ARTICLES

35 YEARS LATER

Iran: A revolution of broken promises and forlorn hopes
By Amir Taheri
Asharq Al-Awsat
11 Feb, 2014

www.aawsat.net/2014/02/article55328833

In 1978, as the turmoil in Iran rapidly developed into a mass movement for regime change, those who took part in the events were unable to agree on a word that would describe what was happening.

The Mussadeqist middle classes, who provided the façade of the movement, used the word “nehzat” (awakening, in Arabic an-nahda) which was the name of their principal organization. The mullahs, who were still anxious not to take personal risks, suggested the word “qiyam”(uprising) because it recalled the events of Karbala in 680 when Husayn, the third Imam, was martyred. The dozen or so leftist groups, some of them armed and trained in Cuba and the Palestinian camps, favored the word “shuresh khalq”: people’s rebellion.

Then one evening, the Shah, broken by a cancer that had been kept secret, appeared on television and, reading from a text, surprised everyone by saying: “I have heard the voice of your revolution.”

Suddenly, “revolution” was the word everyone claimed to have been looking for. Initially, the groups involved in the turmoil had not wanted to use it because the Shah had used it to describe his own reform package as the White Revolution.

Well, now the Shah was giving his beloved term of “revolution” to his opponents. Was not that a sign that he would soon also hand over his power on a silver plate? The answer came a few weeks later, when the Shah conducted secret talks to form a ramshackle interim government that would allow him and his family to fly out of Iran. He was not prepared to stand and fight because, he argued, a king is not a despot and cannot therefore kill his people in order to stay in power.

However, the adoption of the term “revolution” did not end the debate. The diverse groups involved in the anti-Shah movement had different, often contradictory, ideologies and agendas. Much of the Left wished to use the adjective “bourgeois–democratic” to describe the “revolution” in the hope that this would be the prelude to the real “proletarian revolution.” Leftist guerrilla groups dreamed of a Mao-style “people’s republic” and tried to label the events as “popular revolution” (enqelab khalq).

However, once the Shah was gone, the mullahs quickly moved to fill the gap left by his absence.

For more than four centuries only two rival, and at times complementary, narratives had dominated Iranian politics: the nationalist and the Islamist. The Shah had been the spokesman for the nationalist discourse, emphasizing Iran’s ancient history as an “Aryan” nation with Islam only one of many ingredients that formed the complex Iranian identity. In 1979, deprived of its chief standard-bearer, that discourse appeared to be on the losing side. The alternative discourse, the Islamist one, was left unchallenged. According to that narrative, all of Iran’s pre-Islamic history belonged to “The Age of Darkness “(Jahiliyah). It was now time for Iran to assert its exclusively Islamic identity, assume leadership of the Muslim world, and forge a new Islamic superpower to stand up to the two “infidel” super-powers of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Having imposed the Islamist narrative, the mullahs started capturing the centers of power one after another, getting rid of many of their allies, at times simply by having them assassinated. What the mullahs could not do was to wish away the fundamental contradiction of Iranian existence for the past 15 centuries. There is ample evidence in Iranian literature and history to show that while Iranians don’t want to abandon Islam they are, at the same time, uncomfortable with being Muslims. Under the nationalist discourse they were unhappy because they thought, perhaps wrongly, that they were being invited to jettison Islam. Under the Islamist discourse, they started to fear that the mullahs wished to deprive them of their Iranian-ness.

The regime had changed along with the discourse, but the Iranian schizophrenia was still very much in place. Thirty-five years after the mullahs seized power, that contradiction remains unresolved and is, in a sense, the root cause of the Khomeinist regime’s bizarre behavior at home and abroad. The new regime had to accommodate contradictory aspirations. It had to describe itself as a republic, although there is no such thing in any Islamic tradition. It also had to use the label Islamic, although that had never been used by any of the 300 or so Muslim dynasties that had ruled Iran for 14 centuries. Finally, it used the word Iran, although Islam is a universal faith cutting across national boundaries. This is why the “Supreme Guide” is described as leader of Muslims throughout the world, not just Iran.

The new Khomeinist regime established itself at a heavy cost in human lives. In the first decade of the regime, almost 150,000 people were executed or killed in armed clashes and violent suppression of local revolts. For its part, the eight-year Iran–Iraq War claimed almost a million lives on both sides. Since then, the regime has executed an average of 10 people each day. Almost 7 million Iranians, nearly 10 percent of the population, have been forced into exile, creating in part the “biggest brain-drain in history.” according to the World Bank. Over the past 35 years millions of Iranians have been imprisoned, often on spurious charges, and today Iran has the third-largest number of political prisoners: some 4,000 according to human rights organizations.

Economically, Iran has had a history of under-achievement, to say the least. In 1978, Iran was richer than South Korea and, in terms of income per head, was on the same level as Spain. Today, South Korea is number 13 and Spain number 15, while Iran has fallen to number 18 in terms of gross domestic product. In terms of annual growth rate, Iran, suffering from several years of negative growth, is number 208 in a list of 215 nations. The myth of “self-sufficiency” (khod-kafai) peddled by “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, combined with the effects of crippling sanctions, have kept Iran in a technological limbo.

The Khomeinist regime had three sources of legitimacy. The first was that of a successful revolution. In history, the side that wins automatically acquires a measure of legitimacy. However, that source of legitimacy has been eroded over the years as the new regime has created a new ruling class and moved away from original revolutionary aspirations. The regime’s second source of legitimacy was its reference to the people in the form of a series of elections which, though not perfect, initially allowed a limited mechanism for debate and choice. That source has also been eroded as a result of increasingly “arranged” elections with pre-approved candidates and massaged results. This is why voter participation has been on the decline. In the last presidential election, for example, voter turnout was the lowest ever since the establishment of the Khomeinist regime, and Hassan Rouhani won with the lowest percentage of votes cast of any president.

The third source of legitimacy came from a promise of a better life for the poor. That, too, has been eroded with the growing inequality across the board. In last Friday’s Prayer in Tehran, Ayatollah Muwahhedi Kermani offered a grim portrayal of a society split between the haves and the have-nots. “Someone must think of those crushed by misery,” he appealed. That came a few days after the government tried to alleviate pressure on the poor by distributing five million package of food in a system of wartime rationing.

