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Monday 13 October 2008

Syria shouldn’t be demonised

Ignore the hype: Syria shouldn’t be demonised

The Asad regime is not as wicked as US sources argue

Since then there have been two other prominent cases of fiascos resulting from unchecked intelligence: the cruise bombing by President Clinton of the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant said at the time to have been an al-Qa’eda base, but which turned out instead to be the principal manufacturing centre for antiretroviral drugs in Africa; and the notorious ‘sexed-up’ intelligence reports that led to the invasion of Iraq. Both blunders have made more apparent than ever the need for extreme caution when using biased intelligence briefings.

It was alarming, therefore, to read the article by Douglas Davis and James Forsyth in The Spectator of 6 October on the Israeli bombing of Dayr as Zawr. Like the stories about the Syrian invasion of Israel, the piece was not based on any investigation on the ground; indeed, there was no evidence that either author had ever visited Syria. Instead the information was clearly based on leaks from what must ultimately have been Israeli intelligence sources, and the highly speculative findings were presented in the standfirst as unqualified fact — an Israeli attack ‘on a nuclear facility in Syria’ — though no one has ever previously claimed that Syria has a nuclear programme. Indeed, there is much evidence that, unlike its Israeli neighbour, it has consciously chosen not to go down the nuclear route. Worse still was the breathless and uncritical presentation of the bombing of an independent sovereign state as ‘meticulously planned [and] brilliantly executed.’

Well, perhaps. Like the authors of the piece, I have not visited Dayr as Zawr since the attack, so I have no means of judging whether the Israelis attacked a genuine military target, or an agricultural training centre, as the Syrians claim. But it certainly seems a very odd place for the Syrians to put a nuclear facility, since Dayr as Zawr is not far from the Turkish border, on a road regularly taken by tourists visiting the Byzantine sites on the old Eastern Roman frontier. No country would naturally place a vital military research centre close to its border with a hostile country, so it would seem to me to be one of those stories that need to be, at the very least, treated with a degree of scepticism.

There are other grounds to be particularly careful with stories aimed at demonising Syria at the moment. Syria has recently been targeted by elements in Washington in the run-up to the coming confrontation with Iran. The Daily Telegraph recently ran a front-page story quoting a former aide of Dick Cheney, David Wurmser, advocating that ‘the US must break Iran and Syrian regimes . . . we need to do everything possible to destabilise the Syrian regime . . . to prevent the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.’

More articles from: William Dalrymple | this section

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