rights movement - by which I mean such organizations as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International - has earned a lot of respect among activists and perhaps even some world leaders.  Its reputation rests on the idea that, somehow, it does good work, it advances some cause.  I was among the many who firmly believed this.  It seemed entirely reasonable.  As the years roll into decades, it is reasonable no longer.  A hard look at the movement's achievements and prospects indicates it has very little to show for its dedicated efforts.  Given its present activities and overall approach, it has virtually no chance of doing more.  Yet a change in strategy might, after all, bring important results.

Anyone who cares more about human rights than about human rights pieties might ask the following questions.  What has the human rights movement achieved?  How has its approach helped or hurt the cause of human rights?  How can the movement improve its performance?  What follows offers some answers.

What has the human rights movement achieved?

The realities are suggested by the statement of a Human Rights Watch official on the death of Ariel Sharon:

“It’s a shame that Sharon has gone to his grave without facing justice for his role in Sabra and Shatilla and other abuses,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “His passing is another grim reminder that years of virtual impunity for rights abuses have done nothing to bring Israeli-Palestinian peace any closer.”

Sarah Whitson's comment is telling:  something similar could have been said of thousands and thousands of murderers and torturers, great and small.  I don't mean over the course of history; I mean among those who've attracted the attention of human rights organizations.

Though there has been progress towards respecting human rights in some countries, usually this hasn't been the doing of the human rights movement.  In Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina, not to mention Cambodia, South Africa, and Libya, change came with the fall of oppressive régimes.  The new governments instituted their own tribunals which had little or nothing to do with international human rights organizations.  The most substantial achievement of these organizations has been the war crimes trials in ("the former") Yugoslavia, which (a) convicted some offenders, (b) did so partly on evidence collected by human rights investigators, (c) did so in tribunals such as human rights organizations have consistently and persistently promoted.  The fairness of these tribunals is not at issue here:  it's hard to be sure if there was bias and it's also hard to object to  at least some of the verdicts.  But this success nevertheless has more influence than it deserves.  It's not because processes were flawed.  It's because the anomaly of the success hasn't been appreciated.  The circumstances are not just unusual.  They are also increasingly unlikely to repeat themselves.

The case of Yugoslavia is anomalous because Western democracies were not really intervening in an ongoing crisis;  they were there almost at its birth.  They took a particular interest in and assumed unusual responsibility for the course of events.  The West was politically involved in the initial dissolution of the country, when the EEC attempted to arbitrate the dispute.  Soon thereafter Germany, at first over UK and French objections, pushed recognition of Croatia by the EEC.  Moreover the West encountered no effective opposition to its pro-dissolution agenda. Serbia's ally on the UN Security council, Russia, was on the brink of collapse and dependent on the West for financial support. (In the 90s, Russia's GDP fell by a catastrophic 50%.) China, another ally, was not yet ready to take the world stage on its own.

However substantial the success of the UN and human rights movement in Yugoslavia, it did not mark an advance towards a world order that respected human rights.  On the contrary, it was a symptom of a radical and very temporary great power imbalance.  This became clear in the late 1990s, when Russia began to reassert itself in Chechnya and Kosovo.  Subsequent years have shown increasing movement away from an international consensus on human rights.  Libya's uprising confirmed the change in direction:  Russia and China, outmanoeuvred, committed themselves to frustrate any further efforts to enforce human rights according to the West's and the NGOs' agendas.  Important secondary powers like India and Brazil have more discretely adopted a similar stance.

The issue of prospects aside for a moment, what have human rights organizations achieved since their inception in the 1960s?  Part of the answer, but only part, has to do with perpetrators brought to justice.  In the special case of Yugoslavia there have been 67 convictions in the last twenty years.  Perhaps this is a lesson to those who lack powerful backers and commit crimes in Western Europe's back yard.  It must be set against the rest of the record.

This record can be evaluated in terms of justice, of deterrence, and of protecting human rights.

Has justice been served?  Only a tiny, tiny proportion of offenders have been convicted of any crime as a (partial) result of human rights activity.  In this narrow sense, justice has not been served.  Thousands guilty of horrible crimes, far far more than those convicted, have not met with any judicial sanction at all.

A multitude of failures cast a dark shadow over the movement's modest, anomalous Yugoslav success.  Elsewhere, after all the atrocities committed in all these years, the human rights movement has managed to help convict only one leader, Charles Taylor of Liberia (as far as I know).  Other Liberian monsters like General Butt Naked have gone scott free.  The Cambodian genocide trials are barely functional, partly for lack of funding.  Rios Mott in Guatemala has yet to meet justice, thirty years after he visited utter horror on his country.  So have the mass murderers of Indonesia and the Congo.  So have the torturers of Burma, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, the Gulf States, Algeria (including the French colonists), Morocco, El Salvador and many other places.  Those who actually do the torturing have perhaps never been so much as charged, much less convicted.  They enjoy even more impunity than the leadership.  Justice has not been served.

