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The U.S. election and the price of sitting out Syria
This is part of a series on foreign policy issues Christiane Amanpour is analyzing in the-lead up to next week’s presidential debate on foreign affairs.
By Christiane Amanpour, CNN & ABC
For the last 19 months Syria has fallen deeper and deeper into civil war. What started in March 2011 as another offshoot of the Arab Spring, the demand for freedom and reform, was met so brutally that ordinary Syrians decided that Assad had to go.
Left to fester, with the United Nations deadlocked over how to end the fighting, the death toll has reached 29,000 according to the Syrian opposition, and the most horrific massacres of women, children and old men have taken place. Extremists and foreign jihadists are joining the battle. With 1.2 million people displaced, the approaching winter poses as much of a threat as the relentless violence.
As worrisome as this is, recent history has shown us that when people are battling for survival, they end up taking help wherever it’s offered. When I covered the 1990s genocide in Bosnia, the people pleaded for years for the West to help. They did not. Instead the U.N. imposed a similar arms embargo that only ensured the superiority of the better-armed. So all sorts of foreign Mujaheddin came in. The parallels are eerily similar in Syria.
Will whoever wins the U.S. election make any changes to this policy of ‘Sitting Out Syria?’ FULL POST
Amanpour: How Obama and Romney see Iran’s nuclear ambition
This is part of a series on foreign policy issues Christiane Amanpour is analyzing in the-lead up to next week’s presidential debate on foreign affairs.
By Christiane Amanpour, CNN & ABC
The international war of nerves over Iran ebbs and flows.
Talk that Israel, the United States, or both might launch a pre-emptive military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities has been ever-present this year - but with the U.S. presidential election less than a month away, the idea of starting another war in the Middle East seems to have faded, at least for now.
Robert Gates, former U.S. Secretary of Defense under both Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, said in a speech this week: “The results of an American or Israeli military strike on Iran could, in my view, prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations in that part of the world."
“(A strike would) make a nuclear-armed Iran inevitable. They would just bury the program deeper and make it more covert," he said.
Iran and its nuclear ambitions present perhaps the most difficult strategic dilemma in the world today, directly affecting Israel, Arab states, Europe and of course the United States. FULL POST
Bush official raps Obama on Sudan
By Tom Evans; Sr. Writer; AMANPOUR.
(CNN) - Amid new questions about the credibility of next week's elections in Sudan, a former U.S. State Department official accused the Obama administration of wasting time on a new policy on the bitterly divided nation.
"They spent almost a year developing this notion of a 'new policy' toward Sudan," Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs under President George W. Bush, said Wednesday in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour.
"And they came up with this notion of 'carrots and stick' which every administration has. So they wasted almost a whole year on a policy review, and yet they are still talking with many different voices."
She said the Obama administration is sharply divided on how to tackle Sudan, the largest country in Africa, and one that is rich in oil reserves.
"I think the biggest challenge for the Obama administration is they're divided. You see very mixed signals coming out from the special envoy (to Sudan) versus the secretary (of state)."
Obama's foreign policy in gridlock: former national security adviser
(CNN) - President Obama's foreign policy agenda may have "run out of steam" and he must now take risks and provide effective leadership, former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said Friday.
In an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Brzezinski said Obama's foreign policy agenda is suffering from gridlock in Washington.
"I have the feeling that because of domestic problems, he has run out of steam, and I don't know really how determined he is to resume what he started doing so well, which is to engage the world constructively," Brzezinski said.
Brzezinski, who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the only way to break the stalemate is for Obama to take the lead.
The president can show leadership, he said, by "persuasively going to the country directly, mobilizing the support, taking on some difficult foreign challenge, and prevailing."
Torture debate:
A lively discussion with Professor Philippe Sands of University College London and Marc Thiessen, former Chief Speech Writer to President George W. Bush:
@camanpour on Twitter