But has the Khomeinist revolution produced no positive results? The answer is that it has. No phenomenon in history is entirely positive or negative. The first positive result of the revolution is that it has politicized the Iranians. Before the revolution most people thought that politics concerned only a few thousand people in Tehran. Today, many Iranians, perhaps even a majority, have developed an acute political sense that, given time and space, could help them develop a more humane and democratic system of government. Today, it is much harder to deceive Iranians with promises of revolutionary miracles. Having been mugged, they have become street-wise. The second positive aspect is related to the above. Before the revolution we had a thin layer of high-quality leadership at the higher levels but little or nothing in the middle or below. Today, the reverse is true. Today, even in remote provincial towns, one could find leadership levels capable of understanding and explaining the situation. Our middle and lower leadership levels are of a much higher quality than the upper echelon, with people like Khamenei, Rafsanjani, Khatami and Rouhani. Iran also has a vast reservoir of managerial talent that it did not have 35 years ago—at that time our media had a handful of star reporters and editors. Today we have many, many more, perhaps more than any other nation in the Middle East. Given a minimum of freedom and latitude they could do wonders.

Of course, part of these things might have happened anyway, with or without the revolution. But the fact is that they have happened during the revolutionary era. More importantly, perhaps, the tragedy of 1979 and its consequences have forced many Iranians, perhaps even a majority, to think seriously about the makeup of their identity. How much Iranian and how much Islamic? The answer to that question requires recognition of politics as a common public space for all citizens regardless of their individual and group specifics, including religion.

Recognizing that fact would give Iran the true revolution it has been dreaming of for 150 years, yet never attained despite many false dawns.

 

IRAN’S NEW BALLISTIC MISSILE CAN “EVADE ANTI-MISSILE SYSTEMS” AND ARE CAPABLE OF “GREAT DESTRUCTION”

Iran claims to have tested two new missiles
AFP
February 10, 2014

news.yahoo.com/iran-claims-tested-two-missiles-161513869.html

Tehran (AFP) - Iran said Monday it has “successfully tested” two missiles on the eve of the 35th anniversary of its Islamic revolution, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Iran’s ballistic missile programme has long been a source of concern for Western nations because it is capable of striking its arch-foe Israel.

“The new generation of ballistic missile with a fragmentation warhead, and a Bina laser-guided surface-to-surface and air-to-surface missile, have been successfully tested,” Defence Minister Hossein Dehgan said.

He said the new ballistic missile could “evade anti-missile systems” and was capable of “great destruction.”

The other missile can be fired from a plane or a boat to strike military targets with “great precision,” he added.

President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate elected last year on promises to engage the West diplomatically, congratulated the Iranian people and Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over the tests, IRNA reported.

The UN Security Council, the United States and the European Union have long imposed sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile programme.

Iranian officials have said they will not discuss the missile programme at talks with world powers later this month on Tehran’s controversial nuclear activities.

Western nations and Israel suspect Iran is covertly pursuing nuclear weapons alongside its civilian programme, allegations denied by Tehran.

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ADDITIONAL NOTE:

If the bipartisan Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act so vehemently opposed by President Obama had been passed into law, the President would have been required to reimpose sanctions on Iran if the regime tested ballistic missiles with ranges exceeding 500km.

 

WHY ARE MANY IN THE WEST DELUDING THEMSELVES?

Iran Supreme Leader Khamenei dismisses any compromise with U.S.
By Morgane Lapeyre and Indira A.R. Lakshmanan
Bloomberg News
Feb 8, 2014

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused the U.S. of hypocrisy and of seeking to undermine his country’s independence in a speech to air force commanders in Tehran, the state-run Fars news agency reported.

“The Iranian nation should pay attention to the recent negotiations and the rude remarks of the Americans so that everyone gets to know the enemy well,” Khamenei said as the Islamic Republic prepares to celebrate the 35th anniversary of its formation on Feb. 11.

The celebrations will include state-sponsored rallies in Tehran and come as the two countries seek to resolve a decade-old dispute over Iran’s nuclear work. Khamenei himself has given consent to Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani to pursue outreach policies, while maintaining that the U.S. is fundamentally Iran’s adversary.

Rouhani signed an interim accord in November with six world powers, which marked the first breakthrough in an effort to curb Iran’s atomic program. Under the agreement, Iran will benefit from about $7 billion in sanctions relief.

“The Americans speak in their private meetings with our officials in one way, and they speak differently outside these meetings,” Khamenei added. “This is hypocrisy and the bad and evil will of the enemy.”

Khamenei’s statement isn’t anything new, according to Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council and author of “A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran.”

“Khamenei is signaling, primarily to his domestic audience, that the nuclear deal doesn’t change the larger picture -- Iran still distrusts America,” he said in a phone interview.

 

IRAN SENDS WARSHIPS TO U.S. MARITIME BORDERS

Iran sends warships to U.S. maritime borders
Fars news agency
Feb 8, 2014

english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13921119001013

“The Iranian Army’s naval fleets have already started their voyage towards the Atlantic Ocean via the waters near South Africa,” Commander of Iran’s Northern Navy Fleet Admiral Afshin Rezayee Haddad announced on Saturday.

The admiral, who is also the commander of the Iranian Army’s 4th Naval Zone said, “Iran’s military fleet is approaching the United States’ maritime borders, and this move has a message.”

In September 2012, Iran’s Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari reiterated Iran’s plans for sailing off the US coasts to counter the US presence in its waters in the Persian Gulf.

Sayyari had earlier informed of Tehran’s plans to send its naval forces to the Atlantic to deploy along the US marine borders, and in September 2012 he said that this would happen “in the next few years”.

The plan is part of Iran’s response to Washington’s beefed up naval presence in the Persian Gulf. The US Navy’s 5th fleet is based in Bahrain - across the Persian Gulf from Iran - and the US has conducted two major maritime war games in the last two years.

In September 2011, Sayyari had announced that the country planned to move vessels into the Atlantic Ocean to start a naval buildup “near maritime borders of the United States”.

“Like the arrogant powers that are present near our maritime borders, we will also have a powerful presence close to the American marine borders,” Sayyari said.

Speaking at a ceremony marking the 31st anniversary of the start of the 1980-1988 war with Iraq, Sayyari gave no details of when such a deployment could happen or the number or type of vessels to be used.