No one would deny or be surprised by this.  Presumably the point of all these investigations, accusations, and, in some rare cases, trials and convictions, is deterrence.

To see how tenuous the case for deterrence is, you probably only need to examine your own beliefs.  Now, after half a century of human rights activism, few can seriously believe that the police torturers of the world are worried about the International Criminal Court.  There certainly isn't the slightest evidence of it.  Nor is it easier to imagine how rulers, typically impressed by their own power, are going to be frightened of some distant court that has on rare occasion, in special circumstances quite unlike those today, meted out rather gentlemanly punishment to a few ageing wrong-doers.  Human rights violators will be far more concerned with their own domestic unrest, and rightly so.  Someone bent on wreaking agony on human beings is unlikely to be scared off by far-off, theoretical considerations, by the idea that possibly someone, sometime, in circumstances that  can't quite be imagined, might possibly bring them to justice.

If we believe in the importance of deterrence as justification for human rights activism, we believe in a remote ideal.  Since the worst and most massive human rights violations normally occur within uncooperative sovereign states, effective enforcement of human rights conventions requires a supranational enforcing agency.  The idea of judicial sanction as deterrence against human rights violations therefore implies something like world executive power, either through a world government or some utterly dominant nation.  For a brief historical moment - with the unchallenged supremacy of the US in the 1990s - the second possibility seemed close to reality.  The moment is emphatically past and the prospect of effective enforcement is now a mere dream.  So, then, is notion that human rights activism can substantially contribute to the deterrence of human rights violations, now or in the foreseeable future.

How, then, does human rights activism protect human rights, presumably the point of it all?  Amnesty has had success in the comparatively mild sort of cases that came to prominence in the 1960s.  Amnesty's letter-writing campaigns have 'contributed' to the release nonviolent individual 'prisoners of conscience' - 40,000 by Amnesty's count, though no one knows whether the campaigns were crucial to the releases.  But the concern for these sorts of cases, sadly, is almost outmoded - if it was ever appropriate.  Just as Amnesty's letter-writing never addressed, for example, the massive human rights violations committed by the US in Vietnam or the slaughter in Indonesia, so it never touches the real horrors of today.  The idea that such campaigns would ever do anything for the victims of the genocide in Rwanda or the victims of state torturers around the world is a non-starter.

Human rights organizations address these dreadful cases through the judicial model.  They document.  On extremely rare occasion that eventually leads to punishment.  Never, not in a single case among all the hundreds of thousands, does it actually protect anyone.  Once the illusion of deterrence is dispelled, once the actual protection of human rights is seen as the objective,  the human rights movement has so far been an utter failure.  Since the quasi-judicial approach addresses human rights violations only after the fact, this cannot change until these organizations change their fundamental approach.

How have the strategies of human rights organizations helped or hurt the cause of human rights?

Letter-writing and attempting to indict violators has done next to nothing to help the cause of human rights - if by that is meant actually protecting people from human rights violations.  Human rights organizations realize this, so that for some time they have attempted to go further.  They signal out massive human rights violations in well-documented reports, and call for action against them.  (These reports are already obsolescent in the age of ubiquitous cell-phone videos.  In contrast to even a decade ago, the reports rarely document what isn't already public knowledge.)  But their allegiance to the model of world judicial sanctions undermines their efforts and perhaps has even hurt their cause.

This happens in two related ways.  First, the quasi-judicial approach leads human rights organizations to treasure  their reputation for impartiality.  In Syria, for example, Human Rights Watch examines human rights violations; it has done so for decades.  It now finds violations on both sides of the conflict.  All parties, it seems, are bad.  All should be hauled before the International Criminal Court.  The idea of backing one against the other cannot so much as arise; one can only imagine opposing both.  That Syrians should determine their own fate now seems out of the question:  after all, apart from some utterly powerless do-gooders, they are divided into criminal factions!  The only possible reaction is that 'the whole thing is a mess' and must remain so until some august outside authority takes matters in hand.

This first problem leads to a second.  When human rights organizations step out of their quasi-judicial role and attempt to address political realities, their recommendations are feckless to the point of dishonesty.  The meticulously documented reports of mass atrocities tacitly acknowledge the impotence of the judicial approach by demanding 'action'.  But the action demanded is invariably known to be ludicrously insufficient.

Here are some examples.

