I don't call them "final" punchlines anymore, because no matter how ridiculous this Charlie-Foxtrot becomes, it keeps getting worse. Today Bush UN Ambassador John Bolton delivers the coup de grace:
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton predicted on Saturday that the agreement reached between the United States and Russia on destroying Syria's chemical weapons "will die a death by a thousand cuts."
Syrian President Bashar Assad "is required to make his initial declaration on Friday," Bolton, a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, told Fox News. "It'll slip a few days, or maybe a few more. Maybe the first declaration won't be full and complete, and it'll have to be amended. And, then, it'll have to be amended again.
"You can see the impact of this as time goes on, and I think that's exactly what the strategy is."....
The agreement requires Syria to submit a "comprehensive listing" of its chemical weapons stockpiles within a week. Arms inspectors must be on the ground in Syria by November, with the goal of eliminating the country's chemical weapons by the middle of next year.
But the accord contains nothing about the potential use of force if Syria fails to comply — and Kerry said that no pre-agreement existed on what action the U.N. Security Council might take if Syria failed to comply with the plan.
"One of the fine ironies here is that we have agreed with Russia, which has been in violation itself of the Chemical Weapons Convention since the treaty came into force [in 1993]," Bolton told Fox. "Most experts agree that Russia did not make its own full and complete declaration of its chemical weapons stockpiles in the mid-1990s, and many believe that Russia has been in violation of the treaty, developing new generations of chemical weapons.
"So the notion that Russia is going to vouch for Bashar al-Assad is almost comical," he concluded. "You can't make this stuff up." [Emphases added]
One way of looking at this is that in Syria, unlike Iraq, al Qaeda didn't wait until after the U.S. had invaded and deposed the Baathist dictator before importing an "insurgency"; they cut out the American middleman and insurged first, creating a deterrent against American intervention that they knew a perfumed prince like Barack Obama would never transgress. "Muscular pinpricks" would have further aided al Qaeda's cause, so O's idea of "military intervention" would have been welcomed by them, whatever the pretext. It just so happened that getting pantsed in front of the entire planet by Vlad Putin served his, Vlad's, and Boy Assad's purposes even more, so King Hussein genuflected to them instead. Might as well, what with al Qaeda being dead and GM being alive and all that.
Another way to look at this is that Assad is now whistling down the same WMD road that his superiors in Tehran have so well-paved over the past decade-plus. If O genuinely believed that disarming the Syrian ruler of his chems was of such vital importance - he didn't, obviously, but work with me here - he would have taken care of it himself (as Dubya, to his everlasting discredit, failed to do), starting with a full scale Iraq-style invasion to send Assad running for the nearest spider hole. Why? Simple: The U.N. for all intents and purposes IS the Arab League, Russia is their #1 military vendor, and there is simply no way that either is going to allow Boy Assad to be either deposed or disarmed - precisely as with the Iranian mullahs, whom Tsar Vlad offered another S-300 anti-aircraft system and nuclear reactor not forty-eight hours after his spanking of Red Barry on Syria.
In football, that would cost Vlad fifteen yards on the next kickoff. Here, it is but the beginning of sorrows....
UPDATE: By all means, let us pile on.....
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