Thursday morning Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's political and media adviser, Bouthaina Shaaban, spoke via Skype to an audience at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Her webcast speech was part of an event hosted by an organization called the Global Alliance for Terminating al Qaeda/ISIS. "United We Stand" the event was called, united to defeat the Islamic State.
According to GAFTA's literature, ISIS is sponsored by America's traditional regional allies, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and, yes, Israel. The advantage of studying and analyzing cranks is that they are very easy to read—their tics are obvious and their aims are transparent. Thus, GAFTA's real point is not about fighting ISIS but rather to promote a joining of hands with America's "real friends"—like Iran and of course the Syrian regime Shaaban represents. Thursday's event was an information operation, which is why Shaaban's speech, like virtually every public utterance of hers, was polluted with lies and obscene nonsense.
According to Shaaban, the reason the war is still going on has nothing to do with Assad. "The government of Syrian Arab Republic has been cooperative with all international efforts … in order to reach a political solution in Syria." The problem is the other side, which as the regime has been saying for five years is made up only of terrorists. "Did you ever hear of an 'armed opposition' in any country in the world?" Shaaban said. "To my knowledge, opposition is political opposition, but once arms are being taken, killing is being perpetrated, massacres are being done against people, it's no longer an opposition, it is a terrorist movement that kills and destroys."
That's Assad regime boilerplate. The so-called opposition is all terrorists, even the little kids. __Sure, we opened fire first when they took to the streets to protest against the regime in March 2011, but we knew even back then they were all terrorists, which is why we shot them in the streets, or put them in jail, and tortured them, even kids. We had to get them before they got us.__
The worst thing about the event wasn't that the National Press Club provided a venue for an official from a regime that has killed journalists, including Samir Kassir, Gebran Tueni, and Marie Colvin. Shaaban is a terrorist who plotted with Lebanese and Syrian figures to kill Lebanese civilians in order to raise sectarian tensions. The worst thing isn't that C-Span gave airtime to an official from a regime that has killed hundreds of thousands of human beings. Nor is the worst thing that Shaaban, sanctioned in August 2011, may have violated the law by appearing, even by Skype, at an event held in the United States. And the worst thing isn't that her appearance may have gotten others in trouble, too, since Executive Order 13573 prohibits any U.S. person from supplying with any good or service—like, for instance, securing the Skype connection. The worst thing isn't even that GAFTA is registered to Ghassan Mansour, whose Mansour Brothers Auto Trading Company in Tampa, Florida was found in 2011 to have laundered more than $3 million for Hezbollah.
Comparatively speaking, the worst thing isn't that no one in the government of the United States seemed to care that there was a pro-Iran axis information operation run in a building down the street from the White House and the Treasury Department, the agency that sanctioned Shaaban. Treasury spokesmen kept saying "no comment." State Department spokesman John Kirby said he thought the event had already been held.
And the worst thing isn't that our government looks like it's asleep at the wheel when a confederation of terror-supporters holds a meeting in the nation's capital in an effort to shape American foreign policy. No. The worst thing by far is that the White House sees the world roughly the same way Shaaban and GAFTA do: the United States is better off allied with Iran. The event Thursday simply served as another White House echo chamber to sell a deeply flawed Middle East policy, even if the administration probably had nothing to do with it.
Supporters of the Iran deal in the press and think-tank community argued that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was only about Iran's nuclear weapons program. They dismissed the findings of some analysts, chiefly Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who showed that the JCPOA was also designed to pave the way for realignment with Iran.
The evidence supporting Doran and Badran's thesis was in full sight for the entirety of Obama's second term. Indeed, the president discussed realignment with Iran—a new geopolitical equilibrium, he called it in an interview—with a number of well-known journalists, like Jeffrey Goldberg, David Remnick, David Ignatius, and Thomas Friedman. Careful readers cannot have been surprised when Obama spelled it out in Goldberg's profile from March, and Ben Rhodes confirmed it in David Samuels's New York Times Magazine profile last month.
More to the point, Obama showed how it worked on the ground when he teamed up with Iran and its allies to fight the Islamic State. The White House provided air support for Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani in Tikrit last year and is doing the same now in Fallujah. The administration shared intelligence with a Hezbollah-controlled unit in the Lebanese Armed Forces. It leaked news of Israeli strikes. It boasted publicly of deterring Israel from attacking Iranian nuclear facilities. It turned a blind eye to Assad's depredations in Syria and backed opposition groups only if they swore only to attack ISIS. The project that GAFTA and Shaaban endorse has already been embraced and enacted by the White House—America is teaming with Iran and its allies to fight ISIS.
The issue isn't whether defeating ISIS and al Qaeda is a desirable goal. Of course it is. The problem is teaming up with Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, i.e., two state sponsors of terror and a terrorist group. In what possible scenario is the Iranian axis a more suitable partner than America's traditional regional allies, like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel? The resistance axis isn't obviously preferable to the Sunni fanatics who make up ISIS—they're cut from exactly the same cloth.
Yes, some administration officials are grossed out by America's de facto new regional friends. As one State Department official told Politico "For years now [Shaaban] has served as a propaganda mouthpiece for the Assad regime — trying in vain to mask the suppression of the Syrian people and the regime's brutality. The world has not been fooled by her lies."
And yet Secretary of State John Kerry has been telling the Syrian opposition that they have no choice but to accept Shaaban's boss because he can't, or won't, do anything about it. And that's because Kerry's boss sees eye to eye with Assad and his Iranian patrons in so many respects.