December 7, 2012 | Quote
Springtime for Assad
We are beginning to doubt whether Bashar Assad is a genuine reformer. Our latest clue comes from NBC News, which reported yesterday that “the Syrian military is prepared to use chemical weapons against its own people and is awaiting final orders from [dictator] Assad.”
As of yesterday, “the nerve agents were locked and loaded inside the bombs,” which “could be dropped onto the Syrian people from dozens of fighter-bombers,” according to the NBC report. “U.S. officials stressed that as of now, the sarin bombs hadn't been loaded onto planes and that Assad hadn't issued a final order to use them.” Well, that's a relief. Or not: “If he does [give the order], one of the officials said, 'there's little the outside world can do to stop it.' “
The international community is responding. “U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has written to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad urging him not to use chemical weapons,” Reuters reports. Ban told the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that “any use of such weapons would be an outrageous crime with dire consequences.” Who knows, Moon may get angry enough to write a second letter.
This seems as good a time as any to mention the Walter Duranty Awards, a brand-new journalism prize for whose inaugural dinner in October this columnist served as master of ceremonies. Winning first prize, edging out CBS's Bob Simon and What's Left of Newsweek's Andrew Sullivan, were Anna Wintour of Vogue and writer Joan Buck, for a March 2011 cover story titled “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert.”
Claudia Rosett, who presented the award, summed up the article:
Ms. Buck, for whom Vogue obtained extraordinary access to the Assads, gushed about Asma as “the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies . . . breezy, conspiratorial, and fun . . . a thin long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement.” Ms. Buck treated her readers to visions of Asma waking at dawn to begin her charitable rounds, including her campaign urging millions of young Syrians to engage in “active citizenship.” There were vignettes of Asma flying around Syria in a French-built corporate jet, or careening through traffic behind the wheel of a plain SUV, en route to museums, schools, and orphanages, a study in “energetic grace,” deftly accessorized with little more than a necklace of Chanel agates; shoes and Syrian silk tote bag by French designer Christian Louboutin.
You can read the whole piece at PresidentAssad.net, but it is gone from Vogue's website. Further investigation suggested there was a dark side to the Assad family's activities.
This past June, Wintour published an “Editor's Note” with the results of this investigation: “Subsequent to our interview, as the terrible events of the past year and a half unfolded in Syria, it became clear that its priorities and values were completely at odds with those of Vogue. The escalating atrocities in Syria are unconscionable, and we deplore the actions of the Assad regime in the strongest possible terms.”
Wintour was in the news this year when she hosted fundraising dinners for President Obama in New York, London and Paris. As a result, Thomas Pascoe of Britain's Daily Telegraph writes (albeit citing “speculative reports“), “Wintour is in the running to be America's next ambassador to either Britain or France.” Why not New York? Because it's a domestic city, so there's no U.S. ambassador to New York. But there's an ambassador in New York, to the United Nations. Why couldn't Wintour replace Susan Rice? Nah, forget it. We don't want to give them ideas.
OK, maybe one idea. How about nominating Wintour ambassador to Damascus? What a great opportunity that would be to promote the values of Vogue in a country that clearly needs them.