Mostly the open floor plan is incredibly useful – everyone involved in our daily broadcast and web operations needs to communicate almost constantly and much of it can be done easily because we’re close together and not cut off by doors and cubicle walls. But as many of us would attest, the continual interruptions are also wearing, and those who want to concentrate on longer-term projects have migrated to the back of the room, furthest from the hubbub of the daily production fray. Just this week a colleague asked whether I minded if he moved desks so he could sit in a more remote part of the room. He said he was tired of being right next to the studio with the door opening and closing and continual foot traffic and conversations right over his shoulder. I had nothing but sympathy for his plight and heartily endorsed the idea.

Susan Cain’s piece suggests that many creative types are introverts who crave solitude and work best alone. Many of us I suspect are somewhere along the middle of the spectrum, thriving on contact but needing quiet as well. My dream has long been to have an office with a door on it where I can read and write whatever I want. In reality my career has unfolded in newsroom environments, where work is performed in the midst of white noise, machines, constant contact with colleagues and frenetic daily deadlines. Perhaps that’s why it’s such a relief to go on a reporting trip and be lost in my own thoughts for long stretches of travel. Not to mention actually doing the real on-the-ground reporting that is the lifeblood of what we do at The World.

But having said that, what if I were suddenly presented with that quiet office; would I find it as productive as I like to think it would be? Or is it precisely the intensity and discipline and stimulation of the newsroom environment that has kept me churning out radio all these years? Cain’s piece doesn’t really address the question of motivation and how it’s affected by the proximity or not of colleagues. Surely there’s a mixture of peer pressure and peer support that many of us rely on to keep the daily juices flowing. I’m sure creative geniuses have no trouble generating material in solitude, but what about the rest of us?!

I’d love to know your thoughts—how you work best, what the architecture of your workplace is like, whether you think Susan Cain is right about the dangers of the New Groupthink. Perhaps, as she suggests, even in a newsroom like ours, we should be creating places where people can get some quiet and solitude on a regular basis to see if it induces a different kind or quality of work. I can’t help thinking this particular dilemma of solitude vs. physical proximity mirrors the dilemma of how much time to spend reading and writing vs. clicking on videos or tweeting. It’s all about how much interaction is optimal in a creative, intellectual life. And I suspect the answer is very different depending on who you are. Which means only some of you will feel like leaving a comment below!

I remember him telling me the funding for his position was funded by an NGO. One of the big issues in Haiti right now is the tension over the role of international NGOs in the country’s governance and economy. Critics complain they distort the local economy, suck power and money away from the Haitian State and don’t do enough for the people of Haiti.

The BBC’s always-thoughtful Allan Little has a new documentary on the subject.

We’ve also touched on these themes in recent interviews on The World, with Paul Farmer of Partners in Health (considered by many to be among the most effective NGOs in Haiti) and Linda Polman, author of The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?.

Sometimes the arguments become frustrating and cyclical; it’s clearly not an either or situation. Haiti needs NGOs and it also needs a stronger, healthier government. Still, there’s clearly an urgent and important discussion going on; I for one hope it leads to better outcomes.

Follow @jebsharp

How the Video was Made
Many of The World’s reporters are equipped with their own small video camera. They are used to filming other people and the stories they cover. This time, they had to film themselves – or get others to film them – doing their work.

Stand-ups, or reporters being filmed in a story, are common in television. But for radio reporters, used to holding a microphone at interviewees, it was something unusual and took a bit of getting used to.

The World’s News Editor, Chris Woolf, normally based in the Boston newsroom, was in our London office during the day of filming and shot the program elements while there.

There was also a stylized end sequence, where all reporters not in the program on the day of the shoot, were given a chance to be feature in the video. This required each reporter to film themselves in a very particular way which took a bit of coordinating.

The day of the shoot was pretty normal – though shortly before, the hours of work that was put into that day’s program had to be discarded because of breaking news.

In order to get the right footage with everyone doing the same thing on that right day, it was a case of just picking any day in the calendar and seeing what happened.

In the end, what you see is a normal day in the life of The World.

But much of the essential work goes on behind the scenes. A prime example is my colleague Carol Hills.

She was a driving force behind the conception and development of The World in the early days. In fact she hired and mentored me when I came on board as a staff reporter in 1998.

These days she’s a part-time producer and editor of our Global Political Cartoons. She’s developed a unique beat devoted to those cartoons and the cartoonists who create them. (Some great recent posts here, here and here.)

She’s on Twitter @globalcartoons.)

Her on-air chats and online slideshows are proving to be a vital link between our radio and web operations as we morph into a different kind of digital future.

Carol is also a source of endless great ideas and a conscience for the program. Just this morning she was haranguing me about Syria coverage and the importance of staying on the story and finding fresh angles (see Carol’s powerful story about Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat) and interesting ways into the unfolding tragedy there.

