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Facebook has apparently decided to delay a proposed new privacy policy after a coalition of privacy groups asked the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday to block the changes on the grounds that they violated a 2011 settlement with the regulatory agency.
A spokeswoman for the F.T.C. confirmed Thursday that the agency had received the letter but had no further comment.
In a statement published by The Los Angeles Times and Politico on Thursday afternoon, Facebook said, “We are taking the time to ensure that user comments are reviewed and taken into consideration to determine whether further updates are necessary and we expect to finalize the process in the coming week.â€
Asked about the delay, a Facebook spokesman said he was unaware of the latest developments.
When it first announced the changes on Aug. 28, Facebook told its 1.2 billion users that the updates were “to take effect on September 5.â€
The changes, while clarifying how Facebook uses some information about its users, also contained a shift in legal language that appeared to put the burden on users to ask Facebook not to use their personal data in advertisements. Previously, the company’s terms of use, and its settlement with the F.T.C., had indicated that it wouldn’t use such personal data without explicit consent. Facebook’s new terms would also allow it to use the names and photos of teenagers in advertising, an area of particular concern to privacy advocates because children may be unaware of the consequences of actions such as liking a brand page.
The original proposal has drawn tens of thousands of comments from Facebook users, most of them opposed to the changes.
Iran’s new foreign minister, the veteran diplomat Mohammad Javad Zarif, formally took charge of the country’s nuclear negotiations on Thursday, but still managed to find time to reach out to the West through a more informal channel â€" his new Twitter account.
Plunging head first into public diplomacy, Mr. Zarif chose to open his dialogue with fellow users of the social network by extending greetings for the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah.
Later in the day, when his tweet was challenged by one skeptical reader â€" Representative Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Christine â€" the American-educated diplomat, who lived in the United States for three decades, made his message that the Ahmadinejad era is over even more explicit, insisting that the nation of Iran had never denied the Holocaust and “The man who was perceived to be denying it is now gone.â€
Iran’s chief diplomat subsequently confirmed in conversations with Christiane Amanpour of CNN and the journalist Robin Wright that the comments posted on the @JZarif account were his own and he was aware that he had engaged in conversation with the daughter of a prominent American politician.
Having started with an attempt to undo the damage to Iran’s international reputation caused by the former president’s anti-Semitism, Mr. Zarif quickly moved on to the issue of chemical weapons, posting a link to thoughts on the “recent abhorrent developments in Syria,†on his Facebook page.
When a Texan carpenter challenged Mr. Zarif’s message repudiating the use of chemical weapons and militarism, asking, “Does that include nuking Israel?†the diplomat replied: “We do not have nukes. They do.â€
On Facebook, Mr. Zarif suggested that rebel forces might have used chemical agents and noted that the American government was less concerned by the use of chemical weapons in the 1980s, when Iranians were gassed by Iraq’s military.
Any use of chemical weapons must be condemned, regardless of its victims or culprits. This is Iran’s unambiguous position as a victim of chemical warfare. But has it always been the position of those who are now talking about punishing their presumed culprit? How did they react when civilians in Iran and Iraq were victims of independently established massive and systematic use of advanced chemical weapons by their then-friend Saddam Hussein?
Although Mr. Zarif refrained from commenting Thursday on whether President Bashar al-Assad’s forces were guilty of poison gas attacks, earlier in the week, as The Washington Post reported, he did tell an Iranian newspaper: “We believe that the government in Syria has made grave mistakes that have, unfortunately, paved the way for the situation in the country to be abused.â€
The foreign minister’s Twitter outreach came one day after an account maintained in the name of Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, posted similar warm wishes for the Jewish New Year.
The conservative Iranian news agency Fars quickly posted a comment from an adviser to the president denying that the account was an official one. “Mr. Rouhani does not have a tweeter account,†Fars quoted the adviser, Mohammad Reza Sadeq, saying on Thursday.
CNN reported, however, that another Rouhani aide told Ms. Amanpour “that while the president does not tweet from his account, people in his office do, so it is semi-official.â€
Reporting was contributed by Dan Bilefsky.