In October 2013, HRW issued a major report documenting the torture and killing of political detainees.  What to do?  Their acting director for the Middle East and North Africa, Joe Stork, said that “All governments and especially Security Council member countries should put the plight of these thousands of political detainees high on their agenda for diplomatic discussions.”  Their press release added that : "Concerned governments need to make clear that the Syrian government and those responsible for the abuse will ultimately face justice for their actions."

In January 2014, commenting on the release of 55,000 gruesome photographs of people who died under torture in Syrian prisons, HRW director Kenneth Roth reacted by demanding more of diplomacy:

“It is essential that the mass atrocities being committed in Syria be a parallel focus of any diplomatic effort,”... [Roth] called for an end to the indiscriminate killing of civilians and an opening of Syria’s borders for humanitarian aid. “We cannot afford to wait for the distant prospect of a peace accord before the killing of 5,000 Syrians a month comes to an end.” 

On twitter, HRW complained that "Russia has protected Syrian govt from international action, whether explicit condemnation, an arms embargo, or referral to ICC".

Invariably, the reactions of human rights organizations are couched in these quasi-judicial terms.  What does this amount to?  Where Syria is concerned, a useless, pointless scolding of Russia and China.  HRW knows very well that Russia and China will block any attempt by the West to "meet its responsibility to protect civilians."  Such attempts would therefore be illegal, proscribed by the international law HRW holds so dear.  HRW would never encourage the West to violate that law.  It would therefore never suggest that, if civilians can't be protected legally, they must be protected illegally.  But that means the movement can make no serious suggestion at all.  Indeed the only real action mentioned, an arms embargo, suggests that HRW has no genuine interest even in recommending protective measures, because it knows full well that an arms embargo would do nothing to stop the régime's sadistic orgy.

HRW's recommendations are just as much a conscience-salving fig-leaf as the empty protestations of the Western powers.  But no one would reproach HRW in these terms, because no one expects HRW to actually accomplish anything.  The idea is to fight the good fight, that is, to gather up documents which won't matter now, but which are the sort which might matter sometime, decades down the road, in the unlikely event that a genuine international order takes root.  Here HRW and its acolytes exhibit the great sense of leisure that discredits so many liberal, allegedly well-meaning initiatives.  Decades, hundreds of thousands of victims?  no problem.  we have lots of time.

The basic ideological problem of the human rights movement is that it works towards two goals:  the establishment of a just, rights-upholding international order, and the protection of real human beings who suffer horrible 'violations of their human rights'.  By this I mean protecting people from torture and agonizing death.  These goals are considered inseparable, even obviously so.  In fact they are opposed.

You can work towards the vague possibility that, sometime in some unknowable future, the nations of the world will all get together and agree to enforce human rights, wherever and whenever they are violated, no matter whose interests are at stake.  This is a very long-term goal and it requires, or is taken to require, scrupulous judicial procedure in respected international forums.  The goal of protecting real human beings from grievous outrage is very different.  It is a very short-term goal.  It is the goal of people in a hurry, people who have a sense of urgency.  Taken seriously, it very often requires disregard for international law, contempt for international institutions, and willingness to use 'illegal' violence, unauthorized by any world body.  The human rights movement has chosen the former goal.  That's why it has done virtually nothing to advance the latter.

How can the movement improve its performance?

If human rights organizations were locked into the quasi-judicial approach to protecting human rights, there would be no prospect of improvement.  But they're not courts; they're not locked in.  The reason their impotent complaints are so disappointing is that these organization may - we can't be sure - have some real political influence.  Certainly they are widely and deeply respected and they raise their voices just at a time when, in the Syrian case, at least Western governments are apparently quite unsure how to act.  Perhaps the right sort of activism from human rights organizations could move public opinion and even governments towards effective action.  But to do that, the movement would have to recommend effective action, not rule it out.

For a start, human rights activists would have to be acknowledge that only force, only military intervention or arming an opposition, has any chance of preventing human rights violations in the worst and most massive cases.  Acknowledging this means accepting that, here in the real world, effective action to halt mass torture and murder must be expected to be impure.  It will involve other, lesser but still important violations of human rights.  If there is intervention, there will very likely be war crimes.  If an armed opposition is supported, the same - and concern for these violations might require calls to restrain the fighters, not calls to avoid arming impure saviours.  In short, the human rights movement will go nowhere until it involves itself in real politics, not in prissy calls for international cooperation that everyone knows won't happen.  Only then can the 'duty to protect' become more than a barren abstraction.

Brown Moses' credibility - and a conversation about chemical weapons

Brown Moses is under attack for having failed to reveal a conversation with Matthew Van Dyke.  In this conversation, Van Dyke says the following (verbatim extracts):

don't rule out the possibility that the rebels do have a small quantity of chemical weapons.  I've had information for a few months on this

....................

