I will not waste your time explaining why I support his analysis. Instead I will highlight points where I see weakness in his argument. I do so in the hope that I am wrong and he will come back to us with perhaps more tightened analysis and show us that I am wrong. I also do so in the expectation that if indeed there are weaknesses, he will take note of the weaknesses and come up with means of compensating for those weaknesses.
Let me start with what from the perspective of our current agenda is a side issue, but I nevertheless feel strongly about and have mentioned in my previous postings. He thinks that Eritrea is in a bubble of nationalist frenzy. I disagree. It is in a sectarian frenzy primarily Christian highland chauvinism. But that I hope will be an argument for another day.

I agree with Yosief, that the Arms Embargo is easiest to implement, and the arms that matter will not get through with or without our support. That will definitely degrade the already emaciated army and will tilt the balance even more in favor of the Ethiopian army. What I have serious doubts about is its impact on the threat perception of the key enablers of Issayas because it is such perception which will ultimately lead to coincidence of interests between the people and the enablers of the regime leading to regime change.

I believe the enablers know that on the basis of the current balance of forces, the Ethiopian army could easily overrun their feeble defenses. This is so because they know they don’t have an army that is willing to fight for them and against the woyane. After all no shoot to kill policy has succeeded in stopping thousands of their solders from fleeing to the avowed enemy for dear life. No arms can compensate for the fact that the people who carry the arms are unwilling to use them in defense of the regime. The arms embargo will simply add another twist to the already existing farce of the army defending the country from the woyanes.

I believe they have so far been prepared to live with this reality without perceiving any existential threat from the woyanes because the woyanes will not lift a finger unless they provoke them with another invasion. Either the woyanes mean what they say, in which case they are prepared to live indefinitely with a regime that they have successfully put in a cage and do not want to rock the boat in the region while the going is good for them, or they have a very dangerous and sinister agenda of bringing about state failure in Eritrea. If they are out to engineer state failure in Eritrea then the best way of doing that is to let Isayas continue to do what he is doing until the process reaches a point of no return. Either way they will not physically threaten the Issayas regime. If the enablers of the regime are convinced that this is the case, then the arms embargo will have no impact on their threat perception. If the enablers of the regime are convinced that the woyanes will attack if they can, then the threat perception should have by now reached its highest level even without an arms embargo.

I think the arms embargo which needs no ownership from us and is the easiest to implement will have little if any impact on the threat perception of the key enablers of the regime. I think it is the other elements of the sanctions which are very difficult to implement unless we own them and which will have a radical impact on the threat perceptions of the key enablers of the regime and that can provide the short cut to regime change. That is why I cannot wait to read the forth coming posting of Yosief. In the mean time, let me declare up front, that I am all for ownership of the sanctions, and that many of the’’ supporters’’ of the sanctions will be exposed for what they are when Yoseif’s idea of ownership of the sanctions is elaborated.