The Syria Deal Worked Out Great, So… Oh, Never Mind
In The Wall Street Journal, columnist Bret Stephens draws parallels between the failed international deal to eliminate Syria’s vast store of chemical weapons and the current deal on the table regarding Iran’s nuclear program.
In “The Syria Sham and the Iran Deal,” Stephens writes:
Note the Journal’s Adam Entous and Naftali Bendavid in a deeply reported July 23 exposé that reveals as much about the sham disarmament process in Syria as it foretells about the sham we are getting with Iran.
Start with the formal terms under which inspectors were forced to operate. The deal specified that Syria would give inspectors access to its “declared” chemical-weapons sites, much as Iran is expected to give U.N. inspectors unfettered access to its own declared sites. As for any undeclared sites, inspectors could request access provided they furnish evidence of their suspicions, giving the regime plenty of time to move, hide and deceive—yet another similarity with the Iran deal.
The agreement meant that inspectors were always playing by the regime’s rules, even as Washington pretended to dictate terms.
[…]The CIA now admits that Syria retains significant quantities of its deadliest chemical weapons. When Mr. Obama announced the Syria deal, he warned that he would use military force in the event that Mr. Assad failed to honor his promises. The threat was hollow then. It is laughable now. What ties the Syrian sham to the Iranian one is an American president bent on conjuring political illusions at home at the expense of strategic facts abroad, his weakness apparent to everyone but himself.
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