As the noose tightens around Assad over the Hariri assassination, we shouldn’t forget his active support of our enemies in Iraq. From a September 2005 Time piece:
The Baathists, on the other hand, were more active in courting the tribes. Starting in November 2003, tribal sheiks and Baathist expatriates held a series of monthly meetings at the Cham Palace hotel in Damascus. They were public events, supposedly meetings to express solidarity with the Iraqi opposition to the U.S. occupation. (The January 2004 gathering was attended by Syrian President Bashar Assad.) Behind the scenes, however, the meetings provided a convenient cover for leaders of the insurgency, including Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed, the former Military Bureau director, to meet, plan and distribute money. A senior military officer told TIME that U.S. intelligence had an informant–a mid-level Baathist official who belonged to the Dulaimi tribe–attending the meetings and keeping the Americans informed about the insurgents’ growing cohesion. But the increased flow of information did not produce a coherent strategy for fighting the growing rebellion.