Sayyari had first announced in July, 2011 that Iran was going to send “a flotilla into the Atlantic”.

 

BBC PERSIAN TO SCREEN ISRAELI DOCUMENTARY ON PRE-REVOLUTIONARY IRAN

[Tom Gross adds: Israel and Iran enjoyed relatively close relations prior to the 1979 revolution. Several Israeli friends of mine, whose parents worked in agricultural or other business development helping Iranians, grew up in Iran, attending Jewish or international schools there. El Al flew to Iran from Tel Aviv with almost daily flights.]

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BBC channel in Iran to air Israeli-made film for first time
Documentary about Israelis in pre-revolutionary Tehran has won positive feedback from Iranian exiles, says director Dan Shadur.
By Shany Littman
Ha’aretz
February 11, 2014

“Before the Revolution,” a film made by Iranian-born Israeli Dan Shadur, recalls the final days of the Israeli community in Tehran, on the eve of the Islamic Revolution. It will be aired Tuesday evening on BBC Persian Television, a satellite channel that broadcasts in Persian and is aired in Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. This is the first time the channel is showing an Israeli film and this will coincide with the 35th anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran.

Tonight, in advance of the broadcast, an interview with Shadur will be featured on the channel’s main news broadcast. The interview and the film will both be dubbed into Persian. Later in the week the channel has promised to broadcast a selection of readers’ reactions to the documentary.

Shadur’s 2013 film, an Israeli-American coproduction which was produced by Barak Heymann (and has been broadcast in Israel on the Yes Docu channel), tells about the pre-1979 Israeli community in Tehran, to which Shadur’s family belonged. The film describes a kind of paradise lost in which the Israelis were very well-off financially and had a thriving communal life, while at the same time ignoring the social injustice and oppression experienced by the Iranian people under the rule of the shah.

Shadur notes that at one point, an Iranian television station that broadcasts in English within Iran showed an interest in his film and considered purchasing it, but the deal fell through. During various screenings of the documentary around the world, he says, he has become aware of the fact that Iranians are very excited by the film, and react to it strongly. He says that this was a surprise, because he thought he was speaking from a very personal and Israeli point of view.

“Many Iranians say that the film respects them and their narrative. Many people who experienced the revolution approach me and say that they are opposed to the present regime and everything that’s happening in Iran,” Shadur explains. “They feel that the film expresses something of their outcry at the time, and that there was a reason why the revolution took place. As opposed to Hollywood films that present the architects of the revolution as a fanatic and bloodthirsty horde, they feel that it does take their viewpoint into account.

“Someone who was a prisoner of the shah’s secret police saw the film in Toronto and said that it expresses his pain. The film shows the problems in prerevolutionary Iran and the fact that the West was a part of them. And Israel was there, too.”

On the other hand, Shadur continues, “there are some who miss the good life they once had, and for them the film fulfills a nostalgic need. For younger people who were educated in the school system of the Islamic Republic, this past has been erased, both the Israeli and the secular past, in terms of their images. The pre-revolutionary archives are not accessible. These things [in the film] don’t exist in the official narrative of the Islamic Republic. Younger people are very excited about seeing it and they’re curious.”

Shadur says that he has also encountered the reactions of Iranian exiles who didn’t like the film: “In Los Angeles there was a very intense screening. There were many who said that it’s still impossible to say things against the shah. That he must not be called a dictator, and it’s not right that I do that. There are people who still perceive him as a kind of god. Occasionally, there were also adverse reactions from the left, too. Young people who felt that the film doesn’t show respect for the Iranian people and isn’t sufficiently critical of the Israelis, that it’s too soft on them.”

In the interview on television, which will be dubbed into Persian, Shadur says he will try to convey a message of peace and brotherhood.

“I’ll tell my story and about my connection to Iran,” he explains. “I feel that the interview itself and the screening of the film is a powerful and interesting act. It’s something that wouldn’t have happened a year or two ago. Maybe now there’s a kind of openness.”

 

UNDERGROUND FILMS DOMINATE IRAN’S SUCCESS AT FESTIVALS

Islamic revolution can’t upstage Iranian cinema
By Charles Recknagel
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
February 10, 2014

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power in Iran 35 years ago on February 11, Iran’s filmmakers had good reason to worry.

The strict code of censorship ushered in by the Islamic Revolution convinced many that creativity and film were no longer compatible in Iran.

Yet today, despite the continuing strict censorship rules governing them, Iran’s artistic films -- as opposed to the country’s commercial-release films -- are universally acclaimed as among the most innovative and important participants in international film festivals.

The filmmakers’ ability to overcome the suffocation of censorship, while still working under it, is one of the rare successes in the daily struggle ordinary Iranians wage to have greater personal freedom under an authoritarian regime. At the same time, the battle against censorship has had a great influence in forging the look and style of Iranian art films, which have earned a place of distinction in the eyes of film lovers worldwide.

Many authoritarian governments impose strict political restrictions on artists. But the Islamic republic’s censorship code is unusually strict because it includes social restrictions as well. The social restrictions particularly limit how relationships between men and women -- one of the most fundamental subjects of the arts -- can be depicted.

The red lines forbid almost all physical gestures of romantic love, limit the kinds of issues that can be discussed, and bar women from singing or dancing on screen. They also require actresses to wear the hijab -- clothing that masks the figure and covers the hair -- for indoor as well as outdoor scenes, even though in reality Iranian women generally dress at home as they wish and don’t cover their hair.

Jamsheed Akrami, a professor of film at William Paterson University in New Jersey, says that the censorship code is so burdensome that the first talent any serious filmmaker must possess is the ability to get around it.

“Whenever you are under strict restrictions, you try to find out ways of getting around them to still communicate your messages. To the credit of the Iranian filmmakers, they have become very adept at skirting the censorship codes,” Akrami says. “In fact, as an Iranian filmmaker your most prized possession is your ability to undermine the censorship codes and find ways of getting around them. Your artistic gift is like a secondary requirement.”

THE ART OF ALLUSION

One way to get around censorship is to allude to subjects rather than address them directly. Akrami -- whose own recent documentary “A Cinema of Discontent” explores how Iranian directors such as Jafar Panahi (maker of “The Circle,” an independent film banned from public screening in Iran ), Bahman Ghobadi (maker of “No One Knows About Persian Cats,” an underground film never screened in Iran ), and the Oscar-winning Asghar Farhadi operate under censorship -- says the art of allusion has become the hallmark of Iran’s art cinema.

