Jeffrey Laurenti: Tunis Hints of Backpedaling on Syria

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As the Obama administration has parried pressures to enmesh the United States more deeply in Syria's murderous civil war, last year's high tide of international insistence on Bashar al-Assad's departure seems to be receding. One sign has been in eroding vote tallies in the United Nations. Another is the very public rethinking of Syria policy one hears here in Tunisia, where the Arab uprisings began.

Tunisia has particular moral authority in the Arab world as the vanguard of democratic change against the region's encrusted despotisms. It has been navigating its transition more peaceably than any other (and become the darling of international aid donors as a result). Its new government's instinctive sympathy for Syria's democratic protesters made it one of the first to demand that Assad must go.

But Tunisia's own transition has been rockier than its quick disappearance from our media radar screen might lead us to think, and Tunisians' experience of Islamist politics has changed the lens through which many here now view Syria.

As the process of writing Tunisia's new constitution nears its end, the conflict over political Islam is in crescendo phase. International organizations supporting democracy, many aided by Western governments, have invested heavily in civil-society institutions they hope can assure an unambiguously democratic system, largely working with secular parties of compatible views. Secular-minded Tunisians express alarm about Saudi and Gulf funding for Islamist forces, whose commitment to genuine democracy in Tunisia--much less Syria--they doubt.

The role of the United Nations Development Program in the process, one European foundation director here avers, has been "crucial" in keeping the process on track at all, thanks to its scrupulous impartiality in working with all the parties. But the United Nations can provide no guarantee about the true intentions of Ennahda ("Renaissance"), the Islamist party that won 41 percent of the vote in Tunisia's first elections two years ago. As Joshua Hammer relates in the New York Review of Books, there are ample grounds that Tunisians skeptical of religiosity in public life have for concern.

Ennahda has billed itself as a model of moderate Islamism, one that the West can embrace. To form a governing majority it had to enter a coalition with two smaller secular parties, which have been hard pressed to explain to their supporters how their collaboration has moderated the Islamists. Half the members of parliament from the social democratic Ettakatol party have defected in protest at its alliance with Ennaha. Even the country's labor confederation, which has been among the most effective mobilizers of public resistance to Ennahda's conservative agenda, fears infiltration by "the beards" as pious Muslims win elections to local union posts.

Alarm bells have been ringing since Ennahda's leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, was recorded in a meeting with Salafist extremists calling them "my sons and daughters" and appealing for their support for Islamization projects in education. But the Salafists have international ambitions too, among which is the jihad against Syria's "infidel" regime. Tunisian Salafists were fighting with the Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra well before Hezbollah aided Assad at Qusayr, and have been bringing trademark jihadi violence back to Tunisia with them.

A Salafist mob stormed the American embassy September 14 of last year, three days after the Benghazi attack, overrunning most of the compound and burning the American school across the street. Suspicions swirled about government collusion because the Interior Ministry did not send security forces to confront the attackers till the embassy warned that Marine guards were prepared to shoot attackers approaching the embassy's last redoubt. The assassination five months later of a human rights champion turned opposition party leader was the breaking point, and Ennahda began to distance itself from the Salafists.

The escalation of Salafist political violence has hit Tunisians when they are already on edge because of jihadist activity in the southern Sahara since the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya next door. The leaching of arms from Libya has also helped supply jihadist rebels in Syria--yet another factor in Tunisians' reappraisal of the Syrian crisis.

"The government was too hasty in taking the position that Assad had to go," says Ahmed Ounaies, a career diplomat who served briefly as foreign minister in the first transitional government after the fall of Zine el-Abbedine Ben Ali's rule. Tunisians were eager to show solidarity with demonstrators for democracy in other Arab countries.

But liberal democrats are "not who is fighting in Syria today," Ounaies notes. Sensitized by the upsurge in intolerance and violence by Salafists within Tunisia itself, Tunisians have become more agnostic about the Syrian opposition. An unyielding insistence on Assad's early departure, he suggests, is not likely to produce a settlement, or even slow the killing.

With the relatively high education levels, substantial middle class, protections for women's equality, and defense of social rights that Tunisia's legendary Habib Bourguiba bequeathed to the country, Tunisia's revolution has always seemed the likeliest to deliver on its promise. Yet the Islamist divide has been hard to bridge even here, and Tunisians warn Westerners they should harbor no illusions about Syria.

Follow Jeffrey Laurenti on Twitter: www.twitter.com/J_Laurenti

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Obama Confuses U.K. Finance Minister George Osborne With Soul Singer Jeffrey Osborne

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US President Barack Obama repeatedly called British finance minister George Osborne "Jeffrey" at the G8 summit, media reported on Thursday.

The US president said three times that he agreed fully with "Jeffrey" during his presentation on G8 host Britain's plans to crack down on tax avoidance, leaving Osborne red-faced.

Realising his blunder afterwards, Obama joked that he had mistaken Britain's chancellor for the US soul singer Jeffrey Osborne, The Sun and the Financial Times reported.