She’s right but she’s also vying for attention for a story in the context of a very big world full of complex issues that all clamor for coverage. I need colleagues like her to remind me what’s urgent, what’s vital, what’s not OK to ignore.

Thanks Carol!

For a while now I’ve been meaning to start a “show producer’s blog” — a place to jot down thoughts about the news, the program, the production day, the issues that come up in the course of doing what we do, and best of all, I hope, a place to engage with all of you about the stories we do. So here goes:

I hadn’t planned to write about this today but here’s one issue we clearly haven’t tackled hard enough yet: it’s 1 pm and I’ve just realized with all the day’s interviews either recorded or scheduled and the reporter pieces all in and “mixed,” there are barely any female voices in the program…which goes to show that just having a woman in the show producer role isn’t enough to change The World.

Actually it’s a bit unfair to focus on today’s program because there are many days we do have a wonderful mix of voices. Still, I know the trend is there.

It’s been studied and illustrated before across various news media. It’s just all the more sobering to have it illustrated so starkly on one’s own watch. I certainly have thoughts about how to include more women on our air…but I’d love to know yours.

Let me know in the comments below.

“It almost seems as if the Alawites now in power feel as though it’s a duty to all of those Alawites who have raised their sect into a position of power in Syria,” said Lesch. “That it would be betraying what they had done if they let go of power.”

For all its faults, the Assad regime has cultivated a kind of secular pluralism that has allowed different religions to coexist relatively peacefully. And the protestors themselves have been calling for national unity.

But as the conflict between the protestors and the regime intensifies, so does the potential for exacerbating the differences that lie beneath the surface. Robin Yassin-Kassab, a London-based writer of Syrian descent, says there are two poles of Syrian existence and you can’t ignore either one of them.

“One of them is the sectarianism, which is bad,” Yassin-Kassab said. “It exists. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Amongst some people it exists quite strongly. On the other hand, there’s this ancient tradition, thousands of years old, before Islam and Christianity really, this ancient tradition of disparate groups living together in cities and coexisting. Syrian history kind of oscillates between these two poles.”

Yassin-Kassab says the Syrian regime is stoking fears of sectarian conflict to shore up support. He says the regime wants to portray the demonstrations as akin to the violent tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in the 1980s.

The government’s crackdown back then culminated in a massacre of 20,000 people in the town of Hama. It still haunts people today. But, Yassin-Kassab says the two situations are not the same.

“Now we’ve had Alawis and Christians and Druze and so on have been involved in the protests,” said Yassin-Kassab. “There have also been people from all communities shot and tortured and the overwhelming majority of slogans are for national unity. People are calling things like “the Syrian people are One. It’s not a sectarian uprising and the regime is trying to pretend that it is.”

Yassin-Kassab shared an ominous anecdote to share about a friend from a prominent Alawite family unconnected to the regime.

“His parents are receiving threatening phone calls from anonymous numbers,” said Yassin-Kassab. “People saying things like ‘We know where you are, we’re coming after you, your time is up.’ His parents believe that these are Syrian Sunni Muslims, ordinary people, calling up and threatening what’s going to happen to the whole community once this regime has fallen. I believe and my friend believes that it’s actually more likely the Mukhabarat, the secret police, who are calling them up trying to scare them.”

Historian Anne Alexander, a fellow at Cambridge University, also thinks the regime is trying to use sectarianism as a counterrevolutionary tool. She says the real differences in Syria are not ones of religious identity but of social class and geography.

“One view point that I fundamentally disagree with is the perspective that sees the Middle East as some kind of fermenting mass of people who all hate each other on religious grounds,” said Alexander. “And that once you remove the strong state this will all fly apart into people trying to kill each other because their neighbor is from a different religion.”

In fact, says Alexander, the history of the region shows that the gut reaction of national protest movements is to fight for unity, while time and time again, the gut reaction of regimes is to use any mechanisms they can to break that unity apart. In Syria’s case that impulse could hasten the slide toward civil war.

The Arab Spring has put pressure on President Obama to articulate a coherent policy response. But he has been addressing each country on a case-by-case basis. Obama has been weighing the benefits of reform against the strategic costs of alienating key rulers.

Obama made it clear he was with the protestors in Tunisia and Egypt . In Libya he went to war on their behalf. But not in Syria, and the picture has been more complicated in Bahrain and Yemen. In this speech Thursday, Obama laid out some core principles that guide US policy.

“The US opposes the use of violence and repression against the people of the region,” Obama said. “The United States supports a set of universal rights and these rights include free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly, the freedom of religion, equality for men and women under the rule of law. And the right to choose your own leaders, whether you live in Baghdad, or Damascus; Sanaa or Tehran.”