“Iranian movies in film festivals are praised for their minimalist approach, for their aesthetics of omission, how they say things by not saying them, how they show things by not showing them. But we can never be sure that those approaches are decisions that are made consciously by the filmmakers or whether they are the results of the censorship,” Akrami explains. “You don’t know if a filmmaker who is using a minimalist approach is doing it [because he chooses to] or because he can’t be more open in his communication with the audience.”

One technique many filmmakers have successfully used is to discuss the difficult subject of adult romantic love by viewing it through the innocent eyes of children. Another is to use traditional village life as a setting for discussing urban social themes. Both children and village life are generally viewed by censors as posing no threat to the Islamic republic’s strict moral codes or to its political stability.

What art films from the Islamic republic might look like without the burden of censorship is impossible to know. But Akrami, who has interviewed dozens of Iranian filmmakers, says they unanimously believe they could make better films if the censorship were lifted.

Making films in Iran is an activity that not only tests artists’ ingenuity. It also can bring heavy punishment if the artist is deemed too independent.

The best-known filmmaker to suffer punishment recently is Panahi, who was arrested in 2010 after years of conflict with the authorities over the content of his films. Panahi received a six-year jail sentence, which was suspended after an outcry from the international community, and is banned from making films for 20 years.

WITHIN THE SYSTEM, OR WITHOUT

The easiest course is to simply cooperate fully with the state cinema authorities, who provide directors with loans to fund films and offer some free equipment if the initial script is approved. Fully cooperating also means guaranteed approval for the film to be shown in domestic cinemas or on television.

The directors who cooperate make commercially successful films that simply accept the incongruities imposed by the state censors. That includes the absurdity of showing women wearing the hijab as they sleep at home and the careful avoidance of volatile social topics such as attraction outside marriage or high unemployment among young people.

But directors who want to make artistic films -- the kind that go to international festivals -- have only two ways to do so. They can still try to make serious films within the state system, but at the risk of seeing their films banned if they are caught breaking censorship rules.

Or they can try to make underground films at their own cost and without state approval. The films made outside the state system may get to global film festivals but they cannot be shown in Iran’s cinemas and can only be distributed illegally through black-market copies or via Internet download.

Both Iranian underground films and those made within the state system have won critical acclaim at film festivals.

Mohammad Abdi, a London-based film critic and author, says underground films have dominated Iran’s success at festivals during most of the last decade. “If you look at the films in the Cannes, Berlin, Venice, and many other festivals during the last 10 years, especially during the [Mahmud] Ahmadinejad presidency, you see that most of them were made without permission and actually they are illegal in Iran and they have no opportunity to be shown in the [domestic] cinema,” he says.

However, the Iranian film to have the greatest recent success internationally is not an underground film but one made by working within the censorship system. It is Farhadi’s film “A Separation,” which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, the first Iranian film to ever do so.

Abdi says Farhadi has proved to be unusually adept at working within and around the censorship restrictions to produce films that both gain permission for domestic showing in Iran and gain international acclaim for their depth of content and innovative storytelling.

 

ONLY “FULLY FEMALE” PLAYERS ALLOWED

Iranian women footballers to undergo gender tests
Iran’s female footballers are to be given mandatory exams to prove that they are real women
By Robert Tait
Daily Telegraph
February 7, 2014

Footballers in Iran’s professional women’s league are to undergo mandatory gender tests to establish that they are fully female.

The country’s football governing body is bringing in the random checks after it was revealed that several leading players – including four in the national women’s team – were either men who had not completed sex change operations, or were suffering from sexual development disorders.

Gender change operations are legal in Iran according to a fatwa - or religious ruling - pronounced by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution. The law contrasts with the strict rules governing sexual morality under the country’s Sharia legal code, which forbids homosexuality and pre-marital sex.

Medical examiners will turn up unannounced at training sessions of teams playing in Iran’s women’s premier league, as well as those playing in the indoor league, known as footsal.

Ahmad Hashemian, head of the Iranian football federation’s medical committee, said the clubs themselves were now obliged to carry out medical examinations to establish the gender of their players before signing them on contracts.

Those unable to prove they are female would be barred from taking part in the women’s leagues until they underwent medical treatment, he said.

“If these people can solve their problems through surgery and be in a position to receive the necessary medical qualifications, they will then be able to participate in [women’s] football,” Mr Hashemian, a qualified doctor, said in remarks quoted by IRNA, the state news agency.

Sex changes are commonly carried out in phases in Iran, with the full procedure taking up to two years and including hormone therapy before the full gender transformation is completed.

Seven players have already had their contracts terminated under the federation’s gender test directive, according to IRNA.

Concerns about the sexuality of some players are believed to have been first raised four years ago when one women’s team voiced suspicions about an opposition goalkeeper.

Football is highly popular among many Iranian women, despite religious rules that bar them from entering stadiums to watch matches between male teams.

FURTHER READING ABOUT THE NON-SPORTING SIDE OF THE OLYMPICS

(So far Edward Snowden has nothing to say about this....)

* NBC News’ Richard Engel: My Computers, Cellphone Were Hacked ‘Almost Immediately’ In Sochi

www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/05/reporter-hacked-sochi-richard-engel_n_4731846.html

* Russian Official Lets It Slip That There Are Cameras In the Olympic Hotel Bathrooms

www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/02/06/russia_olympic_shower_cams_hosts_dismiss_hotel_complaints_by_citing_video.html

* Journalists’ horror at Sochi hotels. The few that did get rooms, were met with stray dogs, half-built walls, a lobby with no floor and yellow water spitting from the sinks.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2552200/Welcome-Sochi-Journalists-horror-finding-hotels-awash-stray-dogs-brown-water-bugs-no-lightbulbs-days-ahead-Games.html

* Journalists at Sochi are live-tweeting their hilarious and gross hotel experiences

www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/02/04/journalists-at-sochi-are-live-tweeting-their-hilarious-and-gross-hotel-experiences/

(The above links contains a number of pictures.)

***

I may add extra links here in the coming days, if you refresh the page.