"I'm sorry, man. I must have confused you with my favourite R and B singer," Obama was quoted as saying.

The chancellor, 42, bears little resemblance to Jeffrey Osborne, a 65-year-old African-American hit singer-songwriter known for his 1982 classic "On the Wings of Love".

Jeffrey Osborne told Sky News television: "I was really delighted actually. I was really not aware that (Obama) was that much of a fan that he would call the chancellor Jeffrey Osborne.

"Tell the chancellor when I come over I will have to hook up with him and we will do a duet of 'On The Wings Of Love'."

The Sun quoted an onlooker at the session as saying: "Osborne looked really put out" by what was a "visually crushing blow".

"The first time Obama did it was bad enough, but then he kept on repeating the error throughout the presentation. It got really cringe-worthy by the end."

George Osborne's real first name is Gideon, but he switched to George after being teased as a teenager.

Also on HuffPost:

Jeffrey A. Miron: Do the NSA's Phone and Internet Monitoring Programs Make Sense?

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The National Security Administration's monitoring of Americans' phone calls and internet communications raises a fundamental question: when is increased security worth reduced privacy or civil liberty?

The answer depends, in part, on how often these NSA actions prevent terrorist attacks. If the NSA could provide multiple, convincing examples of terror attacks unambiguously prevented by its phone and internet surveillance programs, many Americans would regard the implied privacy and civil liberty infringements as an acceptable price of fighting terror.

But the NSA has not provided such examples. The NSA does claim that phone or internet data from its monitoring efforts -- as opposed to its targeted searches of phone records or emails, backed by specific warrants -- have stopped terrorist attacks, but the number of claimed successes appears to be small.

Even in these cases, moreover, the "foiled attacks" were not ones well underway or inevitable, diffused only because the NSA's information allowed authorities to intervene. Instead, the known incidents were at intermediate stages and might never have come to fruition.

Similarly, many avoided attacks or plots have been foiled by means other than NSA's broad-based, routine monitoring. The Shoe Bomber, for example, was stopped by fellow airplane passengers. The Times Square Car Bomber was foiled by street vendors who noticed the car bomb and informed police.

Real attacks do occur, but for each there may be dozens or hundreds of would-be terrorists with delusions of grandeur, hatching hypothetical plots with their friends, yet lacking the means or true intent to carry them out. By monitoring so many phone calls and emails, the NSA is mainly wasting its time.

The absence of convincing evidence for these NSA programs is all the more striking because the NSA faces strong incentives to publicize its successes, if they exist. Such evidence would quiet criticism and generate public kudos. The NSA might fear that publicizing recent successes would compromise future efforts, but this concern diminishes as time passes, allowing for eventual, safe disclosure of successfully prevented attacks.

The obvious inference, therefore, is that the NSA monitoring programs prevent few if any terrorist attacks.

Whether these programs make sense, therefore, depends on whether the implied privacy infringements are miniscule or substantial. Some Americans would accept a minor reduction in privacy for even a small decrease in terrorism.

The risks to privacy and civil liberty, however, are not trivial. United States intelligence authorities have misused their powers in past, as when J. Edgar Hoover used the FBI to spy on "subversives" or Richard Nixon encouraged the IRS to investigate his political enemies. The recent IRS targeting of conservative 501c(4) applications also illustrates the scope for politicization of government actions.

And anyone tempted to trust one political party or the other to use its security powers wisely should remember that the other party will someday be in charge and have access to these same powers.

In considering the NSA's monitoring of phone and internet communication, therefore, the tradeoff Americans face is not between large and easily demonstrated benefits to national security against modest and easily limited costs to privacy and civil liberty.

The choice is between uncertain and plausibly minor benefits against significant, even disastrous costs.

The case against these NSA programs is weaker still because the United States has an alternate method of reducing terrorist attacks: stop invading, occupying, stationing troops in, or launching drone strikes in the Middle East.

The vast majority of foreign terrorists come from countries where the U.S. has an active and unwanted presence, thereby stimulating the demand for terrorism.

Countless examples -- drug use, prostitution, gambling, immigration, and terrorism - show that when countries use "supply side" (cost-increasing) policies to deter behavior for which substantial demand exists, those policies fail. For most of these behaviors, we therefore have no choice but to accept them.

For terrorism, however, we can save money, avoid infringements on civil liberties, and reduce the demand for terrorism in one fell swoop. The 2009 New York Subway terrorist that the NSA claims it caught because of its phone monitoring has stated that he planned his attacks because of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. And this theme -- anger over a U.S. presence in a Muslim country -- echoes repeatedly from terrorists and their spokesmen.

So the NSA's phone and internet monitoring programs are a costly and dangerous non-solution to a problem that could be reduced markedly by eliminating other costly policies. How can the latter approach not make more sense?

Follow Jeffrey A. Miron on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jeffreyamiron

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