Obama announced an economic aid initiative for the region starting with Egypt and Tunisia. He singled out those countries because Egypt is a longstanding ally and Tunisia was in the vanguard of the democratic wave. By contrast, Obama condemned Syria for choosing what he called the path of murder and mass arrest.

“The Syrian government must stop shooting demonstrators and allow peaceful protests,” said Obama. “It must release political prisoners and stop unjust arrests it must allow human rights monitors to have access to cities like Daraa. And start a serious dialogue to advance a democratic transition.”

Obama said Syrian President Bashar al Assad, has a choice: Lead the transition or get out of the way. He compared Syria’s crackdown on protestors to that of Iran on the protestors of the Green Revolution two years ago.

But Obama also acknowledged that it’s not just America’s foes who are cracking down – it’s also friends like Yemen and Bahrain. And he said that friend and foe a like need to understand that they must take the risks that reform entails to have the full support of the United States.

Finally Obama called on the Israelis and Palestinians to continue to try to forge a peace which he argues is now more urgent than ever. And he encouraged Americans to see their own history in the upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa.

“Our nation was founded through a rebellion against an empire,” said Obama. “Our people fought a painful civil war that extended freedom and dignity those who were enslaved. And I would not be standing here today unless past generations turned to the moral force of non-violence as a way to perfect our union.”

Obama’s speech had many audiences Thursday and he tried to reach them all without causing too much offense. But his broad appeal for peaceful reform doesn’t change the tough strategic questions that litter the road ahead.
Video of the entire speech and analysis
The President’s Speech on Twitter
Text of the Speech

• BBC Coverage of Arab Unrest
• Jeb Sharp’s History Podcast: ‘How We Got Here’ website
• Follow Jeb Sharp on Twitter

Osama Bin Laden’s death raises stark questions about US policy in Afghanistan. That policy was the subject of a previously-scheduled hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday. John Kerry, D-MA, chairs the committee, called the death of Bin Laden a seminal moment and an event of enormous consequence. And he acknowledged it raises big questions about US policy in Afghanistan.

“With the death of Bin Laden, some people are sure to ask why don’t we pack up and leave Afghanistan,” Kerry said. “So it’s even more compelling that we examine carefully, what is at stake, what goals are legitimate, and realistic, what is our real security challenge and how do we achieve the interests of our country?”

In that sense Bin Laden’s death simply crystallized the whole point of the hearing — to zero in on US goals in Afghanistan and how best to achieve them. Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations says success in Afghanistan has been loosely defined as achieving an Afghan government that can hold off the Taliban. He doesn’t buy it.

“Let me just say as directly as I can, I am deeply and profoundly skeptical that this policy will work,” said Haass. “Given the nature of Afghanistan and in particular the weakness of its central institutions and in particular the reality that Pakistan will continue to provide a sanctuary for the Taliban.”

A strategic distraction

Haass calls the war in Afghanistan a strategic distraction from other more important priorities. He thinks the US should scale down drastically from the current 100 thousand troops to somewhere between 10 and 25,000 — and then focus more narrowly on counterterrorism goals. He reckons the Obama Administration would save $75 billion dollars a year if it did so.

“That is one-fourth of the fiscal savings everyone suggests we need,” Kerry said. “That is an extraordinary bit of progress that we could get.”

But Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton, who has just finished a stint as head of policy and planning at the State Dept., is more optimistic about the prospects of success in Afghanistan. She agrees with Haass that the ultimate goal is to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States — but she believes you have to do a lot more work in Afghanistan to ensure that.

“I don’t believe you can accomplish that goal without a political settlement that, longer-term, produces a measure of security, a measure of stability and a measure of self reliance,” said Slaughter. “The problem with the strategy that Richard has articulated is that is the strategy we tried. After we invaded Afghanistan we pursued a narrow counterterrorism strategy. And the result was the Taliban came surging back.”

A new opportunity

Slaughter advocates continuing a comprehensive approach that includes pushing for a political settlement, something she thinks is made easier by Bin Laden’s death.

“The death of Osama Bin Laden creates a new opportunity to begin those negotiations,” said Slaughter. “The United States has already made clear his death is not the end of the war in Afghanistan but we should now mark this moment as the beginning of the end, as a moment that allows us to pivot toward a comprehensive political settlement that will bring stability and security to Afghanistan and greater security to Pakistan, while still allowing the United States to take whatever measures are necessary to protect ourselves against al-Qaeda.”

If Tuesday’s hearing was meant to clarify goals in Afghanistan, it may have had the opposite effect. One of the witnesses, former diplomat Ronald Neumann, echoed the committee’s concerns that there’s no simple agreed statement of purpose for the war there.

“We desperately need it,” said Neumann. “Not just for the American people but we are not projecting to anyone in Afghanistan a clarity of purpose right now and that is enormously important and it’s debilitating.”