 

RUSSIA LEAKS “F--- THE EU” TRANSCRIPT

The White House has reacted with fury after Russia yesterday leaked an embarrassing telephone conversation that they hacked between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, during which she says “Fuck the EU”.

Nuland adds: “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” for Klitschko to go into the government.

Recording here.

-- Tom Gross

ARTICLES

“THIS DISCRIMINATION AGAINST JEWS HAS A NAME”

How to fight academic bigotry
By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post
January 9, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-how-to-fight-academic-bigotry/2014/01/09/64f482ee-795e-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f6_story.html

For decades, the American Studies Association labored in well-deserved obscurity. No longer. It has now made a name for itself by voting to boycott Israeli universities, accusing them of denying academic and human rights to Palestinians.

Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange.

Made more so when you consider the state of human rights in Israel’s neighborhood. As we speak, Syria’s government is dropping “barrel bombs” filled with nails, shrapnel and other instruments of terror on its own cities. Where is the ASA boycott of Syria?

And of Iran, which hangs political, religious and even sexual dissidents and has no academic freedom at all? Or Egypt, where Christians are being openly persecuted? Or Turkey, Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, massively repressive China and Russia?

Which makes obvious that the ASA boycott has nothing to do with human rights. It’s an exercise in radical chic, giving marginalized academics a frisson of pretend anti-colonialism, seasoned with a dose of edgy anti-Semitism.

And don’t tell me this is merely about Zionism. The ruse is transparent. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. To apply to the state of the Jews a double standard that you apply to none other, to judge one people in a way you judge no other, to single out that one people for condemnation and isolation — is to engage in a gross act of discrimination.

And discrimination against Jews has a name. It’s called anti-Semitism.

Former Harvard president Larry Summers called the ASA actions “anti-Semitic in their effect if not necessarily in their intent.” I choose to be less polite. The intent is clear: to incite hatred for the largest — and only sovereign — Jewish community on Earth.

What to do? Facing a similar (British) academic boycott of Israelis seven years ago, Alan Dershowitz and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote an open letter declaring that, for the purposes of any anti-Israel boycott, they are to be considered Israelis.

Meaning: You discriminate against Israelis? Fine. Include us out. We will have nothing to do with you.

Thousands of other academics added their signatures to the Dershowitz/Weinberg letter. It was the perfect in-kind response. Boycott the boycotters, with contempt.

But academia isn’t the only home for such prejudice. Throughout the cultural world, the Israel boycott movement is growing. It’s become fashionable for musicians, actors, writers and performers of all kinds to ostentatiously cleanse themselves of Israel and Israelis.

The example of the tuxedoed set has spread to the more coarse and unkempt anti-Semites, such as the thugs who a few years ago disrupted London performances of the Jerusalem Quartet and the Israeli Philharmonic.

Five years ago in Sweden, Israel’s Davis Cup team had to play its matches in an empty tennis stadium because the authorities could not guarantee the Israelis’ safety from the mob. The most brazen display of rising anti-Semitism today is the spread of the “quenelle,” a reverse Nazi salute, popularized by the openly anti-Semitic French entertainer, Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala.

In this sea of easy and open bigotry, an unusual man has made an unusual statement. Russian by birth, European by residence, Evgeny Kissin is arguably the world’s greatest piano virtuoso. He is also a Jew of conviction. Deeply distressed by Israel’s treatment in the cultural world around him, Kissin went beyond the Dershowitz/Weinberg stance of asking to be considered an Israeli. On Dec. 7, he became one, defiantly.

Upon taking the oath of citizenship in Jerusalem, he declared: “I am a Jew, Israel is a Jewish state. . . . Israel’s case is my case, Israel’s enemies are my enemies, and I do not want to be spared the troubles which Israeli musicians encounter when they represent the Jewish state beyond its borders.”

Full disclosure: I have a personal connection with Kissin. For the past two years I’ve worked to bring him to Washington to perform for Pro Musica Hebraica, a nonprofit organization (founded by my wife and me) dedicated to reviving lost and forgotten Jewish classical music. We succeeded. On Feb. 24, Kissin will perform at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall masterpieces of Eastern European Jewish music, his first U.S. appearance as an Israeli.

The persistence of anti-Semitism, that most ancient of poisons, is one of history’s great mysteries. Even the shame of the Holocaust proved no antidote. It provided but a temporary respite. Anti-Semitism is back. Alas, a new generation must learn to confront it.

How? How to answer the thugs, physical and intellectual, who single out Jews for attack? The best way, the most dignified way, is to do like Dershowitz, Weinberg or Kissin.

Express your solidarity. Sign the open letter or write your own. Don the yellow star and wear it proudly.

 

APARTHEID IN ISRAEL? HARDLY.

Apartheid in Israel? Hardly.
Those who call for a boycott of Israeli universities should take this little quiz.
By Seth M. Siegel
The Los Angeles Times
January 12, 2014

www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0112-siegel-israel-boycott-apartheid-20140112,0,546937,full.story#axzz2qxBt39ha

Two American academic groups — the American Studies Assn. and the Assn. for Asian American Studies — have called for a boycott of Israeli universities. Those resolutions have met with many objections. Much has been made, for example, of the inherent hypocrisy of attempting to ostracize Israel for its treatment of Palestinians and their Israeli Arab cousins when there are so many far worse situations in the Middle East and around the world. But there is another objectionable element in the boycott movement: the abuse of language.

In the discussion that surrounds the call for a boycott, South African apartheid is almost invariably invoked. Say what you will about the Israeli occupation, but the South Africa analogy is false. The word “apartheid” isn’t accurate, but it is emotional and inflammatory.

Of all people, professors should be more precise in their use of language. That they are not, and that they use such freighted language, suggests a goal other than helping the parties get to two states for two peoples.

Let’s use an academic tool — a surprise quiz — to examine the intellectual integrity of the apartheid allegation.


