For it being a perennial thorn in the U.S.’s and Israel’s side, Syria was mentioned as a potential target for regime change by neoconservative policy advisors Richard Perle and Douglas Feith in their policy document A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. The neoconservative plan, authored in 1996, was directed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was serving his first term as Israeli prime minister. The proposals outlined in the document have guided the foreign policy grand strategies of the ultranationalist Likud coalition that has dominated Israeli politics in the last three decades in addition to American Zionists across the political aisle.

During the Global War on Terror, the Syrian regime and the then-administration of George W. Bush briefly became strange bedfellows on the issue of torture. Because the Bush administration could not torture suspected terrorists during interrogations on U.S. soil, it turned to the controversial practice of extraordinary rendition to circumvent restrictions on torture. As former CIA agent Robert Baer candidly put it, “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria.”