Every day, The New York Times’s staff scours the Web for interesting and peculiar items.
Many people awoke this morning to a new logo on what is one of the most visited sites on the Internet: Yahoo.
It’s an attempt to reflect a company trying to reinvent itself under Marissa Mayer, the former Google executive who took over as the company’s chief executive last year.
In a post on Tumblr, Ms. Mayer said that Yahoo hadn’t redone its logo in 18 years, and she wanted the new one to reflect a more human touch.
“We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo,†Ms. Mayer wrote. “Straight lines don’t exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms all have at least a slight curve.â€
Nonetheless, critics turned to Twitter to express their displeasure in the new look, calling it embarrassing and yet another example of why the company has fallen behind Google and other tech companies in recent years.
If you sided with the other camp and thought the logo looked cool, you can see how well it will work with your brand name here.
Here’s what else we noticed today:
All LinkedIn With Nowhere to Go
The Baffler | LinkedIn is critiqued as, “an Escher staircase masquerading as a career ladder,†with “management-speak Mad Lib†advice. - Amy O’Leary
Memo to the BuzzFeed Team
LinkedIn | An internal BuzzFeed memo reveals one model for a new-age digital media company. - Claire Cain Miller
Ashes to Ashes, Peer to Peer
Fortune | An oral history of Napster - Ashwin Seshagiri
Modeled Behavior
The Washington Post | How Netflix could use big data to make twice as much money off you. - Ashwin Seshagiri
The End of E-mail as We Know It
Buzzfeed | How your in-box, perhaps the original online social network, is becoming an app. - Ashwin Seshagiri
Computing’s Future Is Not on Your Wrist
New York Magazine | A lot of tech writers are skeptical of smartwatches. Here’s the roundup of their thoughts. - Damon Darlin
TAIPEI â€" Fresh from poaching a top Google executive to lead its global expansion plans, the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi on Thursday announced another jaw-dropper: a 3-D television with a 47-inch screen, capable of hooking up to Internet, all for less than $500.
Xiaomi unveiled the set, called the MiTV, in Beijing, describing it as a “smart†TV that operates with the Android mobile operating system. The display panels are made by Samsung or LG, the South Korean companies that dominate the global television business.
The introduction of the MiTV follows the news last week that Xiaomi had hired Hugo Barra, an executive in Google’s Android operation, to spearhead its growth in export markets. The move drew considerable attention because Xiaomi until now has focused on China, where its smartphones have overtaken Apple’s iPhone in market share.
Xiaomi on Thursday also unveiled a new smartphone, the Mi3. It is packed with features, including a 5-inch screen, a five-megapixel camera and processors from Nvidia or Qualcomm. Though plans for international availability were not detailed, this is presumably the device with which the company intends to take beyond the Middle Kingdom.
A version of the phone with 16 gigabytes of storage will be sold for 1,999 yuan, or about $327, while a 64-gigabyte version costs 2,499 yuan. That is less than half the typical price of an Apple iPhone 5.
The Xiaomi TV also looks like a bargain, though this appears to be a made-for-China product, at least for now.
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Dave Morin, a former Facebook executive, helped found Path in 2010 because he felt that people needed a smaller, more intimate social network of no more than 50 friends and family members â€" the people truly important in their lives.
It was a deliberate contrast to Facebook, where your list of “friends†might easily top several hundred people, including business associates, college roommates, former lovers, neighbors and distant relatives.
Now Mr. Morin, Path’s chief executive, has concluded that 50 is still too many people with whom to share your most personal moments. The real ideal is five to 15 people, he says.
“Our worldview has always been concentric,†Mr. Morin said in an interview this week in Path’s glass-walled headquarters on the top floor of a San Francisco office tower. “Inner Circle is designed for those people that you’re spending a lot of time with.â€
It’s a problem that other social networks are also struggling with. The Google Plus social network is built on the principle that all your friends and acquaintances should be sorted into groups, with whom you then share information. Facebook, which has nearly 1.2 billion users, initially favored more openness but has over the years added a host of privacy controls that allow users to sort their friends into groups like “close friends†and “acquaintances†and share items just with a specific group or even with particular individuals.