Neumann said he doesn’t have the exact words either, but in his view the Taliban can’t be allowed to win. The hearing was about Afghanistan but US policy there is linked explicitly to US policy in Pakistan. Richard Haass says it’s hard to imagine a more complicated bilateral relationship than the one between Washington and Islamabad.

“Let me suggest a simple guide to US foreign policy when it comes to Pakistan,” said Haass. “We should cooperate where and when we can. But we should act independently where and when we must. And the recent operation that killed Osama Bin Laden is a case in point.”

Jean Wesner Guirand (photo: Jeb Sharp)

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By Jeb Sharp

Class divisions are stark in Haiti. A tiny elite holds most of the country’s wealth and much of the rest of the population is desperately poor. People are divided by income, by language, even by skin color, and there’s fear and resentment all around.

Louis-Henry Mars thinks about these divisions a lot. He’s a former factory manager who comes from a long line of Haitian intellectuals. He says the outside world is focused on Haiti’s economy, but that’s not his priority.

“The front line issue for me is the issue of relationship between people and people, between the rich and the poor, between all sides of society, all sectors of society,” said Mars. “Until we actually focus on that first, nothing is really going to work here because that’s the real deep issue of the country.”

Mars traces the gap between the haves and have-nots to Haiti’s victorious slave rebellion more than 200 years ago. He says after independence in 1804, the elite who were closest to the colonial masters grabbed what they could of the country’s resources.

“But the foot soldiers, the peasants, those who actually were in the heat of the battle, did not get their fair share of the resources of the country and it’s that struggle that is still going on here today,” said Mars.

Talking to each other

And he doesn’t think it’s a struggle that will be ended by paving roads and building electricity grid. He thinks it’ll take people talking to one another, trusting one another, knowing one another.

For the past few years Mars has been working to bring rich business people together with gang leaders from the slums in a neighborhood called St. Martin. It was one of the places where political violence erupted when President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced from power in 2004. Businessman Yves Bourjolly’s building supply store was looted during the riots.

“It was terrible,” said Bourjolly. “There was nothing left. They stole everything. There was nothing left.”

Bourjolly joined the dialogues Mars helps facilitate through a project called the Partnership for Peace and Prosperity in St. Martin. We meet Bourjolly in his air-conditioned office. Armed guards stand watch outside. Bourjolly said he was afraid to meet slum leaders at first.

“I said to myself, those people probably don’t like me or they will be asking me for money all the time,” said Bourjolly. “I was really hesitant.”

But Bourjolly went ahead and joined the dialogues, which he found transformative. In retrospect, he doesn’t even blame the mobs who destroyed his store.

“I don’t think the people were responsible. I think we are all at fault,” said Bourjolly. “The whole society is at fault. The whole society who didn’t do anything for the people so they got angry at themselves, at everyone, because we didn’t do anything for them.”

Gangs

Mars takes me down the road to meet one of the gang leaders, Jean Wesner Guirand. Guirand says he knows gang leaders but he’s not one of them. These days he heads the neighborhood committee that helps run the camp where people have been sheltering since last year’s earthquake.

We sit down to talk in one of the tents. It’s sweltering. Guirand turns out to be less introspective than the businessman Bourjolly but he too says the dialogues have been eye opening.

“There was a tendency in the old days to think that the person who was bourgeois or who has money cannot be friends with someone who is poor,” said Guirand. “But it’s not true. There were differences of color, maybe of means, we were afraid of him, he was afraid of us, but when we sat down around a table it was all a myth. There was no need for us to fear each other.”

That sentiment resonated when the earthquake hit last year. About 25 people involved in the dialogue project were meeting in a courtyard. Louis-Henri Mars shows me the spot.

“If we were going to die, we were all going to die all together,” said Mars. “This building here kind of swerved towards us as we were standing in that yard there. And afterwards one of the guys told me, Louis, we were all going to die together. I said yes there was not going to be a difference whether I had a car or you were walking or whatever. We were all human beings. “

Mars loved that moment of togetherness just after the earthquake. He knows dialogue alone won’t be a panacea for what ails Haiti. But he may well be right that all sorts of other interventions are doomed to fail unless and until Haiti’s rich and poor find reason to trust one another.

By Jeb Sharp

The Syrian government’s crackdown on protesters is forcing the United States to make decisions on Syria. Andrew Tabler, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said he thinks the violence of the past few days marks a turning point and that the United States needs to signal to the government of Bashar Assad that its actions will damage Syria’s relations with the West.

“That’s something we haven’t done over the past few years,” Tabler said. “We have focused on engagement and talking behind the scenes and not openly airing disputes in public. Now it’s important the Assad regime realizes it’s crossed a red line.”

The Obama Administration said Monday that it’s considering targeted sanctions against Assad and his inner circle. But the White House will also have to decide whether to cut off efforts to engage Syria. Tabler said he thinks it’s time for US officials to pull back.