I have a source that has been reliable in the past, who gave me information about the rebels having acquired a small quantity a few months ago, and I know what building they came out of.   and I know some things about the building, having been to the site, that give the information some additional credibility.

...................

I think it was a small quantity, judging by where they were stored but by small quantity, I mean possibly hundreds of shells of some type.  I do not know.   The source didn't have that level of detail.

It is said that the failure to report this conversation damages Brown Moses' credibility.  It does not.  Whether or not Brown Moses should have reported the conversation for some other reason, his credibility is not at issue.

What is Brown Moses credible about?  He is not a reporter.  He is not a witness.  He looks at thousands of reports, and analyses them.  His credibility stems from the caution with which he comes to conclusions and the meticulous care with which he evaluates the testimony - in a number of media - of others.

What is involved in the process of evaluation?  It involves discarding many hundreds of reports as unreliable or irrelevant.   In his analyses, of course, he does not repeat the vast majority of these unreliable reports:  only in rare cases, where a report is thought by others to have credibility, might he report them, to offer reasons why this is not the case.

Where chemical weapons are involved, most of the reports discarded by Brown Moses, and most of the reports he discredits, have attributed the use of chemical weapons to the Assad regime.  In some cases it now seems that these reports may have been correct: subsequent information has made them more plausible.  So it is hardly the case that his sorting of reports has exhibited anti-Assad bias.

The conversation with Matt Van Dyke fits into this pattern.  I myself have seen many reports - a tiny fraction of what Brown Moses has examined - where all sorts of things are called chemical weapons which are anything but.  There are, for example, kits which test for chemical weapons.  There are also cases where riot gas, phosphorous shells and other munitions have been called chemical weapons, but which are not considered chemical weapons by specialists, and which could not be implicated in the notorious Sarin attacks whose examination is associated with Brown Moses' work.  ('Chemical weapons' is typical of the broad, inaccurate descriptions ubiquitous in Syria reports.  Any fighter plane may be called a 'MIG'; armored personal carriers and self-propelled guns are called 'tanks'; any large surface-to-surface missile becomes a SCUD.)

Consider, in this context, the conversation with Matt Van Dyke.   First, he has not seen any chemical weapons, nor does he claim to have seen them.   He claims to have been 'given information' that the rebels have them.  The information is said to come from 'a source that has been reliable in the past'.  But about what?  Presumably this someone is not a chemical weapons specialist, but simply someone who has talked to Van Dyke in the past, about other events.  Considering that the mis-characterization of munitions as 'chemical weapons' has been more the rule than the exception, this matters.

But wait!  Van Dyke does not say that his source claims to have seen any weapons.  He has been 'given information'.  This could mean that his source has seen them, but also that he talked to someone who has seen them or, for all we know, talked to someone who talked to someone who has seen them.  All we know for sure is that someone is said to have seen them - possibly the reliable source, possibly not.

Now what of Van Dyke himself?  Is he a credible, authoritative source?  I personally might trust him, but the answer is that he can't be judged either credible nor not credible.   He has made short documentary films and also characterizes himself as a freelance journalist.  But his reporting experience is very limited and he has never been subject to the sort of professional scrutiny that career journalists normally undergo.   So despite my own tendency to believe him, he cannot be considered an established credible source in journalistic terms.  He's not, let's say, Ben Wedeman of CNN.   (I won't even consider the question of how Brown_Moses was supposed to know he really was speaking to Matt Van Dyke, not a malicious impostor.)

What's the upshot?  We have one of hundreds of reports of 'chemical weapons', an expression we know is habitually used to describe munitions that are not, in fact, chemical weapons.  The source of this report is an un-named party who quite possibly is recounting what he heard from another un-named party.  The person who reports this report is Matthew Van Dyke, a nice guy but whose credibility has not been established.  We might also wonder how the munitions were identified as munitions actually loaded with a chemical agent, as opposed to munitions capable of containing such an agent, or its precursors.  Did someone have a sniff?

That's not all.  In the conversation, Brown Moses undertakes not to reveal that this report comes from Matthew Van Dyke.  So Brown Moses would have to report that an un-named and not authoritative source claimed that an unnamed source, claimed to be credible, either claimed that he had seen chemical weapons, or claimed that someone else claimed to have seen them - in some undefined sense of 'chemical weapons' and even of 'seen'.

What sort of weight would Brown Moses' report itself carry?  Would this take its place among the eyewitness testimony, the on-the-ground reports of UN chemical weapons specialists, the videos minutely analysed by munitions and by many media specialists?  To answer yes would not, I think, be credible.

Authoritarian liberalism: an option for Egypt?

