RUSI on Syria: And No, They Didn't Exactly Say THAT

A lesson in why it's always good to read original reports and not rely on the media summaries: the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), he venerable (as in, the Duke of Wellington was its original patron) British military analysts, have ane a new report out on possible intervention scenarios in Syria. And the Telegraph report has this quote under the headline "Syria: West 'could deploy 300,000 troops following regime collapse"':

Michael Codner, RUSI's Director of the Military Sciences, wrote that a starting point for calculations of full scale intervention would be at least 300,000 troops.

What? Has RUSI lost its mind? 300,000 Western troops in Syria? Holy [poop]!

Well, actually, no. If you go to the actual report, you will find that Codner does use the words "In the case of Syria a starting point for calculations would be at least 300,000." But he uses these words in the last, most extreme stage of a multi-step analysis of a range of scenarios from a small UN presence up to an invasion and occupation on an Iraqi scale, Note a few of the caveats in even a few select, but in-context, quotes:

Invasion
The final category is a full scale invasion of Syria to bring about regime
change along the lines of the 2003 United States led war in Iraq. It is almost
impossible to see the diplomatic and political circumstances under which
such an operation would be possible.

The numbers of civilian casualties might be huge and from a moral viewpoint
early surrender by the Assad regime could not be assumed in minimising this
risk. An initial aerial ‘shock and awe’ campaign against, say, Damascus, to
bring about a change of heart in the government would be as stupid now as it
was in 2003 bearing in mind that it is the communities in all their complexity
who would be terrified and they would subsequently almost certainly be
problematic for occupation forces.

Not exactly a rousing endorsement, is it? Note: "It is almost impossible to see the diplomatic and political circumstances under which such an operation would be possible." The Telegraph is one of Britain's better papers, a respected broadsheet, not one of its tabloids known for Page Three Girls, but this is a reminder that headlines and even the stories even in the quality press can be misleading. An "almost impossible" scenario made it into the headline. Codner is offering a worst-case scenario, and one it's clear he considers unlikely and undesirable.

There's a well-known acronym in computing, RTFM, which stands for Read the [well, you know] Manual. A good rule of thumb for newspaper reports on think tank studies, would be Read the Original Report.

Carnegie's Egypt Election Guide Revisited

One month from tomorrow, Egypt holds Parliamentary elections, the last before the critical Presidential elections next year. There's no doubt that the National Democratic Party will win the Parliamentary vote, and of course that their candidate will win the Presidency, but who their candidate will be is still shrouded in mystery. And how free the Parliamentary vote will be is also up in the air, though not looking optimal just now.

I've mentioned it before, but this seems to be as good a time as any to again refer you to the Carnegie Endowment's Guide to Egypt's Elections, which includes excellent data on such obscure issues as all the legal parties, some of which are known only to their own limited membership, the non-party opposition movements, one of which, the technically illegal Muslim Brotherhood, is the largest opposition bloc in the present Parliament, details of the constitutional and legal framework, which is sometimes deliberately obtuse, and issues relating to election monitoring.

If they — mostly, I think, Michele Dunne and Amr Hamzawy — had n't done this, I'd have to write a lot more in the coming month. This way I can just link.

Egyptian elections do have some suspense, though not about who's going to run the country; they do matter to local folks in local places, the smaller the better because they are below the government's radar. Let the games begin.

Carnegie's Guide ro Egyptian Elections

While Egypt's Parliamentary elections are only moderately competitive by international standards, they do have some meaning, and so the Carnegie Endowment has put together an online guide to Egypt's elections. Michele Dunne and Amr Hamzawy at Carnegie are two of the best analysts on Arab electoral politics generally and Egypt specifically, so this can be a useful guide for anyone who has trouble remembering what the Tagummu&lsuo; Party stands for or how, exactly, the rather byzantine electoral system works. It's a useful guide as we approach the Parliamentary vote and, of course, next year's Presidential vote.

On the same subject, I should also mention Mona El=Ghobashy's piece at MERIP.

An International Force in Israel/Palestine? CNAS Goes There . . .