Changing the approach

“I believe in engaging a country based on its behavior, not on what we wish it to be. I’m not speaking from ideology here,” Tabler said. “It’s simply that the Assad regime’s behavior has become worse, we have done very little about it, and now it’s time we change this approach.”

But other Syria watchers don’t want to see the Obama Administration disengage. David Lesch, a professor of Middle East history at Trinity University, advocates keeping up the pressure, but not alienating Syria completely.

“It’s a very delicate thing to handle, because if you disengage then you know the dialogue is broken,” Lesch said. “I would say don’t disengage quite yet.”

He added that he hopes the new US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, is sending the right signals and meeting with the right people in the Assad government to make Washington’s position completely clear.

Without Assad

President Obama came into office hoping to persuade President Assad to sign a peace agreement with Israel and temper Syria’s pro-Iran, pro-Hezbollah tendencies. But instead, the administration now faces the possibility of a Syria without Assad, and all the unknowns that might entail. David Lesch said it’s an unnerving prospect for US officials.

“They don’t want the precipitous fall of the Assad regime, and then perhaps the country collapse a la Iraq, because like Iraq or Lebanon on the other border, [Syria] is ethnically and religiously and economically diverse, and it’s in a very strategic area,” Lesch said. “Even the Israelis would rather not see that happen. As they’ve been saying, better the devil you know than the greater uncertainty of political instability and the collapse of a country on their borders.”

Lesch wrote a book about Assad and has met him several times. He said he thinks the Syrian president is still in shock that his people are turning against him, but Lesch also thinks Assad was emboldened by the notion that the United States and its allies would not intervene in Syria.

“In the beginning, the Obama Administration was saying outright that Syria is not Libya and Bashar Assad is not Muammar Gaddafi,” Lesch said. “Unfortunately I think that may have emboldened the Syrian regime to think that they had more of a free hand to deal with the domestic problem, or they were being signaled that they had more of a free hand.”

But thinking he had a free hand to shoot innocent people may prove to be Bashar Assad’s downfall in the end. Andrew Tabler used to live in Syria, and he said he’s been amazed by the bravery of the Syrian people over the past month, even in areas traditionally loyal to the regime. He said it’s hard to imagine Assad turning things back now.

• BBC video: ‘Tanks roll into Deraa’
• Who are the protest leaders?
• Syria crisis
• Jeb Sharp’s history podcast: How We Got Here

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]]> http://www.theworld.org/2011/04/syria-assad-sanctions/feed/ 0 04/25/2011,Assad,Damascus,Deraa,homs,Jeb Sharp,protests,Syria The United States says it is considering targeted sanctions against the Syrian government in response to what officials have described as brutal violence against its people. The World's Jeb Sharp looks at options available to the Obama Administration t... The United States says it is considering targeted sanctions against the Syrian government in response to what officials have described as brutal violence against its people. The World's Jeb Sharp looks at options available to the Obama Administration to pressure Syrian President Bashar al Assad (pictured) to stop his violent crackdown against protestors and implement political reforms. Download MP3 BBC video: 'Tanks roll into Deraa' PRI's The World no 7086704252011Jeb SharpLisa MullinsSyria protestsMiddle EastSyriareportpolitics288083965http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/media.theworld.org/audio/042520112.mp3 162 audio/mpeg http://www.theworld.org/2011/04/libya-intervention-darfur-sudan/ http://www.theworld.org/2011/04/libya-intervention-darfur-sudan/#comments Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:20:02 +0000 The World http://www.theworld.org/?p=68669 Download audio file (040520117.mp3)
The military intervention in Libya unfolded relatively quickly. Just over a month passed between the first protest in Libya and the first airstrikes. Compare that with the Darfur crisis where mass atrocities unfolded for years while the UN Security Council wrangled over what to do. The World's Jeb Sharp considers the reasons for the difference. Download MP3 Jeb Sharp's history podcast: How We Got Here ]]>

Darfur refugees in a camp along the Chad-Sudan border in 2007 (Photo: Jeb Sharp)

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by Jeb Sharp

The pace of the Libya intervention has stunned the people of Darfur and the activists who worked so hard to protect them. Back in 2004, the assumption was that if you raised a loud enough outcry, governments would act to stop mass atrocities. In Libya the outcry had barely begun when governments intervened. The difference has not gone unnoticed by Rebecca Hamilton the author of ‘Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide’.

“What Libya has that Darfur never had, still does not have to the present day, and desperately needs, is a unified international commitment to do civilian protection,” said Hamilton.

Hamilton says Libya underscores for her how the battle to protect civilians takes place in the realm of global geo-politics. In this case it was the Arab League’s request to the UN Security Council to enforce a no fly zone and protect civilians that made the difference.

