The Iranian nuclear accord would hardly be the first major arms control agreement that President Obama has negotiated. An important precedent was the agreement reached in 2013 for Bashar Assad to give up his chemical weapons in return for not being bombed and for receiving de facto American support to stay in power. Assad ostensibly delivered on the agreement by June 2014 when the last of his chemical weapons stockpile was supposed to be turned over to international inspectors for destruction.
Or did he? The New York Times reports: “Two years after President Bashar al-Assad agreed to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, there is mounting evidence that his government is flouting international law to drop cheap, jerry-built chlorine bombs on insurgent-held areas. Lately, the pace of the bombardments in contested areas like Idlib Province has picked up, rescue workers say, as government forces have faced new threats from insurgents.”
So you would think that Assad would suffer quick and certain retribution for flouting the chemical weapons accord, right? Err, not quite. As the Times further notes: “Yet, the Assad government has so far evaded more formal scrutiny because of a thicket of political, legal and technical obstacles to assigning blame for the attacks — a situation that feels surreal to many Syrians under the bombs, who say it is patently clear the government drops them.”
The U.S. can’t even get the United Nations to act against Assad and of course Obama isn’t willing to do anything himself, notwithstanding all of his pious talk about preventing “atrocities” on his watch. No doubt the president doesn’t want to offend Iran by acting against its Syrian proxy, not when nuclear negotiations are so close to being finished.
This is a sign of what happens to major arms control agreements in practice—not in the fantasy world constructed by the Obama administration where the only choice is either to sign on the bottom line or to start a war with Iran. In reality signing up for an agreement is often an invitation to cheat—and as the Syria case (along with those of North Korea, Russia, and many others show) the U.S. has a terrible track record of holding other nations to account for arms control violations. There is always some compelling reason not to act against the cheaters, to look the other way and hope for the best.
It’s bad enough that Assad is ignoring an accord to drop chemical weapons on his own people—arguably a weapon no more destructive than the barrel bombs he favors (and about whose use this White House apparently could not care less). It would be far worse if Iran were to violate a nuclear accord and start stockpiling nuclear weapons. Yet is there any reason to believe that Assad’s masters in Tehran will be any more scrupulous about observing international obligations than he has been?
