The Driver He Trusted

Fourteen years is a long time to be wrong about something on purpose, or by accident, or because nobody made you find out. Austin Tice disappeared in Syria in 2012, and the working theory ever since was rotten luck: an American journalist who wandered into the wrong checkpoint at the wrong moment in a civil war. The BBC’s new reporting says otherwise. A member of the group that grabbed him claims Assad signed off on it himself, and the operation took over a month to plan. Tice got into a car with a driver he knew and trusted. That detail is the one I can’t shake, how ordinary it must have looked, a targeted abduction dressed up as the accident everyone assumed for thirteen years.

Three weeks ago the US took Syria off its list of state sponsors of terrorism and started treating its new president like a partner worth having, a former al-Qaeda-linked fighter now shaking hands in Washington. There’s a real, defensible logic to that: you deal with the government in front of you, not the one you wish existed. But it does something strange to a story like Tice’s, arriving now. For over a decade his case was cited by American presidents as a debt the regime that took him would eventually have to answer for. That regime is gone. The man who replaced it is a guest. And the answer shows up anyway, just late enough to land in a room where nobody with the standing to act on it is still listening.

I keep thinking about how many of these there must be, findings that arrive exactly one diplomatic cycle too late to change anything, just in time to become a footnote to the handshake that already happened.