“Without that then you would have had China in particular doing what it did in Darfur–and which is its typical position–which is to threaten to veto anything that looks interventionist,” said Hamilton.

“But with the Arab League specifically requesting to the UN Security Council that they do this, I think that led to China agreeing to abstain and let such a strong civilian protection resolution go through.”

The Arab League was willing to forsake Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in a way it was never ready to forsake Sudanese President Omar al Bashir. Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy says a key motivating factor in the Libya intervention was the widespread desire to see Gaddafi fall.

“The Arab League generally has no love for Gaddafi,” said Knights. “Many of the key players have a strong desire to see Gaddafi fall because of prior disagreements and bitter conflicts that they’ve had with him. Likewise the West has long-lasting grudges against Gaddafi whether they be the U.S., the British, the French.”

Even so, it wasn’t a given that the Arab League would sideline Gaddafi, notes Rebecca Hamilton. At the height of the outcry over Darfur, the Arab League stood by Sudanese President Omar al Bashir.

“I think what made the difference is the high-level defections of some of Gaddafi’s closest inner circle,” said Hamilton.

“And that again is something that you have not had in Sudan. Bashir’s inner circle have stayed tight and in support of him. But I think that when Gaddafi’s inner circle started to split it was easier for regional bodies like the Arab League to say, well we can stand beside Libya, whilst isolating Gaddafi.”

But Hamilton says there’s another striking reason things have played out differently in Libya and Darfur.

“If I had to put it in one word, I’d say Iraq,” said Hamilton.

“The problem during the early days in Darfur was that it was really only the U.S. government that was leading the charge for civilian protection, and it was in many ways the worst-placed actor to do so in the context of the recent invasion in Iraq. It just looked like hypocrisy and double standards for the Bush Administration to be talking about human rights in Darfur whilst you had Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and all of the other consequences of Iraq.”

It also made it easy for President Bashir of Sudan to paint any discussion of an international peacekeeping force for Darfur as an American-led attempt to invade yet another Muslim country. But things are different today. Time has passed. There’s a different administration in the White House, and the rest of the world is less cynical about US motives. There is surprising support for the Libya intervention in the Arab World.

But even if there had been similar agreement on Darfur there’s another glaring difference between the two cases, according to Robert Pape of the University of Chicago.

“The main difference between Darfur and Libya is actually the geography,” said Pape.

Pape points out that Libya is close to Europe and right on the coast. That means Gaddafi’s forces are vulnerable to NATO’s sea-based air power. Darfur, by contrast, is in western Sudan, hundreds of miles from the sea, with mountainous terrain and lots of small arms fire. Protecting civilians there is a different proposition.

“As a result, nearly every plan that was serious included significant numbers of ground troops,” said Pape. “The African Union put together the smallest plan for 2000 ground forces, the UN began to look at this and very quickly the number got up to 30,000 ground troops. And once you’re talking about tens of thousands of ground troops going into a very hostile environment, now we begin to balance out the humanitarian goal with the serious risk of life to ourselves.”

The UN Security Council did eventually deploy a peacekeeping force to Darfur, but not before hundreds of thousands of people had died and millions had been displaced. Even now, says Rebecca Hamilton, there’s an urgent need for international pressure for a peace settlement and the enforcement of a ceasefire in Darfur.

Slideshow from 2007 – all photos: Jeb Sharp

Read more:
• ‘Fighting for Darfur’ by Rebecca Hamilton
• ‘Beyond a No-Fly Zone: How to Protect Civilians in Libya’ by Michael Knights
• ‘The New Standard for Humanitarian Intervention’ by Robert Pape

• FAQ: Sudan’s Darfur conflict
• War in Darfur ‘over’ (2009)
• Jeb Sharp’s history podcast: How We Got Here
• Jeb Sharp’s 2007 Darfur coverage
• Follow Jeb Sharp on Twitter

Remembering Chernobyl after 25 years
Abd El-Krim: A Moroccan hero who never was
Nations Look So Pretty from Afar
100 Years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By Jeb Sharp

Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has been thinking and writing about Libya for weeks now. He’s the author of a book called “Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War.” He takes President Obama at his word that Operation Odyssey Dawn is a humanitarian intervention.

“President Obama has said quite clearly that the purpose here is to save lives,” said Pape. “The UN resolution says explicitly all means necessary to save lives in Libya.”

Pape thinks that’s just as it should be. Draw a line in front of Benghazi and eastern Libya, protect civilians there from Gaddafi’s attacks, protect ports and shipping lanes as well, and pump in economic aid to shore up the opposition.

He cites as a model the Kurdish safe haven created in northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf war. That policy protected the Kurds from Saddam Hussein and allowed them to flourish economically and politically. And also Kosovo where NATO bombing in 1999 forced Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw but stopped short of ousting him. His own people did that peacefully a year later.

