How It Was At The Beau Rivage

An account of how it was at the Beau Rivage, in Lausanne, by the Genevan waves of the lake,  here.

‘It was Wendy Sherman who came up with the idea of the white boards, while John Kerry pulled one all-nighter after another, as if he were still a schoolboy, preparing for a Latin mid-term, or for the APs, along with his dorm-mates Townie and Dudley, at St. Paul’s in wintry New Hampshire. The grown-up from M.I.T., winning Ernest Moniz, came in just for the last few weeks but, having been presented with a number of faits accomplis and concessions about which he could do nothing, was confined to technical matters. Kerry was negotiating with people whose regime has steadily lied about their nuclear project, and many other things, in a country whose people came up with Taqiyya, that is the religiously-sanctioned lying about what they, the Shi’a, believed in order to protect them  from murder by Sunnis. Taqiyya has a Sunni analogue, Kitman, and for both Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, lying, deceit, evasion in dealing with Unbelievers are praised and promoted all over the Qur’an and Sunnah, most famously in Muhammad’s celebrated “war is deceit.” That Taqiyya (no longer confined to Shi’a), that Kitman, that religiously-sanctioned Muhammd-promoted deceit can be seen all over the world, today, with the attempts by Muslims to explain away terrorism, from Boko Haram and Al Shebab to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad and Hamas and Ansar al-Sham and, now most famously, the Islamic State, as “having nothing to do with Islam” when their every act is rooted in Islamic texts which are often quoted, ayat and sura, as justification. Because Muslims in the West still feel insufficiently numerous to reveal themselves, they still rely on such deceit and, like the Islamic Republic of Iran making its agreement with John Kerry and his bleary-eyed mind-fogged all-nighters, and social worker Wendy Sherman with her white boards, place their faith in the gullibility of their Western interlocutors, or perhaps the fear of forthrightly facing the truth because of the difficult  tasks such recognition might entail.

Now that there is still much that has to be cleared up, including possible inconsistencies between the English and the Persian version of what was agreed upon, and clear inconcistencies in the understanding about when sanctions are to be lifted, no more all-nighters would be a good thing. Caffeine and No-Doz may be okay for a test whose results affect only you, and your reach schools, and your safeties, but it’s not a good way to arrive at treaties involving war and peace and mass casualties, and promoting or discouraging nuclear proliferation among the Muslim countries, implacably hostile to all non-Muslims to the extent that their rulers take Islam to heart, and the possible annihilation of a small country, Israel that, like Czechoslovakia in September 1938, was watching others — big powers — arrogating to themselves decisions that affect whether their sliver of a a state lives or dies.

 The American negotiators subscribe, as does everyone in the Western world, to the doctrine of Pacta Sunt Servanda: Treaties Are To Be Obeyed.  You may think this is obvious, it doesn’t need stating, but it was not always so. Such a doctrine originated in, and was elaborated upon, by jurisprudents in the Wewstern world. It is subscribed to in the West, but that West appears not to realize that the same doctrine is not upheld in the world of Islam.  In Islam the model for treaty-making with Infidels (for it is only with Infidels that treaties are needed) does not include the idea that treaties are to be obeyed. Instead of Pacta Sunt Servanda, and treaties of permanent peace, there is only the hudna or truce treaty, lasting 10 (lunar) years, although it can be renewed if circumstances warrant (i.e., the Infidels are still too strong to violate or ignore the treaty); the model for this is the agreement that Muhammad reached with the Meccans at Hudaibiyya in 628 A.D., a treaty he breached 18 months later, when he felt his forces had become strong enough to attack the Meccans. The Iranians have been deceiving the West for several decades; it would be crazy to assume that they won’t try to continue to do so in every way. So the sky’s the limit when it comes to monitoring and verification.

Perhaps, back in Washington, for a self-deserved week of rest, after pulling so many all-nighters at the Beau Rivage, John Kerry could now take the time to learn about the Treaty of Hudaibiyya, and Taqiyya too. It might make what follows between now and June 30, in further hammering out the agreement with the Iranians, less painful. And hope that there will be no more of this down-to-the-wire we-have-to-get-this-done stuff.  That’s been too frightening a spectacle. Few wish  to endure stories similar to the ones we are now reading, about what went on, in those last three frantic days — a profane triduum just before what is for some the sacred one —  by the waves of Lac Leman, at the Beau Rivage.