But fiddling with such settings is daunting to all but the most determined users.
Path is trying to make the process much simpler for its users, who now number around 20 million, up from five million less than a year ago. You simply go through your list of friends and click on a star next to the names you want to add to your inner circle.
Mr. Morin hopes that more privacy will bolster the number of times that people use Path daily, which averages about 19 now, up 130 percent over the last year.
“This is far and away our most requested feature,†he said. “Our highest-level goal of Path is if we give you this trusted place, you would share more.â€
The privacy settings are not the only new features coming Thursday.
The social network, which has had a strict “no advertising†policy since its founding, is adding a premium membership option to help bring in revenue.
So far, Path’s main source of income has been the sale of photo filters and packages of electronic stickers â€" cute, hand-drawn images that users can send one other to express emotions â€" that are grouped in themes like having a baby or travel.
Now, users will have the chance to buy a premium membership for a couple of dollars a month, or $15 a year, to get full access to all sticker packs and filters and a special badge next to their name showing they are premium-level subscribers.
Mr. Morin said that Path has studied the paid users of the note-taking service Evernote and the game and chat services offered by Asian Internet companies and concluded that if even a small percentage of Path users pay, it will make a big difference to the bottom line.
The company is currently trying to raise a round of venture financing from investors at a level that would value it at $300 million or more.
Path is also continuing to seek new users, especially overseas, where growth has been especially strong in France, Indonesia and Latin America.
On Thursday, it is announcing a partnership with Deutsche Telekom in Germany to offer the premium service free for a year to all of the company’s 37 million mobile and 22 million fixed-line customers.
A special version of Path will also come preloaded on Samsung’s new Galaxy Gear smartwatch, which was unveiled on Wednesday.
“The simplicity of the user interface is quite nice,†Mr. Morin said.
Most Americans say they believe the law is inadequate in protecting their privacy online. The e-mail or social media accounts of one in five have been broken into. And most American consumers take great efforts to mask their identities online.
These findings are part of a survey by the Pew Internet Center that was released Thursday. They come amid a cascade of widely publicized revelations about the depth of United States government surveillance on the electronic communications of its citizens. And they challenge the conventional wisdom advanced in support of both commercial tracking and official monitoring of Web services: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.â€
Apparently, most Americans do have something to hide - at least from complete strangers trying to profit from knowing what they do online. The Pew survey found that 86 percent of Americans were trying to scrub their digital footprints by doing a variety of things, like clearing browsing histories, deleting certain social media posts, using virtual networks to conceal their Internet Protocol addresses, and even, for a few, using encryption tools.
“Our team’s biggest surprise was discovering that many Internet users have tried to conceal their identity or their communications from others,†noted Sara Kiesler, an author of the report and a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “It’s not just a small coterie of hackers. Almost everyone has taken some action to avoid surveillance.â€
The findings come at a time when many lawmakers have reacted with outrage about government surveillance but done very little to curb private tracking of Americans Web browsing. Google and Facebook, among other popular services, profit almost entirely on the behaviorally targeted advertising. What we write in our e-mails, what we browse online and what we buy, both online and offline, are compiled and analyzed, all in the service of showing us what the digital advertising industry calls “relevant†advertising.
Efforts to develop global standards for Do Not Track browser settings have been stalled. Anyway, as consumers move to smartphones, companies and advertisers have devised new ways of tracking them.
The legislature in California recently approved a measure to require Web sites to tell users whether they honor Do Not Track signals on browser settings. The bill does not prohibit tracking, but requires all Web services to spell out what they do when faced with a Do Not Track signal, which some browsers turn it on automatically. It is now pending the California governor’s signature.
The Pew survey was carried out on the phone with 792 adult Americans in July. It contained a margin of error of 3.8 percentage points. In the survey, 55 percent said they were worried about the breadth of personal information that exists about them online, considerably higher than the 33 percent who admitted to being worried in 2009.