1. The valedictorian of the most recent graduating class at the medical school at Israel’s MIT, Technion, was:

a) A West Bank settler

b) An Orthodox Jewish man

c) A wounded veteran

d) A Muslim woman

2. The only country on the following list in which the Christian population isn’t falling precipitously is:

a) Iraq

b) Syria

c) Egypt

d) Israel

3. Which of the following is true of Israel’s Arab Christians?

a) They make up about a third of Israel’s pharmacists

b) They are among the winners of the Israel Prize, the country’s highest civilian honor

c) Their high school students have a higher rate of success on their graduation exams than Israeli Jewish students

d) All of the above

4. Since Israel left Gaza in 2005, the number of rockets fired from there into Israel is:

a) 8

b) 80

c) 800

d) 8,000 [TG: Actually, it is over 9,000]

5. Which of the following is not true:

a) Arabs from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza have access to Israeli hospitals

b) Arab doctors and nurses treat Jewish and Arab patients in Israeli hospitals

c) Hundreds of wounded civilians and fighters in the Syrian civil war have been treated in Israeli hospitals

d) By law, Israeli Jews may refuse to be treated by an Arab doctor

6. When West Bank Palestinians have a claim that their rights have been abrogated by an Israeli action, they can file a lawsuit with:

a) A West Bank military court

b) A special court for Palestinians

c) No one

d) The Israeli Supreme Court acting as a court of primary jurisdiction

7. The number of Israeli Arabs currently elected to serve in the Knesset, Israel’s 120-person parliament, is:

a) None

b) 1

c) 3

d) 12

8. The Golani Brigade, an elite Israeli army unit, recently made news when it:

a) Blew up a Hezbollah arms depot

b) Stopped a suicide attack on a city bus

c) Disbanded because Israel faces few military threats

d) Appointed Col. Rassan Alian, a Druze, as its commander

9. Salim Joubran is:

a) An Israeli Arab serving a five-year sentence for insulting Israel’s president

b) A human rights organization fighting for Palestinian rights

c) An Israeli restaurant shut down because it doesn’t serve kosher food

d) An Israeli Arab who serves on Israel’s Supreme Court

10. Israel’s 2013 Miss Israel beauty queen was:

a) Bar Refaeli, a fashion model

b) Agam Rodberg, an actress

c) Sandra Ringler, a fashion stylist

d) Yityish Aynaw, a black Ethiopian immigrant to Israel

Before looking at the answer key, try to imagine the condition of blacks in South Africa, the victims of apartheid, in each of the settings in the quiz.

Israel isn’t a perfect country. Criticism of Israel is legitimate, and Israelis themselves do it every day. But as the quiz reveals — D is the correct answer to each question — whatever Israel is, it isn’t an apartheid state.

Perhaps the professors need to study their subject a little harder.

ARTICLES

“WE BURIED HIM WITHOUT A HEAD”

Despite Decades of Enmity, Israel Quietly Aids Syrian Civilians
By Isabel Kershner
New York Times
January 30, 2014

www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/world/middleeast/despite-decades-of-enmity-israel-quietly-aids-syrian-civilians.html

NAHARIYA, Israel — Two brothers, ages 10 and 8, were playing marbles outside their home in a town in Syria when a rocket decapitated the older one and critically wounded his sibling. Having rushed the surviving child to a local hospital, the mother recalled, medics told her: “If you want to save your son, you should take him to Israel.”

A few days later, the boy and his mother, 34, arrived at Western Galilee Hospital here in Nahariya, on the Mediterranean coast. The traumatized boy told the staff how he had seen his brother’s head fly.

His mother broke down as she showed a visitor how he had hoarded the hospital’s packaged chocolate puddings in a bedside drawer, hoping to give them to a brother and sister still in Syria. She said she was convinced that the son who died had shielded his younger brother from the rocket explosion. “We buried him without a head,” she said.

As opposing Syrian delegations convened face to face this week in Switzerland, the tragedies of the Syrian civil war were reverberating here, the emotions sharpened by the decades of enmity between Israel and Syria, still technically in a state of war.

After nearly three years of internal conflict that has killed an estimated 130,000 and displaced millions, some Syrians say they now fear President Bashar al-Assad’s forces more than the Israeli soldiers at the frontier, who transfer wounded patients and their relatives to the hospital via military ambulance.

Israel guards their identities to avoid exposing them to additional danger when they return home. “Assad calls those who come here collaborators with Israel,” said a Syrian accompanying his critically wounded 5-year-old granddaughter, who arrived last month.

Nearly 200 Syrians, about a third of them women and children, have been treated at this hospital since March 2013. More than 230 have been taken to Rebecca Sieff Hospital in the Galilee town of Safed. A third of the cost is covered by Israel’s Ministry of Defense, a third by the Ministry of Health and the rest by the hospitals. Dr. Masad Barhoum, the director general of the hospital in Nahariya, said that so far the treatment his hospital had provided had cost it about $2.6 million.

Israel made it clear that it would not tolerate refugees amassing along the decades-old Israeli-Syrian cease-fire line. But Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said this week that Israel “cannot remain indifferent” and had been providing food and winter clothing to Syrian villages across the border fence as well as tending to some of the wounded.

A small, low-profile humanitarian effort, it is politically risky for patients and their relatives. Some said they had been afraid to come here and now fear going back.

For some, the journey begins with help from the Free Syrian Army, a Western-aligned loose coalition of rebels who are fighting Mr. Assad’s government, and from international coordinating bodies in the area. Spirited across the frontier into the Israeli-held Golan Heights, the patients and their relatives pass into the hands of the Israeli military.

The 5-year-old’s grandfather, a farmer, said life in wartime was like “living in a whirlpool.” When the rebellion against Mr. Assad first started, he said, “It was us against Bashar, and we had a chance of winning.” Now, he said, “the whole world is involved,” but he asked why America was not coming to the rescue.

About five weeks ago, he recalled, he had been working his land when he learned that his grandchildren had been hurt in a rocket attack. He had heard about the Israeli medical care and, ignoring the political risks, worked to bring his granddaughter here.

“When there is peace, I will raise an Israeli flag on the roof of my house,” he said.

The war has eroded once-impervious psychological barriers on both sides. This month, an Israeli aid drive led by volunteers from the Working and Studying Youth movement, Israeli Flying Aid and other local organizations collected about 20,000 items — mainly jackets, blankets and sleeping bags — to be transferred to Syrian refugees. Donors were asked to remove all Israeli labels. Barak Sella of Working and Studying Youth said there were plans to establish a website for dialogue between Israeli and Syrian youths.

A wounded mother of six, who had been at the hospital in Nahariya with two wounded daughters for nearly six weeks, said, “I grew up hearing that Israel was an enemy country and that if you met an Israeli he would kill you.”