“The key thing is not to fall into the trap of thinking that now that we have protected and saved Benghazi, we should just escalate the military effort toward a foreign-imposed regime change by trying to kill Gaddafi,” said Pape. “This would be a terrible mistake, because it would help congeal support inside Libya around Gaddafi and it would almost surely break the international coalition.”

Determining their own fate

Pape says it’s essential that the Libyan opposition determines its own fate. But its fate is now intertwined with the military intervention and the goal of that intervention is ambiguous. Michael Knights is the Lafer Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“You know, we’ve said we want to remove Gaddafi — and that is the national stated aim of at least three major powers involved in this operation,” said Knights. “But we’re there enforcing a UN mandate that says something very different from that. So it’s fertile ground for confusion.”

Especially since the UN Security Council Resolution authorizing the operation has no expiration date.

“I’m surprised they didn’t use the obvious solution to this which would have been a UN resolution that expired within a certain period of time or needed to be renewed or reviewed,” said Knights. “Instead they’ve gone with an open-ended UN commitment.”

Open-ended and open to interpretation. Where do you draw the line between protecting civilians and ousting the regime that’s trying to slaughter them? As both Pape and Knights point out; you can use air power to protect civilians in a place like eastern Libya where regime forces have to cross open desert to attack. But it’s not much use in urban areas in the West where pro and anti Gaddafi forces and civilians are all mixed up.

That leaves some, like Richard Andres, a professor at the United States National War College and a former special advisor to the Secretary of the Air Force, to worry the war will be longer and messier than advertised.

War fatigue

“The last few wars that we’ve been in we thought would end quickly and you know here we are ten years later,” said Andres. “So biting off another war at this point, you know it’s very frightening to the military community. And I don’t know of too many military leaders who think this is a good idea from the Secretary of Defense on down.”

When Andres hears President Obama say Gaddafi has to go, he assumes that means the United States will be involved in Libya until Gaddafi actually does go.

“I can’t in my own mind understand how we could do a humanitarian operation that left Gaddafi in power,” said Andres. “If we stop supporting the rebels, I assume that Gaddafi is going to go in and retake control which will probably lead to a bloodbath. So you get into an operation like this and I’m not sure there’s any way to get out of it without turning the regime over.”

Andres says Robert Pape’s notion of a safe haven in eastern Libya is one possible scenario. But there are many others. As the military well knows, a battle that begins with air strikes often ends in nation-building. For now though, the UN resolution forbids an occupation force and President Obama has ruled out US ground troops. And he continues to promise that Washington will hand off control of the operation soon.

• Live updates from the BBC
• Coalition firepower
• Strains within the Libya coalition
• Robert Pape writing in Time
• Robert Pape writing in The Chicago Tribune
• Michael Knights at the Washington Institute
• Richard Andres at the Institute for National Strategic Studies

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By Jeb Sharp

The United States was among those trying to dissuade Aristide from returning before Sunday’s election. His relationship with Washington has long been fraught and complicated.

Aristide rose to power in the late 1980′s because he represented hope to millions of poor Haitians who had suffered under the Duvalier dictatorship. “He concentrated unto himself the desire for change in the country,” said political scientist Robert Fatton. “And he symbolized the fight against Duvalier.”

Aristide was elected president in a landslide victory in 1990. But there was trouble ahead according to Fatton. “Aristide talks very bluntly about classes, about class struggle and about the fact that the country is really being run by an oligarchy,” said Fatton. “And that that oligarchy really now has to surrender.”

Aristide proved too threatening to Haiti’s most powerful. The Army overthrew him before a year was out. The CIA had ties to the coup leaders but officially, the United States denounced the move. Margaret Tutwiler was spokeswoman at the State Department at the time. “The United States strongly condemns the removal of President Aristide,” said Tutwiler. “We call for the immediate restoration of Haiti’s legitimate, democratically-elected government.”

Aristide moved to Washington to lobby for his own return. The Bush Administration and Organization of American States imposed sanctions after the coup. The next president, Bill Clinton, ramped up the pressure. In 1994, the UN Security Council endorsed the use of military force to restore Aristide to power and he went home accompanied by a US-led multinational force. James Dobbins was President Clinton’s special envoy to Haiti at the time. “We flew back to Haiti together,” said Dobbins. “There was a huge crowd at the airport, and an even huger crowd at the national palace. There was just an ecstatic reception.”

But once he’d been restored to power, Aristide’s relationship with the US began to sour. “I think the Clinton Administration was very disappointed in his behavior once he was in office,” said Dobbins. “And with his inability to mend relations with other elements of his society and carry through on the reform program that we thought he had committed to.”