Public concern seemed also to stem from apprehension about the law. Two-thirds of those surveyed said they believed the nation’s laws were “not good enough in protecting their privacy online.â€
Users experimented with a variety of strategies to mask themselves. About half said they posted material using their real names, or aliases commonly associated with them. But one in four surveyed said they “posted material without revealing who they are.†Young people were more likely than others to switch back and forth, suggesting what previous studies have suggested: that digital natives, as the generation who grew up with the Internet are called, heavily curate their online identities.
The sometimes painful consequence of disclosure was also reflected. Just over 20 percent said an intruder had broken into their e-mail or social networking account; 12 percent said they had been “stalked or harassed;†and 10 percent had lost sensitive information to online thieves, including bank account information.
These findings are echoed by a poll also issued Thursday by TrustE, a San Francisco company that vets the privacy policies of Web sites and mobile apps and gives a seal of approval to those that meet its criteria. It found that nearly four out of five smartphone users in the United States were reluctant to download apps they did not trust.
More than two-thirds of mobile users did not like being tracked for the purposes of behavioral advertising. And even as about half of all smartphone users said they were willing to share some personal information in exchange for shopping discounts, most were loathe to reveal their exact location or their Web browsing activity.
The TrustE survey was conducted online with over 700 Internet users in the United States in June.
In March, before a former National Security Agency contractor began to leak details about the agency’s surveillance apparatus, a survey by Forrester Research picked up on a trend of heightened privacy concerns among consumers about online tracking for behavioral advertising.
Commissioned by Neustar, an Internet service provider company, Forrester’s survey found that 27 percent of Americans were using an ad blocking tool when they browse the Web; 18 percent had turned on a “Do Not Track†setting in their browsers.
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A coalition of six major consumer privacy groups has asked the Federal Trade Commission to block coming changes to Facebook’s privacy policies that they say would make it easier for the social network to use personal data about its users, including children under 18, in advertising on the site.
In a letter sent to the agency late Wednesday, the coalition said Facebook’s changes, scheduled to go into effect later this week, violate a 2011 order and settlement with the F.T.C. over user privacy.
“Facebook users who reasonably believed that their images and content would not be used for commercial purposes without their consent will now find their pictures showing up on the pages of their friends endorsing the products of Facebook’s advertisers,†the letter says. “Remarkably, their images could even be used by Facebook to endorse products that the user does not like or even use.â€
As I wrote in a Bits post last week, the plain language in Facebook’s new policy documents seems to reverse the default setting for user privacy when it comes to advertising.
The old language gives users the explicit right to control how their names, faces and other information are used for advertising and other commercial purposes. The company’s new policy says consumers are automatically giving Facebook the right to use their information unless they explicitly revoke permission â€" and the company made that harder to do by removing the direct link to the control used to adjust that permission.
“Facebook is now claiming the default setting is they can use everyone’s name and image for advertising and commercial purposes, including those of minors, without their consent,†said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, one of the groups that wrote the letter, in an interview. “Red lights are going off in the privacy world.â€
The privacy groups, which helped persuade the F.T.C. to issue the 2011 order, said Facebook’s changes regarding children were especially problematic. The company’s new policy says that if a user is under age 18, “you represent that at least one of your parents or legal guardians has also agreed to the terms of this section (and the use of your name, profile picture, content, and information) on your behalf.â€
“It’s an extraordinary claim to make,†Mr. Rotenberg said. “That’s something you can’t do without explicit consent.â€
He said courts and regulators have found that the personal information of children should receive special privacy protection.
Facebook, which has nearly 1.2 billion users worldwide, said last week that the privacy policy changes were partly made to clarify what it does with user information as part of a recent class-action settlement in the United States over its privacy practices.
“As part of this proposed update, we revised our explanation of how things like your name, profile picture and content may be used in connection with ads or commercial content to make it clear that you are granting Facebook permission for this use when you use our services,†a company spokeswoman, Debbie Frost, said in a statement on Wednesday. “We have not changed our ads practices or policies â€" we only made things clearer for people who use our service.â€
Comments by Facebook users have been overwhelmingly negative on the official page where the company’s chief privacy officer for policy, Erin Egan, announced the changes.