Some suggest that a preoccupation with democracy can raise unrealistic expectations concerning the Middle East.  Before you have democracy, it's claimed, you must have constitutionalism and the rule of law.  It's said that this was the pattern in 18th and 19th Century Europe, where this sort of 'liberalism' preceded democracy.  This thesis fails because it does not account for significantly different social and political conditions.

The defining document of liberal authoritarianism is Kant's short essay, "What is Enlightenment?"(1784). In it he says:

...a ruler who is himself enlightened and has no fear of phantoms, yet who
likewise has at hand a well-disciplined and numerous army to guarantee public
security, may say what no republic would dare to say: Argue as much as you like
and about whatever you like, but obey!

Arguably there have been such rulers.  Kant had King Frederick II of Prussia in mind.  Napoleon is another example.  But in most of the modern world such figures, or their oligarchical counterparts, are not a live option.  That's because the nature of dissent and the threats to public order have changed fundamentally.

To see this it is necessary to glance at European history, where there was some variation in the relation between dissent, public order, liberalism and democracy.

Of England, where political dissent was far more mature than on the continent, it is not correct to say that liberal authoritarianism preceded democracy.  The development of the two went hand in hand.  It is true that in the 18th Century, England may have seemed liberal because it allowed more dissent in matters of faith, and afforded the Philosophes some refuge when their philosophical writings prompted repression in France and elsewhere.  And England did develop something resembling the rule of law somewhat before most of continental Europe.  But it also moved towards democracy much earlier, starting at least with the Puritan Revolution of the 17th Century and proceeding with the definitive overthrow of absolute monarchy in 1688, followed by the First and Second Reform Bills of 1832 and 1834, followed by periodic expansions of the suffrage.

Though today we would not count English institutions as democratic until the institution of truly universal suffrage in 1928, from the 17th Century on a steadily less restrictive notion of popular sovereignty was strongly established in English political institutions, roughly concurrent with the rise of liberal ideas.  The increasingly democratic character of British popular sovereignty is, over the decades, tangible and unmistakable.  So the example of England cannot support any constitutionalism-before-democracy thesis.

France and Germany are a different matter, because in both countries constitutionalism and the rule of law did indeed precede democracy.  But these countries experienced a much slower and less threatening development of political dissent.  That turns out to have crucial implications for the idea that constitutionalism and the rule of law can be established before democratic institutions.

In France and Germany significant and effective political dissent was, for a long time, aristocratic or at least not populist.  Even the French Revolution began as an aristocratic revolt, and lower-class resistance quickly dissipated when the Revolution was appropriated by the upper middle classes.  After a few years the main popular unrest was among the peasantry who supported, and took guidance from, the remnants of the Church and nobility.  For Napoleon, dissent was virtually no concern at all.  By the 1820s in France, revolts were conspiratorial affairs involving students and other members of the more comfortable classes, producing very manageable political changes.  Never again did peacetime French politics threaten to produce anything like far-reaching social upheaval.  So France could afford liberalism quite early on, and developed democracy later.  In Germany, and before it in Prussia, dissent was never a serious problem, so liberal constitutionalism could precede democracy by quite a distance.

Does this historical record hold any lessons for a country like, say, Egypt?  Could there be an authoritarian but constitutional government that imposed the rule of law before developing democracy?  It's hard to see how the European example affords any support for this idea.

In the Middle East, the problem of what Kant calls 'public security' was solved a long time ago.  Because political violence was unknown in his Prussia, Kant is referring primarily to criminal activity, which in 18th Century Europe existed at levels inconceivable in the contemporary Middle East:  the portly philosopher David Hume thought it natural to take a sword when going out of his house.  So this aspect of the rule of law, once considered the most important, is well established in Middle Eastern countries.  Notably missing is anything like the rule of law when dealing with what 18th Century European governments didn't need to deal with - popular political dissent.  And that makes all the difference when considering whether liberal constitutionalism can be imposed before democratic institutions are established.

In Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, there is massive, resilient, well-organized popular discontent, posing a serious threat to the state.  Rulers do not fail to develop constitutionalism and the rule of law, or the liberal's coveted civil liberties, because they're stupid or myopic.  They need repression to keep that massive popular opposition in line.  This is where the lessons from Europe lose relevance.

The comparative docility of the masses in 18th Century France and Germany, followed by the dominance of relatively genteel middle class 'revolutionaries' later, gave governments breathing room in which liberalism and constitutionalism could grow.  And so it is today.  Europeans and North Americans can say more or less what they like because their dissent never poses a threat to the state:  indeed contemporary anti-terror measures show how quickly liberalism gives way when governments imagine such a threat.

