OPINION | Trump’s Mar-a-Lago diplomacy is reaping real rewards at the United Nations.
Russia’s lonely veto of a U. N. Security Council resolution condemning the April 4 chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria, and calling for an investigation of the attack, places blame squarely on Russia for complicity in the brutal event, at a minimum in the court of public opinion.
Syrian President Bashar al Assad said Wednesday that the accusations of a chemical weapons attack were “ 100 percent fabrication “ used to justify American air strikes but something unique happened in the U. N. vote, a shift that may be attributable to Mar-a-Lago diplomacy. For the last eight U. N. resolutions concerning Syria, beginning in 2011, China has vetoed, lockstep with Russia, with the exception of one vote in 2016.
The deal to rid Syria of chemical weapons was heralded at the time as a tremendous success. But the obvious question raised by the April attack — if the accusations that Assad is behind the attack are correct — is: How did Syria have the chemical weapons if they were all destroyed?
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the U. N. destroyed tons of chemical weapons in Syria. But key to their initial conclusion that the Mission had destroyed Syria’s stockpiles was in the U. N. report itself, which stated, “Of the 27 facilities, 24 have been verified by OPCW as having been destroyed.”
Was this the Obama administration’s fault for failing to acknowledge the fact that the deal had gaps? A well-documented report by the Wall Street Journal concluded that the 2013 deal negotiated by Russia with the U. S. revealed, “one of the best kept secrets in international diplomacy” — that the deal failed to rid Syria of all of its chemical weapons.
The original Fact Finding Mission (FFM) of the OPCW was not empowered to attribute responsibility but merely to “gather facts regarding the incident of alleged use of topic chemicals as a weapon.