The groups asking the F.T.C. to block Facebook’s privacy changes are the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Watchdog, Patient Privacy Rights, U.S. PIRG, and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
An F.T.C. spokeswoman could not confirm receipt of the letter on Wednesday evening and had no additional comment.
Typically, the agency does review such letters. And in the case of the 2011 Facebook settlement, the agency periodically examines the company’s compliance with the commission’s order.
A version of this article appears in print on 09/05/2013, on page B3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Privacy Groups Aim to Stop Facebook Policy Changes.
For PayPal and its mobile application, the fifth time could be the charm.
On Thursday, the company released a new version of its application for both iPhone and Android devices, one that it hopes will help increase adoption and secure the company’s footprint in the mobile e-commerce market. It’s the fifth iteration since the online payments company first released an application for the iPhone, in 2008.
Anuj Nayar, PayPal’s senior director of global initiatives, said that over the past few years the company had realized that mobile wallets on their own were not always that compelling, or more convenient, for users. Pulling out cash or a credit card is often much easier than fumbling with an application to pay. Instead, Mr. Nayar said, the company wants to focus on bonus features and benefits that can come from using the PayPal mobile application.
“It’s what you build on top, like offers and the ability to order ahead,†he said. “These are the things that will drive consumer adoption.â€
The company has reshuffled the main screen of its application to highlight the features that it hopes will appeal to users most: The ability to send money to friends or pay for certain items in some store. The company is also promoting offers and coupons in the new version of its mobile application. In addition, the application now lets users place and pay for orders ahead in some restaurants and shops, like Jamba Juice.
Mr. Nayar said that PayPal has tested many of these features in Sydney, Australia, where PayPal usage is high. Those trials have been successful enough that the company wants to introduce them in other major metropolitan cities around the world.
PayPal’s mobile update comes right as other mobile-commerce companies, both large and small, are rolling out their own ways to let people pay with their mobile phones, although no one has so far been able to woo the masses in the United States.
The company declined to share information about how many people currently use the PayPal app to make purchases, but it said it has 132 million PayPal accounts around the world.
Last Updated, 10:26 a.m. | The discussion about direct military action in Syria has brought in former officials intimately involved in making the case for the 2003 Iraq war, as Mark Mazzetti and Mark Landler reported recently. One of them is Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at that time.
In speeches and television interviews, Mr. Rumsfeld has made frequent remarks about President Obama’s response to the use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, mainly sticking to the theme of a lack of leadership and clarity.
On Wednesday, Mr. Rumsfeld referred to Mr. Obama as the “so-called commander in chief†during an interview with Fox & Friends, in which he repeated, “He has not provided leadership.â€
The former defense secretary continued the theme in an appearance on the “Today†show, saying that President Obama has demonstrated a lack of vision in his military strategy on Syria that may cost him global support.
The leadership has lacked a vision, and the essence of leadership is to have a vision and clarity. That’s where you develop the kind of support and unity in our country and our Congress and in the world.
If there’s anything that’s clear, it’s that they do not have that kind of unity at the present time because of a lack of clarity.
The danger of doing something that’s not worth anything, that results in nothing, that leaves Assad standing, it seems to me that it makes the United States look like that’s what we prefer. Quite the contrary.
Later in the day, Mr. Rumsfeld told Greta Van Susteren in another appearance on Fox News: “I think the decisions that are in the Oval Office are the tough ones, and President Obama’s got his hands full. And goodness knows, you wish him well if he make a decision to use force. But the lead-up to this I think has been most unfortunate.â€
One day earlier, he said in a speech at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., that Mr. Obama was not showing leadership, NBC News reported. “You either ought to change the regime, or you ought to do nothing,†he said.
Last week, Mr. Rumsfeld told the Fox Business Network that “there really hasn’t been any indication from the administration as to what our national interest is with respect to this particular situation.â€
A version of this post was also published in the “Crisis in Syria†section.
