Summary

The diplomat Robert Ford returns in Part 17, though the setting is now 2011, when Ford was on yet another assignment taken begrudgingly: as U.S. ambassador to Syria. The early pages demonstrate why, as this was when the “Arab Spring” was underway, and protestors who supported President Bashar Assad were staging an attack on the U.S. embassy. From inside the facility, flanked by armed U.S. marines, Ford watched as the pro-Assad protestors storm the embassy and begin rattling doors and windows. Ford waited, hoping they would go no further, which might prompt the American marines to open fire.

Here the narrator describes the origins, of Bashar Assad’s regime. Like King Abdullah II, Assad inherited his position from his father by surprise, having studied abroad to become an ophthalmologist, before he was drafted into the role when his older brother...