The Noble Syrian Opposition

I remember viewing footage of a handcuffed Vietnamese man being led into a Saigon street. As he stood there in his plaid shirt, expression of pain on his face, his captor produced a handgun and, placing the muzzle inches from his temple, pulled the trigger. It was February,1968. The image, which energized the Vietnam anti-war movement, was captured by an AP photographer and landed on the cover of at least one major magazine. I remember the picture. It captured that instant just when the bullet entered the man’s head. The man had tilted his head away from the muzzle, as if it might protect him. I can still see his hair, flung straight upward and outward, the way a boxer’s hair goes straight at the impact of a disabling upper cut. The point of the article? The U.S. and its military might were on the side of the man with the smoking gun—Nguyen Ngoc Loan, Chief of the South Vietnamese National Police. The incident made America look inward, questioning whom we had become friends with, as much as the cause.

It is forty-five years later, and all that has changed are dates and scenery.

The scene this time is the town square in Aleppo, a town in northwestern Syria surrounded by olive, nut, and fruit orchards and known for its domes, minarets, stark apartment buildings, and war. It is an ancient city, among the oldest inhabited ones on earth. If it were human it would have celebrated nearly 8,000 birthdays.

It is a Saturday, June 8^th, 2013. Fourteen-year-old Muhammad al-Qatta is working at his coffee kiosk in the working-class Shaar neighborhood. Two years of civil war have left the Syrian economy and currency in free fall and he is glad to have a way to help with his family’s needs. When a man approaches and asks for a free cup of coffee, Muhammad’s smiling reply, variously reported, seems to have been, ‘If Muhammad, peace be upon him, were to come to this earth right now, I would still not give a cup of coffee to anyone unless they pay for it.’ 

Nearby, three men overhear the comment. They accuse him of insulting the prophet.  He is forced into a car and driven away. When he is returned, his head is covered with a shirt and he is blindfolded. Visible on his body are whip marks. The three men, who speak in a clear Arabic accent as opposed to a Syrian accent, announce to bystanders that the youth is guilty of blaspheming the prophet and that all who blaspheme will suffer his fate.

The teenager’s mother is watching from an upstairs window when it becomes clear the men intend to shoot her son. When she rushes into the street her son has already been shot at least once. She pleads with the men who stand over him. ‘That’s haram, forbidden! Stop! Stop! You are killing a child.’ The answer was another shot. Then, the men leave by car, driving over an arm. Muhammad is left in the street. Entry wounds have left his lower face bloody and grotesquely deformed; another bullet hole gapes in his neck.

The men who shot Muhammad al-Qatta are members of the Islamic State of Iraq. In the continuing struggle to overthrow al-Assad, they are part of the diverse mix of opposition forces receiving millions of dollars in non-lethal aid from around the world, and just one of the Al Qaeda affiliates.  And while the United States has taken pains to deny aid to extremist groups, many question whether there can be any effective way to accomplish this goal given the thin lines separating factions fighting alongside one another in shelled ruins, or dashing from building to building in the beleaguered cities and towns of the crumbling state.

Over the past month, concerns took on a new urgency as President Obama, faced with a growing humanitarian crisis and a death toll approaching 100,000,  agreed to send arms. And though the president’s plan—for the moment stymied by Congress—would limit supplies to the more moderate rebel groups, it is difficult to discern who, if anybody, fits the definition of moderate. Certainly not the group that armed Muhammad’s killers, or the militia unit that recently stormed the convent of the Custody of the Holy Land in the village of Ghassaniyeh and put eight rounds into the chest of Father Francois Murad while he tried to protect the nuns.  Nor would it be those represented by Khalid al-Hamad, who was videoed biting into the heart of a fallen Syrian soldier (medical experts say it was actually a lung). The fact is, moderate rebels in Syria are as rare as Baptists in the Vatican.

