AAgave

There are projected to be 5B Internet enabled phones in 2017. That's going to impact US foreign policy, but more importantly, it's going to impact a lot of post-colonial states. Here is where I'll post my observations on the road to 5B.

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Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us. By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical internet stewards. This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the engineering community.

Bruce Schneier, "The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back", September 5, 2013

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The U.S. is now debating a military campaign that marries the highest, most abstract idealism to the harshest, most unsettling pragmatism: Obama wants to punish Assad for violating the abstract norms of war even as he leaves Assad capable of continuing his massacre by more conventional means. This is why there is no enthusiasm for intervening in Syria: Making the decision to punish Assad for using chemical weapons means explicitly making the decision not to stop him when he slaughters with conventional weapons. The brutality of what we are willing to accept tarnishes the better world we seek to preserve.

Ezra Klein, "This is why there is no enthusiasm for intervening in Syria", September 6, 2013

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But the question is, do these norms mean something? And if we’re not acting, what does that say? You know, if we’re just issuing another statement of condemnation or passing resolutions saying “wasn’t that terrible?” You know, if people who, you know, decry international inaction in Rwanda and, you know, say how terrible it is that there are these human rights violations that take place around the world, then why aren’t we doing something about it? And they always look to the United States. Why isn’t the United States doing something about this? The most powerful nation on Earth. Why are you allowing these terrible things to happen? And then if the international community turns around when we’re saying it’s time to take some responsibility and says, “Well, hold on a second, we’re not sure.” That erodes our ability to maintain the kind of norms that we’re looking at.

US President Barack Obama, "Full transcript: President Obama’s news conference in Russia", September 6, 2013

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While some parts of international law are well grounded and well secured in functioning institutions and solid consensus, “R2P” is more like a New Year’s resolution than an actual “law”. The problem with R2P is the same problem that cripples most activist international law more broadly: There is no overriding authority that everyone agrees to respect and obey—no analogue to a state’s government which tries to keep a monopoly on violence and which enforces breaches of the law. In the absence of that supreme international authority, nations will continue to act inconsistently, supporting or opposing R2P actions less from the standpoint of eternal principle than from national interest. As a result, things like R2P inevitably become political slogans rather than principles of international life—a sad but true fact.

Walter Russell Mead, "Syria’s Latest Casualty: R2P?", The American Interest, September 6, 2013

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Al Jazeera's Infographic on Syria's various rebel factions

Al-Jazeera has tracked the various factions of rebel groups and political forces, and where they were active within Syria.

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How the Loneliest Job in the World Got Even Lonelier

It would be a mistake to think the president put himself in this predicament thanks to one walk around the South Lawn with Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. Indeed, the events of the past week do not alone threaten to compromise the president's credibility -- there were plenty of red lines crossed, plenty of other signs of hesitation to take decisive and timely action, not just in Syria but in Egypt, in Libya, and -- at the time of the Iranian Green revolution -- impeding Iran's development of nuclear weapons. Indeed, while it's absolutely true that a congressional vote against the president's planned action to strike Syria would be absolutely devastating to America's international standing, no one is more responsible for that standing being on the line than the president. This move was akin to him holding a gun to the head of Uncle Sam in full view of the world and saying, "Support me or I will shoot."

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If history was as the authors describe, their argument is tough to dispute. Who would really risk a slide back into the Hobbesian jungle just to punish Bashar al-Assad's beastliness? But their stark vision of the world before and after the United Nations Charter is only loosely tethered to reality. The notion that it was the UN Charter that ushered in the post-World War II era of relative peace between the major powers ignores the critical role of nuclear weapons and mutual assured destruction. They also vastly overstate the strength of the norm against the use of force without Council approval. Post-1945 history is littered with examples of states (big and small, democratic and nondemocratic) employing military force across borders without Council approval. It's really only since 1990-1991 that a fragile "Security Council norm" has emerged in practice. And the idea that this norm is what's keeping states from each other's throats is fanciful.

David Bosco, "Idealizing the United Nations Charter", Foreign Policy, September 4, 2013

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For all its obvious failings, the United Nations system has made for a more peaceful world than the one that preceded it. No leader may claim the right to collect debts or gain thrones by going to war. States may fracture into smaller pieces, but they don’t get conquered. Gunboat diplomacy is also out of the question.

Oona Hathaway & Scott J Shapiro, "On Syria, a U.N. Vote Isn’t Optional", September 4, 2013

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The Moral Case for a Syria Strike

Assad’s use of chemical weapons doesn’t present a clear and present danger to the U.S.; let’s not pretend otherwise. Everything comes down to the importance of the chemical-weapons taboo. Are these weapons really so vile, as governments have been saying for more than a century, that their use should be met, where feasible, with force? Or will they be something we learn to accept, just one more horror of war, along with all the others we deplore yet find ways to tolerate?

