{"id":1434,"date":"2006-06-01T07:20:00","date_gmt":"2006-06-01T12:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sandbox.blog-city.com\/bashar_watch.htm"},"modified":"2006-06-01T07:20:00","modified_gmt":"2006-06-01T12:20:00","slug":"bashar-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/2006\/06\/bashar-watch\/","title":{"rendered":"Bashar Watch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"A few years ago, I heard an officer in Israeli military intelligence say that there’s nothing so comical as the sight of Bashar Asad, ophthalmologist,\u00a0peering through binoculars at a military exercise. He looks so unmilitary<\/em>. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but now I do. Just look at this picture, taken on Monday at a Syrian military exercise at an “undisclosed location,” and released by the official Syrian press agency.<\/p>\n

Bashar is decked out in a fresh uniform, sleeves rolled up a little too neatly. The effect is simply to reveal his spindly white forearms, which don’t look like they’ve ever seen the sun.<\/p>\n

But there’s something even funnier. Where’s his watch?<\/em> His wrists are bare. Now as anyone knows, you can’t last for an hour in any military, even the Syrian, without a watch.<\/p>\n

Explanation? Here’s one. When Bashar got to the base and changed into his military costume, he realized that he would look ridiculous in his civilian watch–probably a fancy Rolex. So he took it off and stuffed it in his pocket. Not owning a military watch, he just went without.<\/p>\n

(I know, you’re thinking that the watch might have been brushed out by a Syrian military censor, lest it reveal the time<\/em>. Top secret! So here is a larger<\/a> version of the photo–no obvious tampering. Anyway, if a censor wanted to obscure the time, he\u00a0could have just obscured the watch face.)<\/p>\n

\"\"Compare the Bashar photo to this shot of Jordan’s King Abdullah, at a Special Operation Forces Exhibition held in March at a Jordanian airbase. On this basis alone, I’m betting that Abdullah outlasts Bashar.<\/p>\n

Just in:<\/em> A well-informed source tells me that Dr. Bashar, while adjusting the focus on his binoculars, was heard muttering to himself: “Better… or worse? Better… or worse?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, I heard an officer in Israeli military intelligence say that there’s nothing so comical as the sight of Bashar Asad, ophthalmologist,\u00a0peering through binoculars at a military exercise. He looks so unmilitary. I didn’t know exactly what … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}