12 No more designer shoes for you
Richard Cohen in
The Luxury we don't have in Syria:
About a month ago the European Union, showing it will not be trifled with, barred Bashar al-Assad’s wife, Asma, and other women in his immediate family from shopping for luxury goods in Europe. For some reason, going cold turkey on Dior, Armani and Prada failed to bring down the Assad regime or to end its vicious attacks on the civilian population. Now the Europeans, presumably with the staunch support of the Obama administration, have imposed an across-the-board ban on the sale of luxury goods to Syria — and yet, somehow, the killing continues.
The imposition of the luxury goods ban was cited in a New York Times editorial with all the solemnity usually reserved for naval blockades — as good an example of any of how we have gone to dreamland. In the dream, a vicious dictator, fighting for his own and his family’s lives, will somehow come to the bargaining table because he is down to his last Montblanc pen. Of course, more practical measures and boycotts have also been adopted, but it is always good to remember that severe boycotts were imposed on Saddam Hussein’s regime for about 12 years — and it still took an invasion to bring him down. There is a lesson here.
And a headline that's hardly surprising:
U.N. Observers Prove Little Deterrent to Syrian Attacks.
3) More gas pains
David Kirkpatrick wrote a
despicable article about Egypt's decision to terminate its natural gas deal with Israel. The gist of the article was that since the deal was never approved by the Egyptian people it was of questionable validity. And, yes, Kirkpatrick suggested the same about Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. Egypt claimed that Israel had not paid for gas in four months. Still Kirkpatrick insists on describing the deal to the detriment of the Egyptian people, and they're not going to take it anymore.
Lawsuits and criminal investigations have accused Mr. Mubarak and his associates of corruption for depriving Egypt of a fair market price for the gas sold to Israel. And since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster last year, unknown attackers have bombed a gas pipeline in the Egyptian Sinai more than a dozen times, apparently to disrupt the flow to Israel.
In any case this leaves out some important details (and conclusions).
Barry Rubin observed:
Oh, by the way, the Egyptians have now said they will not sell natural gas any more to Israel. The pipeline that had been providing 40-50 percent of Israel’s natural gas and has been attacked numerous times by Islamist attackers in Sinai will be closed permanently. The $460 million invested in the pipeline project, mostly by Israeli, is gone forever, plus Israel will have to find a substitute source until its own offshore wells come online . While this is supposedly a commercial decision, it is obviously a response to public pressure and the sabotage campaign that the Egyptian government doesn’t care enough to stop. The New York Times dishonestly reported that the issue is just a “payment dispute.” Well, let’s see. Natural gas wasn’t delivered most of the time so Israel didn’t pay. Egyptian leaders and media said the gas shouldn’t be sold to an enemy and that to do so was treason. Sounds like a threat to those operating the natural gas industry there. The pipeline was attacked almost a dozen times and put out of commission without a major effort by Egypt’s army to defend this national economic asset. And they also demanded that Israel pay more than had been agreed, thus violating the contract. But by the time the Times’ article finishes the problem is made to sound as if it is all Israel’s fault. Just wait until Egypt escalates anti-Israel actions and the Times blames Israel for those also.
There are two important lessons here. First, any commitment made to Israel by an Arab partner is easily deemed invalid by the latter (and that would include any potential Israel-Palestine peace treaty). The United States may soon have the same experience in Egypt. Second, while a key Egyptian complaint has been that they wanted higher prices, Egypt will now lose the income from the pipeline, make investors reluctant from fear that their deals might also go up in smoke, and the country will be materially worse-off.
Kirkpatrick's article was even worse than I first thought.
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