Minding the Middle East: a former CIA agent, who once was charged with plotting to assassinate Saddam Hussein, shares narratives of his 40-year career as an intelligence and security specialist.

• Author: Peppers, Elliott
• Position: Worldview - Interview

WHEN Robert Baer first traveled to Syria, the country was in the middle of the 1982 Muslim Brotherhood revolt against the government. Baer stayed with an Alawite major while bombs exploded in Damascus. Back then, he did not know why Sunni Muslims were trying to kill Alawite officers and assassinate then-Pres. Hafez al-Assad. "That started my very long journey and fascination with this country, and it goes until this day," he says.

Given the tumultuous global political climate and the recent U.S. missile strike on a Syrian airbase in response to a chemical weapons attack that killed more than 100 Syrians, a specialist on the Middle East is just the person to discuss the chaos. A former Central Intelligence Agent and terrorism analyst for CNN and Time magazine, Baer spoke at Benedictine University's Center for Civic Leadership's lecture series.

Baer was accused of attempting to assassinate Saddam Hussein--in 1995--by helping organize a rebellion in northern Iraq. He was investigated by the FBI under murder-for-hire charges accusing him of privately trying to assassinate the Iraqi president--which is illegal under U.S. law. He was cleared before resigning from the agency in 1997. He received the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal in 1998.

Even after 21 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, Baer admits he does not have all the answers--or even most of them. When he joined the CIA in 1976, he was assigned primarily to Syria. The Syrian civil war began in March 2011, as rebel forces battled the government for control of cities and towns. The conflict has pitched the country's Sunni majority against Pres. Bashar al-Assad's Alawite sect. The rise of the Islamic State only added to the regional atrocities.

Nearly 400,000 Syrians have been killed and more than 4,500,000 have fled Syria to mainly Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. Syrian refugees also have sought safety in Europe, activating political divisions as countries argue over sharing the weight of the humanitarian crisis.

"Syria is having a domino effect. It had an influence on Brexit. A lot of it has to do with the refugees. Germany and Angela Merkel are in trouble because of this. Certainly, Marine Le Pen (National Front president and losing far-right presidential candidate in France) has been influenced by the Syrian refugees. It clearly had an effect on American elections, too, because [now-Pres.] Donald Trump was talking about Syrian immigrants. Never mind that the Syrian refugees are not committing the crimes."

Syria is emblematic of the many problems in the Middle East. "The civil war was started by...