 By far, the most well-organized and most effective units of the opposition are the Al Qaeda affiliates; and to them the war is not part of a democracy movement: it’s about killing Shiites and establishing Sunni rule. One spokesman has even gone so far as to call fellow Sunnis traitors worthy of death who support democratic elections. Even if these groups are barred from receiving any U.S. weapons shipments, there is no guarantee that supplies of arms and ammunition would not be shared with, or even captured by them or other unsavory members of Syria’s opposition forces.

The atrocities committed by the Assad regime are undeniable. His aircraft bomb civilians, his paramilitary thugs crash through doors to stab, shoot, and incinerate the bodies of those within. His use of chemical weapons has been confirmed. 

But the existence of a cruel, dictatorial regime must never be the sole qualifying criterion for U.S. aid—lethal or non-lethal. In determining who should be friends and beneficiaries, there are certain things we must first learn about them. After they have prevailed; after they have paraded the bloody body of the dictator in the street; after they have posed before the cameras, lighting up the air with their U.S-made automatic weapons, how will they govern? What system of law will they impose? How will they treat dissenters or those who do not conform to their religious views? These questions must be answered in a way that does not offend our basic instincts and values.

Like individuals, nations can be measured by who their friends are. Remembering the police chief in Saigon, and getting a clearer view day-to-day of what contributing to a Sunni victory in Syria would say about us, I, for one, am inclined to be selective.

Guantanamo Prison Camp. Shut it Down!

You are an American.  So am I. We celebrate our freedoms and rights and we trust in our justice system to safeguard those rights.  So, if someone we know is jailed for say, burglary, we would be concerned, but not panicked. We would trust that his innocence (hopefully) would be vindicated or, at worst, his guilt would receive a proportional penalty: nothing more.  But if days of detention turned into weeks and then months without trial or even formal charging, we would speak up and demand answers.  And if justice officials should inform us he is to be held indefinitely, without trial or further due process because, well, because he is, after all, a burglar, we would dial the NRA hotline and demand a national call to arms.

Why then is there no sense of outrage over 166 human beings, more than one hundred of whom are on a hunger strike, held behind chain link and razor wire at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without evidence to prosecute or plan to release? When such a spectacle would evoke the strongest pangs of sympathy and ire if the prisoners were uncharged Americans, what can explain our indifference or justify Congressional action barring their release? Have we accepted the harsh treatment because, well, because they’re terrorists?  Are they terrorists?

Allow me to shed some light on the subject.

Since 2002, when the facility’s metal gates creaked open to admit combatants captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan or in other theaters of the war on terror, 779 men have entered; 604 have been repatriated to their homelands or transferred to other settlement countries, nine have died—six by suicide, and 166 remain, almost all having spent ten or more years in captivity with only six facing formal charges. Let’s review the kinds of men who comprise the shuffling, shackled line who over time have witnessed some or all of the camp’s evolution from new facility, to symbol of torture and interminable imprisonment, to number one recruitment tool of Islamic terrorist groups in the world today.

Some, are terrorists. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the confessed mastermind of the September 11 attack in the United States and the Bali nightclub bombings in Indonesia. He was captured ten years ago and awaits transfer to the U.S for a federal court trial that may still be years away. Ramzi bin al-Shibh is another September 11 conspirator, currently being tried before a military commission.

Most, however, entered Guantanamo as prisoners of war of one stripe or another. Some were captured fighting Coalition forces on the battlefield.  Others were found on the fringes: learning to fight in remote training camps or providing support of some form or another to the anti-Coalition cause.  Together, they included hundreds not captured by U.S. forces but handed over by our Pakistani or Afghan allies after American military officials advertised bounties of $5,000 or more per head.  The torrent of Guantanamo-bound prisoners thus unleashed prompted our own frustrated Secretary of Defense to complain in a memo reported by the Washington Post, “We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay with low-level enemy combatants...GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan.”

Many of these prisoners were tortured.

Our review completed, we ask what to do with those remaining, a question that makes us face our heritage of basic freedoms and our most deeply held conceptions of right and wrong.  

