Jackson Diehl wonders about the lack of fuss last time someone of note was murdered by foreign assassins in Dubai.
That "someone" was Sulim Yamadayev, a Chechen rebel commander. Diehl writes:
To his credit, police chief Tamim tried to subject Russia to the same treatment he has given Israel. At a press conference last April, he named the author of the crime as Adam Delimkhanov, a Kadyrov associate who is a member of the Russian parliament, and said he would ask Interpol for his arrest. It is, he said, “Russia’s responsibility in front of the world to control these killers from Chechnya.”
The difference, of course, is that the audience for a story about a Russian-sponsored assassination in Dubai is nothing like that for an Israeli hit. Relatively few stories were written about the Yamadayev case; there were no angry editorials in the Financial Times. Perhaps it’s needless to say that Delimkhanov and the other suspects identified by Dubai have not been arrested or extradited. As Shmuel Rosner summed it up in a dispatch for Slate: “The consequences for the assassins? None at all. For the Chechen government? None. For the deputy prime minister? None. For Dubai-Russian relations? None.”
It could be that, in the end, Israel too will suffer little from Tamim’s offensive. It will certainly be interesting to see if Dubai, a would-be regional entrepot sinking under its own debt, begins pulling aside travelers at its airport who it deems to resemble Israelis. For now, it seems clear enough that, for whatever reason, stories about the Mossad’s skullduggery are much more interesting to the rest of the world than tales about the Russian FSB — or Libya, for that matter.
When Yamadayev was gunned down in March, 2009, the Gulf state was rolling in money. Splashy press conferences drawing attention to the murder probably weren't in Dubai's interests.
But now, police chief Dahi Khalfan al-Tamim and the powers that be have an interest in keeping the media fixated on the Mossad and an ever-growing list of suspects. It's a great distraction from Dubai's debt crisis.