The undemocratic rulers of 18th and 19th Century Europe allowed dissent and a measure of civil rights because they faced only manageable political dissent.  The undemocratic governments of the Middle East understandably fear that civil liberties could strengthen already powerful popular movements like the Muslim Brotherhood.  That's why the authority of even liberally-inclined elites can be maintained only through bloody repression, designed to ward off even bloodier catastrophe like the Algerian and Syrian conflicts.  In these circumstances, undemocratic regimes simply cannot afford to institute real civil liberties.  Constitutionalism and the rule of law will not and cannot precede democracy, because only democracy has a chance of tempering the truly explosive, deeply popular political dissent that the European authoritarians never encountered.

Syria and the myths of mission creep

Mission creep itself is not a myth.  Britain's 'accidental empire' - at least if standard accounts are correct - is an example.  Britain's original 'mission' was to establish trade outposts.  But the British got involved in Indian politics and, one thing leading to another, became a full-out colonizers.  So their mission gradually changed from establishing secure trade routes to founding an empire.

Here's another example:  the US entered World War II with no further aim than to defeat the Axis powers.  When victory was in sight, the mission expanded into remaking Germany and Japan.  The expansion of objectives is a case of mission creep.

You will never hear either of these cases *called* mission creep.  That's because they were successful.  The term isn't normally used to describe a real-world phenomenon.  It's used to explain away failure, and, unsurprisingly, this almost always involves some myth-making.

The example of Afghanistan has lessons which also apply to Iraq.  Despite all the fine talk of establishing democracy and such, 'the mission' in Afghanistan was straightforward:  to crush anti-American forces.  Not to nit-pick:  if you want to say there was a broader mission, fine, but it certainly was not the case that American policy crept towards it:  in fact it crept in the opposite direction when the prerequisite for any noble objective - control of the territory - proved elusive.  That the US attempted to do too much was not the problem.  'Mission creep' was the lame excuse for failure to accomplish the minimum.

That failure was due not to over-ambitious idealism but to politically induced deafness.  Military experts were quite clear what the mission - the minimal project of establishing control - required.  They said it would require about 650,000 troops, a commitment Washington could never sell to the country.  The decision-makers got around this mental roadblock partly by simply not listening, partly through the absurd fantasy that an indigenous Afghan army would do much of the work.  Apparently Vietnam was forgotten.  As a result and as the expert estimates implied, the US never established military control of the territory.  But the US could not acknowledge its mistake because that would highlight its very dangerous weakness, its political inability to mount the effort required to conduct a major military operation overseas.  So it engaged in all sorts of blather about hearts and minds, and, of course, mission creep.    But hearts, minds and missions required more men and more guns and a lot more casualties.  That, not made-up subtleties about The Nature of Counterinsurgency, was what most Americans never grasped.

The same, long story short, held for Iraq:  the US never committed anything remotely like the military resources required.  That was why, as in Afghanistan, it devoted astronomical sums to various (roughly speaking) 'reconstruction' projects.  This supported the Iraq-specific excuse that 'we won the war, but we could not win the peace', that we were unprepared for this additional task.  But it takes no deep thinking to realize you can't reconstruct - and indeed you haven't won the war - unless you can assert control over the territory.  This, again, required more troops and casualties, and was known to require them, than the US was politically able to afford.  The same weakness led to the same excuse:  mission creep.

No one, I think, anticipated the cost of an ever-deeper attachment to these excuses.  To raise a false spectre of mission creep doesn't just cover up ordinary failure;  it paralyses even very manageable undertakings.  In Syria, effective action requires no troops and very little expenditure; it is simply a matter of supplying some of the non-US fighters.  But the US cannot even do this because it has instilled in its population - indeed in its pundits - the fear that somehow, somehow, there is a mission and it will creep.  It didn't make sense before; it doesn't make sense now.  But people are used to the idea, and it stokes their anxieties.  As a result, the US is politically - and therefore militarily - even weaker than in the previous decade.

US interest in Syria: how 'vital' it does have to be?

Stephen Walt, David Aaron Miller  and others have argued that intervention in Syria is not in US vital interests.  Absolutely.  Trouble is, the argument is a bit too easy to make.

You'd think a country's vital interests are what it needs, or its citizens need, to survive.  Energy and food, mainly.

These days very few countries have to worry about their vital interests.  If their citizens are starving, that's not because the country can't obtain what's needed.  This isn't the 18th Century and there's no energy crisis.  The world produces plenty of everything to go around, and if you don't have it, plenty of people who will sell it to you at less than prohibitive prices. This isn't complacency about the world; shortages of vital commodities could recur. It's a description of current conditions.   But

Foreign policy isn't about vital interests.