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The international community has largely failed in efforts in Syria, in part, because global norms on protecting civilians from their own governments haven't evolved to the point where intervention is considered acceptable (and likely never will completely). Still the norms that do exist are important and maintaining them is one of the best tools at America's disposal to further limit and contain violence and not just in Syria, but in future conflicts (of course it would also help if the US abided by them as well . . ). The fact is there are and should be rules to the game, and when a country acts so far beyond the generally accepted guidelines of armed combat, a response is necessary.

Michael Cohen, "The liberal case for President Obama to strike the Syrian regime", The Guardian, August 29, 2013

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Two years after the beginning of the conflict — and countless lost opportunities to create the genuine global coalition for a political transition in Syria later — the unspoken prevailing sentiment among Western security and intelligence officials is that the only outcome worse than Assad prevailing in the civil war is a victory by a rebel coalition increasingly judged to be dominated by extremists and jihadists whose model for a future Syria looks a lot more like Taliban-era Afghanistan than a pluralist democracy. But to assume that a bloody, deteriorating stalemate between two scorpions in a bottle is the best of a series of bad options mocks our ostensible concern for the people of Syria, ignores the risks of further regional instability and, most importantly, misses the opportunity — even at this late hour — to forge a global alliance for change in Damascus, and an end to the war.

Nader Mousavizadeh, "How to win the vote — and the war — on Syria", Reuters.com, September 3, 2013

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When we cannot be sure how to improve the world, prudence becomes an important virtue, and grandiose visions can pose a grave danger. This is sometimes forgotten by those who want Obama to place bigger bets in the revolutions of today’s Middle East. It is one thing to try to nudge events at the margins and assert our values in the long term; it is another to think we can shape revolutions we do not fully understand. There is a difference between a limited punishment of Syria for breaking an international taboo on the use of chemical weapons and becoming involved in a civil war. In foreign policy, as in medicine, it is important to first do no harm. Bush 41, who lacked the ability to articulate a vision but was able to steer through crises, turned out to be a better leader than his son, who had a powerful vision but little contextual intelligence about the region he tried to reshape.

Joseph Nye, "Arab Revolutions pose", Washington Post, August 30, 2013, 

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What may get lost in the debate is that even if Congress approves, an attack on Syria would still violate international law ­-- in particular, the UN Charter. When a member state is not defending itself against attack, the charter generally permits the use of force only when authorized by a Security Council resolution. And there has been no such authorization in the case of Syria. The whole point of the charter is to prevent member states from attacking each other based on their individual interpretations of international law. If Russia or China decided to attack an American ally on the grounds that it had violated international law, the United States would surely object, and rightly so. Even if America’s goal is humanitarian intervention with the purest of motives, it would be legal under the charter only if the Security Council determined that humanitarian intervention was justified. What Obama is proposing to do is precisely what the charter was designed to prevent.

Jack M. Balkin, "What Congressional Approval Won't Do: Trim Obama's Power or Make War Legal", Sept 3, 2013

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As world attention focused on the coup in Egypt and the poison gas attack in Syria over the past two months, Libya has plunged unnoticed into its worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Gaddafi two years ago. Government authority is disintegrating in all parts of the country putting in doubt claims by American, British and French politicians that Nato’s military action in Libya in 2011 was an outstanding example of a successful foreign military intervention which should be repeated in Syria.

Patrick Cockburn, "Special report: We all thought Libya had moved on – it has, but into lawlessness and ruin", The Independent, Sept 3, 2013

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While Beckett might not appreciate my efforts to define Godot as the Syrian Civil war, the Administration followed the script of Beckett’s play to the extent it never defined the reasons for what the actors were doing, why they were waiting, or what would happen after Godot came. Chemical weapons are a very real issue, but they are only a subset of the real issue: the overall level of suffering and growing regional instability coming out of the Syrian civil war.

Anthony H. Cordesman, "President Obama and Syria: The “Waiting for Godot” Strategy" Sept 1, 2013

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What's particularly baffling is that the White House seemed woefully unprepared for this moment, despite months of repeated warnings of the terrible consequences Mr Al Assad would face should he cross the president's red line. As Fred Hof, a recently retired State Department expert on Syria, wrote in a scathing blog post: "The events of the past 10 days suggest that there was no administration forethought to the possibility of a major chemical incident in Syria; there was no plan in place to respond to a major chemical attack by a regime that had already demonstrated its deep and abiding contempt for the president and his red lines."

Blake Hounshell, "Congress vote will send the wrong message to Assad", Sept 3, 2013

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If someone tries to make gross violations of international law a norm, then we will create chaos. We will create a situation where the U.N. Charter and the principles under which all the nations of the world have signed up, including the principle of unanimous agreement of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the so-called right of veto, which the United States insisted on, then all of these principles will simply collapse.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, "Russia Rejects U.S. Evidence on Syrian Chemical Attack", NY Times, September 2, 2013