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.