If you think about what's NOT in a country's vital interests, you'll probably surprise yourself.  Sea access?  Bolivia, not a rich country, lost it in the 19th Century and is doing just fine.  Territorial integrity?  Austria isn't worse off, much less dead, for its shrunken borders.  Not even military defeat need be a matter of vital interest; Germany and Japan are famous examples.  The US, then, has no vital interests anywhere in the world.  It would have to lose Canada, Venezuela and the Middle East as oil suppliers, all at once, for its vital interests to be called into question.  That won't happen.  To say that Syria isn't in US vital interests is to assert nothing much.  Instead it betrays a perhaps deliberate misunderstanding of how rational nations determine their policies.

Nations look ahead a bit.  They realize the unforeseen can happen; they try to provide against unpleasant surprises.  That makes them want, in a nutshell, power.  The US would get upset if Mexico bought advanced anti-aircraft missiles and the latest fighter-bombers from Russia.  Would that be because US vital interests were compromised?  Not at all.  The US has no reason to think that Mexico would make war on the US.  Mexico has no motive to do so and it knows that if it tried, no level of Russian armament would save it from catastrophe.  But US interests would indeed be compromised because, who knows?  Nut cases might get hold of the arms and do a lot of harm.  Russia might be on its way to encircle the US with a genuinely daunting ring of well-armed enemies.  What is China, Brazil and Venezuela piled in?  Again, no vital interests to worry about:  the US would survive perfectly well as a cowering third-rate power.  But people do worry all the same.

Syria and US policy

So the real question is not whether doing something in Syria is in US vital interests, but whether it's in US interests:  throwing the word 'vital' in there is just a way to abandon strategic thinking altogether.  If you stop doing that, the case against doing something in Syria gets much harder to make.  Yes indeed, the US will survive no matter what happens in Syria.  It will survive if Syria ends up a nuclear-armed client of some US enemy.  It will survive if Israel gets into a war with Syria and US commitments - not to mention Congressional pressure - draw the US into that war.  It will survive if the Mediterranean becomes dominated by Russian and Chinese naval forces.  It will survive if, fearing this, the US gets involved in ever more expensive and provocative arms races.  It will survive if Syria becomes a base for dozens of successful attacks on US citizens, resulting it thousands of deaths and really crippling security restrictions on US air travel.  What's more, none of these things are at all likely to happen.  But it's somewhat more likely that one of these unlikely possibilities occurs, which is why it would make sense for the US to care about Syrian outcomes.  Add to this one thing that has happened already and will mushroom - a contempt for American power that invites increasingly bold challenges to US interests - and maybe what-me-worry policy about Syria isn't such a great idea.

At what cost?

But HOW MUCH to worry?  It turns out that the whole 'vital interest' case against action on Syria rests on a hidden and false premise.  Even if 'vital' is just taken to mean 'substantial', the assumption is that doing something about Syria would be a big deal:  indeed this is at the core of virtually every anti-interventionist argument.  But doing something about Syria would be a very little deal.

What the Syrian opposition wants - and anti-interventionists go la-la-la-la not to hear it - is just two things:  arms and money.  Not troops, no training, and, given sufficiently advanced weapons, not air strikes.  Certainly not, as Miller so dishonestly suggests, a Bush-style 'build democracy in funny Arab countries' campaign.  What would satisfying these needs cost the US?

Usually when Syrians are asked this question, they say millions, or hundreds of millions.  Let's multiply what's asked - one figure is 300 million - by ten, to get 3 billion.  That's far less than 1/10th of 1% of what the US has spent on Iraq and Afghanistan - not to mention that it will cost 0 American lives.  And very likely it will cost far, far less, than that 1/10th of %1.

Why?  Because the arms Syrians want are, by current US standards, old, stuff that the US armed forces would regard as obsolete.  This means the arms exist already, and are sitting in depots, waiting for decommissioning or disposal.  To provide these arms will cost the US nothing but transportation.  However it needn't cost even that much, because Gulf State countries would very likely be happy to finance that transport.  So the best guess is that supplying arms would cost only a few million dollars, or less, possibly nothing.

Just how vital, how substantial, would US interests have to be to do that?  The question amounts to whether there is any chance of any bad consequences from the utter disgrace and contempt the US has drawn on itself, and will draw on itself more and more with the prolongation of slaughter in Syria.  Seen in this light, the case for doing something in Syria is not so easily dismissed.

Syria isn't hopeless

Many if not most Syrian activists have come to despair of their revolution.  They say the West's self-fulfilling prophecy has índeed been fulfilled:  the uprising, starved for Western arms by fear of 'jihadists', has been hijacked by jihadists.  Though my grasp of Syria's realities is inadequate, someone needs to paint a more optimistic picture, and the following is my attempt.

