Ignore the hype: Syria shouldn’t be demonised

In the autumn of 1994 I was looking at Byzantine churches on the Syrian-Israeli border for my book From the Holy Mountain. Telephoning home, I heard that one of the broadsheets had run a series of prominent stories claiming that Syria was mobilising its troops for an invasion of Israel. The paper described the roads jammed with Soviet-built tanks heading for the Golan Heights.

As I happened to be in the area concerned, I could see that the story was completely false: the only movements I could see were of donkeys carrying olives from the harvest to their villages. Yet the story continued to run for several issues, before being dropped without explanation. Only many months later did it emerge that a rogue Israeli agent in Damascus had been feeding his masters the false information which came close to bringing the two countries to open war.

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.