Last Updated, 10:26 a.m. | The discussion about direct military action in Syria has brought in former officials intimately involved in making the case for the 2003 Iraq war, as Mark Mazzetti and Mark Landler reported recently. One of them is Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at that time.
In speeches and television interviews, Mr. Rumsfeld has made frequent remarks about President Obama’s response to the use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, mainly sticking to the theme of a lack of leadership and clarity.
On Wednesday, Mr. Rumsfeld referred to Mr. Obama as the “so-called commander in chief†during an interview with Fox & Friends, in which he repeated, “He has not provided leadership.â€
The former defense secretary continued the theme in an appearance on the “Today†show, saying that President Obama has demonstrated a lack of vision in his military strategy on Syria that may cost him global support.
The leadership has lacked a vision, and the essence of leadership is to have a vision and clarity. That’s where you develop the kind of support and unity in our country and our Congress and in the world.
If there’s anything that’s clear, it’s that they do not have that kind of unity at the present time because of a lack of clarity.
The danger of doing something that’s not worth anything, that results in nothing, that leaves Assad standing, it seems to me that it makes the United States look like that’s what we prefer. Quite the contrary.
Later in the day, Mr. Rumsfeld told Greta Van Susteren in another appearance on Fox News: “I think the decisions that are in the Oval Office are the tough ones, and President Obama’s got his hands full. And goodness knows, you wish him well if he make a decision to use force. But the lead-up to this I think has been most unfortunate.â€
One day earlier, he said in a speech at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., that Mr. Obama was not showing leadership, NBC News reported. “You either ought to change the regime, or you ought to do nothing,†he said.
Last week, Mr. Rumsfeld told the Fox Business Network that “there really hasn’t been any indication from the administration as to what our national interest is with respect to this particular situation.â€
A version of this post was also published in the “Crisis in Syria†section.
As Neil MacFarquhar and Ben Hubbard have reported, Bashar al-Assad has followed a strict “business-as-usual†policy since the start of the Syrian uprising two and a half years ago, behaving in his daily life as if nothing unusual is happening in the country his family has ruled for more than four decades.
Mr. Assad is believed to report for work each morning to a private office in a wooded glen near his family’s home in an upscale neighborhood of the capital, Damascus, and his wife, Asma, has busied herself with charitable functions and ceremonial public duties. The president maintains that his country is not at war with itself but is instead locked in a battle with “terrorists†aligned with Al Qaeda. The Syrian government’s stranglehold on the country’s media keeps alternative views out of the public eye.
Mr. Assad has also sought to project an air of normalcy on social media, though the terrain has been largely dominated by the rebel brigades and activist groups that oppose him. His official YouTube channel offers more than 30 videos, the oldest dating back seven months, that highlight his role as commander in chief of the Syrian military and archive various sit-down interviews.
One featured video, “Al-Assad, Officer and Commander,†posted Aug. 2, shows the president in combat fatigues and aviator sunglasses, greeting his troops and reviewing maps as missile batteries and tanks fire into the air, set to urgent, fully orchestrated music with a choir singing “Syria, Syria, Syria.â€
A video posted to the official YouTube account in May shows images of women celebrating and young men firing rockets to celebrate what it calls the “honor and pride†inherent to the “resistance†to Israel and by extension the United States. The Assad family has styled itself as the exemplar of that role in the Middle East.
On Instagram, the government highlights the less martial and more mundane side of Mr. Assad’s presidential duties. It also serves up generous helpings of his photogenic wife, Asma, a former investment banker raised in Britain, where Mr. Assad studied ophthalmology.
The images portray a model couple. Mr. Assad, in a sober business suit, conducts affairs of state â€" greeting soldiers, meeting with political and religious leaders or speaking at a lectern â€" while his fashionable and unveiled wife poses with an endless stream of students, chats with an elderly disabled woman on Mother’s Day and plays with children.
There is little in the images that might betray the grinding conflict that has laid waste to much of the country. But occasionally, a note of disharmony slips in. Beneath one image of Ms. Assad ladling out food to the poor at a soup kitchen, the caption reads, “Numerous mobile kitchens have been set up by community-based groups to prepare meals for internally displaced families.†Why and how so many Syrians have become internally displaced is left unsaid.
