That's What We Get For Trusting Syria

The Harper government announced Friday that Maher Arar will receive an official apology and compensation. That agreement settles the case--but it does not resolve it.

Canadian security services suspected Arar of connections to terrorism. They monitored his movements. When he travelled to Tunisia in 2002, Canada alerted U.S. authorities that he planned to fly home via New York. U.S. authorities apprehended him, questioned him, and finally deported him to his native Syria, where he was tortured.

It now seems apparent that the information incriminating Mr. Arar originated with Syrian military intelligence. The revelation that Canada and the United States rely heavily on Syrian information exposes one of the most disturbing secrets of the war on terror. The Syrians fingered him because they believed that a cousin of his had allegedly belonged to the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist Sunni Islamic group founded in Egypt in the 1920s. Sunni Muslims constitute the largest single religious bloc in Syria. But the ruling Assad family and much of Syria's Baath party apparatus belongs to a very different religious group, the Alawites, a small mysterious sect regarded by some scholars as a surviving vestige of the ancient paganism of the Levant.

Whoever the Alawites really are, there is one thing they plainly are not: orthodox Sunni Muslims. In 1979, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood launched a revolt against Alawite rule. They used terrorist tactics like car bombings, and in 1980 nearly succeeded in assassinating the reigning dictator Hafez al-Assad. Finally in 1982, the city of Hama, a Sunni stronghold, rose in open revolt. Thousands and maybe tens of thousands of people were killed when the Syrian government crushed the revolt with artillery and air bombardment.

This experience certainly left the Syrian authorities hostile to and mistrustful of Sunni Islamic extremism. But it also underscored the Assad regime's most dangerous vulnerability: its doubtful legitimacy. If it is wrong and improper for infidels to rule in Jerusalem, how can it be right and acceptable for infidels to rule in Damascus?

The Assad family's need to prove its Islamic bona fides explains why they have rejected peace offer after peace offer from Israel and the United States. Any peace, on any terms, would destroy the legitimacy of their regime. It would invite their enemies to sneer: "See--we told you those infidel Alawites would sell out to the Jews the first chance they got. Really, they are no better than Jews themselves.

"The militant posture adopted by the Assads may not deceive many of their own people. But it has worked like a charm on many U.S. officials. The State Department has for years treated Syria as the custodian of Arab nationalism, the ultimate source of legitimacy for the whole Middle East.

When the first Bush administration organized the military coalition to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1990-91, it paid a huge diplomatic price to coax Syria aboard: The Bush administration gave a green light to the elder Assad to crush the last opposition to Syrian rule in Lebanon.

And after the 9/11 terrorist attacks pushed the United States toward war in Afghanistan, the same bureaucracies--and indeed many of the same people--who had urged the elder Bush to pay any price for Syrian co-operation in 1990 urged his son to buy their aid in 2001.In his Sept. 20, 2001, speech, Bush warned that any regime that sponsored terror would be regarded by the U.S. as an enemy. Yet at the same time, his State Department and CIA were quietly signalling to the Syrians: You have nothing to fear. In an article published in 2003, New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh--who often conveys the views of CIA professionals --insisted: "By early 2002, Syria had emerged as one of the CIA's most effective intelligence allies in the fight against al-Qaeda, providing an outpouring of information that came to an end only with the invasion of Iraq.

"The Arar case should raise some belated red flags over the real value and true purposes of all this Syrian "co-operation." Whenever one intelligence agency provides information to another, the recipient should wonder: "Why are they sharing this with us? What benefit do they derive?" That question should be asked with special intensity when the information comes from an unfriendly country like Syria.

And yet the Arabist faction within the U.S. government has responded to Syria's maneouvres with almost childlike credulity, believing what the Syrians say--and even betraying both American principles and American interests by subcontracting torture to them.The reliance of Western agencies on Syrian information has cost the Canadian taxpayer $10 million in damages. It cost Maher Arar indescribable suffering. And the damage this reliance has done the real security of the West--that cost goes beyond calculation.