Three months ago, at the end of a widely reported and protracted saga, Western powers led by the U.S. signed a deal with Syrian President Bashar Assad, in what went down as one of the most deranged agreements in the history of diplomacy. In that deal, which was drawn up after findings pointed to Assad's use of chemical weapons, he was essentially obligated, based on a "man's word" -- and backed, as if that wasn't bad enough, by the word of none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin -- to hand over Syria's chemical weapon stockpiles to U.N. inspectors and agree not to keep anything else in the dark.
Thanks to that "gesture," Assad got the green light, more than ever before over the last two and a half years of civil war in Syria, to continue slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians using the very same weapons he had used to kill them until now: not chemical, of course, but conventional. As for the cherry on top, Assad received the enthusiastic praises of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for the Syrian government's "cooperation."
The Syrian president was bequeathed new legitimacy, which will follow him to the useless Geneva summit, set to usher him into another presidential term with blessings. This type of pot of noodles -- in which Tehran was cooked and served warm by Moscow -- hasn't been eaten since Munich 1938.
Crime follows crime, our sages once said, and lo and behold, about a month and a half after that scandalous arrangement with Syria was inked, the White House and its naive allies parted their lips to consume yet another pot of noodles -- this time from the Iranian kitchen -- in the form of a "new approach," starring then-fresh Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. That same Rouhani, who won over the Western heart, is actually an uncompromising, extremist Khomeini-ist a thousand times worse than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is remembered fondly.
Note this one example, which is just one of many. Ahmadinejad had already chosen which pen he would use to sign the "uranium-for-nuclear-fuel-rods" deal with France two years ago -- a much better deal than the current fiasco -- when the "reformist," "green" bloc in the Iranian government, including Mir-Hossein Moussavi and (you guessed it) Hassan Rouhani, shot it down.
From all angles, the deal with Iran, which began to be implemented on Monday, was far worse than the deal with Syria. Unlike Assad, the Iranians do not have to give up anything; all of the necessary equipment and technology for making a nuclear bomb will remain in their hands. Really, they just agreed to temporarily limit the extent of their uranium enrichment, like running their washing machine on the short cycle. But it's always possible to return to "problematic" levels of enrichment, even overnight.
In exchange for this noble improvement, the Iranians got even better gifts in return than Assad did. They received a free hand to advance strategic Iranian ambitions in the Middle East, which have yielded abundant, juicy fruits without "nuclear" assistance; a recovered and prospering economy, especially given the large portion of painful sanctions that were removed; and a "revolutionary" image, moving from the axis of evil to becoming one of the region's most popular countries.
The Russians have a saying: No one ever steps on the same rake twice. Too bad the Americans never learned Russian.
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