THE FALL OF BASHAR ASSAD

And my encounters with the Syrian dictator

A torn portrait of Bashar Assad is seen inside the Presidential Palace this week in Damascus. / Photo by Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images.

My father’s generation was fixated on December 7, 1941, the “day of infamy” when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and triggered America’s entry into World War II. My day came on March 20, 2003, when the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney responded to Osama bin Laden’s attack on New York and Washington of September 11, 2001, by bombing Baghdad, the capital of Iraq.

The strange decision to respond to an Islamist terrorist attack on the United States by bombing the capital of a nation whose leader, Saddam Hussein, was known for his hostility to Islamist terrorism, was rarely remarked upon as the US went to war. America invaded Iraq along with many embedded journalists, who were individually handpicked by the military and allowed to ride along and report on American glory as US forces sped toward Baghdad from Kuwait, America’s fervent ally in the Persian Gulf.

And so, on the night of June 18, with Saddam Hussein in hiding and the war in what was thought of as a mop-up phase, there was an American special forces shoot-up on the Syrian side of the Iraqi border. As many as eighty Syrians involved in smuggling gasoline—not covert arms or nuclear bombs—were slain. The Syrian government chose to make no complaint about the incident, which had been covered up when I chanced on the story in Washington while working for the New Yorker.

I had been told earlier by persons in the US intelligence community that Syria, then led by Bashar Assad—the son of Hafez Assad, who had collaborated with Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration—had become one of America’s best intelligence sources in the fight against Al Qaeda. Ironically, Syria had been on the State Department terrorism list since 1979 and was considered by the Bush administration to be a sponsor of state terrorism. At one point, the nation was publicly named by the White House to be a junior member of its infamous “Axis of Evil” while it was providing much valued intelligence to the CIA.

So I had to get there.