A version of this post was also published in the “Crisis in Syria†section.
While opponents of President Obama’s plan to strike Syria invoke the cautionary tale of Iraq â€" where an American-led invasion was justified by intelligence claims about a Baathist leader’s chemical weapons stockpile that turned out to be flat wrong â€" some supporters of military intervention argue that there might be more to learn from another United States-led bombing campaign, the one that helped to end the brutal sectarian civil war in Bosnia in 1995.
In an essay for the German Council on Foreign Relations, Germany’s former ambassador to the United States, Wolfgang Ischinger, described some of the similarities between the two conflicts.
Tens of thousands of deaths in a country that lies not too far south-east of us. An extremely complicated military conflict in which the most varied lines of interest converge. A U.S. president who is particularly reluctant to undertake new military engagements on the heels of an electoral campaign centered around domestic issues and a failed engagement in the Arab world. A despot who does not recognize the need to negotiate promptly and seriously. European diplomacy and crisis management are disappointingly far from meeting their self-imposed goals. Political initiatives are failing before they have even been put in place. Long debates about the merits and dangers of an arms embargo.
While Mr. Ischinger, who took part in the peace talks that ended the Bosnian war, acknowledges that there are differences, he also suggests that the use of force against Syrian government forces could help hasten the end of the war in much the same way that the NATO bombing of the Bosnian Serbs did following a massacre in Sarajevo in 1995.
Just like Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s, president Bashar al-Assad sees no obligation at present to negotiate seriously. In Bosnia, too, peace plans and blueprints (“Vance-Owenâ€) were laid out in the early stages, but led to nothing because of the West’s lack of willingness to implement them.
The conclusion of the Dayton agreement, which finally ended the Bosnian war in 1995, was ultimately only possible because Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs, in the face of new realities, suddenly developed an interest in a negotiated solution after all; the Croatian side had made territorial gains and the NATO operation “Deliberate Force†had shown that the West was taking the matter seriously. In other words: The result negotiated in Dayton, which despite all its weaknesses was able to pave Bosnia-Herzegovina’s way toward a future free of war, was only made possible by the threat (and limited use) of force.
This is also the decisive issue for Syria: From a position of strength, to which Assad has apparently returned somewhat, his regime will never be ready to make the necessary concessions. As long as Assad is convinced that his situation could continue to improve over the course of the conflict, or that he could even resolve the war in his favor, he will continue the fight. The international community needs to change this calculation if it wants to reach a political solution.
Given that the Obama administration is now represented at the United Nations by Samantha Power, who charted in excruciating detail the Clinton administration’s years of hesitant deliberation before that intervention in her book “A Problem From Hell,†Mr. Ischinger is unlikely to be the only advocate of humanitarian intervention to be considering what lessons Bosnia might hold for ending the Syrian civil war.
Indeed, the BBC Europe editor, Gavin Hewitt, reported Wednesday that Mr. Obama’s allies in France also appeared to be at least hinting that military intervention could help force Mr. Assad to negotiate more seriously.
Still, not every close observer of the Bosnian war agrees that the parallel is exact or useful. Laura Silber, who was The Financial Times’s correspondent in the Balkans from 1990 to 1997, and an author of “The Death of Yugoslavia,†said Wednesday that airstrikes on Syria would be militarily similar “but completely unlike Bosnia†in an important way. In 1995, Ms. Silber wrote in an e-mail to The Lede, the team of American diplomats led by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and American intelligence officials “knew with a degree of certainty that the war had played out on the ground â€" i.e. that the Serbs could not mount a serious destabilizing counter attack, whereas in Syria the ramifications of intervention may be more uncertain.â€
Another observer who expressed skepticism about military intervention, the Moroccan-American novelist Laila Lalami, also mocked, in her Twitter commentary, the tendency of pundits to look for easy historical analogies.
A version of this post was also published in the “Crisis in Syria†section.