Aristide’s relations with his own supporters began to sour too. Some of them didn’t like the economic deals he’d made with Washington. And Robert Fatton says Aristide was still focused on the movement he created, whereas others wanted to get serious about creating a political party and political institutions. “Aristide didn’t like that,” said Fatton. “He was all about the movement without a clear program. And that generated tensions.”

Aristide’s term ended in 1996 but he was re-elected in 2000. This time though, there were questions about the election. And, Aristide faced fresh hostility from Washington where the Republicans were back in power. James Dobbins says the Republicans during the 1990’s were much more sceptical of Aristide than Clinton and the Democrats had been. “In many ways their scepticism proved justified,” said Dobbins. “He certainly had a much more confrontational relationship with the US government during his second full term of office.”

This time around when tensions reached a boiling point and armed rebels advanced on the capital, the international community withdrew its support. Aristide accused the United States of kidnapping him in 2004. James Dobbins says that’s not quite right. “I don’t think he was kidnapped. I think he was pressured to leave,” said Dobbins. “We didn’t threaten him. We simply told him he couldn’t expect us to protect him.”

According to Robert Fatton, Aristide was besieged in the end–by the international community, by conservative forces inside Haiti, and even by people who had once supported him. “The tragedy of the Aristide movement is that at one point they had a historic opportunity to change the country and change it utterly but that chance ultimately wasn’t seized,” said Fatton.

Which is why Aristide has returned to a Haiti where his vision of a more prosperous and equal society has yet to materialize. Download MP3

• Haiti marks earthquake anniversary

By Jeb Sharp

The change has been swift and dramatic and the Obama Administration has had to roll with the times. Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says there’s no question priorities are changing.

“The Obama Administration came into office wanting to work on the Israeli Palestinian peace process and engaging with Iran to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power,” said Dunne.

“Those are still important issues but they’ve been a bit moved off to the side. So this issue the Obama Administration did not want to take on the issue of internal politics and human rights in these countries now has been forced onto the US agenda.”

The irony of course is that freedom in the Middle East was supposed to be President George W. Bush’s agenda, and one that President Obama took pains to distance himself from. But no longer, according to Dunne.

“I don’t sense that the Obama Administration is reacting to Bush anymore,” said Dunne. “They’ve been in office, they own their own agenda they’re moving forward with it. I do think he’s predisposed to view what’s happening at least in Tunisia and Egypt in a positive light.”

No new doctrine

But there’s no clear, new doctrine emerging yet. And it’s not a given that the United States will side with the protestors in all cases. Bernard Haykel, professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, sees President Obama as torn between ideals and strategic interests.

“I think he identifies with these young people and would like to see them do well and like to see them succeed,” said Haykel. “But he is also being told by more established rulers, especially the ones who have oil, he’s being told if you pursue this path then you will destabilize this entire region and all hell will break loose and the United States will suffer as a result of it.”

Haykel would like to see more emphasis on strategic interests and more consistency. Instead he sees a scattershot approach.

“Choosing sides with those who want to topple Gaddafi, not knowing what to do in Yemen and sticking with what we know in Bahrain, is really no policy at all,” said Haykel. “Sometimes it doesn’t make sense.”

It may not make sense for a while. But Bruce Jentleson, who has just finished a stint as senior advisor at the State Department, says a couple of things are coming clear: these events reinforce, once again, the centrality of the Middle East to US foreign policy. And they have made old ways of doing business obsolete.

“Some of the old deals that the United States tried to stand by, you know, he may be a bad guy but he’s our guy and we would give a higher priority to some of the security cooperation over political and economic reform; that’s not a bargain that will serve American interests anymore,” said Jentleson. “It’s not even saying values are more important; it’s not going to work anymore as a general calculation.”

Cold War impulse

What’s more says Jentleson, the old Cold War impulse to divide the world starkly into us and them, friend and foe, needs to be checked, especially when it comes to political Islam.

“We have to be able to differentiate between different forms of political Islam,” said Jentleson. “Those that are extreme and are fundamentally threatening to our interests, our values, and our allies, like al Qaeda and some others, and those that are here to stay, are part of the political constellation and that we really have to find ways to work with if we really committed to processes in these countries that allow them to shape their own future.”

All of this will require a fundamental strategic rethink says Jentleson. Gone — or at least waning — are the days of presidents for life and absolute monarchies in the Middle East. Michele Dunne says dealing with a new array of political actors will require doing diplomacy differently.

“In a more modern way, in a way I think we do it in most of the rest of the world where it’s not a question of sitting down in a smoke-filled room and cutting a deal with one guy,” said Dunne. “That sort of way of doing diplomacy I think is gradually passing away in the Middle East as it has already in most other places.”

Whatever form the diplomacy takes, it’s hard to imagine the days ahead won’t be defining ones for President Obama’s foreign policy.

• Middle East protests: Country by country
• How We Got Here: Jeb Sharp’s history podcast
• NATO weighing options in Libya
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