Every now and then it's nice for somebody — preferably other than me — to toss a fox into the henhouse, in order to provoke a lot of discussion and probably a fair amount of apoplexy. The Center for a New American Security, which is sometimes characterized, rightly or wrongly, as the defense think tank of the Obama Administration (at least a lot of its former denizens entered the Administration), has come out with such a provocative study: Security for Peace: Setting the Conditions for a Palestinian State.

The whole report can be found here (PDF). Unless you started studying the Middle East, say, midmorning today, the reasons I call this a fox-in-the-henhouse document will be obvious. Israel's worst nightmare is an "imposed settlement," and an international peacekeeping force sounds like someone other than the IDF is going to be policing the peace. And since it just came out, I've read only the contents and introduction, so don't jump all over me for what I haven't gotten to yet.

Marc Lynch, who wrote one of the chapters, has some background on it. Andrew Exum, who edited it, didn't have anything up as of last night on his Abu Muqawama blog, but I'm sure he will. But the contents are as follows 1) Introduction by Andrew Exum; 2) case study of East Timor by Scott Brady; 3) case study on South Lebanon by Exum and Kyle Flynn; 4) case study on Kosovo by Richard Weiz; 5) military lessons learned by Bob Killebrew; 6) political lessons learned by James Dobbins; and 7) Conclusion by Marc Lynch.

As Lynch's blog notes, they aren't urging creation of such as force, but this will likely cause some Israeli and pro-Israeli elements to go into high-damage mode. Many Israelis will not like seeing their theater compared to East Timor or Kosovo (nor will many Arabs, for that matter).

But, given the fact that current peace process efforts seem pretty stagnant, perhaps it's time for someone to propose some different approaches. CNAS is pretty careful to say it isn't urging an international peacekeeping force; it's just looking at what it might entail if tried.

Weekend Reading

I have to think of a clever title for this Friday afternoon links collection that I've been calling "Weekend Reading." Meanwhile, here's the latest installment. And since I've had comments about some of the linked reports, I'll re-emphasize that I'm neither endorsing their arguments nor, in many cases, have I even read much of them beyond the summaries. I'm just keeping my readers informed of what the think tank world is up to.

• In-House business first. I've already mentioned MEI's latest Viewpoints collection on the 30th anniversaries of major events of 1979, but I'll link to it again anyway. Full text in PDF here. Also, a couple of other additions to our web publication series: Alex Vatanka on "Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani's Public Greeting." It first appeared in Jane's Intelligence Weekly. Alex, an Adjunct Scholar at MEI, is an Editor at Jane's. Also up is a commentary that originally appeared in The New York Times by Hossein Askari and Trita Parsi, "Throwing Ahmadinejad a Lifeline." Trita is also one of our adjuncts.
  

• Steven A. Cook at the Council on Foreign Relations has a "Contingency Planning Memorandum" on the prospects of instability in Egypt due to the anticipated transition of power; the cover material and summary is here and the full report, "Political Instability in Egypt" in PDF is here. Obviously tied to the Mubarak visit. And related: a post-visit post by Cook at the Middle East Strategy at Harvard blog including an extended comment by Michele Dunne.
  

• The Brookings Institution's Doha Center (everyone seems to have one these days) has produced a "Policy Briefing" called "Pakistan's Madrassas: The Need for Internal Reform and the Role of International Assistance."

• From Carnegie's Middle East Center, Paul Salem comments on "Fatah Congress Strengthens Abu Mazen and Rejuvenates the Movement."

Abu Aardvark Joining Abu Muqawama at CNAS

Marc Lynch announced today that he is going to be a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in addition to his roles at George Washington University and Foreign Policy. CNAS, already characterized by some as the house think-tank of the Obama Administration, (also see here) is becoming Middle East blogger central as well; Lynch (who started his blogging career as "Abu Aardvark" before moving to Foreign Policy's blogsite) now joins Abu Muqawama among the bloggers at CNAS. As he puts it at the post already linked:

I feel that we have finally achieved a harmonic convergence with a genuine Axis of Abus: putting Abu Aardvark and Abu Muqawama in the same place at the same time... it ain't nothin' but a blogger party.

Congratulations from one of the newer bloggers in the field (though, alas, not one of the younger ones) to one of the pioneers.