The mother, 31, said she had been on the roof of her home with her children and a nephew as snow began when a rocket struck. She said she did not remember what happened afterward. When she awoke in the hospital, she said, “I was very, very afraid, but I tried not to show that to the staff.”

Her left leg was amputated below the knee. One daughter, 6, was recovering from shrapnel injuries. The other, 3, had lost an eye and suffered damaged lungs and a mangled arm.

A son, 5, and the nephew, 12, were in the hospital in Safed, accompanied by their grandmother. The younger boy lost one leg; the nephew, both.

Having barely taken her first steps with a day-old prosthesis, the mother was about to return to Syria with her two daughters and a large suitcase packed with donated clothes and toys. They were to be picked up by an army ambulance in the afternoon to begin the six-hour journey to the border and home.

She expressed fear over what might await her. She did not know if the children she had left behind in Syria had survived the rocket attack.

Asked to draw a house in a hospital classroom, the 6-year-old girl drew rubble. Most of the mother’s neighbors and many relatives had already left for refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon. Once back, she said, she would confide only to those closest to her where she had been.

 

ISRAEL’S GROWING ROLE IN SOUTHERN SYRIA

Israel’s growing role in Southern Syria
By Ehud Ya’ari
Washington Institute
January 29, 2014

* Concerned about the possible drift of al-Qaeda affiliates to areas adjacent to the Golan Heights border, Israel finds itself obliged to increase its assistance to local rebel militias in southern Syria.

******************************

As the fighting in Syria rages, Israel has been moving cautiously and often reluctantly toward assuming a modest role in the civil war, restricted to areas along the Golan Heights frontier line. What began as a purely humanitarian step -- extending emergency medical aid to injured and sick Syrians from neighboring villages -- has by now reportedly expanded into a well-developed mechanism for providing a whole range of items, from medications to food, fuel, clothes, heaters, and more. One should assume that the same understandings which allowed over 600 wounded Syrians to be evacuated for treatment in Israeli hospitals -- including a special military field hospital on the Golan -- are facilitating other forms of assistance as well. A significant operation of this type indicates that a system of communications and frequent contacts have been established with the local rebel militias, since the evacuation of the injured and their return to Syria seem to function flawlessly.

These developments bring to mind the establishment of “The Good Fence” along the Israel-Lebanon border when civil war erupted there in the mid-1970s. Yet unlike in Lebanon, the Israeli forces involved in the current Golan-based assistance effort have been very careful not to operate inside Syrian territory or assume responsibility for the villages in question, most of which are populated by a mixture of Sunnis, Druze, and Circassians, along with various armed factions.

Israel initially opted to remove itself from the bloody quagmire in Syria. It even accepted without protest its exclusion from the latest Geneva II peace conference, despite Israel’s major stake in how the conflict is settled and its longstanding bilateral accord with Syria -- the 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement, which is still in effect. Yet Israeli concerns about the war’s consequences have been aggravated by the emergence of al-Qaeda affiliates and other radical Islamist militias, which have gained preeminence among rebel units in many parts of central and northern Syria. Israel apparently may feel obliged to take unpublicized measures aimed at preventing or at least slowing the movement of such fighters to territory south of Damascus, particularly those representing the al-Qaeda affiliates Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).

The area in question stretches from the Golan frontier up to Mount Druze in the east, and between the southern suburbs of Damascus and the city of Deraa, where the Syrian uprising was first ignited in 2011. The local militias formed in this region’s villages are recognized as a potentially effective barrier to a takeover by al-Qaeda disciples. Although Jabhat al-Nusra has established a presence in the vicinity of Deraa and close to the meeting point of the Rukkad and Yarmouk Rivers, the overall situation in the south does not follow the pattern witnessed in other parts of Syria, where radicals have asserted themselves at the forefront of the rebellion.

For example, military commanders have the last word in other parts of the country, but southern militias are often directed by civilian elders. Many of them have come to view Israel as a temporary ally under the present circumstances. Emboldened by their belief that the Israel Defense Forces will indirectly protect their back, these militias have battled troops from the Assad regime’s 90th and 61st Brigades, which are based in the area. When regime artillery units fire on rebel formations along the Golan frontier and an occasional stray shell lands on the Israeli side of the border fence, the IDF is indeed quick to retaliate with a single Tammuz missile directed at the position from where the shells were fired. Otherwise, however, the IDF refrains from any intervention, even when clashes occur very close to Israeli positions, sometimes with regime tanks driving within meters of the border.

President Bashar al-Assad’s main interest in the south is to ensure the safety of the main highway between Damascus and Deraa and maintain a hold over parts of the latter city. He has also ordered his generals to retain Quneitra, the capital of the district bordering Israel, as well as the stretch of Druze villages to the north along the eastern slopes of Mount Hermon. So far, the regime has managed to achieve these goals and does not seem worried about losing its grip on the rest of the region, which has little strategic significance for the outcome of the current struggle.

The regime is also keen on keeping the southern Druze community out of the fight. Based mainly on Mount Druze east of Deraa, this community could play a major role in shaping realities on the ground in the south. For now, it prefers to sit on the fence until Assad’s prospects of survival are clarified. Traditionally, though, Syrian Druze have special ties to the Hashemite court in Jordan and were once considered by Israeli strategist Gen. Yigal Allon as natural future allies of the Jewish state.

For their part, Israel and Jordan share similar interests in southern Syria. King Abdullah II is no less worried about the possible appearance of numerous al-Qaeda militants along his border. Accordingly, Amman is cultivating an array of local militias close to the long frontier with Syria, taking advantage of the fact that many inhabitants of southern Syria and northern Jordan belong to the same tribes. There are also many reports -- repeatedly dismissed by Jordanian authorities -- of a clandestine “operations room” in Amman where Jordanian military and intelligence officers coordinate military assistance to local rebel groups alongside Saudi and Western advisors. If such reports are correct, the Israeli part of the effort should be viewed as complementing but not necessarily coordinated with the Jordanian endeavor.