Excepting those involuntarily committed to mental institutions, American moral and legal tradition has recognized only two classes of people we may lawfully hold against their will: criminals and prisoners of war. This tradition and the justice it represents should be applied to the 166 now languishing at Guantanamo.  The handful who are alleged to be criminals must be prosecuted, and sent to U.S. super-max prisons if convicted, otherwise, set free.  

The POWs can be divided into two groups and dealt with accordingly.  The first group comprises 86 prisoners who have been cleared for release and who are no longer deemed combatants nor security threats.  Their continued detention is inexcusable, though Congress has taken action effectively preventing their release. Congress should reverese itself and leave the State Department free to work out details of their transfers with home countries. 

The second group includes those the Department of Defense and other security agencies describe as ‘not feasible to prosecute but too dangerous to release.’ As emotionally evocative as it is vague, this classification will not do. It’s like taking that burglar I spoke of earlier and saying, ‘We have no evidence to convict you, but we won’t release you to burglarize again.’ Vivid labels must never serve as a substitute for justice or an excuse to abuse the basic rights of fellow human beings. Cases must reviewed once more for evidence of plots or crimes against the United States.  Evidence must be followed with charges and prosecution; otherwise these men should be treated as prisoners of war and repatriated.

The world knows what values we say we uphold and they see our inconsistency.  The UN has called the continued detention of so many people without trial a clear violation of international law.  Amnesty International has called Guantanamo the gulag of our time.

Now that the war in Iraq is over and we are beginning the drawdown of American forces in Afghanistan the only practical value of continued operations at the Guantanamo prison falls to those who use images of its prisoners and the legacy of its torture to draw fresh recruits to the jihadist cause.  We must shut it down.

This we must do, because we are Americans.

A Reply to McKinsey: The Economy will Reset Global Capital Flows

The McKinsey Global Institute’s March 2013 report, Financial Globalization: Retreat or Reset?, does a masterful job detailing and dissecting the shrinking of cross-border capital flows since the economic crisis of 2007/2008.  However, while the report suggests such a trend may lead to sluggish or stifled recovery of our interconnected global economy, and suggests interventions policy makers and financial institutions should consider to reset things to make them right, I believe McKinsey has misinterpreted the cause and effect relationship between capital flow and economic vitality and misunderstands that reduction in flow is rarely a driving force behind economic downturn or malaise—merely a reflection. Therefore, no interventions are necessary.

Capital flows eased during and after the Great Recession because crashed economies needed less capital and are recovering slowly. Economies did not stall because of insufficient capital.  In languid economies worldwide there is less consumption and less demand, therefore less production and, certainly, less need for capital to facilitate plant construction, expansion, or inventory build up. Thus, we see less call for investment dollars—less issuance of corporate bonds or stocks, less clamoring for loans, and less need, in turn, for banks to increase assets to provide funding for loans either domestically or beyond our borders.  Indeed, lack of demand and uncertainty over the future U.S. fiscal and economic picture accounts not just for the absence of capital flow toward U.S. companies or toward greater U.S. investment opportunities abroad, but also for the nearly $2 trillion U.S. corporations are known to have  sitting on their balance sheets.

In addition, banks and non-bank financial institutions here and abroad, having only lately severed the taxpayer bailout umbilical and embarrassed by the public exposure of their past orgy of reckless risk taking, rather than writing more cross-border junk loans or resuming their proprietary trading gambling games, are shedding billions in toxic assets and reacquainting themselves, however reluctantly, with sound underwriting practices.

In conclusion, a sound supply of capital is the handmaiden of a thriving economy, but not its creator.  Entrepreneurial vision, a solid work ethic, and a dog-eared guidebook of best business practices are the creators of economic vibrancy.  Not capital flow. Resumed capital flow will inexorably track economic recuperation. Even without McKinsey’s suggested capital policy interventions, the light will shine again and economies, fed by wiser and safer investment practices, will flourish until history’s cycle of amnesia and greed produces new credit-fueled bubbles and the latest near-Armageddon.