The threat of extreme Islamists certainly is dire and real.  While it is absurd to say they're "as bad as Assad" - even after the Latakia massacre, their atrocities are episodic, not a constant horror - they're bad enough.  What's exaggerated is their prospects.  They will never rule Syria and they will never establish enclaves in Syria.  Extreme or extremely conservative Islam may conceivably come to dominate Syria, but that's a very different sort of danger, and cause only for a very different sort of concern.

There is no chance at all that extremists could prevail over their opponents.  For this to happen, of course, Assad would have to fall.  Their opponents would then be not just the more moderate Syrian revolutionaries, but every power, great and small, with an interest in the region.  Russia and China would be on the same side as the secularist and moderate revolutionaries. So would all Kurdish factions.  Jordan, the Gulf States and Israel would be united in their determination to eradicate the radical Islamist spectre.  So would Turkey, now with a much freer hand, because the substantial pro-Assad opposition would now be on-side.  So would the West. So would Hezbollah and the Maronites, all but choking off any support from within Lebanon.  The extremists' only source of supply would be within Western Iraq.  Iran, having lost its Syrian ally and no longer capable of maintaining Hezbollah as a militarily robust proxy, would focus on strengthening the Iraqi government, its sole remaining foothold in the Arab world.  In short, the extremists would not only be isolated, but surrounded by forces determined to crush them, with the enthusiastic support of both the West and the East.  The idea that the extremists could, in these circumstances, hold territory, is a non-starter.

What goes for taking over the country also goes for establishing enclaves.  Bear in mind that all the great powers are incurably panicked about Al Qaeda, and that any very conservative or radical Islamic faction, whatever the realities, will be targeted as a result:  the great powers will put pressure on or encourage the regional powers to act.  And of course there will be no shortage of moderate or secularist forces in Syria for them to support.

This is not to say that small underground forces can't cause a lot of harm and disruption even against such odds.  But here the domestic situation makes such outcomes unlikely.  The most extreme of the extremists are to a large extent foreign fighters, some very foreign indeed.  These extremist groups don't have the deeper nationalist and anti-government roots of the Al Qaeda-linked forces in Iraq.  Moreover, in Iraq there is only one significant group of extremist Sunni radicals, Al-Qaeda in Iraq.  In Syria, the extremist forces are fragmented into dozens and dozens of groups whose alliances, even whose existence, constantly changes.  Odd how analysts never tire of pointing to the disunity of the FSA as a fatal weakness, but seem to think the proliferation of extremist groups is a sign of strength.

Even the long-term cohesion within these groups is very much open to question.  The experts and several on-the-scene journalists report that many of these factions' members joined up only because they were looking for the best way to fight Assad.  Many are very young, perhaps like this fighter:

Chava, like any sixteen-year-old, is habitually antagonizing, talking about how much he loves his gun, how much he loves fighting, how much he loves Islam, how he likes Bin Laden (but also George W. Bush).

Chava and more mature or maturely pious fighters may be reluctant, post-Assad, to kill fellow rebels, many of them Sunni Muslims.  There are no certainties here, but there is also no reason to expect strong resistance from a hard core of Syrian extremists, rather than a nucleus dominated by easily identified and isolated foreigners.

Does this mean that the threat of extreme Islamism can be discounted?  Not at all.  What seems all but certain, however, is that the stature of this threat will not depend on its military strength.  It will depend on its powers of persuasion, on its political and social strength.  The extreme Islamists will have this sort of strength for three reasons.  First, it appears that quite a few Syrians in fact adhere to a very conservative version of Islam, and might be receptive to the idea of a very strict Islamist régime, particularly given the shameful record of secularism in the region.  Second, like it or not, the extreme Islamist combattants are, for the most part, heroes.  They fight bravely and effectively and have saved far more innocent lives than they have taken.  Their martyrs often sacrificed their lives when no one else could or did stand up to Assad's onslaughts.  This won't be forgotten.  Third, extreme Islamist groups, despite their repressive bent, often do much good in the areas the control, restoring basic services and supplying both public order and the necessities of life.  In this respect they resemble the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who became powerful partly by helping those in need.

The hard-earned political prestige of the extremists might well bring them not only local but also national power, control over Syrians' lives - at least if these extremists renounce violence.  Such a future would of course be a nightmare for many Syrian activists and the negation of what they've been fighting for.  But the greatest long-term danger is that this peaceful, political threat be ignored, or worse, confounded with the exaggerated but much more dramatic military threat.  That might lead to the kind of repression that usually proves counterproductive, as when Egyptian secularists ran to the military instead of doing the hard ground-level organizing and service work that made their rivals strong.  I hope that doesn't happen in Syria.