In all likelihood, the inability of al-Qaeda affiliates to seize the leading role in the south is due not only to alleged Israeli or Jordanian involvement, but also to the jihadists’ preoccupation with the war in the north, where ISIS has been battling with the Islamic Front and rival group Jabhat al-Nusra (backed by al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri) in recent weeks in addition to fighting the regime. Yet ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra have dramatically increased their strength -- according to Israeli intelligence estimates, they now total 40,000 men. If they launched a concerted effort to extend their foothold to the south, they would pose a major test to local militias that have yet to be seriously challenged. In that scenario, Israel and Jordan would have to decide whether to sit idly while al-Qaeda becomes entrenched along their borders.

In light of these concerns, preventing the southward expansion of extremist Islamist groups is becoming a larger priority in tackling the overall Syrian problem. If al-Qaeda affiliates take charge of the regions bordering Israel and Jordan, new terrorist threats would arise, potentially exporting Syria’s bloodshed to its neighbors. Such a development would give al-Qaeda freedom of action over a vast area stretching from west of Baghdad to southern Syria. Put another way, the organization would have achieved its long-sought objective: a front with Israel.

 

SYRIA CHEATS

Syria Cheats
By David Schenker
Weekly Standard
January 30, 2014

Tuesday, during the State of the Union Address, President Obama boasted that “American diplomacy, backed by the threat of force, is why Syria’s chemical weapons are being eliminated.” The assertion was premature. In early January, Syria’s Bashar Assad regime indeed started the process of transferring its chemical weapons arsenal abroad. To date it’s destroyed only 5 percent of its unconventional arsenal and it’s unlikely Damascus will finish the job. Despite international commitments to the contrary, precedent suggests that Assad will retain a residual supply for future contingencies.

Like North Korea and Libya -- which famously violated international obligations on weapons of mass destruction -- there is good reason to believe that Syria will cheat on its own agreement with the United Nations to fully dispose of its chemical weapons arsenal.

Three years into a popular uprising that has left 130,000 dead, in August Assad gassed nearly 1,500 men, women, and children with Sarin. Facing international pressure, in September Damascus signed the Chemical Weapons Convention and allowed the U.N. to start a process of cataloguing, removing, and destroying CW facilities, weapons, and precursor chemicals.

A month later, Secretary Kerry praised Syrian “compliance” and called the disarmament a “credit to the Assad regime.” But the honeymoon won’t last. In just 13 years in power, Syria under Bashar Assad has established a prodigious track record of reneging on promises and violating international agreements.

Assad’s subterfuge started three years after coming to power, when in February 2003 then Secretary of State Colin Powell travelled to Damascus and secured a commitment from Assad to stop smuggling some 150,000 barrels of oil per day from Saddam’s Iraq. Syria never halted the imports, a violation of trust that later prompted Secretary Powell to say, “I will always have that lying in my background software and on my hard drive.”

Undeterred, months later Secretary Powell returned to Syria and cajoled Assad to shutter the offices and restrict the communications of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Powell reportedly called President Bush, awakening him in the middle of the night to inform him of his diplomatic achievement. Alas, as with the earlier oil pipeline promise, this Assad undertaking also proved insincere and the terrorist headquarters remained open for business.

Later that year following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Assad regime moved thousands of al Qaeda insurgents bent on killing American soldiers and Iraqi civilians across the border. During bilateral security talks with the U.S., Damascus vowed to secure the frontier but the jihadi pipeline never dried up.

To be sure, these deceptions complicated Washington’s Middle East policy. But while Syria’s misdeeds and Assad’s lies were annoying, they didn’t rise to the level of strategic concern -- until 2007. That year, Israel launched an airstrike against a target in northwestern Syria that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) later confirmed was a nuclear weapons facility.

The facility at Al Kibar had been built in contravention not only of Syria’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, but also in violation of the Comprehensive Nuclear Safeguards Agreement to which Damascus is a signatory.

Syria’s egregious breach of its nuclear commitments and the regime’s subsequent obstruction of the IAEA investigation do not bode well for the international effort to denude Syria of its chemical weapons capabilities.

Not surprisingly, the accuracy of Syria’s inventory declaration to the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is already in question. According to the OPCW, for example, the Assad regime declared “approximately 1,000 metric tons” of binary chemical weapons precursors, a number that seems too oddly coincident with Secretary Kerry’s earlier formulation that that Syria “has “about a thousand metric tons” of these agents. (Is it possible that U.S. intelligence assessments are so precise?) Likewise, according to non-proliferation experts, given the size and scope of the CW program, the fact that the Assad regime declared absolutely no filled chemical munitions is a glaring red flag.

At present, it is too soon to tell whether the Assad regime is violating its chemical weapons commitments. After having killed so many Syrians with conventional armaments, it’s difficult to see why the Assad regime would see a need to retain a residual chemical arsenal. Perhaps over the past 13 years, Bashar has come to understand that there is no cost associated with cheating.

Indeed, objectively speaking, the use of chemical weapons has changed the dynamic on the ground in Syria and in the international community, effectively strengthening the Assad regime. Not only did the regime avoid a promised U.S. military strike, as UN Special Envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi noted in October, the chemical weapons deal transformed Assad from a “pariah” into a “partner.”

In the coming months -- even as Damascus continues its genocidal war against its political opponents -- more blandishments are sure to be lavished on Assad. The regime will be praised for fulfilling its commitments, and the rebels may even be condemned for undermining security and delaying the disarmament process. And eventually, the U.N. -- and the Obama administration -- will pronounce Syria free of chemical weapons.

Shortly after the agreement was reached to steal Assad’s chemical arsenal out of Syria, Secretary of State Kerry sought to preempt critics of the deal. “We’re not just going to trust and verify,” he assured, “We’re going to verify, and verify, and verify.” Alas, because the Chemical Weapons Convention provides signatories the right to manage access to facilities and does not mandate intrusive inspections, verification is at best a relative term. And then, of course, there is the matter of Assad’s penchant for lying.

At the kickoff of the Geneva II peace conference on January 22, Syrian foreign minister Walid Moualem told U.N. secretary general Ban Ki Moon, “Syria always keeps its promises.” Western governments should know better. When it comes to keeping international obligations, Syria’s Bashar Assad regime seldom keeps its promises. Given the absence of consequences for pursuing nuclear and deploying chemical weapons, the inescapable takeaway for Assad is that when it comes to dictators and WMD, the old aphorism that “winners never cheat and cheaters never win” doesn’t apply.