A Disappearance in Damascus
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22. Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia, 112.
23. T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 24.
24. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919, 81.
25. Lawrence, “A Report on Mesopotamia.”
26. Roberts, “The Hijackers.”
27. Although an election took place the year the French left with the support of the United States—already engaged in the battle to contain communism in the Middle East—it was handily won by entrenched elites who seemed impervious to American influence. American business interests were soon frustrated with the new Syrian parliament, which stalled on approving a right-of-way for a pipeline that was intended to serve US oil concerns in Saudi Arabia. In The Game of Nations, a New York Times bestseller published in 1970, CIA agent Miles Copeland, a member of the team behind the 1949 coup, describes how events unfolded. They first befriended the head of the Syrian army, Husni al-Za’im: “The political action team suggested to Za’im the idea of a coup d’etat, advised him how to go about it, guided him through the intricate preparations in laying the groundwork for it…Za’im was ‘the American boy.’ ” One member of the American team, Deane Hinton, was less than enthusiastic about the plan. According to Copeland, Hinton said, “I want to go on record as saying that this is the stupidest, most irresponsible action a diplomatic mission like ours could get itself involved in, and that we’ve started a series of these things that will never end.” Had the coup not taken place, transferring authority from an elected government to the military, it is unlikely that Hafez al-Assad would ever have come to power. Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis tells part of the story for the BBC in “The Baby and the Baath Water.” See also Jörg Michael Dostal, “Post-independence Syria and the Great Powers (1946–1958).”
28. AFP, “War in Syria’s Aleppo Takes Toll on Storied Baron Hotel.”
29. Jason Pape, “Winning with the People in Iraq,” 36.
30. William Langewiesche, “Welcome to the Green Zone.”
31. Camp Bucca and other American prisons in Iraq, write Jeremi Suri and Andrew Thompson in the New York Times, “became virtual terrorist universities: The hardened radicals were the professors, the other detainees were the students, and the prison authorities played the role of absent custodian” (“How America Helped Isis”).
32. Brigitte Weidlich, “Namibia: Govt Shuts Down U.S. Firm.”
33. J.M. Coetzee, Giving Offense, 35 and 37.
34. As early as 2006, Saudi Arabia, the leading Sunni regime, sought to reshape the regional conflicts as Sunni versus Shia. As Michael Slackman and Hassan M. Fattah reported in the New York Times, “The shift is occurring with encouragement from the Bush administration. Its goal is to see an American-backed alliance of Sunni Arab states including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt, along with a Fatah-led Palestine and Israel, opposing Iran, Syria and the radical groups they support.” They add that, “Sectarian overtones aside, the battle is also about political power, national interests and preserving the status quo” (“In Public View, Saudis Counter Iran in Region”). This shift was a response to the ousting of Saddam Hussein and the transfer of power to a Shia-led Iraqi government allied with a resurgent Iran that no longer had to contend with Saddam. Saudi Arabia increased its support for Sunni allies in Lebanon to combat the Iranian-allied Shia Lebanese Hezbollah; the decision to lower the price of oil was partly aimed at harming Iran’s oil-based economy. In the Syrian war, Saudi Arabia along with Turkey and Gulf States financed and armed Islamist opposition fighters, including those close to al-Qaeda.
35. Open Society Justice Initiative, “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition.”
36. Where are they now? In 2015, Douglas Feith, of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, was Director of the Center for National Security Strategies at the Hudson Institute, publishing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and Politico. Paul Wolfowitz was a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and serving as foreign policy advisor to failed presidential candidate Jeb Bush. Fellow neoconservative John Bolton was advising Republican candidate Ted Cruz, while Elliott Abrams and PNAC founder William Kristol were supporting Cruz’s failed rival Marco Rubio, who was also being briefed by former Cheney advisor Eric Edelman. (See John Walcott, “What Donald Rumsfeld Knew We Didn’t Know About Iraq.”) Richard Perle, along with Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger, was on the board of advisors of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; Perle was discovered to have been an advisor to Libyan dictator Muammar Qadaffi in 2006. (See Laura Rozen, “Among Libya’s lobbyists.”) Ken Adelman went from the Defense Policy Board under Bush to the Board of the National Center for Counter-Terrorism during the Obama Administration, and has since repudiated both; according to his website he “teaches executive leadership through the wisdom of William Shakespeare.” In June 2015, Rumsfeld gave an interview to the Times of London in which he said, “I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories” (Melanie Phillips, “Bush Was Wrong on Iraq, Says Rumsfeld”). In November Ahmed Chalabi died of heart failure. In December Dick Cheney was making the case for re-invading parts of the Middle East to trounce ISIS (“Vice President Dick Cheney on San Bernardino, Obama’s Foreign Policy, and Setting History Straight”). Paul Bremer said the same thing in the same week, adding that on the whole, Iraqis are “better off” since the invasion (“Paul Bremer Wants US Troops Back in Iraq to Fight ISIL”). Meanwhile George W. Bush was on the speaker circuit, charging $100,000 to appear at a gala for a Texas homeless shelter (Michael Kruse, “On Talk Circuit, George W. Bush Makes Millions but Few Waves”).
37. For a comparative look at the numbers of journalists kidnapped or killed in Iraq and Syria, see Zeina Karam, “Journalists in Syria Face Growing Risk of Kidnap.”
38. The drought that began in 1998 is the worst in 900 years, according to NASA scientists who based their findings on tree rings (Benjamin I. Cooke et al., “Spatiotemporal Drought Variability in the Mediterranean over the Last 900 Years”). By 2010, a million Syrian farmers had been forced to leave their land (Wadid Erian et al., “Drought Vulnerability in the Arab Region: Syria”). “We were forced to flee,” a Syrian farmer told the New York Times the year before the Syria war began. “Now we are at less than zero—no money, no job, no hope” (Robert F. Worth, “Earth Is Parched Where Syrian Farms Thrived”). According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, climate change contributed to the Syrian civil war. “It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to the urban centers….We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict” (Colin P. Kelly et al., “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought”).
39. Raymond Hinnebusch, “Syria: From ‘Authoritarian Upgrading’ to Revolution?”
40. Barack Obama said as much in a 2015 interview with VICE News. ISIS, he said, is “a direct outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion.” (“President Obama Speaks with Vice News.”)
41. Quoted in Martin Chulov, “Isis: the Inside Story.” See also Terrence McCoy, “How the Islamic State Evolved in an American Prison.”
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